The Institute and Archive Signed a Cooperation Agreement with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Prague – October 26, 2008

– The directors of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the Security Services Archive, Pavel Zacek and Ladislav Bukovszky, signed a cooperation agreement with the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Sara Bloomfield, at the residence of the American ambassador. The inaugural event took place at the residence of the American ambassador to the Czech Republic, His Excellence Richard W. Graber. With the finalization of the agreement, the institutions achieve easier mutual access to Holocaust-related materials stored in their depositories. Their cooperation also includes planned study stays of U.S. researchers in the Czech Republic and vice versa. Director Sara Bloomfield pointed out that further archives are opening up to her institution that can testify to the fate of a host of Jewish families on the territory of today’s Czech Republic. U.S. Ambassador Richard Graber recalled in his speech that the location of the signing, the residence of the ambassador in Prague’s Bubenec district, is more than symbolic, due to the fact that before the war it was built by the well-known industrialist Otto Petschek, whose family fled for reasons of race from the Nazis to the USA. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is America’s national institution for the documentation and interpretation of the history of the Holocaust. Its mission is to examine and remind of the horrors of the Holocaust, which caused the murder of millions of people, around the world. The Museum cooperates with historical institutions and archives in 58 countries of the world, including the Czech Republic.