I was able to work on one such project this summer with the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives (UMJA) in the Libraries: Jeanette Frank, born Eugenia Lewin, is a survivor of the Holocaust whose materials reside in the archives. Jeanette’s records contain extensive materials related to her time as a displaced person in the Landsberg am Lech Displaced Persons (DP) camp after the war. The collection includes vaccination records, records of employment, and, most interestingly, a scrapbook of the Yiddish theater troupe “Hazomir,” that Jeanette, (then Eugenia) was a member of during her time in the camp. Included in the records as well are later documents, including Jeanette’s United States passport and naturalization certificate.

Scrapbook page with image of the entire “Hazomir” theater troupe posing in front of a sign for their production of “Der Wilder Mencz” (The Unusual Person), with accompanying newspaper article about the production in Yiddish at right. Eugenia Lewin/Jeanette Frank pictured middle-row center. 
Source:
Jeanette and Kenneth Frank Papers, Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

Eugenia Lewin/Jeanette Frank with future husband Kaufmann Frankowski, 
later Kenneth Frank, while performing in the “Hazomir” troupe.
Source:
Jeanette and Kenneth Frank Papers, Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

What all these documents point to is that Eugenia Lewin survived the Second World War and the Holocaust. After spending time living and working in the Landsberg DP camp, she was able to immigrate to the United States, settle in St. Paul, MN, and live over 75 years as an American citizen before passing away in 2003. While an incredible story of survival and resilience, this story may seem similar to many others told within UMJA’s archives. So what makes Jeanette Frank’s story so impactful? The fact that within certain historical records, Eugenia Lewin is not believed to have survived at all.

The Yad Vashem database of survivors’ names lists a Eugenia Lewin, born on December 21st 1916, in Lodz, Poland as missing, presumed murdered after being interned in the Lodz ghetto under the Nazi occupation. Yad Vashem cites as a source a list published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) that includes names of Holocaust victims who perished in the Lodz ghetto. The records found in UMJA’s archives, however, do not presume murder but in fact show her surviving.

According to the UMJA records, Eugenia Lewin was born on December 21st, 1920, in Lodz, Poland. While it is of course possible that two individuals named Eugenia Lewin were interned in the Lodz ghetto, with one perishing and one surviving, UMJA’s research gives reason to believe that a coincidence like this is not the case.

Letter of Recommendation written for Eugenia Lewin by Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik (WMF) in July 1949. The letter reads: “Ms. Eugenia Lewin, born 21st December, 1920 (Prisoner number 38 834) was employed by us from 5th January 1945-8th April 1945 as a concentration camp prisoner.”
Source:
Jeanette and Kenneth Frank Papers, Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

Within Jeanette Frank’s collection are various recommendation letters given to her after the war to show that she has skills, making her a good candidate for postwar employment. One of these letters came from Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik (WMF), a German manufacturing company which utilized slave labor under the Nazis. The letter states that Eugenia Lewin worked for WMF from January to April 1945, being labeled prisoner 38834, in the Geislingen an der Steige concentration camp. Upon further research, a Eugenia Lewin was listed on a memorial to slave laborers erected at the site of the Geislingen an der Steige camp, and a USHMM record confirms that a Eugenia Lewin was interned as prisoner 38834 in the complex. 

A screenshot of the ‘Namenstafel’ (Name Plaque) erected in memoriam of the female forced laborers interned in Geislingen an der Steige Concentration camp, who were forced to work for WMF between 1944 and 1945. The museum which now stands on the site of the former concentration camp erected this memorial to honor the various women who were sent to Geislingen to work: the circled name above right is Eugenia Lewin, confirming that she was a prisoner at Geislingen after her time in the Lodz Ghetto.
Source:
www.kz-geislingen.de

All of this led me and UMJA Archivist Kate Dietrick, my supervisor for this project, to believe that UMJA’s Eugenia Lewin had survived her time in the Lodz ghetto and was sent to labor in the Geislingen concentration camp. We were left with one more piece of her journey to uncover: how did Eugenia Lewin end up in Landsberg am Lech displaced persons camp, which was located on the other side of Germany?

As I dug further into the fates of forced laborers at Geislingen, I learned that ahead of the Allied forces coming through France, the Nazis sent many slave laborers east from Geislingen to Dachau concentration camp, and to the town of Allach, Germany. Both of these destinations are located just outside of Munich, in southeastern Germany, and are a stone’s throw from the former site of Landsberg am Lech displaced persons camp.

After compiling all of the above evidence, Kate and I sent a letter to Yad Vashem, the world’s Holocaust memory authority located in Israel, supported by scans of documents from Jeanette Frank’s records, to make our case. As of November 2024, Kate heard back from Yad Vashem. In the letter Kate received, Yad Vashem stated that the evidence we provided on Jeanette Frank’s behalf was enough to show her surviving the Holocaust and immigrating to Minnesota. While the revision process can take time, Eugenia Lewin will be removed from Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, reflecting the fact that she survived the Holocaust. We were extremely excited to hear the news.

This experience became one that spoke to me both personally and academically. I have been lucky enough to have spent time working both with CHGS and UMJA, two organizations that engage in crucial community-facing work. During my time with them I have seen what it means to do historical research that really affects the present.

Being able to work with Jeanette Frank’s Holocaust journey this summer, with the goal of giving her, effectively, her life back in the eyes of Holocaust remembrance, has shown me that the work that I do as a historian has a very real impact on people today, because history is a study of people and their lives. This hit me hardest when, after mailing the letter earlier in the day, Kate met me at Temple of Aaron Cemetery in St. Paul, where Jeanette Frank and her husband Kenneth, formerly Kaufmann Frankowski, are buried. We laid rocks on the headstone in honor of their memory, and decided to read aloud to them the letter we mailed to Yad Vashem in memoriam. 

This experience was a very personal one for me; while we were standing and paying our respects, I could feel the importance of completing this project. It was yet another experience that proved to me that it is this historical work that I want to spend my career doing, and that its effects are great. I am so fortunate to have been able to spend time working with UMJA over this past summer, learning how archival documents are not simply pieces of paper, but pieces of people’s lives. I cannot wait to embark on more projects like this, which educate about the Holocaust, and work to keep the stories of its survivors and victims alive.

Ryken Farr is a junior undergraduate at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, majoring in History and Jewish Studies. He is currently the undergraduate student worker with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and spent time in August 2024 as a student assistant with the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

Ryken chose to focus his academics around Holocaust history because it was a topic that he had a prior interest in but was not being taught about extensively in the classroom. Having been at the University for almost two years, he says it’s been enriching to learn more about the history of the Holocaust in the classroom, through his own research, and work like the CHGS’s.

Ryken’s research project focuses on nuanced consequences of the propaganda and advertising distributed by Zionist organizations and US-based fundraising groups targeting Jewish displaced persons after the Second World War. In his research, he explores how Jewish displaced persons, often Holocaust survivors, were treated in these campaigns meant to help them and what other consequences may have arisen from choices these organizations made. Last summer, Ryken traveled to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, NY, for on-site archival research with support from the Office for Undergraduate Research and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Moving forward, he hopes to use this initial research as a starting point for other research projects with the OUR, research abroad in Germany, and work for his Honors Thesis, to be completed during his senior year.

Working with CHGS has been very beneficial for Ryken: He’s been able to work on various projects related to the history of genocide and mass violence, which in turn have been great companions to my classroom study of the Holocaust. He’s appreciated the opportunity to learn more about other examples of genocide in history, as well. Working with CHGS has given Ryken the ability to connect with other scholars in the field, the Center’s faculty, and graduate students, which are great relationships to have as he continues to pursue a career in this field.

Her dissertation research analyzes the remediation of documentary footage and photographs from the Holocaust in literary and media projects made in the United States, Germany, Austria, and Israel from the late 1980s to today. She analyzes these projects as interventions in contemporary conversations surrounding the Holocaust, specifically in terms of memorializing and reviving narratives from the past. She also explores how these remediations have the ability to negotiate questions of voice and witnessing in the 21st century both on an individual and global scale, allowing for transnational discourses that broaden the efforts to create an effective framework for discussing other political and historical issues in the past, present, and future.

In addition to her dissertation research, Rachel is interested in representations of minorities in German-language cinema, as well as the documentation (or lack thereof) of issues surrounding German colonialism, specifically in the context of present-day Namibia.

In the spring semester of 2023, she is working as an RA for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Nathan and Theresa Berman Upper Midwest Jewish Archives on their ongoing project to highlight and present in-depth stories of Holocaust survivors settling in Minnesota.

Tibisay moved to the United States in 2017, and after completing a MA degree in Anthropology and Archaeology from Rutgers University (New Jersey), she moved to Minnesota where she is now pursuing a PhD in History with a minor in Heritage Studies and Public History. 

Tibisay’s research interests focus on the emergence and development of politics of historical memory after events of mass violence, genocide, and violations of human rights. Her dissertation explores specifically the politics of historical memory around state-managed boarding schools for orphans and children of political prisoners during the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship. The generalized abuse that took place in some of these boarding schools is not well-known by most Spaniards, and she is interested in analyzing the different avenues of transmission of historical memory that the victims have had to communicate their experiences. 

In the Spring semester of 2022, she is working as an RA for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and collaborating with the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, while she prepares to conduct a year of archival research in Spain during the fall and spring semesters of 2022-2023. 

Originally from ex-Yugoslavia, Nikoleta’s family immigrated to Amherst, Massachusetts in 1995 during the Yugoslav Wars. After finishing college, she spent a year serving in a refugee resettlement agency in Worcester, MA. She then held positions at the Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights in Boston and at Harvard University in Cambridge before beginning her graduate career at the University of Minnesota.

Nikoleta currently works as a Research Assistant with Joachim Savelsberg on a project that seeks to understand the role of gender in the establishment of collective memory around the Yugoslav Wars, funded by the UMN Human Rights Initiative (HRI). She also works as a Research Assistant with Joachim Savelsberg and Alejandro Baer on a project investigating the role of digital memory activism in constructing genocide narratives in Serbia. 

She will be conducting fieldwork abroad in Belgrade, Serbia for the fall semester of the 2021-22 academic year. In addition to her research, Nikoleta serves as a member of the graduate editorial board for The Society Pages and as Associate Director of Grants for the Council of Graduate Students (COGS). 

His dissertation examines the social reintegration of ex-combatants in Colombia, with a comparative element on Northern Ireland. Michael is interested in the relationships that form between ex-combatants and others following a peace accord and the ways these interactions transform perspectives of each other and the past. 

During the summer of 2017, Michael conducted fieldwork in Belfast with his advisor Joachim Savelsberg and the support of the Human Rights Lab, where he interviewed participants in various grassroots peace-building initiatives. He briefly discusses this project in this video. 

During the 2019-2020 academic year, he conducted fieldwork in Meta, Colombia, traveling between the state capital Villavicencio and rural areas of the surrounding municipalities of Mesetas and Vista Hermosa, which have formal settlement camps of FARC ex-combatants. He curated photos from his fieldwork as a photo essay for the Latin American Studies Association’s Colombia section. And he wrote a blog post for a leading Colombian newspaper on the murder of Rodolfo Fierro, a FARC ex-combatant that Michael had become close to through his research.

During the Spring 2021 semester, he is also working as a research assistant for Professor Alejandro Baer and CHGS.

Besides teaching German studies coursework at the university, he also teaches Yiddish classes in the Twin Cities. He designed beginner Yiddish curricula for Jewish Community Action, a Minneapolis non-profit organization focused on racial and economic justice issues across Minnesota. Each 10-session course introduced students (who ranged in age from high school to retirement age) to Yiddish language and culture in an accessible format. Creating these educational resources also coincided with his work piloting In eynem, the forthcoming Yiddish textbook published by the Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA), and one of the few Yiddish language textbooks to be published in North America since the Second World War. He worked as the TA for elementary Yiddish at the Yiddish Book Center’s Steiner Yiddish Summer Program in 2020. 

As a prior volunteer with the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, he has met with high school theater students at the Sabes Jewish Community Center, and spoke about the linguistic and cultural diversity of Jewish life before the Second World War. He also conducted interviews with guest speakers at the Center that later appeared on the Center website. He led a discussion at the 2019 Minneapolis Jewish Film Festival following the screening of “Black Honey,” a documentary about Yiddish poet and Vilna Ghetto survivor, Avrom Sutzkever. He has also appeared with Yiddish and Ojibwe language speakers about the role of language revival efforts (and the challenges these efforts face) following genocide and displacement. 

In his work as an educator (whether teaching German, Yiddish, or TA-ing for the Center’s affiliated faculty), Meyer foregrounds the diversity of pre-war Jewish life when teaching students about the genocide of European Jewry and its aftermath within broader trends. When George Floyd was murdered, and protests erupted around the world, he was working remotely with the Yiddish Book Center due to the Coronavirus Pandemic. Distance learning due to the pandemic, and while living in the city at the center of a global protest movement, he wanted to convey to beginner students of Yiddish Yiddish writers’ own (and very complicated) attitudes toward the racialized hierarchies they encountered upon immigration to the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Some Yiddish-speaking immigrants tried and failed to effectively grapple with anti-Black racism. Others (including many who remained in Europe and were later killed by Hitler or Stalin) organized around their political affiliations and protested with Black writers and activists in the United States. Teaching about moments like these further cemented his obligations—toward students and society at large—to place the study of, and resistance against, mass violence within a global context.

Jillian’s research interests broadly include violence, knowledge, collective memory, and comparative methods. Her research seeks to understand how societies that recently experienced large-scale political violence teach about this violence to the next generation. More specifically, her dissertation research will analyze how teachers and parents in Sierra Leone and Rwanda relay their respective countries’ violent histories to the next generation, and how the distinct classification of the violence as civil war versus genocide are reflected in these communications. In addition to her dissertation work, Jillian works as a Research Assistant for Alejandro Baer on a project that seeks to understand how education is a form of reparative justice in Minnesota and Manitoba.

In 2016, Kathryn began her second Master’s in Musicology at the University of Minnesota and is now in her fourth year as a PhD candidate in Musicology. Kathryn’s dissertation examines the affective influence of sonic media technology, and the philosophical nature of sounds in Holocaust museums and memorial representations. In other words, how does what a visitor hears in a museum exhibit or representation of the Holocaust impact their response and understanding of the Holocaust? Addressing a breadth of sonic variants—from the sonic influence of language in the Holocaust; to audio guides; and further, to pre-existing soundscapes at the historical sites, such as Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kathryn highlights the role of sound in a field that has primarily focused on visuality. Kathryn just finished a 3-month research fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she worked closely with the “First Person” survivor testimony program. This upcoming 2019-2020 academic year she will begin curating an audio guide for the Treblinka memorial site as an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow under CHGS. She aspires to curate an audio guide that will bridge the gap between theory and practice, as she will investigate the implications and challenges of curating an audio guide about the Holocaust, and will make the audio guide live and accessible to the public via a phone application. Kathryn hopes that if her research makes any impact at all, it will at least encourage people to truly listen to their world and each other.

Brooke’s research interests include knowledge, violence, and reconciliation in Africa. Her research seeks to better understand generational trauma in contemporary Rwanda. She completed pre-dissertation research this past summer in Kigali, where she interviewed young Rwandans about their understandings of the 1994 genocide. She is interested in the commemorative process and has conducted ethnographic work at a number of memorial sites and ceremonies. For her research on the Rwandan genocide, Brooke was awarded the prestigious 2018-2019 Bernard and Fern Badzin Fellowship! In addition to her dissertation work, Brooke is involved on projects about denial of the Armenian genocide and the Rwandan gacaca courts.