Wirth Institute receives new donations to the Rudolf Vrba Holocaust Reading Room

New items have been added to the Rudolf Vrba Holocaust Reading Room thanks to a generous donation from Dr. William Pearce.

The Wirth Institute is pleased to be able to announce new donations to the Rudolf Vrba Holocaust Reading Room. The Reading Room’s primary benefactor, Dr. William Pearce, graciously continued his tradition of donating various materials relating to the Holocaust, for use by students and scholars of the Institute and University as well as by members of the general academic community and the public. These donations include over a dozen books on Holocaust-related topics by authors such as Primo Levi, Tilar Mazzeo and Max Eisen. Dr. Pearce also donated DVDs featuring the lectures delivered at the University of Alberta by Holocaust survivor Rudolf Vrba in 2002, as well as the English translation of the transcript of an interview with the late Polish Holocaust survivor “Mietek” Pemper, one of the figures in the “Schindler’s List” story.

The Wirth Institute is honoured to acknowledge the donation by Dr. Leon Kagan of the text of his late father Paul’s account of his time imprisoned in the ghetto in Wilno, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania). This moving text recounts Paul’s experiences as a teenage Holocaust survivor in the period from 1939-1948, before his move to Edmonton. It also contains an account of Paul’s emotional return in 1993 to his birthplace and the site of the murders of his parents. (For more on Paul Kagan’s move to Canada, see his testimony deposited at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, where Paul disembarked from his boat from Europe: https://pier21.ca/content/the-immigration-story-of-paul-kagan-polish-displaced-person.)

For further information about the Rudolf Vrba Holocaust Reading Room and its collections, or to find out more about how to donate to the Reading Room, please contact Wirth Institute Director Joseph F. Patrouch at patrouch@ualberta.ca.

For more information on our upcoming Jewish Week 2020 events, including the Annual Toby & Saul Reichert Holocaust Lecture, please click here.