Atina Grossmann will give a talk entitled “Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Rescue in Soviet Central Asia, Iran and India” on January 28, 2015. In this lecture, Professor Grossmann addresses a transnational Holocaust story that has been marginalized in both historiography and commemoration. The majority of the c.250,000 Jews who gathered in Allied Displaced Persons camps following World War II survived because they had been “deported to life” in the Soviet Union. Moreover, Iran became a central site for Jewish relief efforts and thousands of Jewish refugees, “enemy alien” as well as allied Jewish refugees in British India, worked with the Jewish Relief Association in Bombay.
Professor Grossmann seeks to integrate these largely unexamined experiences and lost memories of displacement and trauma into our understanding of the Shoah, and to remap the landscape of persecution, survival, relief and rescue during and after World War II. She also asks how this “Asiatic” experience shaped definitions (and self-definitions) as “survivors” in the immediate postwar context of displacement and up to the present globalization of Holocaust memory.
The talk will be held at the Great Hall, British Medical Association House, Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9JP, from 6:30-8pm. This event is organized by the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck and the Institute for Historical Research. For more information and to register, click here.