Highlights Archives
Images of Wisconsin's Holocaust Survivors
More than 140,000 Holocaust survivors came to the United States after World War II. Many came because the only members of their families still living were those who had come to the U.S. before the war. The number who came to Wisconsin is difficult to determine, although estimates place it between 1,000 and 2,000 people. Two dozen of those who settled in Wisconsin were interviewed by Society staff in the 1970s and 1980s, generating more than 160 hours of tape and a collection of more than 1,600 images.
A selection of the most compelling photographs documenting the lives of these survivors are the subject of this month's feature gallery from Wisconsin Historical Images, the Society's online image database. These images are the first fruits of a grant project funded in part by Milwaukee's Helen Bader Foundation to make audio recordings, typed transcripts, and pictures from the Holocaust survivors' interviews available on the Web.
The participants in the History of the Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust Project include those who were concentration and forced-labor camp inmates, families in hiding, and émigrés from Germany who shared their wartime experiences in Holland, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Greece and the Soviet Union. Each of these survivors eventually traveled to the United States and settled in Wisconsin cities, including Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Kenosha, Sheboygan, Manitowoc, Wausau, Merrill, Oshkosh and Monroe.
The images capture the survivors and their families in their prewar environments, postwar Europe, and early years in Wisconsin. Additionally, the project photographer, David Mandel, photographed almost all of the survivors in their Wisconsin homes and/or workplaces. Photos date from 1911 to 1980 and, as a group, portray the arc of the survivors' lives from childhood to wartime to parenthood and new beginnings in post-World War II Wisconsin. These images evoke the hardships and losses experienced by the survivors, but also depict their extreme tenacity and enduring sense of hope.
Project interviews on audiotape, transcripts and photographs in various formats are available in the Society's archives and are supplemented by Sara Leuchter's Guide to Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust: A Documentation Project of the Wisconsin Jewish Archives (Madison, 1983). In 1997 the Wisconsin Historical Society Press excerpted highlights from the interviews in the book Remembering the Holocaust.
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:: Posted May 23, 2008
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