The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27
as an International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the
Holocaust. On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state
to honour the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other
victims of Nazism and to develop educational opportunities to help prevent
future genocides. The 2023 theme for International Holocaust Remembrance Day
is “Home and Belonging.”
Where Holocaust remembrance and education includes
opportunities to develop a deeper appreciation of the victims and survivors and
their agency, it can inform our response to the plight of contemporary victims.
Placing the victims and survivors in the centre of historical research,
learning and remembrance illuminates the humanity of victims of atrocities
today, and the impact of antisemitism fuelled by disinformation and the
distortion of history. Focusing on the humanity of the victims prompts us to
remember our humanity, and our responsibility to combat hate speech, combat
antisemitism and prejudice - to do all we can to prevent genocide.
In this public lecture two scholars of the Holocaust from
Northumbria University, Dr Dominic Williams and Dr Waitman Beorn, discuss
resistance in two camps: Auschwitz and Janowska (Lviv, Ukraine). How were
prisoners able to resist camp regimes that forced them to live and die in such
extreme conditions? What different forms did resistance take? And why is it
important to remember the fact that prisoners did resist?’
About the speakers
Dr Dominic Williams gained a PhD in Jewish Studies from
the University of Leeds, and since then has worked teaching English Literature,
Art History and Jewish History and Culture at Leeds, Reading, York St John and
Southampton universities. He was Montague Burton Fellow in Jewish Studies at
Leeds from 2016 until his appointment at Northumbria in Sept 2019. His work is
deeply interdisciplinary, and is often collaborative. Many recent projects have
been carried out with Nicholas Chare (University of Montreal), with whom
Dominic has co-edited two and co-authored four books. In Matters of
Testimony (2015), we engaged with the ‘Scrolls of Auschwitz’, the
manuscripts written by the prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers of
Birkenau, the Sonderkommando (SK). Following on from that
work, The Auschwitz Sonderkommando (2019) considered post-war witness
borne by survivors of SK in trials, memoirs, video interviews and films.
Dominic’s research addresses general questions of Holocaust testimony, memory
and representation.
Dr. Waitman Beorn is an Assistant Professor in History at
Northumbria University Dr. Beorn was previously the Director of the Virginia
Holocaust Museum in Richmond, VA and the inaugural Blumkin Professor of
Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Dr.
Beorn is the author of Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the
Holocaust in Belarus (2014) and The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of
the Final Solution (2018) and has recently finished a book on
the Janowska concentration camp outside of Lviv, Ukraine, tentatively
entitled Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in
Lviv. His next research project is The Revenants: The Postwar Lives
of Nazi Perpetrators. Dr. Beorn has published work in Holocaust and
Genocide Studies, Central European History, German Studies
Review, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Politics
and Governance, and the Geographical Review in addition to
chapters in several edited volumes. He has been awarded National
Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim
Foundation, and Claims Conference fellowships. He is also active in the
digital humanities. Dr. Beorn teaches courses in Holocaust History,
Comparative Genocide, German history, Eastern European history, Antisemitism,
Modern European history, Public history, and Digital history.
