US Holocaust Museum offers unique opportunity in Prague to relatives of those persecuted on Protectorate territory

Are you looking for information about your relatives who were persecuted during the Protectorate era? Do you want to find out how official records have mapped their fate, or whether they were interned in a camp and what kind of information about them can be looked for in the available records?

The Prague Forum for Romani Histories of the Institute of Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, in collaboration with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C., is offering those seeking information about the wartime fate of their relatives a unique opportunity to aid them in researching that information. The free service being offered especially concerns relatives of victims of the genocide of Roma and Sinti and assistance with searching for information about persons living on the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during the Second World War who were persecuted.

The USHMM takes advantage of all available archives, collections, records of the International Tracing Service (the Arolsen Archives-International Center on Nazi Persecution) or library records in more than 25 languages when searching for this information. If you are interested in this assistance, complete the form here and send it to the e-mail or postal addresses listed below by 30 June 2019.

Prague Forum staffers will inform you of the outcomes of the search. Should the search succeed in finding documentation, you will be invited for an individual consultation on 20 September to Prague.

This will be a closed, personal meeting with staffers of the USHMM who will explain the documents found to you and provide you with color copies of them. The Prague Forum will arrange for interpreters between the applicants and the English-speaking staffers of the USHMM, as well as for the translation of documents written in languages other than Czech.

Applicants traveling for the meeting from outside of Prague will also have their travel costs compensated. Prague Forum staffers and USHMM stafers pledge not to use the personal data provided to them for any purpose other than that of researching information about persecuted persons and will not provide it to any institution or party other than the archive of the International Tracing Service for the purpose of research their documentation.

According to the Prague Forum, the chance of finding such information is highest for persons who were living on the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during the Second World War and who were then interned in any concentration camps for which files and other statistics have been preserved. The USHMM does not have documentation about all of the survivors or victims of Nazi persecution, but does its best to at least provide information about concentration camps and locations for which it does have records.

Researching information about persons persecuted in Slovakia through the International Tracing Services collections will likely not yield many results, especially if the persons concerned survived the war in hiding. For further information, the contact addresses are as follows:

Pražské fórum pro romské dějiny

Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR

Vlašská 9

110 00 Praha 1

Czech Republic

Staffers:

Renata Berkyová (renkabery@gmail.com)

Kateřina Čapková (capkova@usd.cas.cz)

Helena Sadílková (sadilkova@ff.cuni.cz)

Telephone: +420 257 286 350