Otto Perl, born in Vienna, Austria, in 1915, had a peaceful childhood. He never experienced antisemitism, he said. He swam, ran, and skied as part of a Jewish sports club. And yet, his parents were aware of rising anti-Jewish sentiment in neighboring Germany.

Hugo Zulawski was just 13 when he escaped from Nazi-controlled Vienna, Austria, in the spring of 1939. We don’t know much about his life before then. We do know that a year before he got out, German troops marched into Austria, which Germany had annexed, immediately enacting antisemitic legislation that…

They messed with the wrong brothers. On September 2, 1939, the day after the German invasion of Poland, two Nazi sympathizers began harassing Tibor (Tom) and Ernö (Ernest) Kövári on a street in their hometown of Bratislava, Slovakia, pestering them about being Jewish. “Ernest told me that he saw the…

When Aaron Finger arrived at his US Army post in a displaced persons camp in Germany in 1946, his predecessor glibly told him, “good luck.” The man had been trying, unsuccessfully, to communicate with a…

Ellen Kaufmann Boucher was born in 1920 in Mainz, Germany — also the birthplace of Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the movable-type printing press there in the 1400s. Her mother passed away during her birth and her maternal grandmother, Amalie, whom she called Omi, helped care for her for years afterward…

Now wielding a weapon instead of a word processor, a Ukrainian scholar due to start a fellowship at the Museum in early March had to indefinitely postpone his trip after Russia invaded his country. Mykhaylo Tyaglyy said goodbye to his family, who left Ukraine for Poland on their way to…

Three days before war broke out, Museum contractor Kyrylo Vyslobokov had finished a two-year project to digitize archival documents from Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine that is currently occupied by the Russian army. He brought the material to his office in Kyiv, but on the day he intended to…

Yevgeny Khaldei was born to Jewish parents in 1917 in what is now Donetsk, Ukraine. His mother died during a pogrom when he was one year old. In 1932–33, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin deliberately starved at least 3.5 million Ukrainian men, women, and children — both Christians and Jews. During…

And why what is happening in China may be genocide — Bahram Sintash hopes the world sees beyond the pomp and circumstance of the Olympic Games to the distant Xinjiang region, where his father has been missing for five years…