Flamboyant and full of life, Jewish prisoner Helena Citron found herself the subject of an unlikely affection at Auschwitz: Franz Wunsch, a high-ranking SS officer who fell in love with Helena and her magnetic singing voice. Their forbidden relationship lasted until her miraculous liberation. Thirty years later, a letter arrived from Wunsch’s wife begging Helena […]

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski gathered up tens of thousands of documents from Nazi buildings in Berlin, and later, public archives and private synagogues in France, and moved them all, illicitly, to New York. Dr. Lisa Leff reconstructed Szajkowski’s story in all its ambiguity in her 2015 book The Archive […]

In June 1942, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff devised an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees in the United Kingdom. Called “X Troop,” the unit included a motley group of intellectuals, artists, and athletes from Germany and Austria. Many had lost their families and homes, and would stop […]

Twin brothers Henry and Bernard Schanzer were born in Belgium in 1935. When the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, the Schanzer family escaped to Saint-Étienne in the south of France, which shortly fell under Vichy rule. After living openly as Jews in Saint-Étienne for almost two years, the seven-year-old brothers went into hiding in 1942 […]