For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust
In each episode of "For the Living and the Dead", a Holocaust researcher talks about an object, that tells a very personal story about the Holocaust or Roma genocide. The first season of the EHRI Podcast was launched on 29 September 2022 and has six episodes that feature a teddy bear, mica-flakes, a postcard, gramophone discs, a magazine cover and the typewriter. The unique stories come from all over Europe – the Holocaust being a continent-wide phenomenon – ranging from Belgium to Ukraine, from Romania to Italy.
The second and third seasons were released in 2023 and 2024; the latter focuses on special pieces found in micro-archives.
The fourth season was launched on August 5, 2026, and is dedicated to the Roma genocide in WW2. The objects that carry the stories in the seven episodes are earrings, photos, monuments, a painting and a small note that saved a life.
Hosts: Katharina Freise, Kevania de Vries-Menig and Lovro Kralj
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/ Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
Episodes
26 episodes
Midnight in the Graveyard: Remembering the Mass Murder of Roma in Wartime Hungary
In this episode, podcast host Lovro Kralj talks with Hungarian researcher László Csősz about a memorial headstone dedicated to Roma victims of wartime violence in the village of Doboz, which is in Southern Hungary. This small white headstone wi...
The Legacy of Ceija Stojka: Art, Memory and Resistance
In this podcast episode, we learn about the life, art and writings of Roma Holocaust-survivor Ceija Stojka, one of the first Roma survivors to publicly bear witness to the genocide of her people. Deported as a child, Stojka survived three conce...
The Hunger Strike that Forced Recognition: The Story of Hans Braun
In this episode, we look at a photograph taken in 1980 on the grounds of the former Dachau concentration camp. It shows survivors during the hunger strike that became a turning point for the German Sinti and Roma civil rights movement. At the c...
Lost Earrings – The Story of Pauline Eckstein
In this episode, podcast host Lovro Kralj talks with Théophile Leroy about an object gone missing; a beautiful pair of earrings. This piece of jewellery can be seen on photographs of a Sinti woman called Pauline Eckstein, wearing them in her ea...
A Wedding in Haste: Remembering Roma Genocide in Romania
In this episode, we focus on the photograph of a wedding which, at first glance, captures a moment of joy. However, behind it lies a far more complex and painful story. Through this photograph, taken in the Romanian town of Pitești in 1941, we ...
A Monument to Forgetting: Roma Genocide and Memory in Croatia
In this episode, we look at a memorial erected in 1977 at the local graveyard near Hrastina in northern Croatia. The memorial is dedicated to a group of Roma and Sinti victims who were killed by the local Croatian fascists, Ustaš...
A Slip of Paper Worth a Life: Researching Roma Genocide in Serbia
Podcast host Lovro Kralj talks to Milovan Pisarri, who discovered the small document that is the centre piece of this episode. Milovan is a researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade, Serbia.This paper slip ...
Uncovering Hidden (Hi)stories
The final episode of the third series of the EHRI podcast takes a step back to look at micro-archives in a more general sense. In keeping with our theme, howeve...
The Writings of a Wandering Poet
In this podcast episode, we learn about a remarkable manuscript that survived the Holocaust and was later discovered to be the work of one of the most interesting modern creators of Hebrew literature in the 20th century: David Vogel. The manusc...
The Lost letter
In this episode, a lost letter tells the extraordinary story of Tommy Benford Junior, a baby boy born in Paris in 1939 and saved by the incredible bravery of a Dutch woman called Truus Wijsmuller. To look at, the letter is simple, and formally...
A Place of Paradise
In this episode, the object of our focus is a black and white photograph that offers a harrowing glimpse into the narrow survival of Nazi camp prisoners. Two of the survivors in this image would later travel to the ‘paradise’ of Windermere, in ...
The Stamp of Samuilo Demajo
In this episode, we focus on a stamp, printed on the inside jacket of a book donated to the National Library of Serbia in 1941. The stamp is remarkable not least because it belonged to a prominent Belgrade lawyer named Samuilo Demajo, who...
A Message from Malawi
The object of our attention in this episode is a well-travelled letter of 21 pages, received in 1997 by Professor Albert Lichtblau, in response for an appeal for "unpublished biographical memoirs" of Holocaust survivors he had posted on behalf...
Gita's Notes for Survival
In this podcast episode, released during Hanukka 2023, we talk with Ofer Lifshitz about a tiny memory booklet, as small as a young girl’s fist, that belonged to a teenage girl named Gita Rubanenko. Gita was born in 1929 and lived wi...
A Paper Heart for Wanda
In this podcast episode, the object of our attention is a delicate paper heart, a small work of art, crafted by Elisabeth Salomon. You can enfold the 'heart', like a flower, and on each petal, you will find the name of the woman or girl (someti...
A Desperate Call from the Cold Crematorium
In this podcast episode, we talk about a letter dated 23 April 1945, from a man called Hans Fröhlicher to the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs. Hans Frölicher was the Swiss ambassador to Germany during World War II. The neatly typed, official ...
A Tefillin Tale from Siberia
In this episode, Katharina Freise talks with Lidia Zessin-Jurek about some very special tefillin, which is the name given to two black leather boxes with straps which are put on by adult Jews for weekday morning prayers, and are worn on the for...
Life-Saving Linoleum
In Life-Saving Linoleum, we talk about a seal forged out of linoleum by a man named Endre Káldori. We hear about how Káldori, with the watchmaker skills he learnt from his grandfather, a simple piece of linoleum, much luck, and an incr...
A Sunflower for Simon
In this episode, we talk about Simon Wiesenthal’s sunflowers, real ones, or artificial and made from paper or any other material. In 1969, well-known Holocaust survivor and author Simon Wiesenthal wrote The Sunflower. On the Possibilities a...
A Box of Old Gramophone Discs Dusted Off
Release date: 8 December 2022 | More about the Podcast Series For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the HolocaustIn this EHRI Podcast episode, w...
A Photo from No-Man's Land
In this episode, we talk about a photograph on the cover of a French magazine from 1938, showing two destitute looking women, stuck in so called No-Man’s Land. At the end of the 1930s, the emergence of “No Man’s Lands” symbolized the desperate ...
A Girl and a Teddy Bear
In this episode we are presenting a story from Belgium, that of Norbert Vos-Obstfeld, his family and his teddy bear. Norbert Vos was still a baby when on 10 May 1940 Germany invaded and occupied Belgium. The family was Jewish and the danger to ...
A Mica Flake from Theresienstadt
In this episode, we will talk about mica-flakes, objects of little monetary value that were kept by survivors from the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Also known as glimmer, the flakes, shiny glass-like, thin mineral sheets, were sliced from rocks...
A Petition on a Postcard
In this podcast episode, we present the story of two Romanian boys, Sorel and Marcu Rozen, and a simple postcard. The Rozen family, made up of a grandmother, parents and two children, were deported from Dorohoi (a town in Northern Romania) in O...
A Typewriter in Transit
On 19 September 1941, Kyiv, capital of Ukraine, was occupied by the Nazi’s. Before then, Ukraine had been a reluctant part of the Soviet Union. Shortly after Nazi-Germany took hold of the city, it was decided to annihilate the Jews of Kyiv. On ...