For the Living and the Dead: Traces of the Holocaust

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure produced this quietly remarkable podcast built around a simple concept: each episode focuses on a single object from a Holocaust museum or archive and tells the story behind it. A teddy bear from Belgium. Gramophone discs from Italy. Handwritten manuscripts. Photographs that survived decades of displacement. Across 19 episodes and three seasons, the show connects physical artifacts to human stories spanning the entire continent -- from Ukraine to Romania, Italy to the Netherlands. Episodes run 23 to 35 minutes with rotating hosts including Katharina Freise and Kevania de Vries-Menig, alongside guest researchers from institutions like Yad Vashem. The 5.0-star rating comes from just 3 reviews, which tells you this show deserves a bigger audience than it currently has. The object-centered approach is genuinely clever because it gives each episode a concrete anchor. You are not listening to abstracted history -- you are hearing about something you could hold in your hands, and then learning about the person who once held it. Original music by Blue Dot Sessions adds atmosphere without intruding. This is the kind of podcast that stays with you long after the episode ends, precisely because it makes the enormous scale of the Holocaust personal and specific.