In a follow up to her inaugural lecture series, Mélanie Péron will discuss how she and her students at the University of Pennsylvania drew upon a wealth of different sources such as diaries and archives to reconstruct the individual stories of Jewish children and their families in occupied France before they were reduced to a typed line on a deportation list and the importance of using sources such as diaries and video testimonies to teach about the Shoah despite the inexorable disappearance of the last remaining witnesses.

The talk introduces transit  as a concept to analyze spatial and temporal experiences of Jewish or political refugees from Nazi persecution, starting first in 1933 in Germany and later on in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and all over Europe.