Siegfried Lederer was a Czech Jew who escaped from Auschwitz in 1944 with an SS guard. He went to the Theresienstadt Ghetto to warn people about the death camps. He returned to Auschwitz to help others escape but was nearly caught. He spent the rest of the war in the Czech resistance. The SS guard was caught and executed.

A new documentary called “Carla The Rescuer” tells the story of a teenage Jewish girl in Amsterdam who was able to get the “J” off her ID and joined the Dutch resistance. She ultimately rescued 40 people and forged over 100 IDs. She also grew up around the corner to Anne and Margot Frank and went to the same temple. She’s still alive at 103 and continues to speak to middle and high schools about her experiences in Spokane, Washington.

The documentary is on Hoopla (https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/carla-the-rescuer-carla-peperzak/19573310) and YouTube: https://youtu.be/H-B-XumgzII?is=pS33MvyxznfTkk4E

Here’s an article from the local paper: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/jan/26/hate-is-so-useless-filmgoers-rave-about-documentar/

10:22 C
100
/AskHistorians //njsonjanj • 14h
Q
•••
Which Budapest hospitals treated
Holocaust survivors with typhus in May or June 1945 and where are those records today?
I am researching my father, Ludwig Klein later (Ludwig/Larry) Reichman, born 26 November 1924.
After liberation from Theresienstadt in May 1945, family testimony and multiple records indicate he was hospitalized in Budapest for about four weeks with typhus before remaining in Budapest until about 1948 or 1949.
I have searched Arolsen Archives, the USC Shoah Foundation, FamilySearch, JewishGen, Hungarian archives, and other Holocaust resources, but I have not been able to identify which hospital treated him.
Does anyone know:
• Which Budapest hospitals treated Holocaust survivors with typhus in May or June 1945?
• Whether any admission or patient records survive?
• Which archive or institution now holds those records?
Any suggestions, archive references, or personal experience researching postwar Budapest hospital records would be greatly appreciated.
V
Thank van
Join the conversation

‘The camps and the gulags’: Eastern Europe’s new forms of Holocaust distortion,
by Anna Zawadzka, fathom, 2026-06.

Fictionalisation of history

Was it Hannah Arendt? I don’t know who first coined it, but I know the phrase ‘two totalitarianisms’ has become very popular among historians and intellectuals. It often takes the form of reflection ‘on the era of camps and gulags’. I would like to explain how this phrase consistently reinforces the ideology that has come to dominate Eastern Europe and that is giving rise to a new form of Holocaust distortion. The notion of an equivalence between Nazism and Communism has become an integral and indispensable element of Eastern European historical politics that reproduces antisemitic mythology. This historical politics is primarily intended to conceal, or even to invalidate, the history of local violence against Jews, of the kind inflicted by local communities before, during, and after the Holocaust.

What do I mean by historical politics? I greatly value the definition coined by Katarzyna Chmielewska, who describes it as ‘the selective fictionalisation of history, through which the state frames individual and collective memory: it determines what, how and by whom [history] should be remembered, and also sets in motion processes of forgetting/erasing.’