Joseph Schönfelder (Germany)
Volunteering period
- September 2021 - April 1 2022: at Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center in Moscow
- April 1 – August 2022: at the "Grodzka Gate - NN Theatre" in Lublin
Activities
During the months spent in Moscow at the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center I was a valuable member of a small team of historians working at this NGO. I assisted in several educational projects, represented the Center at international and national conferences as well as helped with organizing international competitions.
Furthermore, I did considerable preliminary work for Dr. Altman. His is a professor at the Russian State University of the Humanities and director of the Centre, in the Russian War Archives. I sifting through German documents from the years of the Third Reich as part of a research project funded by the Russian Sperbank to trace expropriated Jewish property to Swiss banks.
At times I was responsible for correspondence between the Center and international partners. This also included working with the English and Russian newsletter, sorting and sending them to the partners.
After Russia started its war against Ukraine all the German volunteers left the country. Later, with another German volunteer, I got the opportunity to continue our voluntary service at the "Grodzka Gate - NN Theatre" Centre in Lublin.
During the beginning of my service in Lublin we were able to indirectly help Ukraine as we spent few weeks taking part in some actions to sort donations. We specifically were working in a storage room facility in the suburbs, opened packages and distributed their content according to the needs.
A great part of our work here was also connected with reviewing German documents from the time of the occupation. We tried to find new names and dates of the murdered Lublin Jews. We then help to extract the names from the documents, so that the new information can be easily transcribed into our database.
Another part of our work was to guide visitors around a permanent exhibition "Memory of the Place" in the Grodzka Gate. Before we were ready for it, we had got familiar with the materials available in the Gate on the Centre's website. In this way we learned a lot about Jewish life in Lublin. Giving those tours also meant meeting with interesting people and sometimes getting to know the personal reasons of their visits.
Joseph Schönfelder speaks about his voluntary service in the "Grodzka Gate - NN Theatre" Centre: