Blavatnik Archive: Individual WWII Experiences

On May 15, 2025, celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Blavatnik Archive ran the program “Individual Experiences of the Second World War”, featuring letters between a young Soviet couple separated by the war, diaries of the Red Army soldiers and artists in the starving besieged city of Leningrad, and other intimate wartime documents. The event, held in the Academy Mansion, New York, included talks by four American historians.

The Blavatnik Archive was founded in 2005 as a non-profit foundation dedicated to preserving materials on 20th-century Jewish and world history. Much of its collections are written in or directly related to Yiddish. The archive continues its series of anniversary events, guided by the belief that its everyday records offer invaluable perspectives on the past. The public events are to highlight popular and personal artifacts — postcards, photographs, illustrations, letters, diaries and testimonies.