Burns Alumna Sarah Wildman Wins Weitz Prize

By: Maia Curtis | 06/01/2010

Sarah Wildman (Burns 2008) won the Peter R. Weitz Prize for excellence and originality in reporting on Europe for a series she wrote for Slate. She conducted research for the series during her Burns fellowship. The $10,000 prize is awarded by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and will be presented at an awards luncheon in July in Washington, D.C.

The five-part series, published in 2009, is about an investigation of the International Tracing Service (ITS), the world’s largest Holocaust archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The ITS holds some 50 million records, including biographical cards from displaced persons camps, files on forced labor and concentration camp inmates, correspondence between Nazi officers, transport lists, crime lists and other data. In 1955, the International Committee of the Red Cross took over management of the archives and it was closed to outsiders and researchers. For decades, the archives were shrouded in mystery and suspicion about why they were closed and what could be found in the files. They were finally opened to the public in 2008.

Wildman’s series is a riveting personal investigation into her family history while exploring the broader implications of these records—both to history and for survivors and relatives.

As one judge wrote, “The story of Bad Arolsen has been told, but not like this...with such detail, dogged pursuit, passion, and deeply felt, first-person storytelling. As opening the ITS ‘is a bit like completing a mosaic’ of the Holocaust, in the words of the director of the Buchenwald camp memorial, so does Wildman give us a sense of the mosaic of ITS, and, hopefully, spread greater awareness of it.”

Wildman is working on a book based on the series. She recently became a foreign policy writer for PoliticsDaily.com and writes a column for the Forward. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Guardian, Slate, The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor, among others. Previously, she held staff positions at The New Republic and The American Prospect.

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