Nathalie Blau

"A Time to Heal" (Ecclesiastes 3: 3)The Children of Écouis: From Buchenwald to Normandy

“We have found approximately one thousand Jewish children in Buchenwald.  Please organize evacuation without delay." This chilling message was dispatched by a US Army commander to the offices of the OSE Child Aid Society in Geneva during the liberation of Buchenwald in April 1945. The troops arriving at the infamous German concentration camp could barely comprehend the images their eyes saw. Mangled corpses and living skeletons intermixed and indistinguishable from one another; beaten and... Read more

The Perception of Time during the Holocaust

At the end of December 2018, Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research held its biennial international conference on "The Time Dimension During and Regarding the Holocaust: In Real Time and in Retrospect." Researchers from Israel, Serbia, Macedonia, Germany, France, the US, Hungary, Australia and Portugal gathered in Yad Vashem's Auditorium to discuss several aspects of this relatively new topic in Holocaust historiography.  Read more

Choosing Life: The Creations of Charlotte Salomon

The story of Charlotte Salomon, a Jewish painter of German origin who fled to France in the 1940s, is upsetting and provocative, which makes it also fascinating. This was a journey filled with personal drama, which merges into the depravity of a world in agony during WWII. What is most interesting is the sharp and lucid look by the artist at German society while the worst is emerging in Europe. How did this young woman in her twenties find within herself the ability to draw with such precision... Read more