Portrait of the Goldberg Family, 1934. WHi 44865
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.
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-WWII 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. And soon, nearly all of the documentary materials generated by the interviews will be digitized and made available on the Society's Web site due to a generous grant from the Helen Bader Foundation in Milwaukee.
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Suggestions for Further Reading
Turning Points: The World War II Military and Home Fronts
Voices of the Wisconsin Past: Remembering the Holocaust
Highlights Archive: Holocaust Survivors' Interviews to Go Online
Helen Bader Foundation
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