This symposium explores communal violence in the destruction of ethnic communities in Eastern Europe during World War II, and the memory of it in remaking and building national identities after the war. Its conception is inspired by recent scholarly work on the commission and memory of Nazi occupation policies in that region, including the work of Omer Bartov, Wendy Lower and Joshua Rubenstein’s edited collection, The Unknown Black Book: the Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories. As Omer Bartov has recently noted, “Despite the increasingly common—and disturbingly comforting—image of the Holocaust as an event of impersonal, “clean,” and distant industrial murder, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Jews, the majority of whom were children, women, the sick, and the elderly, were murdered in full view of the populations in whose midst they had lived: in Eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Western Russia. The Holocaust in these regions was very much a communal genocide that left its imprint on all surviving inhabitants of these localities…The impact of these extraordinarily savage massacres carried over both to people’s daily existence and to their memories.”

The one-day symposium invites expressions of interest for papers from scholars engaged in research on ethnic communities and violence in Eastern Europe. These topics include but are not limited to the following:

- Inter-ethnic violence in Eastern Europe before 1939
- Local complicity and collaboration
- Eastern Europe and the geography of genocide
- Intimate others: loyalty, beneficiaries and compassion
- Eyewitnesses to violence: testimony as evidence
- Beneficiaries and Perpetrators: rethinking categories
- Jews in contemporary Eastern Europe: memories of life and destruction
- Race, class and property in economies of genocide
- Historians’ interpretation of sources of violence
- Reconstructing ethnicity after 1945

Convener: Simone Gigliotti, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand Please e-mail an abstract with title, 300-word synopsis, and a brief biography to: simone.gigliotti@vuw.ac.nz Due date for abstracts is Feb 15, 2009. Individuals will be notified of the outcome of their submission by March 1, 2009. Funds will not be provided for travel. Publication of selected papers will be considered.

For more information contact: Simone Gigliotti simone.gigliotti@vuw.ac.nz