The following are resources that have information pertaining to more than one country. They have been organized under the following categories:
For those resources that are available at CJH, the listings are accompanied by the call letters and numbers that describe the location of the resource. It is possible to order these materials in advance at search.cjh.org for viewing in the Lillian Goldman Reading Room on the 3rd floor at the CJH.
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, and United States Holocaust Memorial Council. Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. Washington, D.C.: American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 2000. This is a four-volume list of survivors who came to the United States after the WW II and submitted their names to the Registry. Volumes I and II are alphabetical listings of survivors, Volume III is a listing by place of birth and town before the war, and Volume IV is a listing by location during the Holocaust.
Genealogy Institute D804.3 .N37
[Lists of Holocaust Survivors and Victims]. New York: World Jewish Congress, 1945. Within each city, survivors are listed alphabetically. Includes birth date and place, as well as present residence.
YIVO Library 000088244 Also available on Microfilm
Jewish Agency for Israel. Search Bureau for Missing Relatives. Register of Jewish Survivors. Jerusalem: Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1945. Contains 60,000 names listed alphabetically and, although details vary, they may include birth date and place and father’s name.
YIVO Library 000022766 Also available on Microfilm
Sharit Ha-platah : An Extensive List of Survivors of Nazi Tyranny Published so That the Lost May Be Found and the Dead Brought Back to Life. Munich: Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria, 1946. Lists of survivors in various camps. Entries include maiden name (where applicable), birthplace, birth year, and current location (at the time of compilation). This publication consolidated lists that were previously published in separate volumes by region.
NOTE: You may search for a name within the Sharit Ha-platah on the JewishGen Holocaust Database, as well as on Ancestry.com (requires a paid subscription).
American Federation for Lithuanian Jews. Survivors: A List of Lithuanian Jews Who Survived the Nazi Tyranny and Are Now in Lithuania, France, Italy, Sweden, Palestine, [Germany]. New York: American Federation for Lithuanian Jews, 1946.
Alphabetical list of survivors.
YIVO Library 000022770 Also available on Microfilm
Professional Medical Register. Compiled by Health Division Headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland, in 1949. Physicians, surgeons, dentists, and pharmacists, listed alphabetically by specialty. Includes age, sex, marital status, family members, nationality, languages, religion and medical education of displaced persons and refugees. This record was created to certify that all included were in fact qualified to practice their profession and specialties, as many had lost their essential documents.
YIVO Library 000088243 Also available on Microfilm
Eyewitness Accounts of the Holocaust Period 1939-1945. Print. The testimonies document the Jewish experience in all countries under Nazi occupation between September 1939 and May 1945. Included are accounts relating to ghettos and death, labor and internment camps; testimonies of Jews on the Aryan side and in hiding; memoirs of Jewish partisans and underground fighters. You may view indexes of names, partisans, survivors, and places mentioned in these testimonies in the Lillian Goldman Reading Room.
YIVO Archives Record Group 104
Correspondence of Julian Hirszhaut 1939-1945. Series I of this collection consists of hundreds of eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust collected by local Jewish historical committees in Bialystok, Katowice, Krakow, Lublin, Lodz, and Warsaw. While most of the testimonies are undated, the majority date from 1945, with some as early as 1944. The testimonies are written mostly in Polish and Yiddish, with a few in German.
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies [video recordings]
Yale University Library created this archive of interviews with over 4,000 survivors, witnesses, bystanders, and liberators of the Holocaust. The Fortunoff Archive makes its collection available at dozens of access sites around the world, including the Center for Jewish History. Researchers can search the archive by town name, concentration camp, or ghetto in the search bar at the top of the page, and then click on a testimony in the search results and request access. (Please note that their records truncate last names of those who gave testimony to protect their privacy. If you are looking for a specific person’s testimony, either shorten their last name to the first initial or contact the archive directly.)
Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust [audio recordings]
Collected by the British Library, these recordings are personal accounts of the Holocaust from Jewish survivors living in Britain. The collection contains over 1,800 interviews from two oral history projects: Living Memory of the Jewish Community and Holocaust Survivors' Centre Interviews. The interviews can be searched by interviewee or by subject.
Voices of the Holocaust [audio recordings]
The mission of Voices of the Holocaust project is to provide to a global audience, a permanent digital archive of restored, transcribed, digitized, and translated interviews with Holocaust survivors. Sponsored by the Illinois Institute of Technology, the interviews were conducted in 1946 by psychology professor Dr. David P. Boder. Dr. Boder visited refugee camps in France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, where he recorded over 90 hours of first-hand testimony. The interviews may be searched by a variety of criteria.
The Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive [audio and video recordings]
Dr. Sidney Bolkosky, Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, has interviewed Holocaust survivors since 1981.
The USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education [video recordings]
Steven Spielberg founded the Institute in 1994 to videotape and preserve interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. The Institute currently has more than 55,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides that have been catalogued and indexed. These testimonies were conducted in 62 countries and in 41 languages (these numbers continue to grow) and are housed in the Visual History Archive, which is an online portal that allows users to search through and view them. The Institute offers full and partial access to the Visual History Archive to subscribing institutions,** including universities, museums, libraries, centers, and memorial sites all over the world.
In addition, the Visual History Archive Online offers online access to indexing data on interviewees and access to over 1,800 full-length video testimonies.
**Note: The Center for Jewish History does not subscribe to the Visual History Archive, but there is a list of sites that do have access.
World Jewish Relief - Record Search and Request Form
This is the successor organization to the Central British Fund, which rescued 75,000 people from Europe in the 1930s and 40s, including 10,000 children through the Kindertransport. Their archives, containing the records of 35,000 people, have been digitized and are available for free.
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Names Database
The JDC has cataloged and digitized many of their post-Holocaust (1945-1954) collections, which include records of JDC’s global rescue and relief efforts to resettle Holocaust survivors around the world and JDC’s provision of aid to the hundreds of thousands of Jews living in displaced persons camps after the war. Search over 500,000 names found in JDC’s collections, including client lists of those helped by JDC.
Association of Jewish Refugees Journal Archives
Founded in 1941 by Jewish refugees from central Europe, the Association of Jewish Refugees has attended to the needs of Holocaust refugees and survivors who settled in Britain. Since January 1946, the Association has published a monthly journal, which contains news items of interest to the refugee community, profiles of prominent personalities in the community, and search notices for those looking for friends and relatives. The journal’s online archive allows word searches.
Ancestry.com has indexed a number of Holocaust-related record groups from the collections of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and is in the process of indexing more. These indexes are searchable free of charge through the World Memory Project (a partnership between Ancestry.com and the USHMM). Please note that the records themselves are not viewable online.
