13 DEC 2022 · On July 7 1944, a mere couple of hours before the liquidation of the Będzin Ghetto and the murder of all the Jews imprisoned in it, Sarah and Yehiel Gerlitz wrote a farewell letter to their six-year-old daughter Dita. Dita had been handed over to a Polish family a year earlier, and in their letter her parents wrote to her what they believed to be their last words. How was Dita taken into hiding? What did Sarah and Yehiel write to their daughter before they were deported to the unknown? What happened to the family members? And what happened to the letter?

30 NOV 2022 · Calel (Calek) Perechodnik was a Jewish policeman in the Otwock ghetto. Within his role, he took part in an Aktion (forced deportation) in which 8,000 of the city's Jews were deported, among them his wife Anna and daughter Athalie. Calek, certain they would be safe, took them out of the hiding place in which they had been located, and led them to the deportation square, where they were put on trains and sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. Calek remained alone, consumed by guilt and, after several months spent in hiding on the Aryan side of Warsaw, penned a combination of a confession, a ringing indictment, and a diary - which he dedicated to his wife and daughter. The text Calek wrote is one of the most graphic, honest, and jarring texts produced during the Holocaust period. Featured guest: Dr. Amos Goldberg, Professor at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, and head of the Research Institute for Contemporary Jewry. Author of Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust, 2017.

14 NOV 2022 · In the spring of 1944, Sara Leicht was deported with her family from her home in Talgad, a small village in Transylvania, to the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was only 15 years old. In the summer of 2019, Irit Dagan from the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem met with her at her home in Jerusalem, two years before she passed away, for a fascinating, moving and honest conversation. They talked about longing, about unforgettable and unforgivable events, about one good German and addressed questions, which are not usually asked...

24 OCT 2022 · In this episode we will continue to trace the fate of the Jews imprisoned in the Minsk Ghetto, focusing on one of its unique dimensions – the dominant underground that emerged within the ghetto in its very first days, and that lasted until its liquidation. Another unique aspect in this context is that the underground and the Judenrat – the ghetto’s official leadership – cooperated fully and together pursued virtually the only option for rescue: escape to the nearby forests, to the partisans. But could all of the ghetto prisoners escape? What did it mean to live among the partisans in the forest? And what remained of the community, its memories, and its story after the war? Featured guest: Dr. Daniel Romanovsky, historian and researcher at the Yad Vashem Research Center.

2 OCT 2022 · The Minsk Ghetto was the fourth-largest ghetto, but for many reasons, its story is virtually unknown. Most of the witnesses and testimonies relating to it remained behind the Iron Curtain for many years, or their words remained sealed in archives that were only recently opened. This is not a story about “another ghetto.” The Minsk Ghetto was unique in many respects: its location within the Soviet Union; its population, the majority Sovietized Jews who were joined by refugees from Poland and deportees from the Reich; and the strong underground that operated in the ghetto almost from its inception. This time on “On the Holocaust,” we will devote two episodes to the story of the Minsk Ghetto. Featured guest: Dr. Daniel Romanovsky, historian and researcher at Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research.

13 JUN 2022 · In Nazi Germany, and throughout Europe during the Holocaust period, Jews filed tens of thousands of petitions against their legal status and persecution. In retrospect, this might seem hopeless, almost naive - the reality, however, was more complicated. In this episode of "On The Holocaust" we examine the use of petitions by Jews during the Holocaust - and its mixed results. Featured guest: Thomas Pegelow-Kaplan, Levine Distinguished Professor of Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies at the Appalachian State University

27 APR 2022 · Today marks Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) 2022. In keeping with Yad Vashem's annual theme, "Transports to Extinction: The Deportation of the Jews during the Holocaust," we're presenting the following episode, that originally aired in February 2021. The Holocaust could not have been carried out by the executioners alone. Such large-scale murder, over vast distances, required a massive apparatus staffed by hundreds of thousands of state administrative and security personnel. How could so many seemingly “ordinary” people knowingly take part in such crimes? In this episode we take a glimpse at this troubling phenomenon, starting with a single German police officer, Paul Salitter, tasked with escorting a train of 1,007 Jews from Germany to a ghetto in occupied Latvia. Featured guest - Dr. Christopher Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

18 APR 2022 · Holocaust-era diary writing offers a rare glimpse into real-time events and personal reflections that, had they not been written, may well have been swept away in the rapid unfolding of events. The diary of a French Jewish intellectual, Lucien Dreyfus, helps us shed light on one person’s grappling with the calamity. In this episode of "On the Holocaust", we'll talk about Dreyfus's life, reflections and fate during the Holocaust as expressed in his wartime diary: “’A Terrible and Terribly Interesting Epoch’: The Holocaust Diary of Lucien Dreyfus.” . Featured guest: Alexandra Garbarini, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Williams College in Massachusetts.

9 MAR 2022 · In early 1942, several high-ranking Nazi officials convened in a lavish villa outside Berlin for what would later be known as the Wannsee Conference. For years after the war, conventional wisdom was that in this infamous conference the Final Solution was decided upon. Today we know that mass murder of Jews began well before the conference. Given this, what makes the Wannsee conference such an important landmark in the history of the Holocaust? Today on "On the Holocaust" we'll talk about the decisions at the conference, about the “desk murderers” and about one crucial document that was uncovered by chance. Featured guest: Christoph Kreutzmueller, curator at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Co-editor of The Participants: The Men of the Wannsee Conference.

15 FEB 2022 · Just before the outbreak of World War II, about 10,000 Jewish children were given a rare chance to escape from mainland Europe. They were sent to Britain as part of a refugee program later known as the Kindertransport. In this episode of "On The Holocaust" we focus on the events leading up to this extraordinary aid effort, the complex fates of these children, and the dilemmas of their parents. Featured guest: Jennifer Craig-Norton, visiting fellow at the University of Southampton in the UK.