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The international conference of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure
The international conference of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), co-organised by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, crowned the four-year project concerning the documentation of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. The main goal of the project was to arrange an exchange of experiences between people who work on documenting the history of the Holocaust, as well as to design a website providing access to many archival sources on the extermination of the Jews.
The conference took place in Kraków and Oświęcim between 19-21 May and was attended by over 60 people, primarily scientists from institutions dealing with research on or the history of the Holocaust. The participants came from Eastern Europe, e.g. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldavia, but also from Poland, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain, the USA and Canada.
On the first day, the participants met in the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków where they listened to lectures and took part in discussions on, amongst other things, new sources in the studies on the Holocaust and on the access to archives containing documents not only on the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, but also on the issues related to war crimes.
The second part of the conference took place at the Auschwitz Memorial, where the guests could become more familiar with the profiles of collections placed in different archives of documents on the Holocaust. Dr Krzysztof Antończyk, head of the Digital Repository of the Auschwitz Museum, gave a presentation on the information database on Auschwitz victims. In the programme, the series of lectures was complemented by visiting two national exhibitions - the Russian and Jewish exhibitions, the latter of which was opened last year at the Auschwitz Memorial.
The guest of honour at the conference was Robert-Jan Smits, Director-General for Research and Innovation at the European Commission. "Above all, the point is to preserve the memory of this horrifying, dark time of our European history. This project is fundamentally a European undertaking, as it unites archives, museums, scientists and researchers into an important co-operation network, not only in Europe," he said.
The conference was co-organised by the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) and the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem.
