Yad Vashem has placed thousands of personal letters >from their archives
-some viewable for the first time-on their website. This is the first in a
series of exhibits featuring last letters. The exhibit presents 9 letters
written by children and adults written in 1941 to their loved ones during
the Holocaust. The letters are >from Poland, Latvia, France, Austria,
Ukraine, Yugoslavia and Romania. They were written while in their homes,
ghettos, in hiding or fleeing. There are photos of the people in the
exhibit 9 letters. To view the exhibit see:

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/last-letters/1941/index.asp#/overview

To search the archives for the 1,000 plus personal letters go to:
http://collections1.yadvashem.org/search.asp?lang=ENG&;rsvr=8

This is the online catalogue of the Yad Vashem archive. It only includes 20
percent of the archival collection. (You can also access this area of the
website >from the Yad Vashem home page by clicking on "Documents Archive"
under Digital Collections.)
This will open a search page. For "Search Profile" make certain it lists
"Documents Archive" If that is not what appears, then go to the drop down
box and select "Documents Archive".
Where it says "Search for" type in o.75. The first character is the letter
"o" not the number zero.
Under fields to search check off Record Group or title-the most important
thing is to have o.75 in the "search for" block.
Click on "search"
Be patient it takes a brief while for the website to respond - it may be due
to website traffic or my computer when I tried it out.
In the search results, a list of over 1,000 titles/links come up. Click on
the hypertext link you want to see, and then that particular post card and
letter information will come up. If that document has been scanned an icon
will appear to click below the narrative which is the scanned file. Click
on the icon. When that opens and if there are multiple pages there will be
arrows on the upper right to click to advance to the next document. Not all
of the documents are scanned as yet.

Thank you to Zvi Bernhardt, Yad Vashem for providing the instructions on how
to find the documents. The article mentioned above focused solely on the 9
documents in the exhibit , which are well worth visiting, but if one wants
to search the remaining documents, we needed the additional information.

Jan Meisels Allen
Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee