Before and during WWII, German corporations went from the abandonment of Jewish colleagues, through profiting off the dispossession and murder of Jews, to working Jews to death. The leading executives of these companies embodied the “thoughtlessness,” the indifference to the people on the receiving end of their deeds. The actions taken by most of them, weren't just a means to keep their businesses running , but an opportunity to profit and shine - a "banality of evil" with deadly and...

In the late 1970’s, the American TV mini series “Holocaust” was broadcast in West Germany, and immediately took over the public discourse. For many younger Germans, this was the first time they’d seen the Jewish victims of the Nazis depicted on screen. It began an unprecedented period of reckoning in Germany, where the word ‘Holocaust’ was not widely used before, and where the horrific crimes of the past were in many ways swept under the collective rug. Featured guests: Actor James Woods;...

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.

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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....

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...

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...

Today marks Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) 2022. In keeping with Yad Vashem's annual theme, "Transports to Extinction: The Deportation of the Jews during the Holocaust," we're presenting the following episode, that originally aired in February 2021. 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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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 by 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...

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. Featured guest: Dr. Valerie Hébert, Associate Professor of History, Lakehead University, Canada.

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.

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...

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...

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.