EHRI Document Blog

Women contributed in significant ways to documenting the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities during and after the Second World War. But these contributions have been relatively obscure until recently, overshadowed by other narratives about the Holocaust and Second World War and the contributions of male historians. Luba Melchior was a Polish-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who was liberated to Sweden in 1945. There, as a refugee, she contributed to an effort to collect material evidence and witness testimonies from other Polish survivors, both Jewish and non-Jewish, also in Sweden as refugees. While the fact that she did this work is known, little has been written about her as a person, as a survivor, as a refugee, as a Jewish victim of Nazism gathering evidence of the Nazis' crimes against humanity, and how she lived out the rest of her life without her husband and son who had been murdered by the Nazis. In this blog post I contributed to the EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure) Document Blog, I begin to place Luba Melchior into these and other historical contexts by piecing together fragmented archival material and other evidence of her life, experiences, and work.