Journeys Through Adversity Archive is a living collection of in-depth interviews with individuals who have faced—and moved through—extraordinary challenges. These personal conversations preserve the raw, unfiltered experiences of those who’ve endured hardship and found resilience. Through their voices, this archive becomes both a record of struggle and a testament to human strength, compassion, and survival.
The Journeys Through Adversity Archive was founded in 2025 as a living collection of oral histories and in-depth interviews with individuals from around the world who have faced – and moved through – extraordinary challenges. The stories made available here to a global audience preserve the experiences of those who’ve encountered hardship and managed to endure. Through their voices, this archive serves as a testament to the strength and resilience of the human spirit.
To add your story to the archive – or if you know of a person whose story belongs at JTAA – contact our editors here.
Noah Saphier, Founder
For most of my life, the only thing I knew about my great-grandfather Wolf Brühl was that he
perished at Auschwitz. My curiosity about Wolf stemmed partly from a desire to know where my family had come from, and by extension, where I came from. I wanted to try to understand why Wolf had died, and how his children had survived the Holocaust, hiding in the forests of Slovenia.
Following exhaustive archival searches, I decided to travel to Europe and meet with local historians and genealogists to try to trace Wolf’s path and save more of his story. I spent almost a year following that path in person and online, from Poland, to Austria, to Lyon, France. I visited the street where he was captured. I visited Auschwitz. Later, I visited the Jewish community in Graz that Wolf’s son, my grandfather, helped rebuild after the Shoah.
I described this journey in the essay “Shoah’s Shadow: Wolf Brühl’s Journey Through a World at War”, set to be published in fall 2025 by S:I.M.O.N., the journal of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. I also shared my findings with hundreds of students in public and private schools and synagogues in Warsaw and the United States.
Again and again I heard from audience members who wished they knew their own ancestors’ stories. Often they shared with me their own remarkable stories of hardship and resilience. The JTA Archive arose from my desire to create a database where such stories could be preserved and made accessible to all.
