Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust
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Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust
Survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust are the subjects of “Those Who Were There,” a new podcast from Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. The podcast is narrated by Eleanor Reissa, actress and Yiddish theater director, and historical oversight by Professor Samuel K...
Episoade Recente
35 episoade
In Memoriam: Renee Hartman (1933-2025)
Renee Hartman was one of the first four survivors to give testimony to the Fortunoff Archive's predecessor organization in 1979. In this podcast epis...
Chapter 10: Aftermath
In this final chapter of “Remembering Vilna,” several of the survivors whose stories we’ve featured tell of their journeys to safety and new beginning...
Chapter 9: Judgment and Revenge
At war’s end, Vilna’s survivors struggle to regain their health, look for missing family members, and search for ways to leave Europe for the United S...
Chapter 8: Nazi Defeat
July 1944. For nearly two weeks, the Nazis and the Soviets fight for every street and block in Vilna. When the smoke clears, Jews hiding in the sewers...
Chapter 7: Liquidation
When the Nazis liquidate the Vilna ghetto, they send thousands of Jews to their deaths or to forced-labor camps. Others escape to the forest to join t...
Chapter 6: The Underground
Young people in the ghetto organize an underground group with the hope of leading an uprising against the Nazis. They risk their lives to build an ars...
Chapter 5: Ghetto Life
Life in the Jewish ghetto demands vigilance and adaptation. Families improvise spaces for hiding. Food is smuggled at the risk of execution. And while...
Chapter 4: The Ghetto
They are given minutes to pack. A suitcase, a sheet-wrapped bundle, whatever they can carry. Thousands of the city’s Jews are marched at gunpoint to t...
Chapter 3: Nazi Invasion
When Germany attacks the Soviet Union in 1941, the Nazis occupy Vilna and begin imposing their harsh antisemitic rule, banning Jews from sidewalks, re...
Chapter 2: In the Shadow of War
With the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the country is split between the Nazi invaders and the Soviet Union. Vilna winds up in the ha...
Chapter 1: Childhood Memories
Recollections of life before 1939 evoke the rich diversity of Vilna’s thriving Jewish community, including its multiple synagogues and political and s...
Introduction: Remembering Vilna
“Those Who Were There” co-producers Nahanni Rous and Eric Marcus introduce a few of the voices that, over the course of 10 episodes, will bring to lif...
Preview: Into the Stacks at the YIVO
Join co-producers Nahanni Rous and Eric Marcus on a research trip to the YIVO Institute in preparation for the upcoming season of Those Who Were There...
Episode 10 — Judith Perlaki
Teenaged Judith Perlaki recalled cheating death twice after being deported from Hungary to Auschwitz. But most of her family wasn’t so fortunate. Whil...
Episode 9 — Elias Recanati
When the Germans took control of the Greek city of Salonika, Elias Racanati’s family had one chance to escape—his mother’s family hailed from Spain. B...
Episode 8 — Malka Baran
Malka Baran expressed her love of children by caring for a toddler hidden in the barracks of a concentration camp and teaching first grade at her DP c...
Episode 7 - Leon Pommers
Fleeing Warsaw ahead of the invading Nazis, concert pianist Leon Pommers was propelled into a perilous journey around the world in hopes of reuniting...
Episode 6 - Esther Schwartzman
As Polish Jews fled across the border into Hungary bearing stories of Nazi atrocities, Esther Schwartzman’s family and community didn’t believe that s...
Episode 5 - Abram Merczynski
When Abram Merczynski’s brother organized an orchestra in the Lodz ghetto, Abram promised himself that if he survived the war, he’d learn to play the...
Episode 4 - Helena Jonas
Deported to the Plaszów concentration camp, Helen Jonas faced almost certain death. Instead, she was chosen by Amon Göth—the camp’s notorious, brutal...
Episode 3 - Annelies Herz
Teenage Annelies Herz saw that fellow Jewish forced laborers were disappearing. So to survive in wartime Germany, she and her twin sister went undergr...
Episode 2 -- Isaac Zieman
Isaac Zieman was a passionate young Zionist with plans to make a life in Palestine. Instead, the Nazi invasion of Latvia propelled him on a years-long...
Episode 1 -- Sally Frishberg
High school teacher Sally Frishberg used her childhood experience of being hidden for two years with her family in a Polish farmer’s attic to create o...
Season Two Introduction
Hear excerpts from the second season of “Those Who Were There,” featuring testimonies drawn from the nearly 600 interviews conducted by the Museum of...
Episode 10 — Sam Kassow
In October 1945, Celia Kassow gave birth to her son Sam in a German displaced persons camp. Seventy-five years later, Sam Kassow reflects on his mothe...
Episode 9 — Celia Kassow — Part 2
When Nazi troops seized the Polish farm where Celia Kassow was in hiding, she fled once again—this time into the forest, where she joined the Soviet p...
Episode 8 — Celia Kassow — Part 1
When Nazi bombs fell from the sky, Celia Kassow fled her Polish boarding school and sought help from a classmate who lived nearby. The response? “Get...
Episode 7 — Leonard Linton
Leonard Linton's story spans half the globe—from Japan to Germany, France, New York, and back to Germany, where as a 23-year-old U.S. soldier he happe...
Episode 6 — Renee Hartman
Renee Hartman was just a child when the Nazis swept into Czechoslovakia. Her parents and sister were deaf, so she became her family’s ears, alert to...
Episode 5 — Arne Brun Lie
Eighteen-year-old Arne Brun Lie answered the patriotic call to join the Norwegian resistance. But instead of fighting for his nation’s freedom, he fo...
Episode 4 — Sally Finkelstein Horwitz
After liberation from a slave labor camp, Sally Finkelstein Horwitz and her sister returned to Poland where anti-Jewish pogroms forced them to seek re...
Episode 3 — Heda Kovaly
When Heda Kovaly was deported from Prague to the Lodz ghetto, along with thousands of other Jews, she never imagined that of her entire extended famil...
Episode 2 — Leon Bass
Leon Bass faced racism growing up in Philadelphia, confronted it in the Army, and discovered its “ultimate” endpoint at a German concentration...
Episode 1—Martin Schiller
As a little boy, Martin Schiller was sent to a slave labor camp in Poland along with his family. Separated from his mother, Martin never lost hope of...
Series Introduction
Meet host Eleanor Reissa and hear excerpts of upcoming episodes featuring first-hand accounts of the Holocaust—drawn from the Fortunoff Video Archive...