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Holding on Through Letters: Jewish Families During the Holocaust

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Venue: Online

No booking required

Professor Debórah Dwork, The City University of New York

Holocaust Memorial Day Lecture - Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism in collaboration with the Institute of Historical Research

Jewish families in Nazi Europe tried to hold onto each other through letters. But wartime conditions applied. Letters were censored, and could not be sent between countries at war with each other. How to keep in contact? And, once contact was established, what to say — and about what to remain silent? In her presentation, Deborah Dwork will trace how letters became threads stitching loved ones into each other’s constantly changing daily lives.   

Debórah Dwork is the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She is renowned for her scholarship on Holocaust history and her pathbreaking early oral recording of Holocaust survivors, weaving their narratives into the history she writes. Her award-winning books include: Flight from the Reich (W.W. Norton, 2012); Auschwitz (W.W. Norton, 2006); Holocaust (W.W. Norton, 2002); and Children With A Star (Yale University Press, 1991). Debórah Dwork is also recipient of the International Network of Genocide Scholars Lifetime Achievement Award (2020). 

Booking via the Institute of Historical Research, click here.

 

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This event is part of the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology's Discover the Past spring 2021 events series, open to the public and students. To see the full list of events, visit the Discover the Past web page.

The Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck has a distinguished tradition as an international centre of excellence. We are the only university department in London to include archaeologists, classicists and historians investigating every period from prehistory to the early twenty-first century. Join us to discover the past and engage with the present across continents and cultures.

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