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.

Latest News

A Reporter's Guide to The History of Tariffs

This piece was produced in collaboration with the Global Business Journalism program at Tsinghua University. The program is a partnership between ICFJ, Tsinghua University and Bloomberg News.

For most of human history, governments have taxed goods crossing their borders. Tariffs — taxes levied on imports or exports — have financed

Hans Staiger Award Winner Investigates Russian Soldiers Secretly Treated in Belarus Hospitals, Including Those Linked to War Crimes

Leaked data from the Russian Defense Ministry shook the story loose. A team of investigators found that during the first 21 months of the invasion of Ukraine, nearly 1,000 Russian soldiers were treated at Belarusian hospitals, including war crime suspects. These “secret patients,” as they were known, directly tied Belarus to Moscow’s war effort.

I Blew Up on TikTok with Journalism — Here's How You Can, Too

l'll never forget the day when an editor at the BBC told a 25-year-old me that journalists shouldn’t be on TikTok because “there’s so much misinformation on there.” By that point, I had maybe 10,000 followers on the platform, possibly more, and the comment stung. My TikToks, which had amplified my journalism as well as my passion for learning new languages, were well researched and I hoped the direct opposite of misinformation.