Dec. 10, 1938 - Herbert Friedman, a day shy of 14 years old, boarded a train in Austria bound for England. It was the eve of World War II, and he was one of nearly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, who were rescued from Nazi-controlled territory across Europe.
A UVA Today story tells the tale in more detail, as Friedman eventually made his way from London to the United States, where he studied to be a pharmacist, fought for the U.S. in World War II and the Korean War, and started a family.
Eighty-seven years after Friedman’s departure from Austria, his personal effects — including the number assigned to him on that fateful train — were gifted to UVA Library by his sons.
UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library will hold the collection, which will be available for researchers and instruction following digitization and processing.
Despite being only 13 when he left home, and extremely limited in what he was allowed to bring, Herbert Friedman kept a personal collection of artifacts from his life. The collection includes photographs, newspaper articles, and personal correspondence.Krystal Appiah, Head of Collection Development for Special Collections (left), and Meg Kennedy, Curator of Material Culture, display Friedman’s Nazi-issued passport. The passport was used exactly once — when he was evacuated with the Kindertransport program.
A team of UVA Library experts recently collaborated with faculty from UVA’s Center for Community Partnerships to expand and refresh an important youth directory, just one example of the successful Library Sprints program.
The database CartoonStock, now accessible through UVA Library, contains more than 750,000 cataloged and searchable cartoons first published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Wired, MAD, National Lampoon, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.
Making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) is key to good data management, so that research data is easier to access and use. LibraData, UVA’s data repository, offers a variety of ways to support this critical goal.
