This article explores how private letters, which were preserved by Jewish refugees who migrated before and after the Holocaust to Britain, and which were eventually donated to the Wiener Holocaust Library (WHL) in London, reveal evidence of how "Holocaust knowledge" was produced, assimilated, spread, and transformed. The authors argue that analyzing these letters as sites of knowledge production reinforces the role of individuals in forming and exchanging knowledge and articulates the multiple mediating interventions of the archive. As an institution born of persecution and forced Jewish migration during the Nazi period, the WHL is a particularly useful archive from which to draw private correspondence for this study and to analyze the changing roles and interventions of archives on migrant knowledge. This article traces rumor, "false" information, and subversive forms of knowledge exchange in the correspondence; as well as the "afterlives" of the material letters held in the archives, and the strategies (sources of information, existing forms of knowledge, culturally embedded narratives) that victims and survivors used to make sense of what was happening to them as events unfolded and were described, and as knowledge was shared and transformed through space and time.

Journal Article How to Write about the Holocaust: The Postmodern Theory of History in Praxis Get access How to Write about the Holocaust: The Postmodern Theory of History in Praxis. By Theodor PelekanidisLondon: Routledge. 2022. 204pp.£104.00(hardback);£31.19(e-book). Dan Stone Dan Stone Royal Holloway, University of London, UK D.Stone@rhul.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, ghad062, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad062 Published: 01 December 2023

Abstract When the Allies set up the body that became the International Tracing Service, they did not expect to have to deal with children in anything other than small numbers. When the scale of the problem of ‘unaccompanied children’ became clear, they established a separate Child Search Branch. In the first years of its existence, the CSB searched for children ‘in the field’, e.g. in orphanages and foster homes, and, after 1950, conducted tracing on the basis of the documentary evidence it held. At the same time, ITS was involved in helping unaccompanied children to be reunited with their families or, where this was not possible, to be repatriated to their country of origin or resettled in a third country. The chapter discloses the emotionally fraught nature of this work, analyses the enormously controversial question of who had the right to decide on children’s futures, and reveals the great lengths to which the dedicated staff at the CSB went in order to help children, often in the face of political and bureaucratic obstacles.

One of the most crucial sections of the International Tracing Service, centralized and established in 1948, was the Child Search Branch (CSB), which had the emotionally and ethically complex task of assisting 'unaccompanied children' who were discovered in far larger numbers after 1945 than anyone had expected. This article examines the role of three women relief workers who ran the CSB in the post-war period: Eileen Blackey, Cornelia Heise and Eileen Davidson. Focusing mainly on these exemplary cases, the authors evaluate and centre the women's leadership and decisions, showing how women who worked for the CSB played roles that subverted the general rule in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and its successor organization, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which was that women were directed into 'feminine' posts. Women who ran the CSB played senior roles in child search and welfare and the decisions they took had significant and crucial outcomes for children, although gendered assessments of 'carer' and 'feminine' roles in UNRRA/IRO more widely have thus far hidden their activities as a subject worthy of analysis. This article shows how gender affected the spheres of influence the women carved out as they contributed to post-war reconstruction and humanitarian aid.

According to Sarah Gendron, following Terrence Des Pres's notion of "Holocaust etiquette", there are two forms of art which government sponsored museums and memorials feel to be "safe" in representing the Holocaust: pure abstraction or direct, realist representation. The former is permissible since, with its "perceived capacity to sidestep misrepresentation", it "does not seek to portray the event or those involved in a figural way"; the latter is acceptable for precisely the opposite reason, because they "present themselves as re-presentations, portraying moments 'as they were' without intervention, manipulation, or interpretation." The artist appears to bear witness to the event, "providing proof of its 'having definitely been.'" Art which does not fall into these two categories offers more of a challenge to the post-Holocaust world's ability to grapple with the meaning and representation of the genocide of the Jews. One thinks of the photorealism, or blurred "photorealism" of Gerhard Richter; the symbolic art of Józef Szajna where thumbprints, for example, stand in for human beings at roll call; or the anonymous mass of Menashe Kadishman's shalechet (fallen leaves), each representing a human face, all the same but all different. Sieg Maandag's paintings cannot be regarded as falling squarely into any one genre; some are abstract (increasingly so over time), some naïve or surreal figuralism or landscape. Maandag's paintings are reflections of moments of his life and by no means all obviously "Holocaust art." In this paper I argue, however, using Susan Suleiman's notion of the "1.5 generation", that it was his experience as a boy in Bergen-Belsen that stamped Maandag's career as an artist. Through an analysis of several paintings, especially the unfinished and untitled work of a perpetrator who has a fork emerging from his eye pushing into the mouth of a child opposite; Het mooie hemd (the beautiful shirt, 1986); three faces; and the 1983 self portrait where Maandag's crumpled face and an empty speech bubble betray an inability to speak, I suggest that Maandag's concentration camp childhood and subsequent knowledge of the Holocaust are, as Raymond Federman says of his fiction, the "gap" in him that "controls my work and gives it its urgency." Sieg Maandag, famous as the boy walking past the laid out corpses in George Rodger's photograph after the liberation of the camp, deserves greater recognition as a "Holocaust artist" not only because of the subtext of his works but because his oeuvre is in its own right a significant contribution to the field of art perse.

Abstract This chapter uses the ITS documents to show how the Gross-Rosen and Auschwitz sub-camps functioned and the roles they played in the context of the German economy, the concentration camp system, and the Holocaust. Examining the sub-camps not only brings to light an under-appreciated aspect of the Nazi camp system, showing its significance for the German war economy and for our understanding of Nazi ideology; it also allows us, through the ITS documents, to follow the trajectories of individual persecutes through the camps. Looking at the Holocaust ‘from the bottom up’ means we can appreciate the extent to which some victims were moved around and the ways in which the Nazis’ desperate search for labour towards the end of the war facilitated some camp inmates’ survival.

In June 1947, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) launched an exhibition in London titled ‘Search for the Scattered.’ Some of the materials on display were loaned to the WJC by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)’s Central Tracing Bureau (CTB), the predecessor to the International Tracing Service (ITS). The exhibition presented a detailed accounting of the vital work of both the CTB and the WJC. This paper argues, on the basis of the limited documentation that remains, that the ‘Search for the Scattered’ exhibition was a site of postwar knowledge production and transnational exchange that served a practical purpose: facilitating searching by addressing visitors as potential enquirers and reproducing the material culture of the search for visitors to view, read, handle, and understand. Like lists of names that were posted in DP camps, the exhibition can also be read as an early marker of the emotive power of name lists; in Leora Auslander’s words, commemorative markers of ‘a shared fate and common tragedy.’ Although tracing work has been infrequently a focus in the historiography of the Holocaust, the staging of this exhibition demonstrates early recognition of the significance of the WJC’s and CTB’s tracing work and the need for its wider acknowledgement, and suggests the reconstructive and restorative nature of the search itself.