In this lecture, 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow Anna Lee discusses the commonalities she discovered in narratives that span decades and continents, as survivors talk about the trauma inflicted on them and the intrusion and violation of safe, protected spaces. She examines the diverse forms of activism described by these survivors and the ways they have employed activism to come to terms with and heal from their traumatic experiences.

If listening is a form of acknowledgment, can we hear the Roma? In this talk, Ioanida Costache (PhD candidate, Stanford University) problematizes the staggering silence and forgetting surrounding Romani persecution during the Holocaust, a history that has been muted or distorted for decades.

In France, Holocaust perpetrators did not segregate Jews in ghettos before deportation, and thus the first stages of antisemitic persecution affected Jews in everyday urban space. Indeed, in the West, the early stages of the Holocaust took place in the victims’ most familiar places, both in public and private spaces, where they lived and worked every day, in their apartments, their streets, and in daily environments.

“Survivor Activism in the Aftermath of Historical Genocides and Contemporary Mass Shootings”
Anna Lee (USC undergraduate, English major, Spanish and TESOL minor)
2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow
November 5, 2019

“Narratives of ‘Home’: Violence, Spatial Belonging, and Everyday Life for Armenian Genocide Survivors”
Ayşenur Korkmaz (PhD candidate in European Studies, University of Amsterdam)
2019-2020 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies
November 19, 2019

Badema Pitic joined the Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2017, where she is involved in the Center's outreach and academic programming directed at fostering and supporting the scholarly use of the Visual History Archive in research and teaching. Badema earned her doctorate in Ethnomusicology from University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the intersections of music, memory, and politics in the aftermath of war and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

About a month before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, sparking World War II, a desperate Jewish father in Germany penned a letter in broken English to a friend in England, Mrs. Wolf.

 “I beg to inform you that we have got a refuse from the Aid Committee in London, owing to our high waiting number for America. … We are very discouraged by this answer and are now forced to get out our children as quick as possible.”

Alfons Lasker, an attorney in Breslau, was on a mission to get his two daughters – Anita and Renate – out of Germany. He did not succeed.