On the Holocaust - Yad Vashem

Before and during WWII, German corporations went from the abandonment of Jewish colleagues, through profiting off the dispossession and murder of Jews, to working Jews to death. The leading executives of these companies embodied the “thoughtlessness,” the indifference to the people on the receiving end of their deeds. The actions taken by most of them, weren't just a means to keep their businesses running , but an opportunity to profit and shine - a "banality of evil" with deadly and lucrative results. In this episode, we hear about some of these executives, and some of these companies - several of which still manufacture and distribute products we may find ourselves using today.Featured guest: Peter Hayes, Emeritus professor at Northwestern University, and the former chair of the academic committee at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In the late 1970’s, the American TV mini series “Holocaust” was broadcast in West Germany, and immediately took over the public discourse. For many younger Germans, this was the first time they’d seen the Jewish victims of the Nazis depicted on screen. It began an unprecedented period of reckoning in Germany, where the word ‘Holocaust’ was not widely used before, and where the horrific crimes of the past were in many ways swept under the collective rug.Featured guests: Actor James Woods; filmmaker Avi Nesher; professor emeritus Moshe Zimmerman, history department of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

A sister writes to her brother, telling him their mother is gone. A husband, still looking for his wife and son, writes to old friends asking for some warm clothes. Four letters, by four survivors, written shortly after being liberated, tell the story of the holocaust and its immediate aftermath in a way that few other texts can. .Featured guest: Doctor Robert Rozett, senior historian at the institute for international holocaust research, Yad-Vashem.

In August 1941, a young writer, Leyb Goldin, sat down to write about his day, struggling to survive in the Warsaw ghetto. This short piece of reportage, described as “a first person account of a man slowly dying of hunger”, is extremely powerful in portraying the terror of starvation, and perhaps deserves a place up there with some of the famous works of holocaust literature.Featured guest: David Roskies, Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

On July 7 1944, a mere couple of hours before the liquidation of the Będzin Ghetto and the murder of all the Jews imprisoned in it, Sarah and Yehiel Gerlitz wrote a farewell letter to their six-year-old daughter Dita. Dita had been handed over to a Polish family a year earlier, and in their letter her parents wrote to her what they believed to be their last words. How was Dita taken into hiding? What did Sarah and Yehiel write to their daughter before they were deported to the unknown? What happened to the family members? And what happened to the letter?

Calel (Calek) Perechodnik was a Jewish policeman in the Otwock ghetto. Within his role, he took part in an Aktion (forced deportation) in which 8,000 of the city's Jews were deported, among them his wife Anna and daughter Athalie. Calek, certain they would be safe, took them out of the hiding place in which they had been located, and led them to the deportation square, where they were put on trains and sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. Calek remained alone, consumed by guilt and, after several months spent in hiding on the Aryan side of Warsaw, penned a combination of a confession, a ringing indictment, and a diary - which he dedicated to his wife and daughter. The text Calek wrote is one of the most graphic, honest, and jarring texts produced during the Holocaust period. Featured guest: Dr. Amos Goldberg, Professor at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, and head of the Research Institute for Contemporary Jewry. Author of Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust, 2017.

In the spring of 1944, Sara Leicht was deported with her family from her home in Talgad, a small village in Transylvania, to the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was only 15 years old. In the summer of 2019, Irit Dagan from the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem met with her at her home in Jerusalem, two years before she passed away, for a fascinating, moving and honest conversation. They talked about longing, about unforgettable and unforgivable events, about one good German and addressed questions, which are not usually asked...

In this episode we will continue to trace the fate of the Jews imprisoned in the Minsk Ghetto, focusing on one of its unique dimensions – the dominant underground that emerged within the ghetto in its very first days, and that lasted until its liquidation. Another unique aspect in this context is that the underground and the Judenrat – the ghetto’s official leadership – cooperated fully and together pursued virtually the only option for rescue: escape to the nearby forests, to the partisans. But could all of the ghetto prisoners escape? What did it mean to live among the partisans in the forest? And what remained of the community, its memories, and its story after the war?Featured guest: Dr. Daniel Romanovsky, historian and researcher at the Yad Vashem Research Center.

The Minsk Ghetto was the fourth-largest ghetto, but for many reasons, its story is virtually unknown. Most of the witnesses and testimonies relating to it remained behind the Iron Curtain for many years, or their words remained sealed in archives that were only recently opened. This is not a story about “another ghetto.” The Minsk Ghetto was unique in many respects: its location within the Soviet Union; its population, the majority Sovietized Jews who were joined by refugees from Poland and deportees from the Reich; and the strong underground that operated in the ghetto almost from its inception. This time on “On the Holocaust,” we will devote two episodes to the story of the Minsk Ghetto.Featured guest: Dr. Daniel Romanovsky, historian and researcher at Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research.

In Nazi Germany, and throughout Europe during the Holocaust period, Jews filed tens of thousands of petitions against their legal status and persecution. In retrospect, this might seem hopeless, almost naive - the reality, however, was more complicated. In this episode of "On The Holocaust" we examine the use of petitions by Jews during the Holocaust - and its mixed results. Featured guest: Thomas Pegelow-Kaplan, Levine Distinguished Professor of Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies at the Appalachian State University