Project focuses on what Americans knew about Holocaust, and when

By SEAN D. HAMILL

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

PITTSBURGH

When Beth Moody saw a recent ad on Facebook that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was asking “citizen historians” to crowdsource articles about the Holocaust from 1933 to 1945 from local newspapers, she didn’t hesitate.

“I was already researching my family’s history through the Altoona [Pa.] paper and figured I’d just look up these [Holocaust] events at the same time,” said Moody, 55, of Wilkinsburg, who is a Title 1 reading teacher at the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center.

Moody put in six hours over two days looking for articles on Newspapers.com from the now-defunct Altoona Tribune. She found stories related to six of the 20 Holocaust-related events the museum is asking people to look for.

It was what she did not find that probably will get the attention of the museum and scholars.

“The [Altoona Tribune] didn’t have anything about [the anti-Jewish riots in 1938 known as] Kristallnacht, or the Jewish stars [that Jews had to wear], or the extermination camps; there was nothing, and I looked very closely,” she said.

Why papers such as the Altoona Tribune chose not to run stories about such events – when other papers did – is something that experts say will be studied closely. Scholars also want to know how these publication decisions affected public-policy actions. It already has spurred a debate in Moody’s family.

“My [adult] daughter and I had a debate about this and why there was nothing,” she said. “My daughter said, ‘Well, maybe it’s because they’re a little bigoted town over there.’ But I said, ‘If they were bigoted, maybe they would have liked to hear about Kristallnacht.’”

This pogrom also is known as the Night of Broken Glass.

The museum’s historians hope the project, dubbed History Unfolded, officially announced April 5, will inspire thousands of more volunteers like Moody to do similar research over the next two years – leading to a 2018 exhibit titled “Americans and the Holocaust.”

Since the project began quietly last fall, more than 1,000 articles have been reviewed, approved and placed on the museum’s permanent project database on its website at newspapers.ushmm.org/?search.

Technology has made such a project possible, now that more newspapers’ archives are online.

But the museum hopes volunteers also will dig into those forgotten small-town papers that exist only on plastic rolls of microfilm or the original hard copies in binders at local libraries.