Help us find the stories 'Behind the Stars'
Published on 28 January 2022
On the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day 2022, the NIOD ImageLab is launching the project "Behind the Star". This new project focuses on photographs in which people are depicted wearing the Yellow Star sewn or pinned onto their clothing. With the help of the public, we want to identify people portrayed in the images, so that their stories can be told.
From May 1942, the wearing of a yellow fabric star – called the “Jodenster” in the Netherlands – was made compulsory by the German occupiers. This measure made it easy to identify Jewish people and was intended to stigmatize and dehumanize them. After 1945, numerous photographs from the war years were collected in archives. BeeldbankWO2 (WWII Image Bank) is the largest online photo archive from this period in the Netherlands, and contains more than 200 images that depict people wearing yellow stars. These images reflect a fraction of the lives of those portrayed - in order to reconstruct and understand their life stories, it is essential to identify their names.
Help us find them
In this crowdsourcing project we aim to find the names of those portrayed, as well as to identify information that can help us and others tell the stories of their lives.
Please help us to find the names and stories behind the stars.
We invite everyone to share with us as much information as possible about the persons depicted in these photographs. We are looking for names, as well as other information about those depicted in the photographs, such as dates and location. All information is welcome, even if it is not possible to gather all the data at once.
To see the photographs and to share information, please visit:
https://beeldbankwo2.nl/en/behind-the-star
Would you like to know more about this project and its initiators? You can find it on this web page: www.niodimagelab.nl or follow us on Twitter (@NIODImageLab) and Instagram (@NIOD.ImageLab)