A free day programme and exhibition took place at the Manx Museum over the weekend looking at the global efforts to find the missing after the Holocaust.
Siobhán Fletcher went along on Saturday and caught up with Dr Christine Schmidt, Deputy Director and Head of Research at London's Wiener Holocaust Library, and Dan Stone, Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Hi, I'm Chavon Flatcha, one of the journalists up at Manx Radio, and welcome to the latest edition of our newscast. Now you might have heard on Friday we told you about a free programme and exhibition being held at the Manx Museum over the weekend. We covered it in our Breakfast Show and Update programme. Attendees heard about the global efforts to find the missing after the Holocaust, and the connections made to the many Jewish refugees held on the Isle of Man during the Second World War. I went along on Saturday and caught up with some of the contributors. Dr Christine Schmidt is the Deputy Director and Head of Research at London's Vina Holocaust Library, and after her talk I wanted to find out a little bit more about what they do. My name is Christine Schmidt and I'm the Deputy Director and Head of Research at the Vina Holocaust Library in London. And so we just had a fascinating talk really about your work and what the library does, but I suppose for anyone who wasn't here can you sum up really quick for me that is even possible of what you do and why it's important to people. We are one of the oldest collections about the Holocaust in the world. We were started by Alfred Vina and we are celebrating our 90th year of operation this year. And we have been collecting about the Nazis and the Holocaust in World War II for those 90 years and working to educate and commemorate the Holocaust and also collect about other genocides. And what we're here today to talk about is our specific focus on supporting family research into the Holocaust. So this is a history that's still living for many people and we have brought with us our Fade Unknown exhibition which looks at the history of tracing after the Holocaust, how people found missing people, and how they were reunited after the Holocaust. So we have a small traveling exhibition and then accompanying that we have a curator's talk which is focused on how we put the exhibition together and what it means for people, but also how you can conduct your own search. So this is a as I said a functional exhibition, also an educational exhibition, and also commemorative because we look at people whose fates were never found and who this you know this the act of searching is an act of commemoration. So it's a it's really wonderful to be able to see people in person and to bring this important collection and the service that we provide outside of London. I think it's interesting I think maybe if your family wasn't directly impacted by the Holocaust in any way maybe people think that those searches are overall or that people have kind of maybe accepted what happened you know and that's really not the reality. Do you still see a lot of people coming to you year on year? I mean what's the reality of the day to day there? Yeah we do. Every time we do an outreach event for example we have a rise in inquiries but yes it's still very much a living history and part of this is because of the way that you know this the cataclysm of World War II has seen archives dispersed around the world and we talked a little bit about that in the event today that even though this collection on which we base our family research support which is the International Tracing Service Archive now known as the Eirelson Archives has 30 million pages of documentation and it's the largest collection of Holocaust in World War II related material anywhere it's still not the full story. So what we need to do is you know archival institutions and holding institutions need to be speaking to each other and need to be thinking about how to link up those materials and then as more and more materials are donated to collections like the library more and more information is becoming known so we always say to people even if you think you've done a search you've found everything you need to know it might be useful to open that search again and we do see people you know coming to institutions like every four or five years I did this search four or five years ago can I do it again is there any new information that you have and there's also the fact that even if when you we get documents in the more accessible they are through indexing through cataloging through digitization more discoveries are always made so it is a it is very much a living history for many people and when you sort of take the exhibition round and you do this talk I mean you're here on the Isle of Man today and we have a history within term and um do you sort of um find more connections with different things that happen because you're right I mean especially if we're talking World War II that history is all over Europe and you know it will even around the world really so do you sort of find a little bit more out about like so internment and do you have people coming to you maybe are you expecting it today if people saying actually I had family members interned here you know what's that like as well yeah that's that's actually one of the reasons that we came because we knew that this history isn't actually very well represented in ITS as such but it's connected to that history because the history of forced migration and the treatment of refugees once they arrived here um is important because it links to what happened to their relatives and so in a lot of cases it may not necessarily shed light on their experience of internment because that collection isn't reflected in the ITS um but it does reflect on the separation of families um what happened to relatives and friends um back on the continent so i suspect that we will get lots of inquiries coming from here even if we can't necessarily shed light on that internment experience because the partners here at max heritage have amazing collections about that um topic um we can help round out the picture with our search uh support in ITS so i could talk to you for hours but let's end so i mean um and i mean you talked there as well in in the in the presentation about like the missing missing and it is this fate unknown i mean you had an example there of a woman who was deported to outwards near the end of the war we can kind of guess what happened there but we don't know um you know if we're talking internment on the almond we actually had a lot of really famous internees where we know exactly who they were and what they did and what they did after the war so i guess what's the importance there of of cataloging maybe the names we don't even know but we know that something happened there and that's i think one of the things i mentioned this that this exhibition is also marking it as a searching as an act of commemoration so even the act of searching for someone even if you don't clarify what happened to them is really important because that name is remembered and that name is spoken again and that's why we always include the examples that we do in the exhibition of Zuzana Knoblock who's the face of the exhibition really and Gita Nussbaum because we were never able to clarify exactly what happened to them but i think that act of searching is really important as a form of commemoration in our research team will also file information at Yad Vashem to commemorate those people who you know if for example you know we do a search for someone and they've discovered family members that they didn't know existed and so we you know we are able to record those names as as other victims of the holocaust who were not previously known and so that that act of somebody looking for that name and saying that name again keeps their memory alive so i guess finally and you don't really have to answer this someone asked a question there about like kind of the future of these resources and i mean given kind of the world context right now as well you mentioned i mean a really important research that are based in Israel as well do you sort of do you feel like you're having to at any point defend the institution or the work you do or do you think actually people still know that it's really important and that you know i mean i suppose how we how is this sector of history feeling right now i don't have that's the right way to question it would you know i mean yeah no it's a good question um we always face challenges as a charity of course we are an independent charity we rely on the donations of supportive foundations and people to be able to do our daily work but of course in a climate where there's a lot of division the rise of the far right difficult developments around the world we do feel it more in the sense that it's you know it both reinforces the importance of what we're doing but also makes it seem you know it's more challenging to find funding and to potentially find support however it it it it does reinforce the importance of this evidence to show what happens when democracy breaks down to show what happens from you know from unbridled hate um and um we we think it's more important than ever to be able to record these stories and to record evidence of the Holocaust and we will keep going as best we can now presenting that talk with Christine was professor Dan Stone i also grabbed him to find out why the exhibition was put together in the first place and what it means for people going forward sure i'm Dan Stone i'm professor of modern history and director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway University of London and we're here today you we've got a temporary exhibition up at the Max Museum called Fate Unknown which actually coincidentally is the name of your book so um can you tell me a little bit about the presentation you just did as well for anyone who wasn't here and um i guess why it's important sure the exhibition was originally shown at the Vienna Holocaust Library in London in 2018 and since then we've been showing a traveling version of it in different parts of the UK and now the Isle of Man as well so we've been to Belfast and Cardiff and Edinburgh and Glasgow and Manchester Newcastle and hopefully various other places in order to engage with audiences outside of London and to explain what the International Tracing Service Archive is how people can access it and use it and both for their own research and for for family history i mean it's the exhibition is about this archive the International Tracing Service Archive which was established at the end of the war to help people trace their missing loved ones people who were displaced as a result of the war and it's an important topic because it's still a tracing service there are still people looking for information about their relatives from World War II and in the context of ongoing refugee crises around the world since 1945 and very much so in in recent years this question of finding missing people how we go about it what services are available is of contemporary as well as of historical relevance so we've tried to condense this vast archive into a handful of small but hopefully interesting stories about the particular individuals as well as a kind of sense of the organization and structures that were in place to help facilitate that process do you have people engaging with it then when you do these talks that people go oh actually i want to search for this that the other i know we did have a question in there so do you see that out of engagement for sure i've just been speaking to a couple of people now after the after the presentation about their search for their relatives so one woman who's been tracing her family back to parts of eastern poland during the period of the zarist empire and other other people telling me about the stories of of their relatives also in in parts of central and and eastern europe so this is an ongoing project for for many many people and for me you know i'm a historian not a family researcher i'm i'm interested in um slightly different types of questions but there's obviously overlap because i'm interested in the trajectories of individuals through the nazi concentration camp system and prison system and various forms of incarceration and so that of course overlaps with people who are doing family research so for yourself then if you go into these archives and it's just that wealth of of knowledge available really um how do you even start tackling topics in these sorts of archives where there's millions of documents well like any historical research you you can't just go to the archive and see what you find you have you have to go with a research question and so you need to think what is it that i want to know what question do i want to address and and then to use the archive to try and locate it in this instance when it's such a vast archive of 30 million documents you have to try and locate the particular units of documents that you're interested in in order to address the the question that you're interested in so you know in in the book that i wrote fate unknown i've tried on the one hand it contains a short institutional history of the international tracing service from its origins in the mid 40s through to today but i've also then shown how you can use certain parts of the archive in order to write about various aspects of the history of the holocaust in a way that you can't using other available documents so it's not it's not history of everything that's in uh in it's it's not a complete history of the holocaust it's showing how certain aspects of that history like the use of slave labor or the death marches or the displaced persons camps after the war can be investigated using the sources that are in it's thank you again to those speakers for catching us up on that event that was held at the max museum over the weekend and if you want to find out more go to our website maxradio.com there's an article on there with all the links you'll need to the various things they were talking about thank you for making it to the end of the manxeradian newscast you are obviously someone with exquisite taste may i politely suggest you might want to subscribe to this and a wide range of manxeradia podcasts at your favorite podcast provider so our best bits will magically appear on your smartphone thank you (upbeat music) You
