On the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the panel will discuss the memory of the Holocaust in Europe. The Holocaust is a defining element of world history, but on the European continent it is a part of very local history. From the Atlantic to the Eastern Front, and from the Arctic to North Africa, nearly everyone was implicated as a collaborator, as a victim, as a bystander, or as a resistor. Fateful decisions had to be made which would define the battle lines of memory for the next generations. Over the seven decades that followed, official commemorations and grassroots movements have lifted up the duty to remember. At the same time, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, there were efforts to recast history in ways favoring the power elites. Since the Cold War’s close, however, significant progress has been made towards a Shoah memory that encompasses all the grey zones. Yet, just as it appeared that a consensus view had emerged, a backlash set in: there is now a disturbing trend in Europe towards nationalistic governments and xenophobic societies. In light of a controversial new law about the representation of WWII history in Poland, we will be discussing the future of Holocaust memory on the European continent.
The Panel – moderated by Dr. Thomas Fleischman, Assistant Professor in the Department of History – will consist of Professor Randall Stone, Director of the Skalny Center, Dr. Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, Skalny Visiting Professor from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and Bonnie Abrams, Director, Center for Holocaust Awareness and Information (CHAI) of the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester.
Free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies, and the Humanities Center, University of Rochester.