Holocaust (Audio)

Archivist Regina Longo (Brown University) joins UCSB’s Harold Marcuse (Department of History) for a discussion of Claude Lanzmann’s final film Shoah: Four Sisters (2018), a four-part miniseries that was screened over two days at the Pollock Theater. Longo’s work includes extensive restoration of Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary footage of testimonials from the Holocaust, and in conversation with Marcuse she offers deeper insight into the history of the film and the women it concerns. Longo explains how Lanzmann’s Shoah was initially funded and produced, how hundreds of hours of footage is being carefully restored from original prints and made available online, and how Four Sisters both influences and is situated in a legacy of film, legal testimony, memoir, and other post-war efforts to represent the un-representable horror of the Shoah. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34842]

Despite the explosive growth of Holocaust studies, scholars of Nazi Germany and the Shoah long neglected gender as an analytical category. It wasn’t until 1984 when the essay collection When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany raised awareness of women’s experiences under fascism. It explored women’s double jeopardy as females and as Jews. In this lecture, Marion Kaplan, one of the editors the publication, takes the audience on a historical tour of her research, from the first workshops raising questions to the first publications providing answers. Since then, the gender perspective has provided significant insight into our understanding of Jewish life in Nazi Germany and during the Holocaust. Kaplan concludes her talk with a forward look at new areas of research that highlight women’s and gender studies. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34018]

The suite of international conventions and declarations about genocide, human rights, and refugees after the WWII is known as the “human rights revolution.” It is regarded as humanizing international affairs by implementing the lessons of the Holocaust. In this presentation, Dirk Moses, Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney, questions this rosy picture by investigating how persecuted peoples have invoked the Holocaust and made analogies with Jews to gain recognition as genocide victims. Such attempts rarely succeed and have been roundly condemned as cheapening the Holocaust memory, but how and why does genocide recognition require groups to draw such comparisons? Does the human rights revolution and image of the Holocaust as the paradigmatic genocide humanize postwar international affairs as commonly supposed? Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34019]

What does it mean to be born in a concentration camp, arguably one of the most inhospitable places on earth? Eva Clarke was one of three “miracle babies” who saw the light of day in KZ Mauthausen in Austria. Nine days after her birth, the Second World War ended. As a newborn, Eva’s chances of survival were extremely slim; against all odds, she lived, making her and her mother Anka the only survivors of their extended family. In 1948, they emigrated from Prague to the UK and settled in Cardiff, Wales. Eva regularly addresses audiences, and her remarkable story has been featured in the British and American media. She and her mother are among the protagonists of Wendy Holden’s book Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope (Harper, 2015). Series: "The Library Channel" [Show ID: 32849]

What does it mean to be born in a concentration camp, arguably one of the most inhospitable places on earth? Eva Clarke was one of three “miracle babies” who saw the light of day in KZ Mauthausen in Austria. Nine days after her birth, the Second World War ended. As a newborn, Eva’s chances of survival were extremely slim; against all odds, she lived, making her and her mother Anka the only survivors of their extended family. In 1948, they emigrated from Prague to the UK and settled in Cardiff, Wales. Eva regularly addresses audiences, and her remarkable story has been featured in the British and American media. She and her mother are among the protagonists of Wendy Holden’s book Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope (Harper, 2015). Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 32849]

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explores the creation of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto and its multimedia narrative exhibition honoring the lives of those who have passed. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a professor emerita at New York University, is also the chief curator of the Core Exhibition at the POLIN Museum. She is presented here by the Jewish Studies Program and the Library at UC San Diego. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 32848]

In describing his new book, “East West Street” author Philippe Sands looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university in a now-obscure city that had once been known as “the little Paris of Ukraine,” a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. It is also a spellbinding family memoir, as Sands traces the mysterious story of his grandfather, as he maneuvered through Europe in the face of Nazi atrocities. Sands is presented by the Holocaust Living History Workshop and the Library at UC San Diego.

Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 32847]

In his highly-acclaimed book, The Nazis Next Door, Eric Lichtblau tells the shocking and shameful story of how America became a safe haven for Hitler's men. Lichtblau explains here how it was possible for thousands of Nazis -- from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich -- to move to the U.S. after WWII, and quietly settle into new lives as Americans. Some of them gained entry as self-styled refugees, while others enjoyed the help and protection of the CIA, the FBI, and the military, who put them to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers. Lichtblau's book draws from once-secret government records and interviews, telling the full story of the Nazi scientists brought to America, and the German spies and con men who followed them and lived for decades as Americans. He is presented by the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UC San Diego. Series: "Library Channel" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 31542]

The International Tracing Service, one of the world’s largest Holocaust-related archival repositories, holds millions of documents detailing the many forms of persecution that transpired during the Nazi era and their continuing repercussions. Based on her recently published book, "Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research," Suzanne Brown-Fleming provides new insights into human decision-making in genocidal settings, the factors that drive it, and its far-reaching consequences. Brown-Fleming is director of the Visiting Scholar Programs of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is presented here by the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UC San Diego.

Series: "Writers" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 31541]

Omer Bartov, the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and German Studies at Brown University, explores the dynamics of the horrifying genocidal violence which took place in the East Galician town of Buczacz— following the German conquest of the region in 1941— and its subsequent erasure from local memory. For centuries, Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews coexisted in the region, but tragically, by the time the town was liberated in 1944, the entire Jewish population had been murdered by the Nazis. They were assisted by local Ukrainians, who then ethnically cleansed the region of the Polish population. Bartov is presented as part of the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UC San Diego. Series: "Writers" [Humanities] [Show ID: 31540]