Ayelet Eva Herbst
EHRI-Fellow (2023)

Escaping the Lemberg Ghetto and Janowska Camp: Flight and Survival of the Holocaust in Lwów

In this doctoral dissertation, Ayelet Eva Herbst follows the trails of Jews who escaped Lwów [today: Lviv, Ukraine] between 1941 and 1944 and survived the Holocaust under German occupation in territories of the Reich Commissariat Ukraine, the General Government, and the Third Reich. Examining the different factors influencing their decision-making process, choices and possibilities of escape, this work offers insights into Jewish reactions, coping, and self-agency during the Holocaust. Consequently, it centers ego-documents such as diaries, memoirs, and interviews with Holocaust survivors as primary sources for investigation and analysis.

The dissertation presents Lwów as a case study par excellence, as it not only stood as the third-largest Jewish center in Poland during World War II, but also comprised of Jews from diverse social, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Furthermore, following the German occupation of Lwów, the city became a central location that facilitated the enslavement and mass killings of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the broader region of eastern Galicia. Nevertheless, Lwów and its Jewish community remain markedly understudied within the rich body of Holocaust research. In this manner, this dissertation will not only provide a comprehensive escape account of individuals from diverse backgrounds, but also contribute to a critical gap in historiography of the Holocaust in Poland. During her fellowship, Herbst will undertake research at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute’s archive and library.

Ayelet Eva Herbst is a PhD candidate at the Ludwig Maximilian University in the institute of Eastern and Southeastern European History. She studied Holocaust, Communication and Tolerance at Touro University Berlin and graduated in 2018 with a master's thesis on Jewish refugee movements to eastern Ukraine during the Second World War. She is a scholarship holder of the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk, a recipient of the Conny Kristel Fellowship, as well as a residency of the Institute for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv. Her research interests focus on Jewish migration and displacement in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, the Holocaust, and its aftermath. Specialising in ego-documents, Herbst employs a bottom-up approach to study everyday lives and history of experiences through a contextualising analysis of wartime diaries, testimonies, interviews, and memoirs. In the past 5 years she has provided such expertise to different memorial projects across Berlin.

Jonathan Lanz
EHRI-Fellow (2024)

 The Birkenau Boys: Childhood, Memory and Testimony in the Theresienstadt Family Camp.

During his two-week visit to the VWI, Jonathan will conduct research for his doctoral thesis which examines the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau through the eyes of child survivors. His dissertation is entitled “The Birkenau Boys: Childhood, Memory and Testimony in the Theresienstadt Family Camp.” Given the relative lack of archival documentation surrounding Jewish communal society in Birkenau, Jonathan’s research seeks to probe how analysing the postwar testimony of Family Camp child survivors provides a pathway to write social histories of the Holocaust which lack contemporaneous documentation. Drawing on recent work in Holocaust memory, Jonathan’s thesis project returns the historians’ gaze to victim-based approaches to life in the Nazi camp system. Historians of the Holocaust have yet to write social histories of the Birkenau death camp, a perplexing fact given the large emphasis on the camp in American and European Holocaust memory. His project remedies this absence by examining how survivor memory of Birkenau was forged, crafted, and instrumentalised by child survivors in the postwar era. This methodological approach will allow Holocaust historians to gain a clearer picture of how everyday life within the Nazis’ largest death camp exists in post-Holocaust memory cultures.

Jonathan Lanz is a historian of childhood, Modern Jewish History, and the Holocaust. He is an advanced doctoral candidate in History and Jewish Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Jonathan’s dissertation writes a history of the so-called ‘Birkenau Boys,’ a remarkable group of eighty-nine Jewish child survivors from Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the past academic year, Jonathan was a Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies (Claims Conference) and a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. In addition to his role as a EHRI Conny Kristel Fellow, Jonathan is currently a Gerda Henkel PhD Fellow. He has presented his research at over a dozen domestic and international gatherings and most recently published a review of children’s histories of genocide in the Journal of Genocide Research. Jonathan received a B.A. in World History with distinction at Georgetown University in 2019 and an M.A. in European History at Indiana University in 2021.

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Oksana Baigent

EHRI-Fellow (2021)

Holocaust Memory in Ukraine in the Digital Age: Memorialization Unmoored

This project explores the rise of non-state led Holocaust memorialization efforts in Ukraine in the Digital Age. The project challenges the widely held notion of ‘absent’ or ‘suppressed’ memory of the Holocaust in modern Ukraine. Through diverse case studies, it shows how the memory of the Holocaust is being created with the advancement and accessibility of digital technologies. It argues that the efflorescence of public history projects and new thinking about the Holocaust memory practices in Ukraine are shaped by the cascade of new communications technologies of the Digital Era. This PhD will particularly investigate how the unlimited access and dissemination of the Information Age democratizing the memory practices in Ukraine and challenge the once-presumptive monopoly that the state held on memory and memorializing. The research also looks at how the traditional Holocaust memory practices are shifting away from the physical space to digital in the post-covid world. With the places like Memorial Auschwitz-Birkenau moving their exhibitions online, even if temporarily, it will explore the future of Holocaust remembrance in the digital realm and situate the Ukrainian example among those novel memorialization and preservation developments in Europe and globally.

Oksana Baigent Oksana Baigent is a doctoral candidate studying Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities at University College London (GB). She holds a BA and MA in History from Kyiv-Mohyla Akademie in Kiev (Ukraine). Her research interests encompass: Jewish history, Holocaust history and Digital Humanities. She has been awarded with several fellowships among them: the American Jewish Archives Fellowship (2018/19), a Research Grant from the British Royal Historical Society (September 2020) and the ReIReS_Transnational Access Scholarship (June 2021).

Hana Green

EHRI-Fellow (10/2021)

Illegales Leben: Jewish Women Passing as Aryan during the Holocaust

This doctoral dissertation examines the experiences of Jewish women passing as Aryan U-boote across Central Europe during the Holocaust. Tracing the transformation of Jewish women’s prewar identities through their adoption of false personas, it plumbs the ways in which individuals adopted and adapted to an assumed identity as a response to persecution. Through the examination of case studies and experiential vignettes, this project aims to bet-ter understand and assess day-to-day passing experiences through vari-ous Judenfrei milieu. Studying the unique vantage point of passers contributes to broader understandings of Jewish presence and absence during the war, narrates a wartime Alltags-geschichte of “the Aryan side” from a uniquely Jewish perspective, and considers relational aspects amongst and between passers and the gentiles they encountered. This research pro-ject integrates literature on identity passing within the framework of Central European Jewish history and Holocaust history and engages with transnational and transhistorical questions concerning identity formation and malleability. Additionally, with its focus on Jewish women and female-specific experiences of trauma and survival, this undertaking as-sesses gender and gendered responses within Holocaust narrative memory.

Hana Green Hana Green is a doctoral candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Stu-dies at Clark University. She holds a BA in History from the University of Florida and an MA in Holocaust Studies from the University of Haifa. Her research interests include Holocaust his-tory, Jewish history, and gender and identity studies. She holds a Claims Conference Fel-lowship (The Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany; 2018-present) and has received fellowships from the Leo Baeck Institute, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, EHRI, and the German Academic Exchange Service.

Anna Veronica Pobbe

EHRI-Fellow (2023)

Trials of Nazi criminals involved in the economic exploitation of Jewish communities

The research project Pobbe is planning to undertake during the EHRI fellowship term is the starting point of some new research paths based, first of all, on some questions still unanswered from Pobbe previous works. The Aktion Reinhard was the Aktion with the highest death rates among the many deportation operations organized by the Nazis (Stone, 2019). The Aktion begun right after the death of Reinhard Heydrich, who was killed by some partisans. During the operation three death-camps were involved in the killing operations: Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. Kulmhof, the first death camp to be built, was involved in the AR only partially: it welcomed few transports, mainly of children, coming from the Czech territories (Trial of Adolf Eichmann,1961). At the top of the hierarchy related to the AR there was Odilo Globocnik, a first-hand Nazi born in Trieste. Pobbe came across the Globocnik’s case at the end of her research devoted to Litzmannstadt. Globocnik tried, in fact, to reinvest the profits of the AR in some projects, like Osti, the SS industrial dream (Schulte, 2001). When, during the middle of 1943, Himmler tried to take control over the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, Globocnik proposed to change the ghetto into a
labor camp controlled by the Osti project. This “conversion” never happened, but what was interesting was the reinvestment process that Globocnik tried to do. The reinvestment was related to the money and goods, that the Nazis were able to take from the deportees in the various phases of the AR. Most of those profits were then transferred into a Sonderkonto, named “R”. The practice of using peculiar bank accounts in order to control and collect the money, that were took from the deportees, were often used by the Nazis, as the case of the Sonderkonto 12300 for the deportations of the Warthegau has shown (Klein, 2009).

Anna Veronica Pobbe is historian and Adjunct Professor of Contemporary History at University of Milan. She received a PhD in European Cultures (major in History) from the University of Trento in 2020. She was postdoc fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome in 2022. Her main fields of research interest include the economic exploitation of Jews in the polish occupied territories, postwar trials controversies and more recently the involvement of the Holy See in the postwar trials matters. Pobbe published her first book on 2023, which was taken from her PhD-thesis (based on the Hans Biebow biography). She received several fundings and prizes, like the Irma Rozemberg Prize from the University of Wien.

László Csősz

EHRI-FELLOW (04/2019–05/2019)

The Strasshof Deportations as Reflected in Post-War Justice in Hungary

The research project Csősz is planning to undertake during the EHRI fellowship term is part of a larger project focusing on the so-called Strasshof deportations from Hungary to Austria in the summer of 1944 as well as on the fate of Hungarian Jewish women and men in Vienna and its vicinity between June 1944 and May 1945, and beyond. Specifically, he aims to contribute to the VWI project Jewish Slaves in a State “Free of Jews”: The Topography of the Hungarian-Jewish Forced Labour in Vienna in 1944-1945. Whereas the research team of the VWI offers a complex and multidisciplinary account on the fate of Jewish forced labourers and utilizes documents from Viennese archives as well as oral history sources, Csősz intends to explore the series of decisions and events leading to the special transports from Hungary to the Vienna region and the aftermath and legacy of the Strasshof deportations in Hungary, including the fate of the some ten thousand survivors of these events. This microhistory has several ramifications, which are intertwined with various debated fields of Holocaust scholarship, including post-war justice, the assessment of the activity of Jewish leadership during the Holocaust, Nazi-Zionist negotiations, the role of native perpetrators and “bystanders” and many other questions of detail.

László Csősz is historian and senior archivist at the Hungarian National Archives in Budapest, Hungary. He received a PhD in History from the University of Szeged in 2011. His main fields of research interest include the social history of the Jews in Hungary as well as antisemitic social and economic policies and the Holocaust in Hungary. Csősz is a national expert delegate at the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and a contributor to the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project.

Anne Lise Bobeldijk

EHRI-Fellow (01/2019)

Competing Narratives of Victimhood in the Age of Transitional Justice. The History and Memory of the Terrorscape Maly Trostenets

This PhD project focuses on the history and memory of the terrorscape of Maly Trostenets in Belarus and a number of Western European countries. The former kolkhoz and camp at Maly Trostenets and two nearby forests just outside Minsk were used by the Soviets (1937–1941) to eliminate ‘enemies of the Soviet Union’, and by the Nazis (1942–1944) to murder partisans, Soviet POWs, as well as Belarusian and Western European Jews. This research will analyse both of these histories of this terrorscape. It will examine the dynamics between these histories and their memory, and if and how they are conflicted, contested, or entangled with one another.

Anne-Lise Bobeldijk is a PhD candidate at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the University of Amsterdam. In 2014 and 2016 respectively, she completed an MA in Eastern European Studies and an MA in German Studies at the same university. Before her PhD research, she worked as a research assistant and as an intern at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and as an education officer and PR manager at the Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam.

Florian Zabransky

EHRI-Fellow (01/2019)

An Intimate History of Male Jewish Sexuality, Emotions and Masculinity in the Third Reich

Sexuality, emotions and persecution of Jews in the Third Reich are inextricable linked. Nazis’ "sexual antisemitism", gendered humiliations in concentration camps or sterilisation were integral part of events in the process to annihilation. The investigation of male Jewish intimacy – i.e. hetero- and homosexual relations, diminishing sexuality, sexual barter, marriage, love, desire or sexualised violence – excavates gendered relations and analyses how male Jews experienced their intimacy in the Third Reich. In particular, the microhistorical exploration of acts of intimacy will demonstrate how sexuality and emotions are connoted with self-assertion, expressions of masculinity and agency.

Florian Zabransky is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex. In 2017, he was awarded the Clemens N. Nathan scholarship for his research on male Jewish intimacy and the Third Reich. He studied Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt Sapienza – Università di Roma and Hamburg University. His academic interests include history of sexuality, gender studies, Nazi concentration camps and the history of anti-Semitism.

Alina Bothe

EHRI-Fellow (12/2018)

The Persecution of Jews of Polish Citizenship in the German Reich 1938–1942

The persecution of Jews of Polish citizenship, called the ‘Polish Action’ in the language of the perpetrators, is a hitherto neglected area of the history of the Shoah.

This action constituted a large-scale persecution on the basis of citizenship which directly affected at least two thirds of the Jews of Polish citizenship living in the territory of the Third Reich between October 1938 and September 1939. This persecution continued to a lesser degree until 1942.

This habilitation project focuses on reconstructions and interpretations of this event in the framework of an integrated history involving both the process of radicalisation underlying the persecution as well as the experiences of the victims.

Alina Bothe is a post-doc fellow at the Institute for East European Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Prior to this, she was a research associate at the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. Her habilitation project has been supported by the Ernst Reuter Association, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, and a Saul Kagan Fellowship for Advanced Shoah Studies from the Claims Conference. Her research has moreover been awarded with among other things a habilitation stipend from the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, with EHRI stipends in London, Warsaw, Jerusalem, and Vienna, as well as with Feldman travel grants from the Max Weber Foundation and an archive stipend from the Joint Distribution Committee. She was awarded a Teaching Fellowship from the USC Shoah Foundation. Her curated exhibition Ausgewiesen! Berlin, 28. Oktober 1938. Die Geschichte der ‚Polenaktion‘ is on view at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin in the latter half of 2018. Her research and publication interests include the history of the Shoah and National Socialism, gender history, and digital humanities.

Dominique Hipp

EHRI-Fellow (11/2016)

Narratives of Violence. Reports on Dachau, Mauthausen and Ravensbrück

This project focusses on an interdisciplinary study of reports about the concentration camps at Dachau, Ravensbrück, and Mauthausen. The sources are statements by perpetrators made in the course of trials of Nazi crimes between 1945 and 1955. The corpus is made up of the main Dachau trial, two German trials against women from the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, and the Volksgericht trials concerning the camp at Mauthausen. Trials constitute a special form of communication and dialogue which has to be taken account of in analysis. Examinations of the statements of the defendants shifts from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ of the narrative and requires the employment of narratological methods. The question of how space and situation in the camps was described by the perpetrators and how they narratively positioned themselves therein is a central focus of the analysis. The statements evince specific strategies of fictionalisation and a particular form of rhetoric. The application of models from literary criticism for the examination of non-fictional texts lends itself to two connected goals: It promises new historiographical insights while contributing a new research methodology.

Dominique Hipp is a PhD candidate at the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg Faktuales und fiktionales Erzählen (Factual and Fictional Narration) at the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg. From 2013 to 2015 she was a research assistant in the start-up phase of the Centre for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, worked on the creation of the permanent exhibition of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, and was involved in the projects of the Jewish Museum in Augsburg.