EHRI – European Holocaust Research Infrastructure
EHRI Czech National Node
Top-quality research on the Holocaust is a prerequisite for informed discussion about Czech, European and world modern history and for understanding the risks and mechanisms of racism and genocide in their various forms. The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) connects collections and sources divided by borders and languages, promotes digital methods and supports researchers. The Czech EHRI national node is a gateway to EHRI services and community and a signpost for Holocaust research in the Czech Republic.
Example of a document from the Terezín Research Guide
Research infrastructure
The EHRI Czech national node has been part of the research infrastructure LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports since 2023.
EHRI is funded by the European Commission under FP7, Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe.
Since 2018, EHRI has been on the roadmap of European research infrastructures and is currently transforming into a permanent organisation - European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC). The Czech Republic supports this process through the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports and is represented in the EHRI Interim General Assembly.
Main goals and services
EHRI-CZ provides the following types of services:
- Makes EHRI data and services available, including EHRI Portal, EHRI Document Blog, EHRI Editions, EHRI Geospatial Repository, Conny Kristel Scholarship, and others.
- Creates data on sources on the history of the Holocaust in the Czech lands and uploads them to the EHRI Portal.
- Links and enhances the victim databases and methodologically supports their further development.
- Applies digital methods to the digitised sources, including automatic text and speech recognition, identification of places, historical actors, keywords, etc.
- Supports research using spatial methods and interactive maps, including the MemoMAP application.
An overview of all 27 EHRI partners can be found on this page.
TEREZÍN INITIATIVE INSTITUTE
In 2023, the ITI identified documents contained in the Holocaust Victims Database for research on automated reading of archival materials. At the end of 2023, the database contained 185,166 documents relating to 176,239 persons.
The content development of the Holocaust Victims Database involves research at the State District Archive in Mladá Boleslav. Around 2,000 documents were scanned. The digitized documents are gradually being processed and prepared for import into the database and for subsequent publication on the Holocaust.cz portal. Since some of the documents relate to people who survived 1945, the ITI can only proceed with this step after the clarification of the data protection issues (GDPR).
You can also visit
Thanks to the generous support of various donors, we have been able to add new books to our library collection. Among them is a wide range of specialist literature in German, English and Czech that complements our existing collection.
We would like to present a few highlights to our readers here. The complete list of new additions can be found in the PDF document.
On the occasion of the meeting of the International Auschwitz Museum Council, its members paid tribute to the Jewish and Roma victims of the Treblinka labor camp at the site of their mass graves. Pictured are T. Kraus, Colette Avital and Roman Kwiatkowski.
This Sunday 11th May 2025 we attended a commemorative act in Lety u Písku to honor the Roma and Sinti victims from Bohemia and Moravia. 1300 people passed through the camp. Of those 335, mainly children, have died due to the inhumane conditions. After the mass transport in 1943 to the extermination camp in Auschwitz - Birkenau, the buildings of the Lety camp were torn down and burnt.
Thanks to Spielberg's film Schindler's List, the whole world knows the story of the rescue of 1,200 Jewish prisoners at the end of the Second World War. The whole world knows who Oskar Schindler was and why he became a symbol of good in a time of evil. But that same world has no idea where this heartbreaking story actually took place. That could change now.
Yesterday, together with the participants of the seminar and excursion Bergen-Belsen on the Threshold of Freedom, we attended a reception at the British Embassy in Prague on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by the British Army on 15 April 1945.
Anne Frank and thousands of others. We visited the place where the fate of one of the world's most famous stories came to an end, as well as that of countless of others. The Bergen-Belsen camp was burned down after the war, but one can still hear echoes of the past. How can we learn about the horrors that have gone to ashes?
Yesterday, we welcomed Director Denise Quistorp and Sebastian Halbauer from the Austrian Cultural Forum in Prague to our premises at Jáchymova to exchange views on our respective activities and projects. This gave us the opportunity to identify common priorities in our work and to further strengthen Austro-Czech exchange through future cooperation.