Carola Williams, born Althoff, belonged to the largest circus dynasty in the world. When the Nazis took power, Carola and her brothers Franz and Adolf Althoff began to harbor Jews in their two traveling circuses. […]
The Latvian-born circus performer Rodion Nikitins lived through WWII performing in different circuses and theatres in Latvia, Germany and Nazi-occupied Prague. In his autobiography Of Flight and Freedom from 1987, Nikitins confesses that his work […]
Gnugo (Giacomo in seinem amtlichen Ausweis, weil Gnugo ein Sinti-Name war) war der Enkel von Giovanni (Jean) De Barre, einem französischen Sinto; und Ida Truzzi, eine Zirkusartistin aus einer altitalienischen Zirkusfamilie. Der Name seines Vaters […]
Alfons, Alex, and Arthur Blumenfeld (Zirkusarchiv Winkler, Berlin) The Blumenfeld Brothers Alex [real name Emanuel] (1885-1942), Alfons (1887-1942), and Arthur (1889-1951), as well as their eight further siblings came from a widespread German-Jewish travelling […]
Edit Sandor Kleinbarth was born in Budapest in 1931. Her parents were Sandor and Elise Kleinbarth. Her father came from a “private” Hungarian family. He had learned the art of school riding in the Czech […]
Irene Bento, née Danner, was born in 1923. A versatile and talented circus artist, she hailed from the Lorch family, a Jewish circus family whose roots date back to the 18th century. They occasionally ran […]
The author dedicates the present life portrait to the memory of his Russian colleague Nikolai Bessonov, who suddenly and untimely passed away in November 2017 Ivanova in Uniform (Private Archive Nikolai Bessonov) Margarita Ivanova […]
Molnar, who grew up in Vienna’s working-class area, left the Evangelical Church at the age of eighteen to join the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) in 1923. From 1927 to 1929, he was the […]
Renee Marshall (born Scott) and Walter Marshall, were a couple whose marriage before the Second World War represented a rare union between a circus family and a fairground family in the UK. Renee Scott […]
The terrain of the former “Gypsy Family Camp”, Memorial of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Photo: Frank Reuter. Lucie Adelsberger was a prominent paediatrician, internist, and allergist, who worked at the famous Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. Shortly after […]
Copyright © 2017 | University of Helsinki
