The Family Unit during the Holocaust

Welcome to the 19th issue of Teaching the Legacy. This edition focuses on the subject of family during the Holocaust. The e-newsletter includes a main article on this theme, as well as an interview with Dukie Gelber, a survivor from Holland, who was one of a few to survive the Holocaust with his parents and brother. The newsletter features new publications, book reviews, and updates on recent and upcoming activities at the International School for Holocaust Studies and across Yad Vashem. We hope you find this issue interesting and resourceful and we look forward to your feedback.

Yael Weinstock Mashbaum

IntroductionDiscussing the subject of the family unit during the Holocaust raises many issues of devastation as well as strength. Professor Dalia Ofer shares many insights about this in an article published in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. She explains that the Holocaust devastated families and Jewish life in general. Nevertheless, there was also considerable strength in family...

Interview with Dukie Gelber, Survivor from Holland

Jackie Metzger, Yael Weinstock Mashbaum

Holocaust Survivors

Please introduce yourself and give us a brief overview of your life.

My name you know is Dukie Gelber. I’m from Holland originally. I’m nearly 77 and I have been under German occupation for five years. In 1940 they invaded Holland and I’ve been 2 years in German concentration camps. About half a year in Westerbork which was the main transition camp concentration camp in Holland,...

The Diary of Yitzchak Rudashevski

Bilhah Shilo

“The first great tragedy. People are harnessed to bundles which they drag across the pavement. People fall, bundles scatter. Before me a woman bends under her bundle. From the bundle a thin string of rice keeps pouring over the street…I think of nothing: not what I am losing, not what I have just lost, not what is in store for me. I do not see the streets before me, the people passing...

The Family Unit during the Holocaust - March 2010