What we do not talk when we talk about rescuers of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland

Location
eri building room G51
Dates
Thursday 1 December 2016 (18:00-20:00)
dr-joanna-michlic

Fourth Annual Birmingham Lecture in Jewish Heritage and Culture

Speaker: Dr Joanna Michlic (Leo Baeck College, London; Senior Honorary Research Associate at the UCL Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, London).

The lecture discusses the early postwar memories of Jewish survivors and their rescuers, and the relationships between rescuers and their Jewish charges in the immediate postwar period.  It will focus on the portrayal of the selfless “dedicated” rescuers, especially females that emerges from letters of Jewish survivors, their relatives and members of Jewish organizations, and other testimonies. Such a rescuer typically succeeded in standing up to social pressures, fear, and threats of denunciation from neighbours, acquaintances and family members, and continued to engage in rescue activities. The lecture will discuss the attitudes of the members of the local communities towards these rescuers and will reveal the price that they had paid for their activities during and after the war.  The lecture also addresses the thorny issues of the politics of memory of rescuers in contemporary Poland: especially the manipulations and abuses of the history of rescuers in the current historical policy, 2015-2016.

For information contact Charlotte Hempel at c.hempel@bham.ac.uk or Isabel Wollaston i.l.wollaston@bham.ac.uk.

Everyone welcome

To register, please visit www.birmingham-lecture-in-jewish-heritage-and-culture.eventbrite.co.uk