VWI invites Documention Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW)
Chairs: Éva Kovács (VWI), Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider (DÖW)
13:00-13:40
Nina Valbousquet, Jewish-Catholic Odysseys: ‘Non-Aryan’ Refugees, the Holocaust, and Pius XII’s Vatican (1930s-1950s)
My current project sheds light on several categories of Shoah victims overlooked in the scholarship: Jewish-Catholic mixed families, converts, and Catholics of Jewish origin persecuted as ‘non-Aryans’ by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Vichy France. At the intersection of Jewish studies, Holocaust history, and Church history, the project examines the fate of Jewish-Catholic refugees and uncovers their migration paths from 1938 (the Anschluss and the promulgation of the racial laws in Fascist Italy) to 1950 (closing of the Cinecittà DP camp in Rome). I intertwine untapped Vatican sources with materials from European, American, and Israeli archives in order to reconstruct their journeys before, during, and after the Holocaust. As a result, my research highlights the agency and negotiated identity of victims in the face of imposed racial, religious, and political categorization, thus shedding light on a variety of individual and family experiences beyond the imposed category of ‘non-Aryan’. During my fellowship at the VWI, I plan to consult the archives of the Jewish Community of Vienna and Holocaust testimonies on intermarriage, mixed families, and conversion (the Fortunoff Video Archive and the Refugee Voices London oral history project).
Nina Valbousquet is a permanent researcher at the CNRS (French national scientific center), IHMC (Institute of early modern and modern history), École Normale Supérieure - Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, and a research associate at the French Research Center in Jerusalem. She was awarded the 2025 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust research for her latest monograph: Les âmes tièdes. Le Vatican face à la Shoah (Lukewarm Souls. The Vatican and the Shoah, Paris, 2024). Valbousquet recently edited the volume The Global Pontificate of Pius XII. War and Genocide, Reconstruction and Change, 1939-1958 (Berghahn, 2024, with Simon Unger), as well as the special issue of the Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah on the Vatican archives and the Holocaust (2023). She was the scientific curator of the “The Churches and the Holocaust” exhibition at the Shoah Memorial in Paris (2022–2023). She received fellowships from the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv and Yad Vashem to conduct her current project.
Commentator: Katarzyna Nowak
Katarzyna Nowak is a historian specialising in the cultural and social history of the early Cold War and the author of Kingdom of Barracks: Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria. She is currently working on her book project Knocking on the Vatican’s Gates. Refugees, the Holy See, and the Spectre of Communism, 1945-1958 as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Vienna. Research interests: Cold War, Population displacement, Refugee studies, Soviet and Eastern European history, Intellectual history of communism and anti-communism, The Vatican and the origins of the Cold War.
13:40-14:20
Barnabas Balint, Reconceptualizing Resistance: Zionist Networks of Rescue and Resistance in Wartime Hungary
This project explores the role played by the Hungarian Zionist Association (Magyarországi Cionista Szövetség, MCSz) in resistance and rescue during the Holocaust in Hungary and the relationship between Hungarian Jews and the occupying authorities. In so doing, it reconceptualises resistance around pre-existing personal solidarities as opposed to political and national ideologies and reveals how resistance developed in response to and in tandem with persecution. Rooted in archival research in Hungarian, Austrian, Israeli, and American archives, this project approaches resistance from both a macro and a micro perspective. As a result, it combines the vast national and transnational networks of Zionist movements across Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the global flows of ideas and money, with the local realities of the communities where their members lived and worked. It also traces lesser-known figures from the German authorities who occupied Hungary, revealing their role in persecution and combatting resistance and rescue efforts. Drawing on archival research in German-, English-, Hungarian-, and French-language sources, this project promises to make a significant contribution to our understanding of Jewish life and persecution in Hungary, while also suggesting a new way of approaching the history of resistance.
Barnabas Balint completed his doctorate in History at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. His thesis focused on a generation of Jewish youth in Hungary during the Holocaust. His postdoctoral research builds on this work to explore Jewish responses and resistance during the Holocaust. He has held fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, University of London’s Institute of Historical Research, European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (Yad Vashem), and USC Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He has published widely in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the European Review of History, Jewish Culture and History, and The Journal of Holocaust Research.
Commentator: Kinga Frojimovics
Kinga Frojimovics, PhD, is a historian and archivist, senior archivist at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI). Her research focuses on the history of the Holocaust in Hungary, Jewish religious life in Hungary, and the cataloguing of Jewish and Holocaust-related archival collections. She has authored six monographs, edited eight volumes, and published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals.
14:20-15:00
Hana Kubatová, Fascists into Communists? Opportunism and Survival across Autocracies
This project investigates how mid-level collaborators of the fascist Slovak state—teachers, clergy, lawyers, and local bureaucrats—successfully transitioned into positions of influence under the communist regime after 1948. Instead of treating collaboration as a fixed label or purely ideological choice, the research explores how survival, ambition, and pragmatism shaped these individuals’ ability to adapt across autocracies. While most scholarship treats fascism and communism as distinct, even opposing regimes, this project reveals striking patterns of continuity. Drawing on archival documents, oral history, and personal records, it reconstructs how “former people”—once compromised by their roles in the wartime Slovak state—rebranded themselves as loyal citizens of people’s democracy. Their reinvention illuminates how autocracies depend not only on ideological loyalists but on those who know how to navigate power. Focusing on the blurred boundaries between complicity and survival, the project brings fresh insight into how autocracies are sustained at the local level—and why some historical legacies remain unresolved. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on political transitions in 20th-century Slovakia and challenges simplified narratives of rupture between fascist and communist rule.
Hana Kubátová is a historian and political scholar based at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. Her research explores how ideologies take root, adapt, and persist during periods of upheaval, with a particular focus on mid-level actors in fascist and communist East Central Europe. Her work has appeared in journals such as Nations & Nationalism, Contemporary European History, Holocaust Studies, and East European Politics & Societies, with a forthcoming article in the Journal of Genocide Research. Her latest book, Christian Nationalism, Nation-Building, and the Making of the Holocaust in Slovakia, was published by Oxford University Press.
Commentator: Wolfgang Schellenbacher
Wolfgang Schellenbacher is a historian at the Documentation Centre of the Austrian Resistance (DÖW) in Vienna where he is responsible for Holocaust research and the Shoah victims database. Since 2011 he has worked on the EU-funded international research project European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) – from 2011 until 2019 at the Jewish Museum in Prague and from 2019 until 2025 at the VWI. From 2018 to 2020, he worked at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. His research topics and publications to date have focused on Austrians in exile in Czechoslovakia, the Holocaust in Austria, digital archiving and the Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto.
15:00-15:30 COFFEE BREAK
15:30-16:10
Paul Hanebrink, Reconsidering the Memory of Antifascism
During my time at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, I will be studying antifascist memory culture in Austria, Hungary and Italy. My purpose in this project is not to rehabilitate stuffy and dated tales about long-dead heroes of the resistance. Instead I want to understand antifascist memory in historical context: to reconsider the hopes invested in its creation as well as the disillusionment that it later bred; to treat its contradictions as productive of meaning rather than as errors of fact, and—most important of all—to ask what legacy these ambiguities leave for societies in Europe and North America that are once again debating the historical relationship between past struggles against persecution and the injustices and inequities that define our own time. Initial guiding questions include: how did forms and institutions devised to mediate antifascist memory to wider publics circulate across national boundaries?; what role did Jewish leftists and the specter of “Jewish Communism” play in the lives and afterlives of these memorial practices?; and how did institutions charged with preserving and transmitting antifascist memory adapt to the rise of Holocaust memory on both sides of the Atlantic?
Paul Hanebrink is Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University – New Brunswick, where he has taught since 2001. He is the author of two books: In Defense of Christian Hungary. Religion, Nationalism, Antisemitism, 1890-1944 (Ithaca, 2006) and A Specter Haunting Europe. The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA, 2018). A Specter Haunting Europe has also appeared in Italian and Romanian translations. In addition, he has served as a member of the academic committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum since 2014.
Commentator: Andreas Kranebitter
Andreas Kranebitter is a sociologist and political scientist, as well as the research director of the Documentation Centre of the Austrian Resistance (DÖW) in Vienna. His research focuses on Nazi concentration camps, resistance and persecution in Austria during the Nazi era, and the history of sociology. Recent publications: Die Konstruktion von Kriminellen. Die Inhaftierung von „Berufsverbrechern“ im KZ Mauthausen, Mauthausen-Studien, Band 17, Wien: new academic press, 2024; Handbuch Rechtsextremismus in Österreich, Wien: Falter Verlag, 2026 (hg. mit Isolde Vogel und Bernhard Weidinger).
16:10-16:50
Jan Elantkowski, The Circulation of Original Holocaust Photography and Photography as a Tool in Addressing Holocaust Trauma in Contemporary Art from Central-Eastern Europe
My research investigates the circulation of original Holocaust photography and the usage of photography as a tool for addressing Holocaust trauma in contemporary art (instead of “the works of Central-Eastern European artists over the decades”). While the engagement with Holocaust photography is a global and transnational issue, this study focuses on Central-Eastern Europe, examining how artists from the region have integrated historical images and employed new photographic strategies to confront Holocaust trauma. Building upon existing case-study research on the work of Boris Lurie, the study expands to include a broader range of Central-Eastern European artists and their unique approaches to using Holocaust photographs in art. Boris Lurie, a Jewish artist from Eastern Europe who found refuge in the United States after World War II, incorporated Holocaust photographs into his works during the 1950s and 1960s, blending them with elements of American post-war consumer culture and aesthetics. By examining Lurie’s incorporation of these photographs, this research contributes to the understanding of how Holocaust images were repurposed in the context of contemporary art. The study also delves into earlier examples, such as Władysław Strzemiński’s 1945 collage series "To My Friends, the Jews," which merges personal war experiences with Holocaust photographs. Expanding the scope to the 1980s and beyond, the research will also explore the shift in artistic mediums, exemplified by artists like Péter Forgács, who used original film footage to create layered narratives of wartime memory. Additionally, contemporary artists such as Elżbieta Janicka, Attila Szűcs, and Marcell Esterházy continue to address Holocaust trauma, offering new perspectives on its enduring impact.
Jan Elantkowski is an art historian and curator based in Budapest. He holds a PhD from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and master’s degree in art history from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He has published on contemporary art from Central-Eastern Europe and artistic representations of trauma and on the Holocaust. Between 2015 and 2018, he was a teaching and research associate in the Chair of East European Art History at Humboldt University of Berlin. Since 2018 he has worked as a curator and art historian in Ludwig Múzeum – Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest.
Commentator: Lukas Meissel
Lukas Meissel is a professor of history didactics at the University of Vienna and a lecturer at the University of Haifa. He was a postdoc research fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, supported by a grant from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, and completed his award-winning PhD thesis Beyond the Perpetrators’ Gaze. An Integrated Visual History of Nazi Concentration Camps at the University of Haifa. Prior to this, he studied history and contemporary history in Vienna.
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