On the Holocaust - a Yad Vashem Podcast

"How a TV show starring Meryl Streep changed Germany" - Transcription:Jonathan Gal: In the summer of 1977, two young unknown American actors traveled to Austria and Germany to shoot a television miniseries for NBC. The title of that show “Holocaust,” the actors Meryl Streep and James Woods.James Woods: There was a moment where we were literally standing in the gas chamber pot of Mauthausen, Meryl and I, just alone and she said, “I wonder if we'll go to hell,” I said, “What?” she said, “Well, we're doing a television show about...

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.After So Much Pain and Anguish - Transcription:Jonathan: It’s one of the major questions of modern life: who do I put down as my emergency...

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.Leyb Goldin’s race against starvation in the Ghetto - Transcription:Jonathan Gal:...

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?A cacophony of voices reading excerpts from...

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,...

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.Irit: Hello and ...

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...

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...

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

A Desperate Plea- Transcription:

Nate: In May...

Holocaust-era diary writing offers a rare glimpse into real-time events and personal reflections that, had they not been written, may well have been swept away in the rapid unfolding of events. The diary of a French Jewish intellectual, Lucien Dreyfus, helps us shed light on one person’s grappling with the calamity. In this episode of  "On the Holocaust", we'll talk about Dreyfus's life, reflections and fate during the Holocaust as expressed in his wartime diary: “’A Terrible and Terribly Interesting Epoch’: The Holocaust Diary of Lucien Dreyfus.”...

In early 1942, several high-ranking Nazi officials convened in a lavish villa outside Berlin for what would later be known as the Wannsee Conference. For years after the war, conventional wisdom was that in this infamous conference the Final Solution was decided upon. Today we know that mass murder of Jews began well before the conference. Given this, what makes the Wannsee conference such an important landmark in the history of the Holocaust? Today on "On the Holocaust" we'll talk about the decisions at the conference, about the “desk murderers” and about one crucial...

Just before the outbreak of World War II, about 10,000 Jewish children were given a rare chance to escape from mainland Europe. They were sent to Britain as part of a refugee program later known as the Kindertransport. In this episode of "On The Holocaust" we focus on the events leading up to this extraordinary aid effort, the complex fates of these children, and the dilemmas of their parents. Featured guest: Jennifer Craig-Norton, visiting fellow at the University of Southampton in the UK.The Kindertransport: Strangers in a Strange Land - Transcription:

Parents often...

On April 10, 1961, at 8:55 a.m. Adolf Eichmann, who during the Holocaust period had orchestrated the deportations of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps,  was seated in a glass booth in the Beit Ha'am hall in Jerusalem. The hall was packed full. People in Israel and around the world clung to the radios and listened intently to the one hundred and ten witnesses who came up one after the other and told, in the first person singular, of the horrors of the Holocaust. It was the first time the stories of the survivors took center stage and the first time the public in Israel truly stopped...

In a morally bankrupt world, at a time when the attitude of the majority of the local population towards Jews was tainted by apathy or outright hostility, there was also a small minority of people who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold their moral values. People who were willing to leave their place among the bystanders and in many ways share the fates of the Jewish victims.
In this episode of "On The Holocaust" we discuss several of these exceptional stories, some controversial cases, and the driving forces that led to the establishment of Yad Vashem’s Commission for...

For years, the story of Regina Jonas was lost to the world. Then, in the 90s, scholars began to discover this woman of extraordinary talent and ambition. In this episode of "On The Holocaust" we focus on the fate of the Jewish community in Germany through the remarkable story of Regina Jonas, the first female rabbi, whose life was taken in Auschwitz, but whose place in Jewish history is no longer forgotten.Featured guest: Guy Miron, Professor of History and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Open University of IsraelThe First Female Rabbi - Transcription:On December 16th, 1931,...

On September 28, 1941, a German edict was issued ordering the Jews of Kiev and of the surrounding area to gather some clothes and belongings, and report at an intersection not far from a local freight train station. Instead of being deported, however, they were marched to Babi Yar and shot over the course of two days. According to a contemporary report, the German forces on hand murdered 33,771 Jews. Dina Pronicheva is one of the very few to survive this horrific event. This is her story.Featured guest: Karel Berkhoff, Senior Researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies...

Shmerke Kaczerginski was a boisterous, radical young writer and musician who led an exciting circle of young artists who called themselves "Young Vilna." His best friend, Abraham Sutzkever, would go on to become one of the greatest Yiddish poets of his generation. As the two entered adulthood, their artistic careers were interrupted with the Nazi invasion of their hometown of Vilna. They didn't expect that being thrown in a ghetto would lead to one of the most important works of their entire lives - the “Paper Brigade"The Paper Brigade - Transcription:It’s an...

Kurt Gerstein defies easy categorization. The Germans didn't know what to think of him, the French changed their minds. His friends and family paint a picture of a man torn between two worlds. Facts about his life seem to clash with one another. Even decades after World War II ended, people still couldn't figure out whether he had participated in, or sabotaged, the German murder machinery.
Guest speaker: Valerie Hébert is associate professor of history and interdisciplinary studies at Lakehead University Orillia. She teaches European history, specializing in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust,...

On April 22nd, 1945, Kurt Gerstein, a lieutenant for the Hygiene Institute in Berlin, took a train headed for Allied territory. That would seem a risky move, but this SS man had a pitch. He approached a French commandant, surrendered, and told the man his truly remarkable story.
Guest speaker: Valerie Hébert is associate professor of history and interdisciplinary studies at Lakehead University Orillia. She teaches European history, specializing in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and the photography of human rights violations and international conflict. She has published on the German resistance...

The Holocaust could not have been carried out by the executioners alone. Such large-scale murder, over vast distances, required a massive apparatus staffed by hundreds of thousands of state administrative and security personnel.
How could so many seemingly “ordinary” people knowingly take part in such crimes? In this episode we take a glimpse at this troubling phenomenon, starting with a single German police officer, Paul Salitter, tasked with escorting a train of 1,007 Jews from Germany to a ghetto in occupied Latvia.Featured guest - Dr. Christopher Browning, Frank Porter Graham...

 In November, 1940, the German occupiers of Warsaw forced nearly 400,000 Jews into 1.3 square miles of land, then walled off the neighborhood.
That's when a group of Jews got together to document what was happening. They wrote of disease, starvation and torture, both physical and psychological, but also of themselves, their families and the brief moments of normalcy amid all the horror. This was the Oneg Shabbat archive, and it's our primary record of the Warsaw Ghetto to this day.Featured guest: Samuel D. Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, Hartford,...

Prior to the Holocaust, much of the Jewish landscape of Eastern Europe was made up of shtetls. Today, decades after its destruction, the shtetl’s residents, streets and buildings still remain etched in the Jewish collective memory.
In this episode of "On the Holocaust", Yad Vashem's podcast, Prof. Samuel Kassow takes us into the world of the shtetl, introducing its origins, history and inner-dynamics.The Shtetl: Between Myth and Reality - Transcription:Hello, and welcome to this latest episode of "On the Holocaust", Yad Vashem's podcast. I'm Dafna Dolinko...

Description: The allies were receiving accurate information about the murder of European Jewry at a very early stage. However, even though they formally denounced Nazi atrocities against the Jews in 1942, the "Final Solution" continued to unfold, largely uninterrupted. Why did allied leaders stand by as millions were being killed? In this episode of "On the Holocaust", Yad Vashem's podcast, Dr. David Silberklang will continue to explore the free world's response to the Holocaust.The Allies and the Holocaust Part II - Transcription:[00:05] Nate Nelson: Hi, I’m Nate...

How did the free world stand idly by during the Holocaust? This question is one that continues to echo today.
For many years it was commonly thought that the "Final Solution" was shrouded in secrecy, as it was indeed planned to be by Nazi Germany. Yet Information regarding the mass murder of Jews in Europe began to reach the free world soon after these actions began.
What did this information entail and how did it reach the "outside world"? In this episode of "On the Holocaust", Yad Vashem's podcast, Dr. David Silberklang will discuss these issues, as well...

The Auschwitz concentration camp was one of the most horrific places ever conceived of by man--a place of constant torture. The experience was uniquely terrible for women, who were forced into some of the most unimaginable of circumstances. Even years later, the mothers who survived couldn't escape the memory.

Germany's army during World War II was seen by many, on both sides of the conflict, to be politically "neutral". While the Nazi regime carried out the Holocaust, it was thought, the army was elsewhere, carrying out more traditional warfare. This was a fiction. The Wehrmacht were a Nazi army. So how did this fiction spread? And who had an interest in spreading it?

Operation Reinhard was a Nazi plan to exterminate all of Poland’s Jewish population. It was methodically plotted and marked the single deadliest phase in the entire Holocaust.

After the Holocaust, a group of young Jews decided to enact revenge on the Germans. They called themselves The Avengers. Their plan? An equivalent punishment

The Hall of Names at Yad Vashem is the world's most significant memorial for Holocaust victims. But gathering information on thousands of people killed so many years ago is not easy. Teams of dedicated historians and archivists work every day to find, gather and present information in a way that will properly honor those lost.

While so many were being kidnapped, held in captivity and killed, a group of free Jews in Europe were working to help their brothers and sisters. They called themselves "The Working Group." Their goal was to save as many people as possible. The odds were not in their favor.Jews Saving Jews - Transcription:"Fate has willed us apart, yet the same fate has also willed that during the years of our people's greatest misery, your mother is fulfilling a great mission in order to ease this terrible suffering. If I survive this difficult period, I think I will be able to say that I have...