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Living through the Holocaust was such a strange and overwhelming experience, survivors often found it difficult to find ways to describe it. In her lecture “Phantom Geographies in Representations of the Holocaust” hosted by USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Studies on March 22, Kathryn Brackney identified survivors who talked about living in a world outside of time and place, where even the laws of nature fell apart.
During the trials, she worked as a research analyst. Her command of the English and German languages made her an invaluable resource to the prosecution.
In this clip from her testimony, Jane Lester talks about the relative gender equality that existed in her work environment during the Nuremberg Trials.
Nurusseher is a Rohingya refugee. An English transcript of Nurusseher's message is below:
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.
In this clip, Sara Shapiro describes her initial refusal to leave her parents after they had arranged her escape, but because of her father's insistence, she and her brother fled the ghetto.
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.
"Good Amidst Evil: Rescue During the Rwandan Genocide"
Jennie Burnet (Georgia State University)
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.
Kathryn Brackney, the 2017-2018 Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies, gave a public lecture on the research she conducted during her month in residence at the Center.