Mélanie Péron Lecture Summary
On March 15, Mélanie Péron from the French department at the University of Pennsylvania delivered a lecture on the research she conducted during her fellowship at the Center.
Jennie Burnet Lecture Summary
"Good Amidst Evil: Rescue During the Rwandan Genocide"
Jennie Burnet (Georgia State University)
Murder of 85-year-old Holocaust survivor in Paris underscores the loneliness of the Jewish community in the face of rising antisemitism
Mireille Knoll managed to survive the Nazis during the Holocaust, but antisemitism is ancient and tenacious, and its tentacles finally caught up with her last week at her home in Paris.
The 85-year-old Knoll was stabbed 11 times and burned after attackers – a neighbor and a homeless man – tried to set her apartment ablaze. The men, both in their 20s, were later arrested for a crime that is being investigated as an antisemitic attack.
“She’s a Jew, she must have money,” said one attacker to the other, according to Gérard Collomb, the interior minister of France.
Christopher Browning Talks About the Changing Attitudes of Witness Testimony in Genocide Studies
Despite the testimony of many witnesses to his Nazi-era crimes, Walther Becker walked out of a German courtroom a free man. The judge in the case – who was later revealed to have his own Nazi sympathies – gave little credence to survivor testimony when he handed down his 1972 verdict.
Historian Christopher Browning used Becker’s story as a springboard for his March 29 lecture about his research into a little-known Nazi labor camp in Poland and how the role of survivor testimony has evolved in the ensuing decades.