‘Packing for an Unknown Destination’: Possession and Dispossession in the Holocaust

Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies Solomon Schonfeld Lecture

‎Zoë Waxman is Professor of Holocaust History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Writing the Holocaust: memory, testimony, representation (2006), Anne Frank (2015), and Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (2017), as well as numerous articles relating to the Holocaust and genocide.

Visitors to Auschwitz today cannot help but be struck by the sheer range of objects brought there by the victims of the Holocaust. Ordinary and extraordinary, these things were carefully chosen and illustrate the lives of those subject to Nazi persecution. They tell us about where they were from and also where they imagined they were going. Exploring these possessions helps the historian to uncover the experience of dispossession almost in real time. Reading these objects against other forms of testimony, both visual and verbal, provokes significant methodological difficulties, but also offers the possibility of particularising and personalising an otherwise almost unimaginably enormous cataclysm in European history.

Tuesday 2nd December

18:00

This lecture will be a hybrid session which will be accessible both online and in person in the Catherine Lewis Lecture Room, Clarendon Institute, Walton Street, Oxford OX1 2HG.

Register to join online here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/2ULvDE0uTKO7XJoMmsARtA#/registration