Holocaust Centre North launches first digital archive

Holocaust Centre North in Huddersfield, west Yorkshire, has launched a new digital archive of 70 collections of papers and personal testimonies from Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees.

The archive is the first phase of an ambitious three-year project, Homeward Bound, by the museum to catalogue its extensive Holocaust collection and make it accessible online.

The new archive can be accessed remotely via the National Archives website, opening up the centre’s collections to anyone with an interest in Holocaust history, such as academics, artists, schools, researchers and survivors’ families.

In a statement, the institution said: “Following months of painstaking work for the centre’s archivist, this groundbreaking and transformative service enables global public online access to its collections and supports the centre’s strategy to becoming a world-class destination for Holocaust education and research.”

The statement added: “Not only is this level of access and depth of information invaluable for worldwide Holocaust education, this cataloguing has also greatly benefitted the centre’s own staff.

Through complete immersion in its records, collections and learning staff have gained a far greater understanding and increased knowledge of its collection, its stories and the survivors themselves.”

The cataloguing process helped to uncover previously unknown connections and stories in the collections.

In one such instance, it was discovered that a well-known magician, David Berglas, had shown kindness to a newly arrived Jewish refugee. The centre's head of collections, Tracy Craggs, was subsequently able to interview Berglas before his death in 2023, and his collection of family photographs has been digitised.

The project also led the collections team to establish a stronger connection with Yorkshire resident Gail Simon, the granddaughter of a couple who ran a hostel for Kindertransport boys in Bradford. Simon has since donated personal and institutional records, photographs and a menorah to the centre, which can be viewed in the new digital archive.

“On a personal level, it has been thoroughly enjoyable getting to know the archive better and, as a result, becoming better equipped to support Holocaust Centre North’s team and external users to share in the richness of these extraordinarily compelling collections,” said Holocaust Centre North archivist Hari Jonkers, who helped secure funding for the project and worked on the hands-on cataloguing together with archives assistant Barbora Vackova. 

“Sharing ‘new discoveries’ with colleagues is incredibly rewarding and has increased staff awareness of the work that archivists do, which can often be hidden. Cataloguing has already enabled us to strengthen our existing relationships within the northern community of Holocaust survivors and their descendants and to seek out and develop new relationships. It has been a crucial learning curve, illustrating the depth and dedication cataloguing demands within archival operations.”

Jonkers added: “As an organisation devoted to ‘fostering a culture of care’ when engaging with traumatic stories, this work has also taught our team that an archive is the perfect place to foster that culture of care. It is exciting and rewarding to see the fruits of our hard work online at the National Archives so that these remarkable and vital Holocaust histories can be preserved and accessed globally.”

The initial digitisation of Holocaust Centre North’s archives and collections was funded as part of the Archives Revealed Grant managed by the National Archives.

Phase two of the Homeward Bound project will involve the scanning and photographing of the centre’s materials. Holocaust Centre North aims to make digitised collections available by the end of December 2025 through a collection browser on its website.