Although the primary interest of the OSA was the heritage of the Cold War and communism, it soon extended its interests to include human rights archives. The first was an archive on the Yugoslav wars, including documents of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Initially, interest in this archive was based on its relation to the aftermath of communism, but later it was realized that “it was a document of human rights”, and this subject was accepted as a part of the OSA’s key activity.
By
Anna Kharkina
November 10, 2017
This paper deals with the dilemmas scholars can run into when they encounter the conflict between political activists and what can be proven by evidence. The dispute with historians revolves around what the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot terms “Silencing the past”. This is certainly true in the case of the Roma and genocide. What complicates the case is that a long-standing memory is part of a still ongoing political activist campaign to build a recognized memory for all of Europe’s Roma.
By
David Gaunt
October 25, 2016
This article explores how several key museums discuss the Holocaust in the wider context of Estonian history, including Estonia’s traumatic past under Soviet occupation. It is argued that the Estonian narrative of victimhood still dominates collective memory as displayed in museums, and Jewish suffering in the Holocaust takes a much less prominent place despite an increase in Holocaust awareness among the Estonian political elite since the country’s “return to the West”.
By
Paul Oliver Stocker
June 16, 2016
At a symposium in March 2015, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Andrej Kotljarchuk presented the results of an ongoing research project “The Roma Genocide in Ukraine 1941-1944: History, memories and representations”.
By
Andrej Kotljarchuk
May 28, 2015
During the war von Otter worked at the Swedish legation in Berlin. In 1942 he met an SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, who had witnessed killings by gas at the Bełżec extermination camp. Gerstein joined the SS to oppose the Nazi regime from within and he asked von Otter to report to his government on the atrocities. At that time the official policy in Sweden was to not anger Nazi Germany by publishing reports on war crimes. There is much obscurity about von Otter’s report.
By
Mose Apelblat
May 12, 2015
The post-communist countries did not see the Holocaust narrative and its relation to the history of the EU as part of their own narrative. Since entering the EU, a number of Eastern European countries have challenged the EU’s master narrative and tried to gain acceptance for — and draw attention to — their memory of Soviet Communism.
By
Anne Wæhrens
January 21, 2015
Survivors actually created manifold historical sources on the Holocaust and even completed a broad array of relevant publications before the end of 1940s; these sources were largely neglected afterwards and have remained underexplored to this day.
By
Ferenc L. Laczó
January 21, 2015
The author argues that the history of the Holocaust is the history of Europe; "as Europeans, we all continue to live it".
"It is not wise to appropriate to ourselves the story of suffering, because even in the short term such a course will lead to isolation and a rise in anti-Semitism."
By
Andrea Petö
October 18, 2014
A hundred years have passed and Raoul Wallenberg is currently the subject of much publicity.
By
Hans Wolf
June 28, 2012
The deportation of children, the elderly, and the sick transformed Łódź from a traditional ghetto to an industrial slave city and established the motto for which Rumkowski would become known: work is our only way out.
Essay by
Olaf Haagensen
June 27, 2012