Category: Spurensuche Projekt

14 students from the Catholic University of Freiburg participate in the Blaue Haus seminar SEARCHING FOR TRACES OF GURS

“Searching for Traces of Gurs” is the abbreviated title of the project to which invited German and Polish students. Together we took part in active remembrance work, both with and beyond contemporary witnesses.

“Mickey Mouse in Gurs. When comic characters have a completely different origin”

Illustrator Horst Rosenthal (1915–1942) created three comic books during his internment at the Gurs camp. Using Mickey Mouse and other characters, he made it possible for later readers to understand what everyday life was like behind the barbed-wire fence. In connection with the commemoration of the deportation of Jewish residents of Baden to Gurs on October 22, 1940, the Blaue Haus made a series of videocasts on the illustrated stories and the man who created them.

Training course as part of the project SEARCHING FOR TRACES OF GURS
conducted by Dr. Christoph Kreutzmüller, House of the Wannsee Conference memorial and educational site, Berlin

The photographs in the Lili Jacob album are viewed as “icons of the Holocaust,” despite the fact that they were taken by two SS photographers in the summer of 1944 with the aim of showing how smoothly the murder of Hungarian Jews was proceeding. Jumping off from the book he wrote with Tal Bruttmann and Stefan Hördler, historian Dr. Christoph Kreutzmüller discussed with the project group SEARCHING FOR TRACES OF GURS the background of the album, visible and invisible, and reconstructed the original order of the photographs.

The recorded Zoom workshop was part of the seminar – also titled SEARCHING FOR TRACES OF GURS – of the Catholic University of Freiburg and the Blaue Haus.

In September, a group of full-time employees and volunteers had a first glimpse of the Blaue Haus collection of letters preceding and related to the deportation to the Gurs internment camp.