Holocaust

The Museo Nazionale dell'Ebraismo Italiano e della Shoah (National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah) presents the history of “the two thousand year-old Jewish presence in Italy.” Particular detail is given to the Italian Jewish experience in the years leading up to the Second World War, Italian persecution of Jews, and records of Italian Jews in the Shoah, including the changed circumstances resulting from the German occupation of Northern Italy in 1943.    

The Fondazione Villa Emma (Villa Emma Foundation) is a cultural centre and historic organization established in Nonantola to commemorate the actions of the town and its residents in housing and sheltering 73 Jewish children and youth between Summer 1942 and Fall 1943. A total of 73 youth between the ages of six and 21 arrived in Nonantola over this period in two large refugee groups: the first from Germany and Austria on July 17, 1942, the second from Bosnia and Croatia on April 10, 1943.

The Mémorial de la Shoah de Drancy (Drancy Shoah Memorial) is located at the site of the former Camp de Drancy, a major internment, transit, and deportation site chiefly for Jewish peoples and operated by French and later German SS authorities from 1941 to 1944. Established in a large residential building built between 1931 and 1934 and designed as a modernist, urban living space with the name ‘Cité de la Muette’ (‘The Silent City’), the camp functioned as the most important transit point for French and foreign Jews taken in roundups and sent to death camps, usually Auschwitz.

The Riga Ghetto was a small area in Maskavas Forštate, a neighbourhood of Riga, Latvia, designated by the Nazis where Jews from Latvia, and later from Germany, were forced to live during World War II. On October 25, 1941, the Nazis relocated all Jews from Riga and the vicinity to the ghetto while the non-Jewish inhabitants were evicted.

While Camp Westerbork is mainly known for the period between 1942 and 1945, it was initially built in the summer of 1939 to house Jewish refugees coming from Germany. The acceptance of Jewish refugees into the Netherlands, however, was initially certainly not the norm. In 1938, after the first overt persecution of the Jews in Germany (the Kristallnacht), the Dutch government had sent 600 extra officials to the borders ‘for the protection of our own people’.

The Hollandse Schouwburg (Dutch theater) was opened on the 5th of May 1892 in the Amsterdam Plantage District, it was designed by the Dutch architect Cornelis Antonius Bombach. Initially it was named the Artis Schouwburg, but two years later it was renamed the Hollandsche Schouwburg. In the beginning of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, little changed in the daily life of the theater, but in 1941 the Nazis changed the name of the theater to the Joodse Schouwburg (Jewish Theatre).

At the end of July 1940, the German police force, which was a part of the German SS, installed in Belgium. The following month the decision was made to install an Auffanglager in Breendonk to take in the prisoners of the police force. On September 20, 1940 the first prisoners were brought to the Fort. It wasn’t until after January 1941 that the number of prisoners would exceed 100.