In 2005, 60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, the United Nations designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism and to promote Holocaust education to help prevent future genocides and create a safer future. Following is a list of resources available to the UConn community to honor the day through education.

You can also check out the one credit course UConn is running starting March 6 – “Why the Jews? Confronting Antisemitism.”

Thanks to Zach Claybaugh, Betsy Pittman, and Graham Stinnett for gathering the following list. We welcome you to reach out if you would like to learn more.

Exhibition

Kristallnacht: Art installation from the Collection of Irena Urdang deTour

Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party’s Sturmbtelilung (SA) and Schutstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9-10 November 1938. Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Historically viewed as a prelude to the Final Solution, the month of November marks the anniversary of this dark period of history and genocide.  This art installation has been created by Connecticut resident and Holocaust survivor, Irena Urdang deTour.   

The exhibit has been extended through January 2023 in memory of Ms. DeTour who died in December 2022 at the age of 98. The exhibtion can be accessed through Archives & Special Collections.

Archival Collections

Connecticut Soldiers Collection, Carl Viggiani Papers. arl Viggiani, Emeritus Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at Wesleyan University, was a member of a “Spearhead Military Government Team” attached to the 83rd Infantry Division during World War II.As the 83rd moved down toward the Elbe in April 1945, Viggiani’s unit took over a Nazi official’s home in Braunschweig for a night.

Series VII: Nuremberg Trials from the Thomas J. Dodd Papers. The Thomas J. Dodd Papers consists primarily of material from Dodd’s Senate years (1959-1971) and the Nuremberg war crimes trial before the International Military Tribunal from 1945-1946.

Dedication of the Dodd Research Center by Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel was an Auschwitz survivor and human rights activist. Author of Night, Wiesel devoted his life to educating the world about the Holocaust. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Other Resources

Database

Human Rights Online, Holocaust (1933-1945)

Documentary Film

Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah. New York: IFC Films, 1985.

Reference Work

Laqueur, Walter, and Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, eds. The Holocaust Encyclopedia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Megargee, Geoffrey P., ed. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.

Monographs

Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.

Browning, Christopher R. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Finkel, Evgeny. Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival During the Holocaust. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Horwitz, Gordon J. Ghettostadt: Łódź and the Making of a Nazi City. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008.

Kaplan, Marion A. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Kay, Alex J. Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021.

Waxman, Zoë. Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Academic Journals

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History

The Journal of Holocaust Research

Fiction

Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. New York: Penguin, 1967.

Kertész, Imre. Fateless. Translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992.

Schwarz-Bart, André. The Last of the Just. Translated by Stephen D. Becker. New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1960.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

Memoir

Frank, Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank. Translated by Arnold Pomerans, B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday, and Susan Massotty. The revised critical edition. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

On Friday, January 20, one of the oldest structures on the UConn campus suffered extensive damage from a fire. Thankfully the structure was unoccupied and no one was hurt but it is unknown if the fire has damaged the structure beyond repair.

Known as the Whitney House, or the International House, it was built between 1802 and 1807 by John Gilbert, Jr., of Mansfield, Connecticut, one of the original owners of the property. The building and the property passed on to Gilbert’s sons, and then his grandsons, and in 1867 it was then sold to Augustus Storrs.

Storrs had a large family farm nearby and was, at that time, a businessman in New York City, so he rented the house to Mrs. Minerva Whitney, widow of Edwin Whitney, who established and was director of a school for orphans near the house. It is thought that after Mr. Whitney’s death Augustus Storrs offered the home to Mrs. Whitney to purchase.

In 1881 Augustus Storrs and his brother Charles offered to the State of Connecticut the property and funding for what was then used to establish the Storrs Agricultural School, later known as the University of Connecticut.

At the time of Edwin Whitney’s death Mrs. Whitney was pregnant with their daughter, whom she named Edwina. In 1900 Edwina Whitney became the Connecticut Agricultural College’s Librarian, a position she held until 1934. She was also an instructor of German. You can read more about Edwina Whitney here.

In the late 1800s Minerva Whitney used the house as the local post office. She sold the house to the college in 1918 and it was used to house faculty members. In 1964 it was refurbished and made available as a center for foreign students, thereby known as the International House.

Post written by Laura Smith, Archivist

UConn Library has been shifting over the past ten years from just-in-case collection development practices to a budget sustainable just-in-time approach for providing access to scholarly information. Journals have always required a significant source of funding, and as journal costs rose exponentially over the last two and a half decades, libraries paid for “Big Deal” journal subscription bundles with flat or reduced library budgets. This meant cutting the other materials and services that libraries provide. “Big Deal” packages were once a way for libraries to pay for access to large amounts of content at reduced rates, but the increases in costs for packages have far outpaced both inflation and library budgets. Additionally, many of the bundled journals are used very little. “Big Deals” have put pressure on the entire library budget and forced academic libraries to eliminate staff, programming, and support services. This is unsustainable.

Every research library regularly cancels journals or ends publisher contracts, including schools such as MIT, Purdue, and UNC Chapel Hill, to stay within their budgets. In the Fall of 2020, Dean Langley and Provost Lejuez convened the Future of Journals Committee, including administrators, faculty, and staff to assess journal subscriptions at UConn with an eye on strategies that would yield a viable long-term solution. The committee-approved pilot project was successful and we began the first phase of Future of Journals in 2021. We are in year three of a six-year implementation schedule. Each year different publisher contracts are not renewed, and we purchase articles on demand, quickly and conveniently, with access paths only slightly different than before. Because publishers limit how we provide articles, you may have to alter how you search and request materials. We have created a guide to help you learn the most efficient methods.

Consistent with the Future of Journal timeline, we did not renew our bundled contract with Elsevier, which expired at the end of 2022. What does this mean for your access to journal articles found in Elsevier and other subscriptions that have not been renewed? Using past use data and forecasting tools we predict that 85% of articles most frequently requested will be available immediately. If an article is not, it can be requested by any member of the UConn community via Interlibrary Loan. Faculty and graduate students have expedited access to articles from a subset of publishers. Depending on where the article comes from, most items will be delivered within five minutes (or less) to an hour. The Library will annually review article usage statistics and other criteria to assess the most cost effective models for access.

We can now manage the Library budget without the burden of the unsustainable increasing costs of journal subscriptions and we’ve been fielding questions and giving presentations to other academic libraries interested in our implementation of this expedited process. It continues to be a top priority for UConn Library to support the research mission of the University. The Future of Journals approach has given UConn the flexibility to be nimble in how we provide access to the library materials you need as the publishing landscape continues to change.

 You can learn more about the Future of Journals at https://lib.uconn.edu/research/collections/future-of-journals/ and we encourage you to email us your feedback and/or questions at journalsfeedback@uconn.edu.