For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust

In this podcast episode, we talk about a letter dated 23 April 1945, from a man called Hans Fröhlicher to the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs. Hans Frölicher was the Swiss ambassador to Germany during World War II. The neatly typed, official letter starts: ”I have the honour to enclose a copy of a communication that was secretly delivered to the Consulate General in Munich/Rottach-Egern. It concerns a cry of distress from non-German Jews deported to the territory of the Reich, who are being held prisoner under deplorable conditions in various external commandos of the Dachau concentration camp.”

Enclosed with it was a typed copy of a, most likely handwritten letter that had reached Hans Fröhlicher against the odds. In this last phase of the war, prisoners from all over Europe, including survivors of the Ghettos in Eastern Europe and concentration camps such as Auschwitz, were driven to the interior of Germany and placed in already overcrowded camps such as Dachau. The situation in these camps became appalling and they were places of mass starvation, disease and killing, although not planned like in the extermination camps, but by complete and deliberate neglect. Therefore, the prisoners referred to these camps as Cold Crematoria.

This letter and the enclosed copy are now in the Swiss Federal Archives, as a lasting reminder of Jewish agency. Even though resistance was dangerous and difficult, Jews sought and found many ways to resist the intentions of the Nazi’s to dehumanize, humiliate and exterminate them.

Featured guest:

Johannes Meerwald is a scientific project officer for the EHRI project at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. He is a PhD Candidate at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt on the late phase of the Holocaust and the Jewish prisoners who were deported to southern Bavaria. Podcast host is Kevania de Vries-Menig.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

In this podcast episode, the object of our attention is a delicate paper heart, a small work of art, crafted by Elisabeth Salomon. You can enfold the 'heart', like a flower, and on each petal, you will find the name of the woman or girl (sometimes a boy or man) who made it, maybe a date or place, and endearing messages of gratitude. Elizábeth was not the only woman who crafted this paper heart. There are many paper "hearts", all with their own uniqueness, in the Swedish Holocaust Museum, that was opened in the summer of 2023. Many carry a message on one of the petals that is more or less similar to the one by Elizábeth: "Andi erinnerung liebe Vrou Wanda", not so good German for "of/for the memory of dear Mrs Wanda".

Elizábeth, called Bössi by family, Salomon, was Romanian and Jewish. We don't know much about her life until she was one of the prisoners of Bergen Belsen when the camp was liberated on 15 April 1945. Like all prisoners in the camp, she was in a horrible condition, close to death.

Inthe summer of 1945, Sweden agreed to allow 10,000 ex-inmates of Belsen, Buchenwald and other German concentration camps to travel to Sweden and stay there for a period of six months recuperation. Elisabeth and a relative, possibly cousin, Laura, who also survived the camp, were brought on one of the so called White Boats to Sweden where they recovered in a hospital. It was here that they met Wanda Lanzer, an Austrian-Jewish woman who had sought and found refuge in neutral Sweden and was now involved in helping the survivors of the camps. Like many others, Elisabeth felt very grateful to Wanda and developed a special bond with her. She wrote to her also after her release from hospital and Wanda helped her with books and housing. After a while though, Elisabeth returned to Romania. We don’t know anything about her from then on.

The paper hearts are now part of the collection of the recently opened Swedish Holocaust Museum in Stockholm.

Featured guests:

Yael Fried is curator at the Sveriges Museum om Förintelsen, the Swedish Holocaust Museum. Podcast host is Kevania de Vries-Menig.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

In this episode, we focus on a stamp, printed on the inside jacket of a book donated to the National Library of Serbia in 1941. The stamp is remarkable not least because it belonged to a prominent Belgrade lawyer named Samuilo Demajo, whose family was murdered in May 1942 in a Dušegupka, a truck re-equipped as a mobile gas van. Though Demajo's life was abruptly ended, his legacy lives on in this and the approximately 200 other books that he donated in an effort to rebuild the public library.

Demajo was born in 1898 into a prominent Belgrade Jewish family, doing his Military Service after the First World War before studying law and becoming a lawyer. As an active member of his community, he was involved in social initiatives and local politics as well as a member of the Belgrade City Assembly. After the National Library of Serbia was bombed by Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe and its precious collections destroyed by fire between 6 - 9 April 1941, a public call was put out for donations to rebuild the library's collection. 6th April 1941 also marked the beginning of World War II in former Yugoslavia and the control of Belgrade as well as other parts of German-occupied Serbia by the "Militärbefehlshaber Serbien" (territory of the military commander in Serbia). Persecution of Serbian Jews began immediately, with strict laws and restrictions against their movement, rights, employment and citizenship. Nevertheless, in May 1941, Samuilo Demajo responded to the public call of the library and made the generous offer of a donation of 133 "works from all fields of science and literature". Due to the restrictive laws against Jews, it was prohibited for Demajo’s donation to be accepted, but the then-director of the National Library corresponded with the German authorities and an exception was made. Demajo later added around 60 bound volumes of newspapers and magazines, stenographic notes from the National Assembly, and collections of laws and decrees.

The stamp was found by Andreas Roth, who was doing research in the National Library of Serbia in 2014. The discovery led to Andreas conducting a research project with a teacher colleague and a handful of history students, to try to uncover the story behind the stamp and retrace the lost history of the Demajo family. Through their research, the group were able to identify the history of the family and uncover details about their lives in Serbia before the war, after the occupation and ultimately leading to their tragic murders in May 1942.

​The object of our attention in this episode is a well-travelled letter of 21 pages, received in 1997 by Professor Albert Lichtblau, in response for an appeal for "unpublished biographical memoirs" of Holocaust survivors he had posted on behalf of the Institute for Jewish History of Austria as well as the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. The letter was written by Norbert Abeles, an Austrian living in Malawi, and its arrival prompted an exchange of further letters between Malawi and Austria, unravelling in the process the remarkable story of a young Jewish boy's escape from Nazi persecution and his journey across three different continents to find home.

Abeles was born in Vienna, Austria in 1923 to Siegfried Abeles, an author of Jewish children's books, and Sabine Abeles. Abeles's life was already marred with hardship even before the Nazi occupation of Austria, having experienced the traumatic suicide of his father in 1937, when his mother signed him up for the Kindertransport, an evacuation program for Jewish children in Nazi-controlled countries that took them to the United Kingdom. By the time he said goodbye to her on the platform in December 1938, he already knew it would be the last they ever saw of each other. Indeed, Sabine Abeles was deported to Maly Trostinec on the 6th of May 1942 and was murdered days later on the 11th.

Once in the United Kingdom, Abeles attended Hakhshara, an agricultural school intended to prepare young Jewish people for emigration to Palestine. This school was located in Stenton, East Lothian in Scotland at Whittingehame House, the former home of the Earl of Balfour. The house and the grounds were leased to The Whittingehame Farm School Ltd., a non-profit organisation which aimed to educate and train Jewish children in the range of agricultural skills. Students were instructed in agriculture and horticulture in a combination of English and Hebrew, and days were structured around a half work, half study routine.

Before the end of his time at Whittingehame, Norbert was one of a handful of refugees who were interned as “enemy aliens”. This, along with the trauma of being torn away from their parents and the vastly different backgrounds and beliefs of the children staying at Whittingehame made for turbulent years at the school, which according to Norbert was very much in a “disorganized state”.

After leaving Whittingehame in 1941, Abeles found work as a lock smith's apprentice whilst attending evening school for a Diploma of the Royal Technical College in Glasgow, which sparked the beginning of a professional career that would take him around the world.

He married his first wife in 1950, who had also emigrated to the UK from Austria. Together, they left the UK and emigrated to Africa in 1956, living in Nigeria. Norbert would go on to live in different places across Africa, taking various postings in the British Colonial Service, predominantly in the educational department and taking posts as a lecturer.

​Featured guest:

In this episode, we are joined by Albert Lichtblau, former Deputy Director of the Center of Jewish Culture History and the History Department, at the University of Salzburg in Austria.

Podcast host is Katharina Freise.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14

In this episode we are presenting a story from Belgium, that of Norbert Vos-Obstfeld, his family and his teddy bear. Norbert Vos was still a baby when on 10 May 1940 Germany invaded and occupied Belgium. The family was Jewish and the danger to them was imminent. After an attempt to flee, Norbert’s mother found herself alone with her baby boy; the rest of her family and husband were already deported. To save her life and that of Norbert, the mother knew she had to go into hiding and she desperately tried to find a place. After several disastrous attempts, she and Norbert, almost by chance, finally found a relatively safe haven with a café-owner and his wife and daughter. It was with this family that they managed to survive the war, and that Norbert received a present from the little girl of the family: a teddy bear, a gift that he and the girl would hold on to for the rest of their lives until they donated it to Kazerne Dossin.

The teddy bear is now part of the collection of Kazerne Dossin: Memorial, Museum and Research Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights in Mechelen, Belgium, where it is one of the most beloved pieces.

Featured guest: Veerle Vanden Daelen, Deputy Director and Director Collections & Research at Kazerne Dossin. Podcast host is Kevania de Vries-Menig

Veerle will tell the story of Norbert Vos and his teddy bear, that came into the collection of the museum.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).