Memories of the Forgotten Holocaust: The Jews of Wolyn, 1900-2000

Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) Forum, Room 450

USC Shoah Foundation's 2013-2014 Institute Scholar, Dr. Douglas Greenberg, will looks at the lives of Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust in the Wolyn district of modern Ukraine.

As a USC Shoah Foundation Institute Fellow, Greenberg is conducting research for his multimedia scholarly project using survivor testimony from a place that was in six different countries in the twentieth century: the region of Wolyn, which is now in Ukraine.  The project aims to reconstruct the experience of the survivors of the Holocaust who came from a place where 250,000 Jews were murdered before the death camps were completely operational. Relying on about 500 video interviews in the Shoah Foundation archive, Greenberg is attempting to uncover the narrative of the path to mass murder as well as the unusual paths to survival followed by the Jews from Wolyn who escaped the bullets of the Einsatzgruppen and their Ukrainian henchmen.  

The second aim of the project is to explore the memory of the Shoah in Wolyn as expressed by survivors who are only too aware that the prevailing images of the Holocaust do not comprehend the murder of their families and friends.  Their knowledge that the story of the Holocaust in Wolyn has been largely forgotten in public memory influences how they recall and retell the story in their Shoah Foundation interviews.

Pleas send RSVP to kiahays@usc.edu.