Centre for Interdisciplinary Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Centre for Interdisciplinary Holocaust and Genocide Studies
BIAHS 2024 speaker abstracts alphabetically by surname
Barnabas Balint
A Jewish History or a Hungarian History? Comparing Memories of the Holocaust in Hungary – Panel 3A.
This paper shows how the narrative of the Holocaust in Hungary has been politicised from the outset, compared to and subsumed into more politically expedient narratives of, at first, anti-fascism and, later, anti-communism. This resulted in key omissions in its history, obscuring its nature as both a Jewish and Hungarian history. It hid the Hungarian face of many of its perpetrators and stripped Jews of their unique victimhood. By comparing its competing narratives – from state, Jewish and other actors – this paper shows how the history has itself been subject to comparisons and manipulation. It focuses mainly on how the wartime head of the Hungarian Zionist Association (MCSz), Otto Komoly, has been presented in history and memorials. Under Komoly’s leadership, the organisation hosted cultural events, supported groups across the country, and promoted Aliyah. Increasingly disruptive persecution changed how they operated, pushing it further towards resistance activities. Little history has been written on the MCSz and there is only one memorial to its work – an unkempt pile of stones on the bank of the Danube in Budapest. Several plaques exist to Komoly, mainly in Jewish spaces. By charting the history of these memorials, this paper explores Komoly’s place in wider politicised narratives.
Barnabas Balint is a doctoral candidate at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on Jewish experiences of the Holocaust in Hungary. He holds research fellowships from the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, the USC Dornsife Centre for Advanced Genocide Research, and the Institute of Historical Research and has conducted research in the UK, USA, Israel, and Hungary.
Mallory Bubar
Through a Modern Lens: Preserving vs. Co-opting the Holocaust for Today’s Audiences – Panel 2A.
For decades, the Holocaust has been repeatedly invoked to frame or compare world events. Recently, anti-vaccination activists have used the yellow star to describe their status within society, migrant detention centers have been equated to concentration camps, and terms such as ‘second Holocaust’ have been used to describe conflicts – with some incidents more defensible than others. Since October 2023, these have increased. During these times of social and political upheaval, what then is the role of cultural institutions such as museums dedicated to the Holocaust? Tasked with preserving the history of the event, Holocaust museums can be places of discussion and a source of reliable resources for ongoing situations while remaining within the realm of the institution’s mission. Museums can work with their constituents, such as teachers and students, to create materials needed to aid their discussions in classrooms or at home. At the same time, museums must be cautious not to cross the line into misusing the Holocaust for political agendas, as pressures arise from within and outside the institution. My paper will thus discuss the role that museums play in these contemporary discussions and the ways in which they can navigate them while maintaining their educational credibility.
Mallory Bubar taught university level classes for ten years ranging from German grammar to Jewish and Holocaust history and now oversees education and outreach programs in a museum. Her research interests include Holocaust film and literature and museum representation with an emphasis on the child figure, as well as the use of the digital across these platforms.
Gilly Carr
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Charter for Safeguarding Sites: an Introduction for Academics, Practitioners, Activists and the Public – Panel 2C.
In November 2023, at the Zagreb plenary meeting under the Croatian chairmanship, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted the IHRA Charter for Safeguarding Sites. This charter was launched in Brussels in January 2024 as part of the European Commission’s marking of Holocaust Memorial Day. The charter has been the result of five years of work by IHRA, the project chaired and managed by the author, Dr Gilly Carr.
In this presentation I discuss how the IHRA Charter was written and the methodology adopted. I outline the Charter’s Articles and discuss how the Charter is to be used. I showcase the dissemination tools and discuss how the Charter can be used by site managers, practitioners, academics and activists in order to adopt good practice in the safeguarding of sites of the Holocaust and other victims of Nazism. Finally, I discuss the application of the Charter to other comparative sites of violence.
Gilly Carr is Associate Professor in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, Fellow and Director of Studies in Archaeology at St Catharine’s College, and a Partner of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre. She is also a member of the UK delegation of IHRA where she has been chairing the project to write the IHRA Charter since 2019. Gilly is also a member of the Academic Advisory Board for the forthcoming Holocaust centre in Westminster. Her research interests sit at the intersection between heritage studies, archaeology, Holocaust studies and history. Her eighth monograph, A Materiality of Internment will be published by Routledge in 2024.
Peter Davies
The New German Translation of Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit – Panel 1C.
In 2022 the first volume appeared of a new collected edition of Elie Wiesel’s works, in new German translations, published by the Elie Wiesel Research Center in Tübingen. The opening volume is the first new German version of Wiesel’s La Nuit since 1962: this original translation, by Curt Meyer-Clason, entitled Die Nacht, has been in print ever since, and is the text through which readers of German have encountered Wiesel’s most famous work. The new, collectively written translation makes a claim to supplant the old one, correcting errors, historical inaccuracies and stylistic infidelities; it also takes into account the most recent French edition, research into Wiesel’s earlier Yiddish testimony, from which La Nuit derives, and the new direction taken by the 2006 English translation by Marion Wiesel.
The new edition is a complex and fascinating project that makes a claim to greater authenticity and fidelity, while at the same time responding to multiple other texts in multiple languages, and still aiming to replicate the power and readability of the familiar testimony. This paper explores the qualities of the new translation, setting it in the context of research on the translations of Wiesel’s testimony, and asking what a critical, methodologically informed approach to translation can tell us about the contribution of translation and translators to Holocaust memory in Germany.
Peter Davies is Professor of Modern German Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His current research focusses on the role of interpreters and translators at post-Holocaust trials in Germany, and on the transmission and transformation of testimonies through reformulation, remediation and translation. He has published on the intersection of Holocaust Studies, Memory Studies and Translating and Interpreting Studies, with essays on the work of Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, Krystyna Żywulska, and the interpreter Wera Kapkajew, who interpreted at post-Holocaust trials in West Germany. Publications include The Witness between Languages: The Translation of Holocaust Testimony in Context (Camden House, 2018), and, with Jean Boase-Beier, Andrea Hammel, and Marion Winters, Translating Holocaust Lives (Bloomsbury, 2018).
‘The Holocaust and…’: Decentralizing the Holocaust in Non-Western Museum Culture – Panel 2A.
In the new millennium, a number of museums have attempted to locate the Holocaust within broader historical and cultural contexts as a direct result of the narrative demands of collective memory. In Mexico City, the Museo Memoria y Tolerancia (MMT) utilizes the Holocaust as a vehicle for educating about different forms of intolerance in Mexico and to promote social justice. In post-apartheid South Africa, the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre (JHGC) explores the Holocaust alongside the Rwandan Genocide to educate about the dangers of prejudice in the hopes of preventing future instances of mass violence. Both nations grapple with the legacies and enduring consequences of colonial violence, yet the creative teams of both museums chose to employ the narrative of a genocide from which they were physically removed to highlight issues of discrimination, inequity, and mass violence within their respective cultures and histories. This presentation will discuss both the MMT and JHGC as sites of collective memory of multiple genocides, illuminating the differing ways that both sites employ Holocaust comparisons to create shared narratives of suffering. This work will contribute to emerging scholarship on Non-Western Holocaust memory and the shifting modalities of Holocaust representation in the 21st Century.
Cailee Davis is a doctoral researcher at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford. Her work examines the shifting modalities of transnational Holocaust representation across media in the new millennium. She is a recent EHRI Conny Kristel Fellow and holds an MA in Holocaust Studies with Distinction from Royal Holloway, University of London. Currently, she is the Graduate Development Scholar in History at St. Anne’s and the co-convener of the Holocaust Studies Reading Group, University of Oxford. Her work has been funded by the American Foundation of RHBNC International Excellence Scholarship, the Herringham Scholarship, and the Anne Huxter Fund, among others.
Clara Dijkstra
Entangled Histories? Jews and Roma in French Internment Camps, 1940-1946 – Panel 3B.
Though the historiography of the persecution of Europe’s Roma population has developed significantly over the last decade, this history is still perceived as separate from the field of Holocaust studies, especially in the study of the Holocaust in France. A lack of comparative approaches to Jewish and Roma fates in France limits our understanding of the experiences of persecution of both groups and perpetuates xenophobic assumptions towards France’s Roma population. It is more fruitful to see the fates of Jews and Roma in France as entangled rather than separate, especially in spaces such as internment camps where both groups were detained. Though they were imprisoned in different sections, they were only separated by one barbed wire fence. Jews and Roma were able to observe each other and interact, making them witnesses to each other’s internment and persecution. Notions of agency and resistance are more present in the historiography of Jews in France but applying these to Roma prisoners questions narratives of passive victimhood that have dominated scholarship on the Roma genocide. However, issues of source disparity and availability shape the persistent marginalisation of Roma stories from the broader study of the Holocaust in France.
Clara Dijkstra is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her research is co-supervised by The Wiener Holocaust Library and examines the experiences of Jewish and Roma prisoners in the French internment camps Drancy, Poitiers and Montreuil-Bellay, 1940-1946. She is the USC Dornsife Centre for Advanced Genocide Research’s Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies for 2023- 2024 and was recently a Junior PhD fellow at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She has a forthcoming chapter on letter-writing and Jewish motherhood in Drancy in Holocaust Letters: Methodologies, Case Studies and Reflections (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Lucy Dixon
Comparisons and ‘Never Again’: A Philosophical Critique Utilizing Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Thinking and Non-Thinking – Panel 6C.
Since the liberation of Nazi concentration and death camps in 1945, the world has continued to witness genocides; from Cambodia (1975-1979), to Rwanda (1994), to Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995), to Darfur (2004), to the current and on-going genocide in Palestine. Following the Holocaust, the phrase ‘never again’ has been utilized to ensure the world learnt from the atrocities and would not let it happen again, yet, it has happened again and continues to happen again. The Holocaust is considered as the largest genocide in history, which brings about opportunities for comparisons, but genocide isn’t synonymous with the Holocaust.
Within this paper, I utilize Hannah Arendt’s work around thinking and non-thinking; after attending the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt’s interest in thinking was awakened as it was this ‘absence in thinking – which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination to stop and think’ (Arendt, 1978:4, original emphasis). I argue we need to engage in thinking (inspired by Hannah Arendt) before engaging in discourse around comparisons and ‘never again’, especially in the age of easily accessible social media and education.
Lucy Dixon is a PhD candidate at the University of Winchester with her research situated in the fields of Philosophy of Education and Holocaust Studies/Education. Her thesis focuses on ordinary ‘Aryan’ women and their complicity in National Socialism at the intersection of maternity, care and thinking; she primarily utilises the work from Hannah Arendt and Care Ethics theorists, such as Virginia Held. She is also one of the 2023/2024 PG Reps for BIAHS. Twitter: @dramaindocs.
Ariella Esterson
Holocaust Rhetoric and the Human Rights Discourse – Panel 4B.
Since the end of World War II, the international community has grappled with the memory of the Holocaust and its implications on international law and norms, as well as on human rights discourse and advocacy. Current deliberations over the meaning and implication of Zionism, both as a political program influencing Israel-Palestine, Israeli policies and actions, and its relationship to contemporary Jewish identities, often invoke these competing understandings of Holocaust memory.
Recent years have seen an increased attempt in human rights discourse to utilize Holocaust rhetoric in its respective narratives across the globe. One method that has been debated for its legitimate application is the use of Holocaust inversion, the portrayal of Israelis as modern-day Nazis. While some members of civil society have deemed these comparisons as appropriate criticism of Israel, other Jewish communal institutions have argued that this phenomenon is a contributing factor and facet of an increase in global antisemitism.
This study will focus on the question: What role does Holocaust imagery play in the human rights community? It will examine examples, originating with human rights NGOs, of the use of Holocaust rhetoric and imagery, debate the validity of these comparisons, and offer recommendations for appropriate usage.
Ariella Esterson received her BA in History and Education from Queens College in New York, concentrating on European and Jewish history, and holds a Master’s Degree in Holocaust Studies from the University of Haifa. Previously, Ariella worked at Yad Vashem, working to create online courses to educate individuals about the Holocaust. Ariella currently serves as the Research and Online Content Manager at NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem based globally recognized research institute promoting democratic values and good governance. Her articles and op-eds regarding the misuse of Holocaust terminology have appeared in The Hill, the Jerusalem Post, and JNS.
Gareth Evans-Jones
In the Days of Future Past: The X-Men and Holocaust Analogy and Personification – Panel 3C.
Marvel Comics’ X-Men series of graphic novels has spoken to various audiences regarding a variety of themes: from xenophobia and inclusion, to homophobia and acceptance, the majority of these themes circulate depictions of injustice and societal strife; and the most striking connection between the X-Men universe and the Holocaust can be seen in the character of Magneto, once dubbed the master of the Brotherhood of evil mutants, and a Holocaust survivor, as well as certain references to the persecution of the ‘other’, and the fascination of Mr Sinister and others with eugenics. This paper will seek to build on those particular foundations by focusing on the 1981 Days of Future Past series, which is set in a dystopian future of 2013 and where mutants are further persecuted by internment in concentration camps. We will explore the reasons why such a comparison was drawn and its impact on audiences, before considering how the concept of the ‘holocaust’ was later personified in X-Men Alpha (February 1995), with the character Holocaust (later renamed Nemesis), being a spawn of one of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.
Gareth Evans-Jones is a lecturer of Philosophy and Religion at Bangor University, North Wales. His main research interests rest within the fields of religion, slavery and society, justice and ideology, and Holocaust depictions in fiction. In 2018, Gareth published a Welsh-language novella entitled Eira Llwyd (Grey Snow) which aimed to explore certain unheard voices from the Holocaust in Welsh literature, including those of children, those deemed ‘elderly’, and queer individuals. Gareth is also the co-director of the National Centre of Religious Education for Wales and is engaged with several projects bridging secondary schools and academia, including ‘Peace and Pedagogy’.
Mariann Farkas
Holocaust Art Comparisons: Forced Laborers in Hungary and Romania – Panel 3C.
Although the scholarly exploration of Jewish identity in Holocaust art started in the last decades, the comparative study of Hungary and the Diaspora is still missing. Therefore, my presentation aims to introduce László Gross’s album (1941‒1943) and Endre Vadász’s drawings (1944) thematizing forced labor experience in two different Hungarian-speaking geographical contexts. Forced laborers were adults with professional and personal identities already formed at the time of the Holocaust. They reacted to the persecution with different coping strategies, ways of representation, and styles. László Gross from Timisoara and Endre Vadász from Budapest produced art as a form of spiritual resistance and used humor as defense mechanism. Analyzing and placing their caricatures housed in Yad Vashem in a wider context provides an opportunity to better understand the changing Central European Jewish experience in the first half of the twentieth century. The subject will be explored from methodologically diverse points of view, including the perspective of art history, sociology, and Jewish studies. The lecture seeks to present the means by which visual arts can contribute to cross-cultural dialogue, and at the same time to compare different Holocaust narratives in East Central European art.
Mariann Farkas earned her BA from Eötvös Loránd University, received her MSc from University of Milan and obtained her PhD from Bar-Ilan University where she is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Jewish Art. Her research interests include East Central European Jewish art and Hungarian-Israeli cultural history. Prior to commencing her PhD she was a coordinator at Friends of the Hungarian National Gallery. Her earlier internship at the Israel Museum provided good understanding of the art sphere. Her study has been supported by the Erasmus Programme, by MAECI, by the BIU President’s Scholarship and by the MFJC.
Thorsten Fehlberg
Activism of Jewish Descendants of Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Germany – Panel 6B.
Firstly, descendants of survivors are actively involved in historic-political work at memorial sites or, for example, in non-governmental organizations to keep the memory of Nazi crimes alive. Secondly, there are existing narratives and research that prove the specific situation and motivation of politically active descendants of survivors of Nazi persecution. Thirdly, one can find a lack of public awareness of the activism of those affected. Fourthly, the activism is often influenced by the family history of persecution.
Jewish socio-political activism in post-national socialist Germany started immediately after the Second World War. Survivors of the Nazi persecution were fighting for the recognition of the Shoah, compensation payments, and the establishment of memorials. They organized themselves into committees to collect evidence to bring former Nazis to justice and for better conditions in DP camps. Jews in Germany had to re-establish public representation and formed the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany) in 1950, which came with some limitations regarding pluralism within Jewish communities. In the beginning, there was not much space to argue about different positions within Jewish communities. Another obstacle was that, for most Jews who lived in other countries, it was not understandable how Jews could start a new life in Germany after 1945. Therefore, German Jewish communities had to justify their position and were confronted with moral pressure from other Jewish communities worldwide. Representatives of Jewish communities in Germany often did this by explaining their importance for the establishment of West German Democracy.
This presentation aims to improve the understanding of different approaches to activism connected to Judaism, the remembrance of the Shoah, Jewishness, and Religion. It relies on qualitative problem-focused interviews. People I interviewed were engaged in memory activism, social justice movements, public policies of memory, remembrance of the Holocaust and interreligious dialogues, and Jewish community empowerment. They themselves or their ancestors came to Germany after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Thorsten Fehlberg is a political scientist and social geographer. His main areas of expertise include right-wing extremism, political activism, and descendants of victims of Nazi persecution. He worked for the non-governmental organization ‘Federal Association Information and Advice for Survivors of Nazi Persecution’ from 2013 to 2019. From 2020 to 2022, he worked for the Foundation of Hamburg Memorials and Learning Centres Commemorating the Victims of Nazi Crimes as a research assistant. Thorsten is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Cologne and a member of the Research Training Group ‘Right-wing Populism – Authoritarian Developments, Extreme Right Discourses, and Democratic Resonances’. He is a scholarship holder of the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES) and an associate scientist at the Else Frenkel-Brunswik Institute.
Kate Ferry-Swainson
Charlotte Delbo’s Representations of Children’s Socks as Connections Between the Holocaust and the Algerian War – Panel 4C.
Charlotte Delbo, French Holocaust survivor and supporter of Algerian independence, evokes connections between the Holocaust and the Algerian War (1954–62) through two references to children pulling up socks. In None of Us Will Return, Delbo depicts Jewish school-children descending cattle trucks in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943. Forty years later, in an unpublished manuscript, she describes Algerian children in socks arriving in central Paris on 17 October 1961 to join a peaceful demonstration massacred by Paris Police and covered up for decades. Delbo’s attention to children’s socks offers a new perspective on comparisons between the Holocaust and the Algerian War as instances of state-sanctioned violence and repressed cultural memory. The repetition of her representation of socks extends links drawn between the Holocaust and France’s wars of decolonisation and goes beyond using a lexicon of the Nazi Occupation to articulate opposition to the Algerian War. Through making children’s underwear visible, Delbo draws attention to war’s effect on children as both victims and participants – including young French conscripts committing torture in Algeria. Moreover, Delbo’s depictions of children’s socks evoke the consequences of war to individuals and societies and highlight the complicity and dereliction of adults and state authorities in exposing children to atrocity.
Kate Ferry-Swainson is a PhD researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, her thesis entitled ‘Clothing matters: Uncovering overlooked aspects of the Holocaust through Charlotte Delbo’s representations of garments’. This explores literary depictions of female and child Holocaust victims’ clothing, including raspberry-silk lingerie and a mauve silk dress. Such garments seem incongruous but evoke atrocity, complicity, trauma and survival. One thesis chapter, ‘Destabilising Uniformity through Charlotte Delbo’s Portrayals of Auschwitz Prisoner Clothing’, forthcoming in Trauma, Ethics, Hermeneutics, ed. by Helena Duffy and Avril Tynan (Oxford: Legenda), examines how Delbo’s language and imagery of the striped prisoner uniform undermines Nazi ideology.
Agnes Grunwald-Spier
The Tribulations of Writing a Memoir about my Hungarian Family Before and After the Holocaust – Panel 1C.
I was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in July 1944. My father was a forced labourer under the Hungarian fascists and my mother and I were in the Budapest Ghetto when I was a few months old. Now aged 79 I am trying to write a memoir because if I don’t all that history will be lost. I neither speak/read Hebrew nor Hungarian, all the relevant family are dead and countries have changed boundaries. My father committed suicide when I was 10 so I had no chance to hear his story. My mother told me bits and pieces but she had not written anything and as a young woman I knew she had bad dreams if I brought it back, so I avoided pursuing the past. Filling the enormous gaps in the jigsaw now is hard work but important and inspiring. There are some surprises along the road and great courage.
Agnes Grunwald-Spier is the author of Women’s Experiences in the Holocaust (2019), Who Betrayed the Jews (2016), and The Other Schindlers (2010). In 2016 she was awarded an MBE for her ‘services to Holocaust consciousness’. She also serves on the board of BIAHS.
Niamh Hanrahan
The ‘Japanese Schindler’: Global Memories of Chiune Sugihara – Panel 3A.
Chiune Sugihara was the first Japanese diplomat to be posted to Lithuania, in 1939-40. During this time, he facilitated thousands of Jews being able to escape Nazi persecution in Europe by issuing them with visas to go to Japan. Largely forgotten in the immediate post-war era, growing acknowledgement of Sugihara’s aid work began to emerge in Israel and Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to him receiving the title of Righteous Among the Nations from Yad Vashem in 1984.
This paper compares efforts to promote memories of Sugihara and his wartime actions in different national and transnational contexts, with a particular focus on Japan, the United States and South Korea. It argues that memory of the consul has been (and continues to be) reconfigured and adapted depending on the context within which it is received. Drawing on material including film, memorials, testimony and educational guides, the paper examines motivations for highlighting certain memories of Sugihara – for example, as a government dissenter, a humanitarian hero, or simply as a good Japanese person. Ultimately, this paper emphasizes the potential for research into comparisons of cultural memories within the Holocaust, on a global scale.
Niamh Hanrahan is a PhD student at the University of Manchester, based in the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute. Her PhD project examines the migrations undertaken by Jewish refugees from Europe to Japan during WWII. Niamh was the postgraduate representative for the British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies in the 2022/23 academic year, and previously completed her MA in Holocaust Studies with Distinction at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published research in blogs for the academic website Refugee History and for Holocaust Centre North and has been awarded fellowships to conduct research in the USA, Germany, Japan, and Australia.
Daniella Hovsha
Reimagining Marginalised Memory: An Exploration of Holocaust Fiction and Memorialisation in South Africa – Panel 4C.
Harold Serebro’s 1984 novel The Devil and His Servant is one of very few instances of South African fiction on the Holocaust. Adopting a ‘roving microphone’ of perspectives, the novel consists of a collection of stories Serebro arguably feels have not been told, both owing to the time in which he was writing as well as the country. Indeed, there is a dearth of South African writing on the Holocaust. Whilst the country has three Holocaust museums across its major cities, it does not have a history of writing on the Holocaust and is especially lacking in fictional representation. The tension between memorialisation and fictionalization in Holocaust representation is especially stark in the case of South Africa, for reasons I will discuss here.
Using Serebro’s novel, this work proposes to explore the position of South African Holocaust representation in fiction and its multiple museums as national, transnational and multidirectional.
Daniella Hovsha is a PhD candidate in the School of English at the University of Sheffield and a fellow of The White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. Their PhD is an interdisciplinary project focused on the interconnectedness of national and transnational Holocaust memory through a study of fiction and museums in the United Kingdom and South Africa. Daniella was the marketing and project coordinator at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Museum before embarking on their PhD. Daniella has an MA in transgressive Holocaust fiction from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. They have chaired the Johannesburg Limmud conference, been the national chairperson of the South African Union of Jewish Students, and an English lecturer.
Zoltán Kékesi
Proximities: Perpetrator Perception and the Spaces of the Third Reich – Panel 4A.
This paper contributes to the application of spatial methodologies in the study of national socialism and the Holocaust by examining the personal experiences and memory of the Third Reich as a spatial project. It draws on previous research such as Geographies of the Holocaust (2014) and Hitler’s Geographies (2016)but adds a novel angle as it 1) looks at the everydayexperiences of micro-spaces (instead of the macro-realms of Lebensraum, Ostpolitik, etc.); 2)prioritizes lived (and remembered) spatial experience over planning and design; 3) foregroundsthe perspectives of a wide range of ordinary Germans.
In order to do so, my paper uses ‘Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies’, a recent collection of oral history interviews recorded between 2008 and 2017 by documentary filmmaker Luke Holland (1948–2020). The collection is rare in its ambition to interview men and women from the ‘perpetrator side’ and contains hundreds of interviews with men and women from across and beyond Germany and Austria about their memories of and involvement in Hitler’s regime, the war, and the genocide. Based on a selection of interviews, my paper asks the question how ordinary Germans with varying degrees of complicity contributed to the everyday construction of Third Reich spatialities.
Zoltán Kékesi is a cultural historian of Central and East Central Europe with a focus on Holocaust research, Jewish history, and memory studies. He is a research fellow at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University College London. He has worked internationally for several years, most recently as senior research fellow at the Center for Research on Antisemitism (TU Berlin). He is the author of two books in English: Agents of Liberation: Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Art and Documentary Film (Central European University Press, 2015) and Memory in Hungarian Fascism: A Cultural History (Routledge, 2023).
Charlie Knight
Confronting the Archive: Postmemory and the ‘Outsider’ Researcher in the Archives of German-Jewish Families – Panel 2C.
When asked to reflect on the discovery of host of letters, documents, diaries and other ephemera pertaining to the experience of her great grandmother Clara Licht, Bridget King described growing up under the spectre of her great-grandmother’s memory, concluding that it was ‘easier to love the Clara from the [archive]’. For Bridget, the discovery of these ego documents in her father’s house had begun to complicate her own familial narrative. For myself as a researcher external to all the collections I research, questions of positionality, reflexivity, and my own ‘outsider-ness often come to the fore.
This paper will auto-ethnographically reflect upon the experience of reading, discovering, researching, and navigating private collections of the families of German-Jewish refugees from Nazism, for both the researcher and for the descendant. Building on Judith Szapor’s and others’ observation of the German-Jewish archive as both repository of and subject to that same history, this paper will highlight how various types of ego document are conceived differently by the various parties viewing them. It will engage with both privately held and archival collections, namely the private collection of the Licht/Königsberger family (now donated to the Jüdisches Museum Berlin) and those of Marion Ferguson at Manchester Central Library.
Charlie Knight is a PhD candidate at the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton funded by the Wolfson Foundation. He has written, published and presented internationally on topics centred around the refugee archive, letter writing in the Holocaust, and international aid efforts. Charlie was previously a content researcher at the Imperial War Museum and is currently an Outreach Fellow at the Parkes Institute, and Communications Officer for the German History Society.
Toby Kunin
From Buchenwald to Notting Hill: Holocaust Comparisons in Postcolonial Britain – Panel 1B.
Using a selection of primary sources from The Modern Records Centre, Hansard and The London Metropolitan Archives, I will map out the ways that Holocaust memory and comparison interfaced with changing ‘race relations’ in post-war Britain, particularly in the build up to the 1965 Race Relations Act. I will explore how comparisons were used by Jews, other racialised peoples, and their anti-racist allies to anchor their respective positions in this moment of change.
Growing public consciousness of the Holocaust in the 50s and 60s naturally led to comparisons, as people used it as a tool to situate their experiences of marginalisation, or their opposition to racist violence and discrimination. This was especially the case following the Eichmann Trial, which brought Holocaust memory to the front of a public consciousness beginning to grapple with race, racism and a changing Britain.
From this research I will present the long history of Holocaust comparisons in Britain, the multifaceted relationship between memory and comparison, and will explore how comparisons were used both constructively and counterproductively in this time of still embryonic Holocaust memorialisation and contested racial politics.
Toby Kunin is a postgraduate student at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, studying for an MA in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies. Their research focus is on the interactions between Jewishness, Jews and contemporary analyses of race, nation and migration. Toby is particularly interested in the interwar and post-war years, and in reconnecting Jewish histories to discussions around race and identity in post-colonial Britain.
Simon Lavis
Law, Continuity, Rupture: The Comparability of the Role of Law in the Third Reich – Panel 4B.
This paper explores the history and status of Anglo-American academic discourse about the comparability of the Nazi legal system. It asserts that the ‘rupture thesis’ – the idea that Nazi law represented an aberration from normal legal-historical development with a point of rupture persisting between it and the ‘normal’ or central concept of law – that has prevailed in legal and historical research about the Third Reich, has prevented effective comparison of Nazi law with other legal systems. This includes other authoritarian and genocidal regimes. While more recent legal-historical scholarship has engaged with the diachronic continuities evident in the development of Nazi law, there continues to be very limited consideration of the role of law directly in the Holocaust itself (as opposed to as an antecedent to genocide), and therefore of the comparability of the law-ful Holocaust with other extreme applications of law. The Holocaust continues to be viewed as an event outside of the scope of the law. In historiography, this both feeds into and is fuelled by the uniqueness discourse around the Holocaust comparison that is notable within the literature. This paper makes the argument that an effective framework for comparison is necessary for understanding law’s complicity in the Holocaust.
Simon Lavis is Senior Lecturer in Law at The Open University. His research focuses on the nexus between law, history and theory in relation to the Third Reich, including the historical and theoretical nature of Nazi law and its representation in academic discourse. He is co-editor of States of Exception: Law, Theory, History (Routledge, 2020) and author of ‘The Constitutive Role of Nazi Law: Constructing Complicity in the Third Reich’ in Fulbrook et al. (eds.), Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond Compromised Identities? (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Beatrice Leeming
Didactic Differences and Audience Engagement: Comparative Genocide in Holocaust Exhibitions, Dachau and Mauthausen since 1990 – Panel 1A.
Most Holocaust memorial-museums have only recently (and sometimes reluctantly) included in their exhibitions reference to other genocides. Though there are some exceptions, the Anne Frank House commenting on contemporary anti-migration rhetoric as early as the 1960s, most expanded from the Judeocide in the past two decades. But a close-reading of visitor engagement with these spaces suggests a receptivity to contemporary analogy, and an automatic interpretation of memory through other tragedies. My paper historicises the evolution of exhibitions in Mauthausen and Dachau and explores the practice of memory by their audiences. The visitors’ books suggest that a cosmopolitan semantics of suffering – as a frame to process the affective experience of being in historic sites – predated the curatorial presentation of comparisons. Before Cambodia was even in the ‘postscript’, the Holocaust was ‘made meaningful’ by reference to abortion, animal welfare and ongoing Japanese amnesia. Comparison was blacklisted in 1980s German academia, and cautioned again in Moses’ more recent catechism debate, but it appears an unproblematic means to approach the task of memory for its lay public. My paper hopes to explore not what is lost in comparison, but what is gained in dialogue between groups who share a commitment to commemoration.
Beatrice Leeming is currently doing a PhD at the University of Cambridge, under the joint supervision of Dr Bernhard Fulda and Dr Gilly Carr. Their research looks at the co-creation of memory-sites of the Holocaust by institutional, political and public communities and the dynamic fluidity of the narrative that is found in and made at these spaces. Beatrice’s previous research has been in popular mediums concerned with ‘difficult memories’ in Germany in relation to the Holocaust and in formerly communist spaces in Central and Eastern Europe.
Alina Legeyda
The ‘Shadow’ of Holocaust in Soviet/Post-Soviet Cinematography – Panel 3C.
Without being completely denied and at the same time not receiving special historical treatment as an absolutely unique manifestation of genocide on ethnic grounds in the world history, the representation of the Holocaust in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema resembles a shadow that periodically appears in space, acquiring certain features, has a transient existence within a certain cinematic film to disappear again, never becoming a full-fledged category on a par with other historical phenomena. The Holocaust in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema has been systematically reduced to the status of a narrow problem of the Jewish people, which cannot claim to be a tragedy of universal scope touching the pendulum of universal morality. The Holocaust, coded under the global suffering of Soviet citizens (Pomni Imya svoe – Remember Your Name (1974), Оbykhnovenny Fascism – Ordinary Fascism (1966), etc.) emerging onto cinematographic surface in the period of post-Stalinist liberalization was not to reappear on screen until the era of Perestroika and even then resembled a phantom rather than one of the central tragedies of the Second World War. Far from being a central narrative, the Holocaust in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema is smeared and relegated outside the Soviet state and post-Soviet space. The Soviet tradition of not openly showing the Holocaust in film continued into the millennium when the aestheticization of scenes in gas chambers and ovens, silencing antisemitism as motif for Jewish elimination, among others, continued to contribute to denying the Holocaust its place in cultural memory on the post-Soviet space.
Alina Legeyda is a researcher into Holocaust Cultural Memory and Mediation at Newcastle University (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK) and an Associate Professor at VN Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, she holds a PhD in Linguistics, graduating cum laude from VN Karazin Kharkiv National University. Alina has 23 years of university teaching experience, including as a
university professor of English, German, French, Spanish. She holds a Diplome DALF, Diplome de l’Institut Provence Marseille, France. Her research interests include cultural memory of Holocaust, Holocaust mediation across media and genre, transformation in Holocaust memory representation in diachrony, cultural memory of genocide, Holocaust book-film adaptation mechanisms, and non-linear narratives in Holocaust representation.
Urs Lindner
The Shoah as Extreme Case – Panel 6C.
During the last decades, the view that the Shoah is the extreme case of mass crimes has considerably gained traction. Those within the uniqueness camp who admit that the Shoah was a genocide, i.e. nearly everybody, are pushed into this direction, whether they want it or not, because there is nothing else left for the uniqueness thesis. But also long-term and strident critics of uniqueness claims like Dirk Moses have started to embrace this view. The paper explores the conception of the Shoah as extreme case. It argues that there are actually two models in order to understand it: i) a combinatory model that disputes any unique traits of the Shoah (= traits that only belong to it) and declares its extremity to consist in a particular combination of properties shared with other mass crimes; ii) an intensification model, which takes the one unique trait of the Shoah about which there is relative consensus amongst historians, i.e. redemptive antisemitism, to be an escalation of general properties of mass crimes. The paper further asks for the normative implications of the extreme case view (what kind of ‘Never Again’?) and whether it can escape the criticism of still being Eurocentric.
Urs Lindner is a philosopher at the Max-Weber-Kolleg of the University of Erfurt, Germany, and currently a fellow at the Center for Research on Antisemitism of the Technical University Berlin. Amongst his research interests are egalitarianism, affirmative action, realism/materialism, Marx(ism), colonialism and memory politics. In 2023 he submitted his habilitation thesis (second book) titled: ‘An Egalitarian Justification of Affirmative Action: Non-Ideal Theory and the Scope of Political Philosophy’. He is currently working on a conceptual history of the ‘Singularity of the Shoah’.
Laura Major
Holocaust Inversion in the Wake of October 7th – Panel 2B.
This talk will explore the phenomenon of Holocaust inversion in the wake of the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent ground incursion in Gaza. Already in 2013, Clemens Heni[1] identified the equation of Israel and the Jews with Nazism as an ‘inversion of truth’ used as a type of ‘extremely aggressive anti-Jewish propaganda’.[2] This kind of Holocaust inversion, I shall argue, has nothing to do with any legitimate criticism of Israel, but rather plays into ancient and new anti-Semitic tropes. Nazism has become the embodiment of absolute evil; the equation of Jews and Israelis as Nazis then lays the ground for the re-demonization of Jews, the possible delegitimization of Israel, and even the justification of the destruction of the Zionist state. In the wake of the attack by Hamas, who also practice Holocaust inversion in their charter[3], the very victims of massacre, rape, mutilation, plunder and kidnapping, and indeed the historic victims of Nazi atrocities, have themselves been accused of Nazism in the most insidious visual and other media, which would put De Sturmer to shame. It is insufficient to frame this Holocaust inversion around the question of Holocaust comparison since the results of this kind of anti-Semitism may have dangerous outcomes for Jewish people worldwide and for the state of Israel itself.
Laura Major (PhD) is a lecturer at the English Departments of Achva Academic College and Hemdat Academic College in the field of Literature. Her research interests include women’s narratives, crime fiction, spiritual narratives, pedagogy, and Holocaust Literature.
Kerri Malloy
A Series of Legal Events: Legitimizing Genocide on Two Continents – Panel 4B.
Intertwined with the colonial contexts of the genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America and the Holocaust of Jews in Europe is a series of legal events that enshrined deep-seated hatred of Native Americans and Jews in the legal cannons that governed the United States and the Third Reich through legislation, administrative law, executive decrees, and imposing legal frameworks on occupied territories. The links between the legitimization of genocide using the legal process in the United States and the Third Reich will be examined and comparatively analyzed in this paper. Through that comparison, it will be demonstrated that there is a genealogy of legal events that connect the genocide in North America to the Holocaust in Europe, using primary documentation from court causes and legislative enactment. The analysis will show that the systems that are generally understood to shield individuals from governmental persecution were and can still be weaponized to aid in the destruction of those deemed to be less than human.
Kerri J. Malloy (Yurok/Karuk) is an assistant professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at San Jose State University, specializing in Indigenous and genocide studies. His research focuses on the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the ongoing healing and reconciliation in North America. He looks at the need for systemic change in social structures and the promotion of transitional justice in response to human rights violations through judicial and political reform. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
Jonathan Marrow
Entangled and Entertaining Evils: Dramatizing Slavery and the Holocaust in 1970s American Television – Panel 4C.
My paper explores the entangled histories behind the production and reception of two blockbuster 1970s television miniseries Holocaust (NBC, 1978) and Roots (ABC, 1977), which depicted the histories of the Shoah and American slavery in transformative ways. With close proximity, almost identical popularity, comparable narratives, and other similarities, scholars have previously suggested that Roots may have informed the making of Holocaust. This research is the first to explore at length the dynamic relationship between the two. Drawing on oral histories with actors and producers, archival sources from ethnic advocacy organizations and production companies, and contemporary news coverage, I demonstrate how Roots influenced Holocaust, in its production, promotion by the American Jewish community, and critical reception. More broadly, at all stages of their development, the two were involved in a fundamentally entangled dialogue about the connections between Holocaust and slavery. A comparative approach to these highly similar series also reveals key differences in American moral understandings of the two histories, and activist strategies by the Jewish and African American communities. These findings suggest the benefits of comparative approaches to studying the cultural memory of troubled histories, especially those that examine mass media works and underlying commercial and activist motivations.
Jonathan Marrow is a graduate student in American History at Oxford University, where he researches the legacy of the Holocaust and slavery in American culture. His current research compares the production and reception of 1970s television dramatizations of these histories. Marrow previously graduated from Georgetown University with an honors degree in history and an MPhil degree in American History from Cambridge University. He spent several years as a history instructor at schools across the United States, including Boston, Massachusetts and Chattanooga, Tennessee, teaching courses on Holocaust ethics and American and world history.
Peter Morgan
The Historical Presence of the Armenian Genocide Before and During the Genocide of European Jews – Panel 4A.
Between 1915 and 1923, the Ottoman Empire and its successor state organised a series of deportations and massacres of its Christian minorities which would now be labelled as genocide. The current scholarship has increasingly shown that mainstream discourse in the ‘West’ conceptualised and described this a process of systematic extermination. Further, it demonstrated an awareness of the criteria involved whereby given geographical areas could be homogenised and how ethnical groups were constituted, and how (in whole or in part) they subsequently could be destroyed. As such, I argue that these events are directly comparable to those regarding the genocide of European Jews during the Second World War.
This paper will go further than this comparison by demonstrating the historical presence of the Armenian genocide in the 1930s and the early 1940s. I will also give a brief survey of the research that shows a significant engagement with this presence in the Polish ghettos. Moreover, it will comment on the significance of this and the issues it raises in terms of genocide denial.
Peter Morgan studied history at the University of Leeds between 1986 and 1989 before working as a history teacher in secondary schools for 21 years. Since 2010 he became increasingly involved in Holocaust education. He left the teaching profession in 2015 to research and write a doctoral thesis on British Representations of the Armenian Genocide 1915-23 at the University of Brighton. He has recently started work as an education officer at the Wiener Holocaust Library.
Dóra Pataricza
Holocaust Distortion in the Nordic Countries: Evolution, Expression, and Impact – Panel 2B.
This paper delves into the pervasive issue of Holocaust denial and distortion within the Nordic countries, shedding light on its historical roots and contemporary manifestations. Following the aftermath of World War II, the taboo surrounding the concepts of race and biological racism in Europe led to the emergence of Holocaust denial and distortion as central features of contemporary antisemitism. Termed as ‘secondary antisemitism’ by scholars, these phenomena, originally weaponized by National Socialists and post-war right-wing radicals, evolved into prominent elements of extreme right discourse.
The paper will try to answer the question of whether all forms of Holocaust distortion inherently constitute expressions of antisemitism. By exploring the shift from explicit to coded expressions of antisemitism, the paper investigates how Holocaust denial and distortion have delegitimized and stigmatized public expressions of antisemitism. The paper will present both coded and explicit manifestations of antisemitism post-1945, including its ties to traditional forms such as conspiracy narratives and tropes rooted in Christian and Islamic anti-Judaism. The analysis will extend to the mobilization of antisemitism in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, providing insights into the persistence and transformation of antisemitic sentiments over time.
Dóra Pataricza is the vice PI at Åbo Akademi University (ÅAU) of a project titled ‘Antisemitism Undermining Democracy’, funded by the Kone Foundation. Since January 2020, she has also been conducting a project that reconstructs the fate of Holocaust victims from the Szeged region, (funded by Claims Conference and IHRA). Together with Mercédesz Czimbalmos (ÅAU), she is the author of the scientific report with the title ‘Experiences and perceptions of anti-Semitism in Finland – Study on discrimination and hate crimes against Jews’, to be published by the Ministry of Justice of Finland and the Human Rights Center in March 2024.
Joanne Pettitt
Between Nationalism and Nazism: Representing the British New-Right – Panel 1B.
This paper will consider the legacy of Nazism as it appears in representations of the British far-right. It will consider the tension between the little island exceptionalism that underpins much of the nationalist discourse in Britain – particularly in relation to memories of the Second World War, but also re-emerging with fervour in debates over Brexit – and the global connections that can be discerned through the British New-Right’s reliance on what I call the Nazi paradigm.
By drawing on the legacy of Nazism and its aesthetic mode, the British new-right movement positions itself within a global framework of fascism. This can be observed in the writings of the New-Right themselves: in political magazines, propaganda, memoirs and even self-published fiction. At the same time, the invocation of Nazi motifs – including the figure of Adolf Hitler or other high-ranking officials, Swastika flags, or Nazi-esque salutes – can be seen in fictional accounts that seek to promote a more liberal, anti-fascist agenda. In these cases, the Nazi paradigm operates as a point of comparison and a marker of ethical boundaries.
As this paper will demonstrate, literary representations of the British far-right constantly oscillate between the nationalist idea of home and the global arena in which fascism has been formed and where it continues to develop. The resulting tensions bleed into contemporary literature (including post-Brexit literature), where broken cities, fractured relationships, disintegrating friendships and hidden pasts all create an air of a Britain irrevocably changed; a place that is once familiar and foreign.
Joanne Pettitt is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent (UK). She is the Secretary of the British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies (BIAHS), a member of the executive board of the European Association for Holocaust Studies (EAHS) and co-editor-in-chief of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History. She is the author of Perpetrators in Narratives of the Holocaust: Encountering the Nazi Beast (2017).
Rachel Pistol
Introducing the UK Holocaust Research Infrastructure – EHRI-UK – Panel 2C.
The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) has been supporting research that breaks down barriers between academic, archival and heritage institutions since 2010. The project is a pan-European infrastructure of 25 partners across 17 countries including the USA and Israel and in 2025 is converting to a permanent European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC). As part of this transformation, national nodes are being created, and the UK Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI-UK) will develop new services unique to the UK whilst continuing EHRI’s existing work.
EHRI-UK is working to overcome the fragmentation of Holocaust resources; accelerate the digital transformation of Holocaust and other related studies; amplify the social relevance of the Holocaust; provide virtual and physical access to resources; create new communities of experts; train the next generation of practitioners; and disseminate the results of Holocaust research. Alongside adding to EHRI Resources (www.ehri-project.eu) and developing the EHRI-UK network (www.ehri-uk.org), we will provide trans-national research fellowships, UK research fellowships and create a brand new regional placement scheme. This will be an opportunity to showcase EHRI resources to enhance Holocaust research in the UK and beyond, as well as promote new schemes and funding opportunities to institutions, scholars, and researchers in all areas of Holocaust Studies.
Rachel Pistol joined King’s College London in 2018 as a digital historian and is on the management board of EHRI as well as the Director of EHRI-UK, for which she is based at the Parkes Institute, University of Southampton. She is the Historical Advisor for World Jewish Relief, formerly the Central British Fund, working on making their extensive archive on refugees from Nazi oppression more accessible. Rachel also teaches refugee history at the University of Cambridge, is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter and Committee Member of the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies (EXILE).
Rosa Reicher
‘Now My Inner World is All Peace and Quiet’: Bringing Etty Hillesum to Life – Panel 5C.
Debates about the Holocaust’s uniqueness in educational context often touch on general ethical and moral values. In the moving account of the life, work, and ethics of Etty Hillesum in the world of the Holocaust, this paper explores the ways in which concepts of love and hate, good and evil, freedom and oppression can meaningfully convey through the writings of Etty.
Etty was a Dutch Jew, who was born on 1914 in Middelburg and lived in Amsterdam during World War II and suffered under the persecutions of the Nazis, ultimately dying at Auschwitz. Her letters and diaries offer a provocative portrait of an independent and intellectual young woman who was audaciously open about her active sexual life and describing her religious awakening.
The legacy of Etty is preserved at the Etty Hillesum House. The EHH develops educational materials for UK Upper Key Stage 4 and Key Stage 5 (ages 16-19) as well as for undergraduate and adult discussion groups. The paper sketches out the purpose and goals of these lesson and discussion pack. Furthermore, the paper would like to examine the extent to which the legacy of Etty serves to make the Holocaust understandable for students.
Rosa Reicher is completing a PhD thesis on ‘Gershom Scholem as a Theorist “Bildung”’ at Goethe University of Frankfurt, Buber-Rosenzweig Institute, supervisor Prof. Christian Wiese. She lectured in the Department of Educational Science, University of Heidelberg on Holocaust Studies, memory culture and Jewish Education. Her main research areas are Jewish Philosophy, Jewish History, Hebrew Literature and Jewish Education. Her recent publication: ‘”Go out and learn”: Shakespeare, Bildung and the Jewish Youth Movement in Germany between Integration and Jewish Self-Identification’ appeared in European Judaism, Vol 5, issue 2, (Sep 2018), pp. 124-133.
Alasdair Richardson
‘Until You See the Book or Visit the Place You Cannot Comprehend’: Thinking About Young People Visiting Holocaust-Related Sites – Panel 4A.
This paper continues the conversation started at last year’s BIAHS conference around young people’s experiences of visiting Holocaust-related sites. The focus will be the development of guidelines and a resource for educators (from formal and informal settings) to use when planning and delivering visits to Holocaust-related sites with young people. The resource draws on previous research, best practice guidelines, and first-hand experience. It also draws further from a medium-scale research project into a government-funded programme that takes UK teenagers to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
The resources consider some of the practicalities of taking groups to sites, including how educators might ‘frame’ the visit, safeguarding considerations, and planning the itinerary – the inclusion of testimony, ‘pause’ for reflection, etc. There will be a focus on some key educational sites – locations in Poland, Germany & the Netherlands – as well as some consideration of visiting sites virtually.
The paper hopes to open up a pragmatic discussion between those in education and academia, to continue and revive the dialogue around the purpose and form of educational visits to Holocaust-related sites post-pandemic.
Alasdair Richardson is a Reader in Education (Holocaust Education) at the University of Winchester, where he teaches across the initial teacher education, Masters and Doctoral programmes. He spent many years as a schoolteacher, both in Primary and Secondary schools. He has published a number of articles about young people’s experiences at Holocaust related sites and is currently working on his second monograph (for publication in 2024/5). Alasdair is an Educator for the Holocaust Educational Trust and a member of the Education Consultative Group for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. He was BIAHS President 2021-22.
Joan Salter
Paper Title: The Kindertransports: A Gold Standard for Immigration Policy? – Panel 5B.
Using evidence from a variety of archives in UK, USA, France & Israel, this paper compares the UK Government’s response to the Kindertransportees, with its refusal to allow sanctuary to two other groups of children during the Holocaust: the children of Polish Jewish origins in Vichy France (1942) & the Jewish children in Hungary (1944).
Within two weeks of Kristallnacht, the British Government endorsed a proposal underwritten by the Central British Fund (CBF) to allow Jewish children from Germany and Austria into the UK.
While the main focus will be on the children of the July 1942 Vel d’Hiv roundups, using two War Cabinet papers from the National Archives, it will show that the UK turned down offers by both above governments to allow emigration for these children.
This paper will provide a brief overview of the Kindertransports, including the historic prejudice against the Eastern European Jews within both the government and Anglo Jewish Leadership. For instance, I make reference to the 1905 Alien Act and the decision by the CBF that funds should be focused only on the Germanic Jews. In the case of France, I will discuss the offer by the Vichy government of safe passage to the Vel d’Hiv children, and most notably, the role of the CBF in the refusal to accept these children. I will then make comparisons with the Hungarian case; while the UK government queried the validity of the Vichy offer, it accepted the validity of the offer by Admiral Horthy, yet it still refused to offer sanctuary.
By providing a historical comparative study, we can reflect on the respective prejudices still faced by refugees today in the UK context.
Joan Salter was born Fanny Zimetbaum in Belgium in February 1940. In the 1980s, she began researching her own history which after thirty years of primary research was accredited with a Masters in Holocaust studies. Following a career as a speaker and educator, in 2018, she was awarded an MBE for Services to Holocaust Education She is a trustee of the HMDT. Her papers and presentations include: ‘A Comparison Study of the Response to the Kindertransportees and the Polish Jewish Children in France’ and ‘Tarnow: The Life and Death of a Polish Jewish Town’. Joan Salter MBE, BSc (Hons) LSE, MA Research (Distinction) NTU.
Caroline Sharples
Mass Observation and Public Reflections on Nazi Atrocities in the Aftermath of the Nuremberg Tribunal – Panel 1A.
The legacy of the 1945-6 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg has long generated debate among historians. Aside from its crucial precedents for shaping international law, the hearings have frequently been depicted as a major media event and the ‘first comprehensive definition and documentation to a non-Jewish audience of the persecution and massacre of European Jewry’.[4] But how far does the British public really engage with – and understand – these proceedings? Using Mass Observation sources, this paper investigates the depth of public knowledge of Nazi atrocities and, in the process, demonstrates some of the earliest examples of Holocaust comparison thanks to a general preoccupation with British war losses, and significant concern regarding the long-term repercussions of ‘victors’ justice’. The atomic bombings of Japan, for example, were routinely emphasised as people questioned the very wisdom of conducting war crimes trials. At the same time, British audiences could not help but fall back on more familiar frames of reference for contextualising Nazi crimes. This prompted comparisons to both domestic garrisons (to help make sense of the size of certain concentration camps), and recent, home-grown, convicted murderers who had also been sentenced to death for their deeds.
Caroline Sharples is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Roehampton. Her research interests concern war crimes trials, memories of National Socialism and representations of the Holocaust. She is the author of West Germans and the Nazi Legacy (Routledge, 2012), Postwar Germany and the Holocaust (Bloomsbury 2015), and co-editor, with Olaf Jensen, of Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). This paper emerges from her current work with the Sussex Digital Holocaust Education Project which is exploring how Mass Observation sources might be utilised within twenty-first century Holocaust education.
Lydia Souter
‘Protecting the Boundaries of Normalcy’: Remembering the Holocaust in America over the Past Decade – Panel 2A.
Drawing comparisons between the Holocaust and present-day socio-political issues has proven to be an especially controversial topic in American commemorative activity during the last decade. Memorial sites and academics engaged in researching and representing the Holocaust have been called upon to challenge the more extreme political views that have increasingly been found at the centre of national political discourse. The presentation of Holocaust memory and history as a means to challenge contemporary social and political issues has at times been met with consternation, as with the USHMM’s 2019 statement against Holocaust analogies, and at others formed a central component of a site’s memory activity, such as at Philadelphia’s Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial Plaza. In this paper, I examine the differing approaches to the presentation of Nazism and the Holocaust as a means to challenge disruptive social and political movements in the present day. By reflecting on the specificities of sites’ local, national, and transnational contexts, I offer an insight into the ways that comparisons to the Holocaust are used both productively or problematically to engage with contemporary issues
Lydia Souter was awarded her PhD from the University of Exeter in 2023 for a thesis entitled ‘Memory Between the Local, the National, and the Transnational’. Her project examined the development of museums, memorials, monuments, and archives in the US, Britain, Germany and Italy over the course of early twenty-first century. She argued that divisive political movements, social frictions, and the particularities of national memory cultures have contributed to the increased salience of local and national factors despite the ostensible transnational shift in memory work since the start of the 2000s.
Mia Spiro
Holocaust Memoirs and the Role of the Editor – Panel 1C.
‘In telling these stories, the writers have liberated themselves,’ writes David Azrieli, in the printed preface of the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs. With these words, Azrieli, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Azrieli Foundation, expressed what many memoirs have similarly noted. The urgency to pass on the stories – and to publish them – so that they continue to provide witness to the events as the survivor population dwindles. Memoir publication has increased in the past two decades; likewise, there has been an upsurge in self-published narratives sold over the internet by survivors and their children. Many of the authors nevertheless have little experience writing for a mass market; for many, English is not their first language.
This paper will examine the role of the editor in the process of memoir publication. An editor is sometimes a spouse, a child, a volunteer or a paid professional. As link between testimony, unpublished manuscript, and finished product, the editor of the Holocaust memoir has the ethically complicated role of writing coach, fact-checker, translator, sometimes ghost writer – assisting survivors to tell a story that is inexpressible. And while published memoirs are often analyzed and examined by students and scholars as finished literary products, what is left out of the published work – repetition, slippages, voids, and historical obscurities – often contain valuable articulations of traumatic memory. Using three examples of memoirs from archived manuscripts to published product, this paper will examine how scholars might account for what is changed or left out of published works, and raise questions about the ethical processes of translating fragments of traumatic memory into narrative form.
Mia Spiro is Senior Lecturer in Modern Jewish Culture and Holocaust Studies at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction (Northwestern UP, 2013) and has published widely on Jewish representation in literature and film, and the impact of the Holocaust on post-WWII Jewish culture. She is currently working on a project on the ethics of editing Holocaust survivor memoirs and completing a book entitled: ‘Monsters and Jewish Migration: Golems, Dybbuks, and the Ghosts of War’ (to be published in 2025).
Emily Stiles
Plight of the Persecuted: Deserving Refugees in the Museum Space – Panel 5B.
This paper considers the representation of refugees within the museum space in Britain using the framework of a ‘deserving and undeserving migrant’. Often, public discourses around migrants and migration exclude refugees as they are considered the ‘right kind’ of [temporary] migrant; the deserving migrant who has fled conflict or disaster to find a [temporary] home within a welcoming and hospitable Britain. Refugee is, of course, separated from asylum seeker who has not yet qualified as deserving (and so continues to be treated with suspicion). Awareness (or consciousness) of the Holocaust in Britain, through formal education and cultural representations, has provided the benchmark for British hospitality. Had Britain not allowed the entrance of tens of thousands of migrants in the 1930s, the Holocaust would have had even greater devastating and deadly effects across Europe. In this sense, those fleeing persecution and murder during the period of Nazism become the archetypal refugee in the British imagination (despite many gaining entry on worker schemes, not as ‘refugees’, so as ‘economic migrants’ by today’s definition). With knowledge of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, there is no doubt of the deservedness of the refugee fleeing Nazism. This Holocaust comparison, however, rarely connects with public audiences to encourage positive debate around refuge and migration (least of all to problematise the question of ‘British hospitality’). Instead, it often contributes towards the rhetoric of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migration or deserving and undeserving migrant. This paper will explore how representations of refuge and refugee in the museum space consider public conversations on migration more broadly to better understand why Holocaust comparisons ultimately fail to connect past narratives with present discourse.
Emily-Jayne Stiles is Lecturer in History at the University of Winchester where she teaches on various aspects of Holocaust and refugee history, memory, and representation. Her latest research explores cultural representations of refugees and refugeedom, past and present. Her first book, Holocaust Memory and National Museums in Britain, was published by Palgrave in 2022.
Thomas Van de Putte
Localizing the Holocaust. A Micro-Study of Holocaust Memory Education for Mozambicans – Panel 1A.
This paper presents an interactional and ethnographic study of a case of multi-directional Holocaust memory education for Mozambican professionals. In the case that I am analysing, institutional partners from the UK and South-Africa have set up a program of Holocaust memory education (Change Makers Program) for young professionals all over Africa, the premise of which is that learning about the Holocaust will enable ‘Africans’ (in this case Mozambicans) to make better sense of their own violent everyday realities and local cultural memories, and become ‘upstanders’.
But the borrowing process these policy projects have in mind are not always successful. When being offered the frame of the Holocaust to make sense of local memories and realities, participants in my fieldwork resignify the Holocaust for it to fit their own realities. This process of resignification includes the metaphorization of the Holocaust, ideas of Holocausts, or rejection of the Holocaust frame. My ethnographic and micro-approach opens the study of memory politics up to these local, vernacular enactments of cultural memory and its politics. These enactments are often surprisingly heterogenous, complex and show meaning effects that are unintended by policy makers.
Thomas Van de Putte is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at King’s College London. He works on questions of cultural and collective Holocaust memory, combining perspectives from sociology, linguistics and cultural studies. His work is published in the most prominent journals of memory studies, Holocaust studies and narrative studies. He published his first monograph, Contemporary Auschwitz/Oswiecim, in 2021 with Routledge. Thomas’ second monograph, Outsourcing the European Past, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in March 2024.
Sue Vice
The ‘Holocaust-By-Bullets’ in British Thrillers: Frederick Forsyth and Beyond – Panel 1B.
In this paper, I will ask what role is taken by the representation of Holocaust-era mass shootings in recently published British thriller fiction. These novels are Sam Bourne’s The Final Reckoning (2008), David Thomas’s Ostland (2013) and Graham Hurley’s Kyiv (2022). In each case, a significant debt is evident to Frederick Forsyth’s 1972 bestseller The Odessa File, in relation to the focus on the ‘Holocaust-by-bullets’ and the plot devices that arise.
In each text, the reality of the ‘Holocaust-by-bullets’ offers elements that follow, yet also challenge, the thriller format with its demand for ‘suspense, action and darkness’ (Steed 2024). The killings’ occurrence in public enables their witness by the novel’s protagonists, while the need for secrecy in the post-war era requires their investigation as a crime. As the titles of Hurley’s and Thomas’s novels show, topography is tainted by the atrocities.
The narrative viewpoint varies in each case, enlisting that of a survivor (Bourne), a perpetrator (Thomas) and a bystander or investigator (Hurley and Forsyth), revealing the impetus to represent these events. Each novel draws on the precedent established by Forsyth to depict events by the means of fictional memoirs, from the perspective of survivors and perpetrators alike. Yet the terrible events of the mass shootings seem so unassimilable that, despite their foundational role for the plot, they are relegated to the backdrop in all four examples.
I will ask in conclusion if the very reasons for these novels to invoke the Holocaust-era shootings, and their basis in factual sources, suits or exceeds the popular fiction format in which they appear.
Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, where she works in the areas of contemporary literature, film and Holocaust studies. She is currently writing a study of Holocaust representation in popular British and Irish fiction.
Dominic Williams
Witnessing Professionals in the Work of Robert Jay Lifton: From the Holocaust to Climate Catastrophe – Panel 5C.
The medical specialty of Conflict and Catastrophe Medicine brings together its two defining situations without equating them, because doctors’ work in humanitarian emergencies is not defined by distinguishing those emergencies’ human and natural causes. In this paper, I will suggest that it is possible to take a similar approach to the testimony given by healthcare professionals about conflicts and catastrophes. Doctors and other medical workers are often key witnesses to human rights atrocities and natural disasters. Their different forms of witnessing exhibit commonalities even when they take place in radically dissimilar contexts.
I will make this claim through an engagement with the work of Robert Jay Lifton. Witnessing and medicine have been at the heart of Lifton’s work, from The Nazi Doctors to recent articles and interviews discussing ‘witnessing professionals’, who can use their status and knowledge to stand for truth and warn against dangers. Lifton’s own work, therefore, makes possible a comparative consideration of how doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers have borne and can bear witness to the Holocaust and to climate catastrophe.
Dominic Williams is Assistant Professor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Northumbria University, UK. He has co-edited and co-authored (with Nicholas Chare) four books in Holocaust Studies, most recently Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando (Berghahn Books, 2019, paperback 2023). He has recently published a number of articles and chapters on the location outtakes of Shoah, most of them co-authored with Sue Vice. He is currently co-editing two volumes: The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau (with Sarah Cushman and Joanne Pettitt) and The Clinical Witness: Conflict, Catastrophe and Medical Testimony (with Nicolas Barnett and Nicholas Chare).
Mark Wilson
‘I didn’t experience the Shoah’: Comparing Experiences of Persecution by Survivors of the Holocaust in France – Panel 6B.
Most Jews in France survived the Holocaust. Those who had not faced deportation were in the majority, but their voices can seem under-represented in Holocaust oral history collections. When they do appear, these interviewees frequently compare their experiences to the experience of deportation to Nazi death camps and forced labour camps. These comparisons have several functions, but are often awkward and painful moments, in which survivors of the Holocaust in France seem to diminish their own accounts.
One such survivor was Léon Fellmann. His parents were deported and killed in Auschwitz, and he faced arrest, serious injury during his escape from Vel d’Hiv, the risks of living in hiding, the pillage of his family’s apartment and the struggle to rebuild a life after liberation. In his interviews, he insists his suffering was nothing compared to that of other Holocaust victims. Despite the facts of his account and the pain he feels when remembering, he doubts that he even experienced the Holocaust.
This paper will trace the post-war trajectory of Fellmann’s life and explore the changing personal, political and commemorative contexts which shaped his narratives. Such an approach allows us to examine the complex interaction between subjective and collective memories of the Holocaust in France. Comparisons within the Holocaust can show us how survivors challenged or aligned with dominant post-war narratives of the Holocaust and navigated the aftermaths of persecution.
Mark Wilson is a PhD candidate in History at Durham University. His research explores place, space and emotion in oral histories of the Holocaust in France. He is currently Membership Secretary for the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France.