Two Polish scholars will introduce us to complex issues of Jewish identity, politics and memory in post-Holocaust Poland. They will ask what it was like to be a Jewish child, a Jewish communist or a Jewish intellectual after the war in the land saturated by the genocide and its memory.
Lecture 1: Voices of Jewish Child Survivors as an Important Historical Source in Documenting the History of the Holocaust and its Aftermath
Joanna Michlic, Lund University (Sweden)
In this lecture, Prof. Michlic will discuss the late post-war testimonies as secret and communal memories in the early post-war testimonies of the child survivors. She will also show that the late post-war testimonies complement and elaborate in a variety of ways the early post-war testimonies. Her main argument is that the three waves of child survivors’ testimonies must be studied together to understand the full impact of the genocidal past on different stages of young survivors’ lives. Only then can we write the full biography of the generation of young survivors.
Joanna Beata Michlic is a social and cultural historian, and founder and first Director of HBI (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute) Project on Families, Children, and the Holocaust at Brandeis University. She is a Visiting Full Professor of the Holocaust and Contemporary History at University of Lund (2023 -2025) and an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the UCL Centre for the Study of Collective Violence, the Holocaust and Genocide, UCL Institute for Advances Studies, and Research Fellow at Weiss-Livnat International Centre for Holocaust Research and Education, University of Haifa, June 2019 – May 2025.
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