Missed Lessons from the Holocaust

CBEES Advanced Seminar “Missed Lessons from the Holocaust: Avoiding Complexities and Darker Aspects of Jewish Child Survivors’ Life Experiences” with Joanna Beata Michlic, Visiting Hedda Andersson Professor at Lund University, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL, London

Speaker: Joanna Beata Michlic, Visiting Hedda Andersson Professor of Holocaust and Contemporary History at Lund University, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Education, Practice and Society, UCL, London

Discussant: Sylwia Szymańska-Smolkin, Researcher at the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies, Södertörn University

Chair: Martin Englund, Ph.D. Candidate in Historical and Contemporary Studies, Södertörn University

Abstract: In my essay, “Mapping the History of Child Holocaust Survivors”, (2020), I contend that the rich history of Jewish childhood during and in the aftermath of the WWII can offer us a valuable template for historical and contemporary comparisons. These comparisons could advance our understanding of the short-term and long-term impact of displacement and the loss of childhood and families among young refugees in the post-1945 era. However, in the recent invocations of young Jewish survivors in the public debates about young refugees’ crisis in Europe and beyond (2014-2022), the more painful memories of their wartime and post-1945 biographies are generally glossed over and, instead, more aesthetically sanitized accounts of a swift recovery seem to be showcased.
In this article, I argue that to learn valuable lessons from the Holocaust (and from other genocides such as Armenian, Cambodian, Rwandan and Darfurian), we must avoid smothering, sentimentalizing and renewal narratives in public debates and representations. Instead, we have to fully grasp how “wartime and genocidal histories flow through” young survivors and their intergenerational families. We have to accept that in the aftermath of the Holocaust, young Jewish survivors rebuilt their familial, social and educational/professional life, in spite of the multiple wounds, not because they were actually able to get rid of them and start anew from a “Year Zero” in 1945. Only by accepting the impact of the irreversible destruction of childhood and families in the lives of young survivors, we could write a global, non-sentimentalized history of child survivors of wars and genocides in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

Joanna Beata Michlic is a social and cultural historian specializing in the history of the Holocaust and its memory in Europe, East European Jewish childhood, rescue of Jews and antisemitism and nationalism in Europe. Currently, she is a Visiting Hedda Andersson Professor of Holocaust and Contemporary History at Lund University, Sweden. She is a recipient of many prestigious academic awards and fellowships, including Gerda Henkel Fellowship, 2017 – 2022 and serves as a senior historical consultant on the Claims Conference & WJC Force Task on the Memory of the Holocaust in Poland, and is one of the editors-in-chief of Genealogy journal.
Her most recent publications on childhood are: „Piętno Zagłady: Wojenna i powojenna historia oraz pamięć żydowskich dzieci ocalałych w Polsce” (Collection of essays on Jewish childhood during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, in Polish), Warsaw, Jewish Historical Institute, 2020; and “Mapping the History of Child Holocaust Survivors”, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 32, 2021, 79 -103. Her forthcoming publication Family, War, Identity and Nationhood: Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland will be published in 2025 b in English by Nebraska University Press and in German by Dietz-Verlag publisher. Her book Jewish Family 1939 –Present: History, Representation, and Memory, Brandeis University Press/NEUP, January 2017) made to the Ethical Inquiry list Länk till annan webbplats, öppnas i nytt fönster. of the best books published in 2017 at Brandeis University.