THREAD: I’m in Jerusalem this week for a @YadVashem seminar for journalists about the Holocaust, its legacy, and the challenges of preserving its memory. As we go, I’m going to be sharing what I’ve learned, especially things that surprised or moved me. Feel free to follow along.
In 1946, Yad Vashem was just an apartment in Jerusalem on King George St and another in Tel Aviv. The director, Holocaust survivor historian Sara Friedlander, started the archive w/ materials she brought w/ her from Hungary. She was killed in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. 
Rachel Auerbach was a member of the Warsaw Ghetto’s clandestine historical society Oneg Shabbos, which chronicled the story of its Jews. She was one of only 3 members who survived. Arriving in Israel, she founded Yad Vashem's oral history project to preserve survivor testimony.
In 1967, Yad Vashem had 25 million pages of documents. In 2008, they had 59 million. In 2018, they have 204,000,000. The surge in material is largely thanks to archival agreements signed with European governments in the last ten years.
This is the first blueprint of Auschwitz-Birkenau. You can see the entire chain of signatories, all the way up to Hitler's deputy Himmler. It fell into the hands of neo-Nazis after the war, was acquired by a friend of Yad Vashem who donated it to the museum.
This Jewish inmate card from Mauthausen concentration camp is stamped by the IBM computer the Nazis bought from America to catalog their prisoners. Yad Vashem Archives Director Chaim Gertner: "They used technology to dehumanize people; we're using technology to rehumanize people"
This is a Hebrew calendar drawn up from memory by Rabbi Yaakov Avigdor in the Buchenwald concentration camp, who later survived and became the Chief Rabbi of Mexico. He risked his life to preserve a sense of sacred Jewish time while imprisoned.
Amazing story: This headstone in a Christian cemetery was erected by a Polish priest after he found Jews who had been shot on the road in a death march. But because he didn’t know their names, he put their prisoner numbers on the grave instead. 1/2
Years later, Israeli students in Poland stumbled on the headstone and contacted Yad Vashem. Cross-referencing documents from multiple countries, Yad Vashem identified the murdered Jews. The students and locals—along with one of the victims’ grandsons—then erected a new tombstone.
Some selections from Nazi propaganda about Jews: Note the recurrence of “Talmud” as a scaremongering slur. It’s an old anti-Semitic trope that predates the Nazis & persists among anti-Semites today, from Iran’s regime (which blamed the Talmud for the drug trade) to Alice Walker.
I never knew this: When the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, they forgot to bring a camera to document it. So they came back with one and had the starved Jewish inmates reenact the liberation for their propaganda. That’s … really something.
Yad Vashem currently has an exhibit on Jewish art during the Holocaust. It opens w/ this quote from a Jewish artist’s will, in which she bequeathed her work to a future “Jewish museum.” Even amidst genocide & her impending death, she believed the Jews would endure. She was right.
Carol Deutsch beautifully illustrated the Hebrew Bible for his daughter’s second birthday. He did not survive the Holocaust, but his daughter did, and when she returned to her grandmother’s home, she found the Bible miraculously preserved. Here are some of the illustrations:
Jewish teen Peter Ginz loved Jules Verne and drew hundreds of images of space and spacecraft. He was murdered by the Nazis, but his drawings survived. In 2003, Israel's first astronaut Ilan Ramon took this one into space. This year, NASA's Andrew Feustel did the same.
You might wonder why Yad Vashem has preserved this painting of a Nazi soldier. Flip it around and you discover that the canvas was actually a fragment of a Torah scroll.
Why would Yad Vashem have this Nazi dagger? It came from a Jew from Vienna—who had moved to America, joined the U.S. Army, helped liberate the camps, and confiscated the blade from a Nazi officer he interrogated.
After being liberated, the Jewish inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp established a “kibbutz” at the Buchenwald displaced persons camp. Eventually, many of them left for the land of Israel, like these three girls:
This is Daniel Gold, a child survivor of the Holocaust who hid beneath a farm. He was in better shape in his 80s than anyone in our group. A decorated fighter pilot, he still motorcyles around Israel when not researching vaccines as a professor emeritus of microbiology. (18/18)
