Conference Announcement:

Beyond Numbers, Beyond Names:

The Experience of Holocaust Victims

April 2 - 4, 2006

 

Youngstown State University

Youngstown, OH

 

Much history of the Holocaust has focused on the perpetrators of the genocide; particularly what was done to the victims and why. This conference addresses victims and their experiences of the Holocaust.  Keynote addresses will be given by Professor Dalia Ofer of Hebrew University and Dr. Tim Cole of University of Bristol. There will be a performance of the one man show REMNANTS by its creator Dr. Henry Greenspan, as well as a screening of "Diamonds in the Snow", a documentary about Hidden Children and a discussion with the director, a child survivor. Panels will discuss ghetto life, life and death inside the concentration camps, life outside the walls of the camps and ghettos, Children and the Holocaust, The experience of Jewish displaced persons and Jewish life in post-war Germany, the use of victim testimony as a means of telling their story, and the way in which victims have memorialized their own experiences.

The conference will be held on the campus of Youngstown State University in Youngstown, OH on April 2-4, 2006. For more information about the conference, please contact Dr. Helene J. Sinnreich at hjsinnreich@ysu.edu or by telephone at 330-941-1603.

 

 

Conference Hotel: The conference hotel is the Holiday Inn Metroplex in Girard, OH. The conference rate for the hotel is $75 for a single room and $85 for a double room. There will be a bus which will take conference participants from the hotel to campus. Reservations can be made by calling 1-888-447-0606 and asking for the Youngstown State University group rate. This rate will not be available after March 6, 2006.

 

 

Parking:  Parking is available on Sunday in the M-24 lot next to McDonalds and in the Wick Avenue Parking Deck on Monday and Tuesday.

 

 

Conference Schedule

 

Sunday, April 2, 2006

DeBartlo Hall Auditorim, DeBartlo Hall

1 pm - Opening Ceremony

                        Opening Remarks by Provost Robert Herbert 

                        Presentation of 2006 Janusz Korczak award to Dr. Saul Friedman

1:30 pm - Keynote Speaker Tim Cole (University of Bristol) 'The return of György Andràs M. and other (exceptional?) stories: Social and cultural histories of the Holocaust'

3 pm - Performance of "Remnants" by Henry Greenspan (University of Michigan)

Monday, April 3, 2006

9 am – 10:30 am – Panel I

 

Panel IA: Ghetto Life

Jones Room, Kilcawley Center

 

Robert Moses Shapiro (Brooklyn College) The Strange Case of Shlomo Frank's Diary from the Lodz Ghetto

Irena Kohn (University of Toronto) Confession and Community in Arnold Mostowicz's With A Yellow Star and A Red Cross

Joanna Podolska (University of Lodz) German, Polish, Jewish: Three stories of Survival

Panel IB: Children and the Holocaust

Humphrey Room/President’s Suite, Kilcawley Center

 

Boaz Cohen (Western Galilee College and Bar Ilan University) Children as the Ultimate Witnesses: Collecting Testimonies from Children Survivors 1945 – 1948.
Jolene Chu (JWHESF/CUNY Graduate Center) Nip It in the Bud: The Impact of Nazi Persecution on Jehovah’s Witness Children
Kenneth Waltzer (Michigan State University) A Tale of Three Young Children at Buchenwald and Belsen, 1944-1945.

 

10:30 – 11 am – coffee break

Chestnut Room, Kilcawley Center

 

11 am – 12:30 pm - Panel II

 

Panel II: Life and Death in the Concentration Camps

Humphrey Room, Presidents Suite, Kilcawley Center

 

Joseph Robert White (University of Maryland) Round Up the Editors! The Persecution of Three Munich Journalists at the Early Camps of Ettstrasse and Stadelheim

Stephen Feinstein (University of Minnesota) Hangman's Humor: Satirical and Humorous Art from the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Holocaust

Mark A. Mengerink (The University of Toledo) Jewish Suicide in Concentration and Death Camps

 

12:30 am – 2 pm – lunch break

Conference participants may choose to utilize the tables in the Chestnut Room for eating lunches brought from home or bought at the Dining facilities in Kilcawley Center

 

2 pm – 3:15 pm - Keynote Address

Chestnut Room, Kilcawley Center

 

Dalia Ofer (Hebrew University) “The Political and the Social: Towards a Comprehensive interpretation of the Holocaust”

 

3:30 pm – 5:30 pm - Panel III

 

Panel III: An Analysis of Victim Documentation

Humphrey Room/President’s Suite, Kilcawley Center

 

Miriam Intrator (Leo Baeck Institute) “The cases under the bunks in the concentration camp were real treasure chests”: Books and Readers in Terezín

Carson Phillips (York University) Behind the Walls of Therestienstadt: Survival and Defiance Documented

Veronika Zangl (University of Vienna) Preparing Lists, Preparing Evidence, Preparing the Future. About the Interconnections between Historiography and Story-telling.

Gunnar S. Paulsson (University of Toronto) The Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts: Parsing biographies of escape and hiding during the Holocaust

 

5:30 – 8 pm – dinner break

 

8 pm - Evening Program

Chestnut Room, Kilcawley Center

 

Screening of "Diamonds in the Snow" about hidden children and talk with Film Director and child survivor Mira Binford (Quinnipac University)

Tuesday, April 4, 2006

9 am – 11 am – Panel IV

 

Panel IVA: Outside the walls: Jewish and non-Jewish encounters

McKay A, Beeghly College of Education

 

Natalia Aleksiun (New York University) Narratives under Siege. Polish Jewish intelligentsia and antisemism of the late 1930s

Stephen J. Gaies (University of Northern Iowa) Problematizing Victimhood: Representing the Experience of Irène Némirovsky

Martin Dean (USHMM) More than just neighbors? Encounters between Jews and Gentiles in a genocidal relationship
Zoe Waxman (University of London) Jewish Women in Hiding During the Holocaust

Panel IVB: From Generation to Generation: Telling Personal and Family History
McKay B, Beeghly College of Education

 

Jack Nusan Porter Parents as Partisans: Interviews with my Soviet Father and Mother
Roslyn Abt Schindler (Wayne State University) (Re)vision of a Life: My Mother's Holocaust Story

Jaye A. Houston Last Moments: Mothering, Survivor-Grandmothering, and the Holocaust

11 am – 12:30 pm - Panel V

 

Panel Va: Jewish life in Post-War Germany: The Experiences of Displaced Persons
McKay B, Beeghly College of Education

 

Thomas Pegelow (Grinell College) “And from the Ruins of the German Cities…Emerges the Poison Gas of Wild Hatred for the Jews…”: Holocaust  Survivors, Anti-Semitic Discourse, and the Remaking of Jewishness and Germanness in the U.S. Occupational Zone in Germany.
Sonja M. Hedgepeth (Middle Tennessee State University) A Stranger in Her German Homeland: Jutta Pelz-Bergt’s The First Years After the Holocaust
Laurie A. Whitcomb (Washington State University) Reassessing the Complexity of Marriage and Motherhood in the Displaced Person Camps: Bergen Belsen, a Case Study

Panel Vb: Victim Holocaust Memorialization
McKay A, Beeghly College of Education

 

Daniel Magilow (University of Tennessee and Resnick Scholar at USHMM)“Yizkor Books, Photography, and the Rhetoric of Redemption”

Krista Hegburg (Columbia University) Unknown Holocaust: “Accusatory Song” and Roma history in the Czech Republic

Howard Potter (London Metropolitan University) “From the Remnants to the Writing of Lives”

12:30 – 1:30 pm – Lunch break

1:30 pm – 3 pm – Panel VI

 

Panel VI: Diaries as illuminations (cross-listed with Quest, the Youngstown State University student and graduate student conference)
Samuel DiRocco (Youngstown State University) An Assessment of Salonikan Jewry Under the Direction of Chief Rabbi Dr. Zvi Koretz
Eryk Tahvonen (Georgia State University) The Crisis of Imagination: Perpetrators as depicted in Holocaust Diaries
Chaya Kessler (Youngstown State University) “Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter”: Jewish Resistance in Vilna in World War II

Kylene T. Edson (University of North Carolina – Charlotte) Holocaust Drama: The Preservation of a Culture.