What happened to the Jews from Trondheim during the Holocaust? What can the images tell us?
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Photo: Jewish Museum Trondheim.
THE IMAGES FROM BUCHENWALD. Lecture with historian Karianne Hansen
12/11/25, 5:00 PM
The Jewish Museum Trondheim invites you to a lecture by Karianne Hansen, researcher at the ARKIVET Peace and Human Rights Center. The lecture is free and open to anyone who wishes to attend.
DECEMBER 11, 6:00 PM AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM TRONDHEIM
ABOUT THE LECTURE
29-year-old Josef Mendelsohn from Trondheim was part of the American forces that liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 11, 1945. In the disease-ridden camp, which over time had developed into a humanitarian disaster, Mendelsohn found his cousin, Julius Paltiel. This joyful and intense reunion with one of the few family survivors of the Holocaust was documented by Mendelsohn. The color photographs are well-known in Norway: the five Norwegian-Jewish survivors, Julius Paltiel, Assor and Pelle Hirsch, Samuel Steinmann and Leo Eitinger, smiling and posing for the camera.
It is a well-known fact that several of the Jewish Norwegians who survived Auschwitz, including Paltiel and the Hirsch brothers, came from Trondheim. But how much do we know about their experiences after their deportation from German-occupied Norway in 1942-1943? What was life and death like inside Auschwitz, the Nazis’ largest concentration and death camp? What can a series of photos from Buchenwald from the spring of 1945 tell us about the stories of the 230 Norwegian-Jewish families who were exterminated in the Holocaust?
ABOUT KARIANNE HANSEN
Karianne Hansen is a historian educated in England and Scotland, specializing in Holocaust history and World War II. She recently completed her PhD in history at the University of Leicester with her thesis “The Nation in the Barrack: Norwegian Experiences and Identity in the Nazi Camps, 1942-1945.”
She was hired as an advisor to fanger.no at ARKIVET in 2024. There she is responsible for designing a research project on Norwegian prison history, generally contributing to the professional work in fanger, and developing national and international collaborations related to fanger.no.