The Holocaust

Holocaust survivor Ivor Perl answers questions about his experiences.

How Miriam Freedman survived the Holocaust in Slovakia.

Randol Schoenberg is a leading US lawyer specializing in cases involving looted Nazi art and the recovery of property stolen by the Nazi authorities during the Holocaust. During the past decades, he has litigated several prominent cases, including the Republic of Austria v. Altmann case, in which he sought the return of six famous Klimt paintings to his client, Maria Altmann.

This lecture tells the story of Oxford resident Vivien Sieber's grandmother, Paula Sieber, who was a cinema owner in Vienna before becoming a refugee in 1938. She became the second matron in a hostel for girls saved by the Kindertransport. Her father, Peter, was interned. Kino and Kinder has many quotes from the girls themselves (as adults) on their experience of leaving their parents, their journey to England and arriving at the hostel. The girls describe adjusting to hostel life. Much of this history is told using contemporaneous writings – journals, letters, archive documents along with adult reflections on their experiences of the girls cared for in the hostels.

The Budapest House: A true story of a family caught up in the Hungarian Holocaust and the traumatic aftermath.

Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga served as the sixth President of Latvia. Dr. Vike-Freiberga was born in 1937 in Riga, Latvia. In order to escape the Soviet occupation, her family fled the country in 1945 and became refugees. After arriving in Canada in 1954, she entered the University of Toronto, obtaining a B.A. (1958) and an M.A. (1960) in Psychology. Resuming her education at McGill University in Montreal, she earned a doctorate in experimental psychology in 1965. She is the author of seven books and about 160 articles, essays or book chapters. Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga is a Founding Member of the Club de Madrid and has been a Member of the Global Leadership Foundation since 2010.

Ruth Bourne was born in Manchester in 1926. At the age of 18, she was sent to a training camp in Scotland, and thence to join the chain of codebreakers in Bletchley Park to train to operate the Turing machine invented by Alan Turing to speed up the breaking of the Enigma encoding machine, recently the subject of the film “Imitation Game”. In 1994 she returned to Bletchley Park as a volunteer tour guide and demonstrator of the Turing Bombe for 22 years and two further years as a demonstrator in the Museum of Computing, retiring at the age of 92.

Evy Cohen is the granddaughter of Haimki and Rachel Cohen, who were rescued during the Holocaust in Athens by the late Prince Phillip, The Duke of Edinburgh's mother, Princess Alice of Greece.

Walter Bodmer, former Principal of Hertford College, Oxford, fled Nazi Germany in 1938 as a young child, and is a world-leading geneticist. He was one of the first to suggest the idea of the human genome project. Early in his career, Walter helped to discover the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system, vital for the success of organ and bone marrow transplants. He was the first Director General of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and was knighted in 1986. He is currently Head of the Cancer and Immunogenetics Laboratory, Cancer and Immunogenetics Laboratory, Department of Oncology, University of Oxford.

A truly harrowing account of the years leading up to the Holocaust and the Holocaust itself.

A look at the unfortunate children left behind from the Kindertransport to Britain in 1938-9. What was the process for selection? Paul Weindling is Professor of the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University and formally part of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford.

A harrowing first-hand tale of life and death in the Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto.

Bart van Es is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine's College. He is most recently the author of 'The Cut Out Girl: A story of War and Family, Lost and Found (Fig Tree),' which follows the story of a Dutch Jewish girl who was taken in by the author's grandparents before her own parents were sent to Auschwitz.

Manfred Deselaers, born in Duesseldorf, Germany, is a theologian who lives in Auschwitz, dedicating his life to German-Polish Reconciliation and Christian-Jewish Dialogue in Auschwitz. He studied theology in Tuebingen (1976-1981) and Chicago (1978-1979), served as curate in Moenchengladbach and Board member of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation.

A poignant and personal account of oppression and salvation.

A story of determination and fortitude: how members of one family were able to make their way to safety, leading up to and during the Second World War.

Jason O'Connor is a PhD student at Florida Atlantic University. He has a BA in Judaic Studies and Political Science from Florida Atlantic University, an MA in Near East and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University and an MA in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Gratz College. His interests include post-Holocaust memory and commemoration in Eastern Europe and Post-Communist Polish Jewish relations.

A heartbreaking look at some of the personalities involved in the gathering the Ringelblum Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Alf Dubs was born in Prague, arriving in the UK in 1939 on a Kinderstansport train at the age of six. He was an elected Member of Parliament from 1979-87. After losing his parliamentary seat, he became CEO of the Refugee Council. In 1994 he was appointed to the House of Lords as a Labour Peer. In May 1997, he became a Minister for Northern Ireland until December 1999. He is currently on the EU External Affairs Sub-Committee which is looking at aspects of trade post Brexit. He is also a member of the British Irish Parliamentary Assembly and of the Parliamentary Assembly.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was deported to Auschwitz in December 1943. Due to her being an accomplished cellist she was saved and was made to join the Women's Orchestra. She was forced to play marches as the slave laborers left the camp for each day's work and gave concerts for the SS. In October 1944, with the Red Army closing in, Anita was taken to Bergen-Belsen where she stayed until its liberation by the British.

An account of one of the historic train journeys arranged by Nicolas Winton, known as the 'Czech Kindertransport' which rescued over 600 children from Prague in July 1939.

Ivor Perl was 11 years old when he arrived in Auschwitz. His parents and sisters perished there, only he and his older brother survived. This is the story of his survival.

On the evening following his eighth birthday the terrors of Kristallnacht changed John Izbicki's life forever. Here he recounts the story of his escape from Germany and his arrival in Britain. John Izbicki was born to a Jewish family in Berlin, after escaping Germany he went on to lead a successful career as a British journalist. His memoir, Life Between the Lines, was published in 2012.

Solly Irving was just a boy when the Nazis invaded Poland. He was incarcerated in several concentration camps, including Buchenwald, and was liberated from Theresienstadt. This is his story.

In May 1939 the cruise ship S.S. St Louis sailed from Hamburg for Cuba with some 980 Jewish passengers fleeing from Nazi persecution. When Cuba refused them entry the ship went on to Florida, but the US government too refused them entry.

George Schwab was ten years old when he witnessed the willing collaboration of his Latvian neighbors in the persecution and murder of Jews. Here he presents an overview of the development of antisemitism in Latvia and reads a chapter from his forthcoming memoir.

The Rohr and Feuchtwanger families both emerged from the neo-orthodox movement of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. Sami Rohr was both a prominent supporter of Chabad and a patron of Jewish literary endeavors. One of his favorite writers was the Jewish German novelist, Lion Feuchtwanger, who was a vocal critic of the Nazis. Lion's nephew, Edgar Feuchtwanger, grew up as a neighbor of Hitler.

As a child, Professor Ladislaus Löb watched as anti-Semitism slowly tightened its grip on the Hungarian nation, culminating in the Natzi occupation, beginning in 1944. He later wrote a book describing how Rezső Kasztner negotiated with Eichmann, saving Löb and 1,700 other Jews. Kasztner was later accused of collaborating with the Natzis.

Professor George Steiner FBA, born to a Jewish family in Paris in 1929, is one of the greatest minds in today's literary world and is currently Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford University, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University & Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University.

Sir Guenter Heinz Treitel, QC, FBA, is a German-born English academic and retired Vinerian Professor of English Law

In 1940, when Mark Goldfinger was 9, the SS set up an academy for training killers near his hometown of Rabka, Poland. This is the amazing account of what he saw and how he survived. (Many viewers may find details described to be extremely disturbing. Viewer discretion advised.)

The amazing, firsthand account of 92-year-old Denis Avey, a non-Jewish, British soldier who smuggled himself into Auschwitz as a POW. (Many viewers may find details described to be extremely disturbing. Viewer discretion advised.)

Auschwitz survivor Freddie Knoller shares his amazing story of survival, including how the Gestapo in Paris thought he was a German and hired him as a translator. (Many viewers may find details described to be extremely disturbing. Viewer discretion advised.)

Austrian-Jewish Holocaust survivor, Fritz Sternhell, relates his first-hand experiences as a child during the German annexation of Austria.

Victor Greenberg tells the story of how he grew up in the small village of Majdan, now in Slovakia. In 1941, when he was 12 years old, he and his family were among the very few to escape when the entire Jewish population of the town was massacred. He was a prisoner in Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Gunskirchen, where he was finally liberated by the Americans. (Many viewers may find details described to be extremely disturbing. Viewer discretion advised.)

Ben Helfgott, born in Lodz, Poland, 1929, is a Holocaust survivor and former champion weightlifter representing Great Britain in the Olympics. This is his personal story of survival and triumph. (Many viewers may find details described to be extremely disturbing. Viewer discretion advised.)

Rebecca Wolpe has a BA in Hebrew from Wadham College, Oxford, and an MA and PhD in Yiddish from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has worked at Yad Vashem for around nineteen years in various capacities, including guiding in the museum and translating/editing various books. She has also translated documents from the Ringelblum Archive as well as other private memoirs.

Sir Richard J. Evans—widely regarded as the preeminent historian of Nazi Germany—explores his life’s work and examines the rise of the Nazi regime.

Hans Mouwes, born in 1941, describes growing up hiding from the Nazis with a kind foster family in Amsterdam.