Visiting The Wiener Holocaust Library

MY GOAL WAS ONE OF THE GLOSSY BLACK DOORS that punctuated a row of typical British four-story buildings, their basement and ground floors painted white and the upper floors built of sand-colored brick. Each door sported a semi-circular light above. A bronze plaque on the wall beside one of the doors let me know I was in the right place. The plaque read, “The Wiener Holocaust Library.” I had previously used the library as an online resource. Now, visiting London from California, I hoped to view documents unavailable on their website.

Unseasonably warm for October, the city felt more like home than foggy England. The notorious heat wave of the summer of 2026 had broken but not retreated. A sheen of perspiration moistened my brow as I climbed the five steps up from the pavement. Following posted instructions, I pushed a button to gain entrance. The door opened and a tall man greeted me. “Are you here to see the exhibit?”

“No,” I answered, “I’ve come to do research.”

He waved me inside the dim entry hall, indicating a sign-in book. After I filled in my name and the time, he ushered me past a stairway to a room with a bank of lockers. “Please leave anything you don’t need for your work here,” he said. “There is an elevator. The reading rooms are on the first floor.” Then he left me in the quiet manner of an English butler.

Upstairs, the research area was quiet and pleasantly cool. Several large library computers sat near a cluttered librarian’s desk. In the room beyond, two rows of study cubicles filled the space.

The librarian greeted me with a smile, and I introduced myself. “Oh yes,” she said. “I remember your emails. It’s a pleasure to meet you in person. I have the materials you requested right here.” She turned to a nearby bank of shelves, picked up a stack of three books, and handed them to me. I asked if I needed to pay a membership fee, and she explained that all resources are free to the public. The only advantage to being a member, she said, is that one may then check out books to study them at home.

I settled into the nearest study desk with its British-style electric outlets (those with the three substantial square holes) and connected my laptop using my plug converter. The books I had requested all pertained to the women’s WWII internment camp on the Isle of Man. I hoped to find something fascinating that would add authenticity to a story I planned that would take place in the camp.

The study room was filled with books lined up on white shelves from floor to ceiling. A large window overlooking Russell Square allowed sunlight to stream in. Working here would be a pleasure, I thought. Indeed, I stayed, reading and taking notes without a break, until the library closed at 5:00 pm. I had not yet had time to read an unpublished manuscript written by a woman internee. For another story idea, I wanted to listen to a video interview with a German-Jewish woman who had been married to an Aryan man. I happily anticipated returning to the library several more times.

As I was leaving, the librarian insisted on coming downstairs to point out a book she highly recommended. Books for sale were displayed on a bookcase in the ground floor exhibition room. “Maybe you will have time to visit the current exhibition when you return,” she said. She also pointed out a sign in the vestibule that announced free tours of the archives every Tuesday afternoon.

One evening later that week, I received an email from Martina Ravagnan, the print and audio/visual collections manager at the Wiener. She wrote to say that my two historical novels, Immigrant Soldier and Ashes and Ruins, had been approved for addition to their collection. “I have put them in our buy basket,” she wrote. I was thrilled and I replied with an offer to donate copies of my books, which I had with me in London. Martina and I arranged to meet so I could give her the books personally.

The following week, after several more successful research visits, I returned to the library, this time with my daughter, Erin, who joined me in London after an independent tour of Ireland. Erin, an information sponge, loves history, so I had saved the exhibit and the archive tour to do with her.

Erin and I arrived just before noon on Tuesday. We first spent an hour looking at the excellent exhibit, Nazi Slave Labour, Perpetrators & Victims. The exhibitions offered by the Wiener are compact, filling only one room, but they are exceptionally well curated and displayed. These exhibits change periodically, each one highlighting a different aspect of the Holocaust and displaying items from the Wiener’s massive collection.

After a quick lunch at the outdoor café in Russell Square Park, we returned for the afternoon archive tour. The enthusiastic volunteer docent who led our small group obviously loved the museum. She started the tour in the exhibition room with a summary of the founder’s background.

Before the Nazi era, Dr. Alfred Wiener was a successful German journalist and a linguist fluent in several Arab languages. Like my grandfather Hugo, he served in the German army during WWI. Wiener was assigned to Palestine, where he worked as a translator with Germany’s Arab allies from the Ottoman Empire. During WWII, my uncle Heman, fluent in both English and German, served as a US Army translator. These family parallels struck a chord with me.

As early as the 1920s, with unusual clarity, Dr. Wiener understood what was happening in Germany and campaigned against Nazism. He gathered evidence of antisemitism and the persecution of Jews in Germany―everything from letters to school primers, from magazines to photographs.

In 1933, Dr. Wiener took his family to the Netherlands, where he hoped they would be safer than in Germany under Hitler’s government. They lived in Amsterdam in the same community as the family of Anne Frank. There, Wiener established the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO), whose mission was to collect information about the Nazis and their antisemitic acts.

After the March occupation of Czechoslovakia and the November Pogrom of 1938 (known now as Kristallnacht), the JCIO made the decision to move their collected documents to a safer location. With some difficulty, Dr. Wiener secured a visa to come to the UK, bringing the archives with him. He immediately founded the Holocaust Library, using this amassed evidence as the basis for the collection.

After the docent shared the background of the Wiener family, she led us down a narrow set of stairs to the basement where the books and documents are carefully stored. With reverence and love she shared a collection of family photos that had belonged to a German-Jewish refugee, and with disgust in her voice she leafed through a truly terrible children’s book published in Germany in the 1930s. Written by a Nazi kindergarten teacher, the colorful picture book was filled with ugly antisemitic rhetoric and drawings.

Most fascinating to me were the vegetable seed packets, the ladies’ shampoo package, and a tiny brochure on how to grow cacti, all of which contained hidden resistance and anti-Nazi messages. These items, known as Tarnschriften, are an entire genre I knew nothing about.

We were allowed a few minutes to peek into the actual stacks where countless books are stored in crammed bookshelves along narrow aisles. “We can’t use the normal library Dewey decimal system,” the docent told us. “Our collection is too specialized. All of it would fall within a narrow range of that system’s number designations.” She explained that in the 1970s, The Wiener Library developed their own cataloging system that uses letters rather than numbers, making it possible for books in the collection to be found quickly and easily.

Much of the Wiener collection has been, and continues to be, scanned digitally. Already thousands of documents are available to researchers over the internet from computers anywhere in the world. However, some items will remain available only at the library. These include privately donated family history documents and photos that lack full permissions and unpublished manuscripts with copyright issues. Recently, I searched the library catalogue to see the intriguing tomato seed packet again. Among a group of documents listed was an unpublished manuscript, Appearances are deceiving: an indicative study of the Tarnschriften (camouflaged pamphlets), 1934-1939. A master’s thesis done at the University of the City of London in 2015 by Robert Smith, this document is not digitalized and therefore only available at the library.

When the tour finished, my daughter and I met Martina Ravagnan in the vestibule, and we found a quiet spot to talk near the reading room. After giving Martina signed copies of my books, I admitted surprise that my novels were considered valid for the Wiener collections and asked how the selection of books was made. She explained that the library collects many books within the Holocaust Literary Fiction category. They foresee, she said, that researchers will be interested in the role of Holocaust literature and how it affects the way the world understands the Nazi era.

Curious, I searched the Wiener online catalogue under “Holocaust Literature.” The search page showed hundreds of fictional and semi-fictional works, including such notables as The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen, The Book Thief by Marc Zusak, and the works of Elie Wiesel. I feel quite honored that my novels will be in the company of such respected books.

All of this has made Erin and I eager to gather family photographs and documents to donate. As I approach my mid-eighties, I have wondered what will become of all the precious information, family photos, and valuable primary documents uncovered while researching for my books. In the Wiener Holocaust Library, I see the perfect place for our family treasures to rest.