From Suitcase to Archive

When Jewish refugees fled Nazi Germany, they carried with them more than the bare necessities of exile. Letters, photographs, certificates, books, memoirs and personal objects became fragments of lives disrupted by persecution and displacement. From Suitcase to Archive traces the remarkable afterlife of these materials – from hurried selection and private custody to donation, cataloguing, digitisation and historical interpretation. Bringing together the histories of major German-Jewish refugee archives in Britain and Israel with new case studies of families, archivists, writers and researchers, the volume explores how private remnants became public evidence. The contributors show that archives do not simply preserve the past; they select, organise and confer authority, shaping what later generations can know about German-Jewish life, exile and memory. Comparative, transnational and richly grounded in archival sources, this book reveals how displaced heritage continues to be remade across generations and borders.