Stitching the Fragmented

Tuesday, January 7, 2025 11:00 am PST | 2:00 PM EST

For the inaugural event in the Stanley D. Ginsburg USC Shoah Foundation Lecture Series, Mélanie Péron will explore the work of Hélène Berr, a volunteer at the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF) who sheltered four Jewish children during the occupation of France. Using Hélène Berr’s diary, Ms. Péron will examine the official and clandestine roles played by the UGIF during the persecution and deportation of France’s Jews, and how sources such as diaries reveal individual stories in all their humanity, in many cases before they were reduced to a typed line on a convoy list. Finally, Ms. Péron will discuss using sources such as diaries and video testimonies to teach about the Shoah despite the inexorable disappearance of the last remaining witnesses.

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Mélanie Péron is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the associate director of the Penn-in-Tours summer program. She was the recipient of the USC Shoah Foundation Rutman Fellowship for Research and Teaching (2016-2017). As a Price Lab for Digital Humanities fellow, she created a multimedia digital map of Occupied Paris and two websites related to the Holocaust in France : Occupied Paris and En marge du journal d’Hélène Berr.