Book Launch and Special Collection Exhibition - Holocaust Letters

Join us for the launch of a new edited collection Holocaust Letters: Methodologies, Cases and Reflections () edited by Clara Dijkstra, Charlie Knight, Sandra Lipner, and Christine Schmidt, which features groundbreaking new research into the holdings of the Library’s archive.

Throughout the Holocaust, letters were sent in their millions, in a variety of different contexts and for a range of differing purposes. Holocaust Letters marks the first volume of its kind to examine collectively letter writing during this period. The book presents different methodological approaches to letters as texts, material objects and markers of memory, and outlines a range of different case studies using letters as sources in practice. Emerging from the exhibition of the same name held at The Wiener Holocaust Library in 2023, the authors in this volume use letters to gain a deeper understanding of the Holocaust and the post-war period in Western and Central Europe, and transnational humanitarian efforts in the UK and North Africa.

Holocaust Letters also presents a series of short source critiques of individual letters and small collections of letters, with insightful analysis of a variety of different types of letters to be found throughout. In whatever form they occur, Holocaust-era letters are witness not only to what happened and to whom but contain valuable evidence of how and, crucially, why the events that came to be known as the Holocaust occurred.

This event will feature two of the collection’s editors, Dr Clara Dijkstra and Dr Charlie Knight, who will discuss their approaches to and findings from their contributions in Holocaust Letters.

Following the launch, this event will feature a reception and a special pop-up display of the William Kaczynski Collection.

William Kaczynski (1936-2019) was born in Germany to Martin and Edith Kaczynski. The family fled to England in 1939 after his father’s release from Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Upon arrival, William was interned with his mother and brother at Rushen internment camp on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens. After their release they were naturalised as British citizens and lived in north London.

A letter from his cousin, Wolfgang Happ, who was interned in Canada, sparked William Kaczynski’s interest in items documenting the postal history of the Holocaust. He built his collection of related material, both buying items at auctions and receiving donations from surviving correspondents and families. Ultimately the collection was used to illustrate his book , which documents communications to and from concentration and internment camps across the world.

Thanks to the generous permanent loan by The Schorr Collection, the Library maintains and holds Kaczysnki’s collection which includes letter covers, correspondence, ephemera, and photographs, alongside some contextual material from Kaczynski’s collection process and exhibition. It also includes documents relating to internment camps, concentration camps, displaced person camps, undercover mail and addresses, refugee and relief organisations, as well as significant events and individuals.

At this event, a selection of letters from this collection will be on display. The letters and the wider collection will be briefly introduced by the Library’s Acting Co-Director, Dr Christine Schmidt, who will chair the event.

Dr Clara Dijkstra is the Research and Curation Officer at The Wiener Holocaust Library in London. She completed her doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 2025. Her research examined the experiences of Jewish and Roma prisoners in the French internment camps Drancy, Poitiers and Montreuil-Bellay, between 1939 and 1946. Clara has a BA and an MSt in History from the University of Oxford. She has held fellowships at the USC Dornsife Centre for Advanced Genocide Research in Los Angeles, and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam.

Dr Charlie Knight received his PhD from the Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton where he remains an Honorary Fellow. He is currently a Bithell Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Languages, Cultures, and Societies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Weidenfeld Institute at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on the topics of German-Jewish migration, letter writing during the Holocaust, and Holocaust memory, and is co-editor of several special issues alongside the edited collection Holocaust Letters: Methodologies, Cases, and Reflections (Bloomsbury, 2026).

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