Holocaust Memorial Day

Evoking the potential plot of a dystopian political thriller, there is an actual place where former US presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Axis-allied Hungarian leader Miklós Horthy, the Soviet Red Army, as well as 21^st century right-wing populist historical revisionism come together. Szabadság ter (Freedom Square) in the heart of Budapest bulges with competing narratives whose silent screams merge into the cacophonous political realities of current-day Central Europe. Having pushed a pram in endless circles across this square during the first year of my son’s life, I never ceased to be struck by the historical hysteria of the commemoration circus adorning the space around me. 

Public spaces are contested spaces. Recent years have seen heated debates fuelled by the lingering presence of monuments and statues that offer an unproblematised national narrative at best, or even serve to flat-out glorify past atrocities. These discussions have mostly been waged in the west. In the US scrutiny befalls Civil War-era ‘heroes’ whose supposed heroism was forged on the broken and bloody backs of slaves. In Europe swords are crossed over monuments related to colonial legacies: the statues of slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol and of Winston Churchill in London’s Parliament Square. Most Dutch cities have streets named after various ‘Zeehelden’ (‘sea heroes’), such as Dutch East India Company officer Jan Pieterszoon Coen, responsible for large-scale violence against the local population on the Banda Islands to secure access to nutmeg and clove in the 17^th century. (Coen’s statue in his hometown Hoorn also led to modest protests last year.)

What seems to be at stake is not just the conflicting messages undergirding different lieux de mémoire (‘sites of memory’, to self-consciously refer to Pierre Nora’s much-quoted concept). Rather, it is the tension between a hegemonic narrative based on outdated sets of morality connected to ‘national glory’, and the lived realities of the descendants of the victims of this ‘glory’. The latter are themselves often subjected to structural racism prevalent in 21^st century societies. 

In Central and Eastern Europe the use of public spaces for memory-formation has a different yet equally convoluted history. After 1989, most post-Communist governments quickly undid themselves of physical references to their countries’ immediate pasts. Socialist monuments—statues of Lenin, Stalin, local communist leaders and heroes, idealised images of working men and women—were mostly destroyed. In Hungary’s capital Budapest various statues were instead collected on a desolate stretch outside of the city. A remarkable tribute to a much-detested past, Memento Park is still a must-see for any historically interested visitor. (I recommend a slightly overcast and chilly winter’s day for the most atmospheric and—dare I say it—authentic experience.)

However, one would be mistaken to assume that post-1989 Budapest is free of politically charged monuments. On the contrary, the politicisation of history has only intensified since Viktor Orbán’s ‘illiberal’ (Orbán’s own term) populist Fidesz party came to power in 2010. 

This is nowhere more poignantly visible than on Szabadság ter. The execution site of Prime Minister Lájos Batthyány after the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1848/1849, the square obtained its current layout at the end of the 19^th century. In 1946, at the very beginning of socialist rule in Hungary, the centrally placed monument to the Soviet liberators of the city was erected. After 1989, this epic structure lost much of its revered status and in the early 2000s there was some talk of demolishing the whole thing. Instead, a fence and guards were installed to prevent vandals from attacking the site, as Russia threatened economic sanctions if anything were to happen to the monument. 

Hungarian authorities did allow for the appearance of two symbolic ‘challengers of communism’. Life-like statues of former US Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. were placed on either side of the Soviet memorial column, in 2011 and 2020 respectively. While open for other interpretations as well, one thing these statues signal is that despite political ties with Russia communism does fervently belong to the past. 

Certainly not in the past is Hungarian irredentism manifested in lingering nostalgia for pre-World War I Greater Hungary, which was brought to an end by the Treaty of Trianon (1920). Second World War leader Horthy initially backed Adolf Hitler in the hope of regaining some of Hungary’s lost territories. In 2013, members of the ultra-right-wing section of the Hungarian Reformed Church believed that these efforts warranted a bust of Horthy, which now stands at their church’s entrance on the square’s edge. Even though technically on private property, the statue’s visibility led to discontent amongst liberal Hungarians (one of whom attacked the bust with a red paint bomb last year). 

If the presence of a stern-looking Horthy, partially held responsible for the mass-murder of Hungarian Jews and Gypsies during the Holocaust, was not yet enough of an affront to Jewish and Romani minorities, the following year saw the erection of what is now the most eye-catching structure on the square: an archaic-looking memorial for ‘the victims of the Second World War’. A German eagle attacks the Archangel Gabriel—a stand-in for an undifferentiatedly victimised Hungary. Absent is any reference to the Hungarian complicity in the deportation to Auschwitz of half a million Hungarian Jews in the spring and summer of 1944 alone. The monument was erected covertly overnight on 21 July 2014 and aroused large-scale controversy lasting until this day.

But it is not just the monuments that render Szabadság ter historically charged. Looking at the 21^st century, one could also mention the storming of the now vacated Television Building by mostly right-wing groups in 2006, as part of the protests against Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s socialist government. Briefly leaving the square, around the corner we find the now mostly deserted campus of the Central European University. Since this year, the CEU has started operating from Vienna after having been effectively ousted from Hungary by a cynically formulated new law. Hiding behind legal semantics, Orbán still does not admit to having pushed the university out of the country. It is clear, however, that he considered the CEU a political Trojan horse for the university’s founder and the Prime Minister’s chosen arch-enemy George Soros. 

On most days, history is silent on the square. Instead, one hears children playing and dogs barking as they chase fat pigeons across the central field. Szabadság ter is also home to a sizable colony of hooded crows. On a cold winter’s night, their cawing adds to the Poe-like eeriness of this marvellous place. Do visit, if you ever have the chance.

Note: Szabadság ter’s monument medley was also eloquently analysed by Cara Eckholm in 2014.

Laura Almagor is a lecturer in the University of Sheffield’s History Department and the editor of History Matters. She specialises in modern Jewish history with a special focus on Jewish political movements and ideologies. She also has a keen research interest in memory cultures. Laura divides her time between Sheffield and Budapest.

Cover image: The Hungarian Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation on Szabadság ter. Photo credit: Laura Almagor

On Monday 27 January, thousands gathered across the globe to commemorate International Holocaust Memorial Day 2020, which also marked the 75^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau – the Nazi concentration and extermination camp where European Jews and other minorities were imprisoned and murdered en masse. In Sheffield it was no different, with residents coming together for a candle lit vigil in the Winter Gardens that was well-attended by important representatives of the city, such as the Lord Mayor, as well as religious leaders from local Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities.

Every year Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK is given an accompanying theme by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and this year was no exception, the 2020 theme being ‘Stand Together’. Underlying this phrase is a message of solidarity: solidarity with Jews in the face of the global rise in antisemitic hate crime, solidarity with survivors, and solidarity with those who perished in the Holocaust – which is still subject to widespread denial and revisionism. This solidarity also allies us with the victims and survivors of subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, who are also commemorated on Holocaust Memorial Day.

Connecting this annual event with an overarching theme can help to direct the focus of Holocaust commemoration and make it more relevant to a contemporary audience, and to young people in particular. Symptomatic of our western liberal approach to memory making, however, these themes also have the potential to dilute or otherwise universalise the specific ‘lessons’ to be learnt from the attempted annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany over seventy-five years ago.

This concern was brought to my attention during Sheffield’s own vigil, which opened with several upbeat renditions of well-known pop songs by a primary school choir, including (to my surprise) Randy Newman’s Toy Story hit ‘You Got a Friend in Me’. Audience members clapped along and applauded the performance, which led into the evening’s scheduled readings and reflections.

It’s encouraging that so many Sheffield residents of all ages and backgrounds feel willing and able to participate in a Holocaust Memorial Day vigil, which is always welcome to all. It is also perhaps easy to understand the inclusion of songs that advocate for friendship, camaraderie and love within an event of this kind, especially for children. The problem with using a Disney-associated song about the love of two fictional characters for a commemorative Holocaust vigil is that it entirely obfuscates the identities of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

We are in danger of reducing Holocaust Memorial Day to an event defined by well-meaning but platitudinal phrases such as ‘never again’, which serve to depoliticise the antisemitic roots of the Holocaust. Memory is always political and is inextricably linked to power and identity: this means we cannot refer to the ‘people’ who died during the Holocaust, as this constitutes a generalised description of the victims of Nazi genocide who were persecuted on the basis of their religious beliefs and ethnicities. As the numbers of those who witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust first-hand are sadly dwindling, it is more important than ever that official commemorations of the Shoah (the Jewish Holocaust) are firmly situated in their historical and political contexts.

Yet there is a degree to which the sometimes-universalising effect of Britain’s National Holocaust Memorial Day is a product of our nation’s identity-affirming motives for establishing this commemorative event in the first place. Established in 2001, Holocaust Memorial Day was designed to bring national recognition to the suffering of Jewish victims and other minorities of the Holocaust, and to critically reflect on how the past can inform our approach to religious, ethnic and racial prejudice and discrimination in the present. As Daniel Tilles and John Richardson argue, however, Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day is just as much about emphasising what Labour MP Andrew Dismore called the ‘positive values of Britain’ as it is about commemorating victims.[1]

As such, the Holocaust has been deployed in national commemorative practice as a tool not only to advance Britain’s false superiority as liberators, but, as historians have argued, to mask the more uncomfortable aspects of Britain’s wartime past. According to Tilles and Richardson, this includes Britain’s ‘collaboration in deporting Jewish residents from the occupied Channel Islands to Nazi death camps’ as well as its little-acknowledged ‘reluctance to facilitate the escape of Jewish refugees fleeing occupied Europe’.[2]

Moreover, the designation of a day dedicated to commemorating the Holocaust is an important opportunity to remember Holocaust victims. It should, however, be viewed as part of a rigorous and ongoing critical reflection regarding the treatment of Jews as well as a chance to educate upcoming generations of the atrocities of the Third Reich. In order to better express our solidarity with Jewish victims of persecution past and present, an acknowledgement of their identities must be at the forefront of British Holocaust commemoration, as should the current reality of antisemitism that increasingly rears its ugly head in the political sphere. Holocaust Memorial Day is not a marker of western sophistication; rather, it is a reminder of the continued threats of antisemitism, racism and xenophobia to minorities.

Emily-Rose Baker is a final year PhD researcher based in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis examines postcommunist representations of Holocaust memory and dreams in central-eastern Europe, and is funded by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH). You can find Emily on Twitter @emily_baker18.

Cover Image: Holocaust memorial in Rishon LeZion, Israel, 2006. Courtesy of Zachi Evenor. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocaust-Memorial-MKZE.jpg, [Accessed 3 February 2020}.

[1] Daniel Tilles and John Richardson, ‘Past, Present and Future: Poland’s New Memory Law Exposes the Problematic Nature of Holocaust Remembrance’, History Today, 68:5 (2018).

[2] Ibid.

The following post has been adapted from the author’s contribution to a Holocaust Memorial Day vigil, held in the Winter Garden, Sheffield City Centre on 28.01.19.

 The home, both as a place of dwelling and as a more abstract yet instinctive sense of belonging, is a frequently evoked image within Holocaust literature. Home can mean many different things to different people: it can constitute a country of origin or birth, encompass friends and family and is often central to the creation of selfhood and identity. Yet to not have a home, to be home-less, is a fear (or realisation) that can be universally related to. The act of being ‘torn from home’—this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day theme—whether a house, nation, people or a combination of all three, affected all those who experienced the Shoah to some degree. Under Nazi persecution, European Jews were dispossessed of land and property, were forced to evacuate their homes to be deported or killed, or to go into hiding. They were also physically displaced in ghettos and/or camps. Those who survived returned to homes and formerly thriving communities destroyed by war, and faced the very difficult task of re-establishing new ones.

The home features in the work of Holocaust memoirists, in survivor testimonies, film, graphic novels, poetry and other media. In many instances, it remains an image of hope for refugees and those imprisoned and forced into slave labour in concentration camps – although, as late survivor Jean Cayrol reflects, to linger on memories and dreams of home was often detrimental to survival. In Charlotte Delbo’s short story ‘The Teddy Bear’, the uniting power of the word ‘home’ is enough to carry the author and her fellow inmates through a Christmas Eve dinner spent in a death camp, even when spoken in another language. ‘The Frenchwomen […] tried to repeat the magic words’ of their Polish inmates, Delbo writes.[1] ‘Do domou, do domou—at home.’[2]

In other accounts, the home is an irrevocably ruined construction: a traumatic reminder of a pre-war past. In her autobiography A Lesser Child, Kindertransport refugee Karen Gershon had to write about her ‘German self’ in the third person as ‘Kate’ and in her mother tongue when articulating the traumatic experience of growing up as a child in Nazi Germany, which she escaped in 1938 after Kristallnacht.

For those with families who survived, the postwar return home at least meant reuniting with loved ones. Yet repatriation was often a disillusioning process for survivors, some of whom were welcomed by racial hostility and violence as well as stolen property. Even the voyage back was itself arduous: many prisoners freed from camps were malnourished and diseased, with either no means of getting home or a lengthy journey ahead of them via rail or foot. Primo Levi’s The Truce documents the treacherous journey home across Europe from Auschwitz to Italy, which entailed further starvation, marching and work in a Russian rehabilitation camp before reaching his homeland nine months after liberation.

The alternative to these desolate realities was the adaptation of victims to new wartime lives and temporary homes – as was the case with Anne Frank and her family, who took refuge, in Amsterdam, 1933, from an increasingly hostile antisemitic climate in Germany. The hiding place of Anne Frank and her family from July 1942—an attic in the building of her father’s business—constitutes perhaps the most famous example of the home in collective Holocaust memory and literature, visited by thousands each year. Much of the global interest in the Anne Frank House owes to its authentic traces of a life that continued despite perilous political and domestic conditions. These include the displayed pages of Anne’s diary and posters of German film stars cut from magazines and plastered onto walls, which gesture toward the popular culture of the period and illustrate the interests of a ‘normal’ (albeit persecuted and later revered) teenager. The diary itself provides an intimate portrait of a home life filled with the happiness and tensions of a typical family despite limited space and the ever-present fear of their discovery.

Sites such as Auschwitz, however, represent the antithesis of home. This is exemplified by Polish survivor Tadeusz Borowski’s ironic use of the phrase ‘Auschwitz, Our Home’ as one of his short stories in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

The luxury of being able to choose one’s home rests on their right to move. Today, this is increasingly undermined and threatened by the strictures of hard borders and tightened immigration laws. Among those who are unable to pinpoint a specific location or physical construction they call home are refugees and asylum seekers – an especially important consideration on Holocaust Memorial Day.

On July 23, 1943, Anne Frank wrote of her wish ‘to be able to move around freely’ in her own home despite her successful assimilation into a new culture, language and way of life in the Netherlands.[3] This desire deeply resonates with the kinds of discourse surrounding EU separation and an escalating global refugee crisis exacerbated by detainment and deportations. It also exposes the fact that, contrary to erroneous depictions of migrants as job-takers and exploiters of national services, many refugees long to return home to a place of familiarity, but are prevented from doing so due to circumstances beyond their control. An event often described as historically ‘unique’, this reminds us that the persecution of minorities central to the Holocaust is not confined to the past, but manifests today in the refusal of a home or place of safety within society to those targeted on the basis of race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality or gender.

Emily-Rose Baker is a second-year WRoCAH funded PhD student based in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Her research examines central-eastern European Holocaust memory and dreams in the post-communist era.

[1] Charlotte Delbo, ‘The Teddy Bear’, Auschwitz and After: Second Edition, trans. by Rosette C. Lamount (London: Yale University Press, 1995) p.164.

[2] Delbo, p.164.

[3] Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: Definitive Edition, eds. Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler (London: Penguin, 2011) p.112.

I struggle with memorial days. I can’t help thinking that they make little impact on the notion of memorialism, and before you know it we’ve all moved on without giving a second thought to the event which we are supposed to be remembering.

On Holocaust Memorial Day 2017 UK Prime Minister Theresa May wrote in the Holocaust Educational Trust’s book of remembrance “our commitment to remember the Holocaust is about more than words — it is about action. It is about raising awareness, spreading understanding, ensuring the memory of the Holocaust lives on, and standing up to prejudice and hatred wherever it is found today.” The same day she stood with President Donald Trump, who was in the process of attempting to block, wholesale, the entrance to the US for citizens of selected ‘Muslim countries’. Such stark and obvious moments of hypocrisy cause me to wonder what the point of Holocaust Memorial Day is?

Of course, primary among the objectives of Holocaust Memorial Day is to bring the events of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides into the public’s consciousness. Knowing about and understanding an event which shook the foundations of Western Civilisation and, in part, shaped the world we live in today should be regarded as more than enough of a task. But remembrance means more than this. Remembrance entails response, action, and reaction to what has happened.

The ‘never again’ mantra is trotted out amid a world in which genocide has been present in every decade since 1945 and atrocities are part of the daily news cycle. It seems that remembering for one day in the year is not enough to change patterns of human behaviour. When memorialising is a passive process, based on unimaginable statistics and empty phrases it can do little more than generate a momentary response. For people to engage with the memory and implications of the Holocaust and wider genocides, I’d argue that we must go a little deeper than this.

The British government stated clearly that Holocaust Memorial Day was about “articulating a particular vision of Britishness”.[1] What that vision of Britishness is remains unclear. Memory Scholars Jann Assmann and John Czaplieka suggest that the values which are highlighted from memory “tells us much about the constitution and tendencies of a society.”[2] So, beyond the memory of the Holocaust, Holocaust Memorial Day can be seen as an ideological tool which promotes a contemporary narrative.

In the case of the UK this narrative is limited to Britain as righteous liberators of camps, and fighters against Nazi tyranny. Holocaust Memorial Day is not the time to discuss the refusal to accept more than a few thousand Jewish refugee children before the war, restrict Jewish immigration to British Mandated Palestine, or fail to act on the intelligence from Eastern Europe of the unfolding atrocities taking place. What is admitted into and omitted from our national image of Holocaust memory seems to create a somewhat skewed picture.

Before its inception in 2001, Historian Dan Stone registered his concern predicting that it would be a ‘a day of fatuous ceremonies when the great and the good will congratulate themselves for not being Nazis’ while also reliev[ing] the community of the burden of memory.’[3] The example above does little to refute such a fear and, in some ways, renders the meaning and value of such a day as lost. But despite the grandiose, yet simultaneously half-hearted, statements from statemen and women I would argue it is important that we devote time to remembering this cataclysmic event, and the subsequent genocides perpetrated in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. The challenge is making the memory meaningful.

Meaning can be found through personal engagement with the past, addressing complexities and moving away from simplistic and universalised statements. This can ignite genuine thought and consideration of the events, and their implications for us. If Holocaust Memorial Day is about more than remembering as knowing what happened, then it must be challenging to us in a way which causes us to think, and react through behaviour rather than ceremony. There is a place for ceremony in so-far-as it marks the occasion, but memorialisation of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides should be an active process.

‘Never again’ is often a trite statement which, despite good intention, fails to achieve the active change it demands. Moreover, it won’t stop failing to make an impact while we keep thoughtlessly saying it. What Holocaust Memorial Day should be about is asking why it has failed, challenging ourselves with the stories of past genocide, and starting a process of thought and action that doesn’t stop at midnight on January 27^th.

Ben Fuller was a 2004 graduate of Sheffield University, with BA in Politics and Sociology. He now teaches History at Tapton School in Sheffield, and is also currently completing his MA in Holocaust Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He works freelance with The Holocaust Educational Trust and has written educational materials for the Winston Churchill Archive on the Holocaust and WW2 History.

This blog is part of a series of posts for National Holocaust Memorial Day – they will appear here as they are posted.

Image: Holocaust memorial, Budapest [via WikiCommons].

[1] Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Marcel Stoetzler.Holocaust Memory in the 21st Century: between national reshaping and globalisation. European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 18:01, pp69-78. 2011.

[2] Jann Assmann and John Czaplieka. New German Critique, No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies, pp. 125-133. Duke University Press. 1995.

[3] Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Marcel Stoetzler. Holocaust Memory in the 21st Century: between national reshaping and globalisation. European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 18:01, pp69-78. 2011.

It is more than seventy years since the first publication of the first Dutch version of Anne Frank’s diary appeared in print. It was followed by both English and American editions in 1952 and subsequently translated into more than 60 languages to become perhaps the most iconic text to emanate from the Holocaust period.

The writings of a young girl, albeit in extreme circumstances, trying to make sense of growing up and writing about her hopes and fears, struck a chord with successive generations of young people across the globe. Sales figures bear witness to its popularity as a text, but that also made it a target for Holocaust deniers – undermine the veracity of the text and you undermine the veracity of the Holocaust itself. One of the deniers’ arguments was that there were different versions of the diary and they could not have been written by the same person.

In response, the custodians of the diary, the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation published what they described as the ‘critical’ edition in 1989 where they placed the various versions side by side, to show how they had been edited and changed by Anne herself. The book also contained chapters about the Frank family and the circumstances of their betrayal.

An unwieldy tome and not really designed for the mass market, it inevitably did nothing to convince hard-line deniers, and was itself subsequently undermined by the admission that there were a number of diary pages that had been withheld from previous publications because Otto Frank had deemed them too critical of Anne’s mother, Edith.

Twenty five years on and with the copyrights on the various versions of the diary coming closer to expiry, albeit staunchly defended by the lawyers of the Fondation Anne Frank in Basle, funds were found to mount a comprehensive re-evaluation of the diary. Martin van Gelderen (Lichenberg Kolleg) and Raphael Gross (Fritz Bauer Institut) led a team of scholars and translators who have gone back to the original manuscript diary to produce a new version. Their work has uncovered innumerable flaws in the earlier transcriptions.

For example, a fresh look at the manuscript shows that Anne often made errors and used German rather than Dutch grammatical constructions in her writing. This is especially ironic given the sometimes cruel jibes she made about her mother’s lack of competence in the language. Such errors seem to have been elided out in earlier versions.

A close reading of the diary also betrays Anne’s reliance for her writing style on the various Dutch authors she read as a child, not least the novels of Dutch children’s author Cissy van Marxveldt. Moreover, the sections that she was rewriting in 1944 show how her style changed as she got older and was influenced by other authors she read while in the Achterhuis. This on its own will force a literary reappraisal of the diary and provide a much more nuanced view of her writings.

This new set of publications will undoubtedly change the scholarly landscape surrounding Anne Frank’s legacy, not least in encouraging comparison with another recently discovered contemporary diary of Carry Ulreich, a teenage Jewish girl who survived the occupation in hiding in Rotterdam. That said, Anne Frank the symbol shows no sign of losing its status. Within the last six months alone, there have been at least two major controversies.

The first involved a Deutsche Bahn plan to name one of its new ICE trains after Anne Frank. While the idea sparked a great deal of debate, it was mediated by the Fondation’s insistence on a contextual explanation in the train itself. Far more extreme and deliberately provocative was distribution by neo-fascist fans of SS Lazio football club of stickers showing Anne Frank wearing a shirt of their arch rivals AS Roma. Such was the public outcry that the Italian football federation ordered a reading from the diary at all Serie A matches the following week – something that rather backfired when it led to further ugly scenes elsewhere.

Although an updated and more accurate version of the diary will undoubtedly be of benefit to academic and scholars, will it put an end to the use and misuse of Anne Frank as a symbol? Somehow I doubt it.

The Dagboek van Anne Frank will be published in Dutch by Prometheus in 2018 and in English and German translations by Cambridge University Press and Fischer Verlag respectively in 2019. Carry Ulreich‘s Nachts droom ik van vrede. Oorlogsdagboek 1941-1945 was published by Uitgeverij Mozaïek in 2016.

Professor Bob Moore is Professor of 20th Century European History at The University of Sheffield. His research is centred on the Second World War and Holocaust in Western Europe. He is currently a vitisting fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Goettingen and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte, Munich.

This blog is part of a series of posts for National Holocaust Memorial Day – they will appear here as they are posted.

Image: Anne Frank, 1940 [Via WikiCommons]