Johannes Blum collection

Collection description

Holding institution:: Kazerne Dossin - Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre on the Holocaust and Human Rights

Holding institution (official language):: Kazerne Dossin - Memoriaal, Museum en Documentatiecentrum over Holocaust en Mensenrechten

Scope and content:: This collection firstly contains an impressive collection of interviews. The focus is mainly on the Shoah – we mostly find interviews of people who lived through the Shoah as a hidden child, deportee, political prisoner, resistance fighter and others, but we also note interviews of refugees (i.a. of the M.S. St. Louis), of children of Shoah survivors, of Righteous Among the Nations, etc. The fonds also contains interviews related to the genocide in Rwanda, the Spanish Civil War, the collaboration during the Second World War, etc. For each interview there is a documentation file, containing mainly the agreement between Blum and the interviewee as well as other documents such as biographical information, forms filled out by the interviewee, sometimes correspondence, press clippings, pictures, notes and texts written by the interviewees on their activities during the war, etc.

Administrative/biographical history:: Johannes Blum (who has been living in Brussels since 1969) was originally German but was naturalised around 1980. He was a high school teacher. As a result of meeting several former prisoners of Auschwitz in the early 1980s, Blum became convinced of the necessity to record testimonies of Shoah survivors to keep the memory to the genocide alive. He established for this purpose the association Les Compagnons de la Mémoire (around 1980). Since 1993 Blum has interviewed hundreds of deported Jews, resistance fighters, political prisoners, Jewish hidden children but also Spanish Republicans and former combatants of the International Brigades, survivors of the Rwandese genocide and others, collecting at the same time documentation material on and archival material of these witnesses.

Subject terms:: Children; Historical research; Holocaust; Holocaust--Collaboration; Holocaust--Deportation; Holocaust--Hiding; Holocaust--Rescue and resistance; Holocaust--Righteous Among the Nations; Holocaust--Survivors; Jewish self-defence and resistance; Testimony

Access, restrictions:: Consultation is only possible after prior request and following the approval of the archivists.

Finding aids:: There are several detailed finding aids; however research is best done in cooperation with the archivists.