Curator Suzy Snyder discusses materials, including photographs and letters, that were donated to the Museum by members of the Kusserow family. As Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Kusserows were persecuted by the Nazi regime.
Rodi Waterman Glass was born in the Netherlands. Because her mother had British citizenship, the family was not deported to a camp in Poland or Germany like most other Dutch Jews but was sent instead to Vittel in France, where the Nazis held them in the hopes of exchanging them for German prisoners of war.
Maria Madi was a non-Jewish physician living in Budapest during World War II. In her diary, she recorded her observations of life in wartime Budapest, including the persecution of Hungarian Jews after the German invasion in March 1944. Madi was not only a witness but also a rescuer; during the war, she hid three Jews in her apartment to protect them from possible deportation.
In 1936, Hermann and Hedwig Picard of Lauterborg, France, gave a copy of The Children's Haggadah as a gift to their grandson, Ernest Picard, who lived with his parents in Mainz, Germany. Learn what this book reveals about Jewish life under the Nazis during the 1930s and one family’s desire to transmit its traditions and values to the next generation.
In 1938, Manfred Gans left his parents’ home in Germany for the United Kingdom. After World War II began, he was interned as an enemy alien. He volunteered to serve in an elite British unit made up of German native speakers and later took part in the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.
Born in Amsterdam in 1904, Frieda Belinfante joined a Dutch resistance group during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, forging identity documents for people in hiding and helping plan an attack on Amsterdam’s population registry. Klaus Mueller, the Museum’s European representative, interviewed Frieda when she was 90 years old, just nine months before she passed away.
Museum librarian Vincent Slatt shares photographs, documents, and artifacts from the Museum’s collection that document the persecution his grandparents Eugene and Irene Wojtas, Catholics from rural Poland, underwent at the hands of the Nazis.
This collection documents the efforts of Ben Zion Kalb (later Colb), who, working with leaders of the Jewish community in Poland and Slovakia, smuggled more than 1,000 of his fellow Jews out of Poland. His children donated the collection to the Museum to bring recognition to their father’s heroism during the Holocaust.
Born in Berlin in 1929, Peter Feigl moved with his parents to Prague and Brussels before they ended up in southern France in 1940. In 1942, Peter was at a Quaker summer camp when his parents were arrested. Learn about the diary Peter began after his parents’ arrest, how it disappeared, and how he recovered it decades later.
In April 1946, Jews in Europe celebrated the first Passover after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Created by survivors and published by the Third US Army, The Survivors' Haggadah incorporates elements of the traditional Passover text with the recent experiences of Holocaust survivors.