The 1942 "Race Study" of Jewish Families in the Tarnów Ghetto

The Center for Holocaust, Human Rights & Genocide Education's (Chhange) May Virtual Lunch & Learn Program features Margit Berner. In spring 1942, two Viennese scholars photographed and examined 106 Jewish families in the German-occupied Polish city of Tarnów. Their "research" addressed “typical characteristics of eastern European Jews” and they worked quickly, aware that their subjects, including 565 men, women, and children, would soon be deported to concentration camps. Examining scattered records and conducting extensive archival research, Dr. Berner identified some of the people featured in the “study” and make contact with their families, including the family of Victor Dorman, father of Chhange’s Board President, Howard.

Their recollections, together with the images and biographic data, allow us to reconstruct the lives, persecution, and destruction of the 25,000 Jews of Tarnów.

Dr. Margit Berner is a human biologist and anthropologist, who has worked at the Vienna Museum of Natural History since 1986 and who teaches at university. As a curator for the museum’s anthropology department, she researches and publishes on questions of physical anthropology, osteology and paleopathology as well as the history of collections and the history of her discipline. She is the author of Final Pictures: The 1942 "Race Study" of Jewish Families in the Tarnów Ghetto.

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