Erik Rhey

Writer, Editor, Strategist, and Story Development Lead

Making Holocaust Archives Available to Everyone

Allan Brauner is a Holocaust researcher. His late mother Margaret Brauner, who lived from 1924 to 2017, was a Holocaust survivor. He discovered her name, the number tattooed on her arm and her signature on a list of female prisoners held at Auschwitz by the Nazis. There are 227 names on the list, and Brauner has made it his personal journey to uncover the stories of all those who experienced the Holocaust alongside his mother. We accompany Brauner as he travels to the Arolsen Archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany in search of information. The largest archives in the world on the victims of Nazi persecution, the institution houses 30 million documents. Ancestry formed a partnership with the Arolsen Archives to make these records widely available and searchable online, for free. “It is more important than ever to show what can happen if these values about solidarity, about equality, about respect are not upheld,” says Floriane Azoulay, the director of the Arolsen Archives. Learn more at Ancestry.com/AlwaysRemember

Cory Booker at SXSW: Changing Government with Disruptive Technology

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, in Austin’s Long Center, across the river from the clamor at the Austin Convention Center for the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference was a discussion of a different kind. Instead of privatized space travel, social media, grumpy cat, and the Internet of things, this talk was about politics and government. The star speaker was Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey; compulsive tweeter, and one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party.