Donnerstag, 4. April 2019, 12:00 - 14:00

Institut für Zeitgeschichte der Universität Wien, Seminarraum 2, Spitalgasse 2-4, 1090 Wien

VWI goes to the University of Vienna

Justyna Majewska’s dissertation, Visions of Social Change in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1940-1942, analyses social pressures on the Warsaw Ghetto’s Jewish community from the perspective of Jews, Nazi Germans and Poles. Her presentation will focus on one particular question from her dissertation: How did Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto understand the present and envision the future? Although the Nazis saw the Jewish community in the ghetto as homogeneous, it was a complex group with a variety of political circles who were able to remain active. Zionists, Socialists and Bundists, acculturated and religious Jews, had different visions for not only how to survive the present but also how to build a Jewish future. Intense debates focused on the anticipated social structure of Jewry, the language Jews would speak, Jewish education, and the professions that the post-war generation would pursue.

Using the sociological concepts of quantitative and qualitative time, the presentation will cover how Jews understood social time, 'colonised' the future, and perceived the past, present and future in the Warsaw Ghetto. Answers to question of time will be drawn from documents gathered already during the war by the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Ringelblum Archive).

Justyna Majewska is a Junior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She also works in the Research Department at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. She has published in Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały (Holocaust Studies and Materials) and East European Jewish Affairs.

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