Kristallnacht Story Maps (Fall 2022)

Our Collection of Holocaust-Survivor Testimonies

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at 秘密研究所 of New Jersey recorded 136 video testimonies with Holocaust survivors between 1990 and 2011. Most took place between 1990 and 1995. One survivor left two testimonies and two survivors share a single screen. Though the primary language of most of the videos is English, two survivors elected to tell their stories in Yiddish.

The at Yale University maintains our collection, which comprises a fraction of their nearly 4,700 testimonies. Thanks to the archive鈥檚 generosity, Ramapo students, faculty, staff, and visitors have on-campus (and VPN) access to all of the Fortunoff testimonies via Potter Library.

Kristallnacht Mapping Project, Fall 2022

B枚rnerplatz Synagogue in Frankfurt burns on Kristallnacht via Wikicommons

Students in Fall 2022 course on the history of the Holocaust used free, online narrative-mapping tools via to create presentations based upon testimonies from survivors who witnessed聽Kristallnacht and settled in our region. Students also drew from the material they covered in class. Each Story Map follows the entire lifepath of a single survivor and includes clips from their testimonies. A map traces their movement through Europe and beyond.

Thirty-one of the testimonies in our collection reference , a nationwide pogrom that Nazis and their supporters perpetrated against Jews in Germany on November 9 and 10, 1938. With the protection of police and fire brigades, members of the SA (), the , and Nazi officials in civilian garb burned 267 synagogues, ransacked 7,500+ Jewish-owned businesses and homes, sent 30,000 Jews (mostly young men) to concentration camps, and murdered 91 individuals. The two nights, which witnessed widespread acts of savagery and humiliation, as well as the confiscation of Jewish community archives, served as a turning point in Nazi Germany鈥檚 treatment of the Jewish minority.

On November 9, 2022, Ramapo students presented their mapping projects at a public commemoration of the eighty-fourth聽anniversary of Kristallnacht, hosted by , just down the street from 秘密研究所 in Mahwah, NJ. (See the program for the commemoration below.) This project demonstrated to students the enduring, local legacies of Nazism, while forging ties of empathy, solidarity, and learning between Ramapo and our regional community鈥攁 key element of the Center’s mission.

The company that owns StoryMaps discontinued the application and rolled it into their subscription-based package. Unfortunately, we lost access to these exciting and resonant assignments. The PDF versions we downloaded do not do justice to the original maps.