Ivan Ermakoff

Professor

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Sociology Department

Conference: Exploring the micro history of the holocaust, December 5-7, 2012, Paris

Over the past years, numerous surveys adopting a micro perspective applied to different terrains of investigation have enhanced our understanding of the holocaust. Focusing on family trajectories, deportation convoys, the histories of a ghetto, a camp, a city or a region, these studies aim to provide a local contribution to the national and European edifice of the history of the holocaust. The purpose of this international conference is to engage and compare the methods deployed in these studies, to investigate the specificity of the scale of observation thus adopted and to assess how the choice of a micro scale contributes to our macro comprehension of the history of the holocaust.

Locations of the conference: Wednesday, December 5: Ecole Normale Supérieure (rue d'Ulm); Thursday, December 6: Shoah Memorial (17 rue Geoffroy l'Asnier); Friday, December 7: Archives Nationales (Pierrefitte sur Seine).

Contact: Annabelle Milleville, Adjointe de direction (Annabelle.Milleville@ens.fr)

Organization committee: Claire Zalc (IHMC), Tal Bruttmann (Ville de Grenoble), Ivan Ermakoff (University of Wisconsin at Madison), Nicolas Mariot (CURAPP-CNRS)

Scientific committee: Omer Bartov (Brown University), Jan Grabowski (University of Ottawa), Jan Gross (Princeton University), Maurice Olender (Ehess, Paris), Dieter Pohl (Universität Klagenfurt), Annette Wieviorka (CNRS-Paris1)

Exploring the micro history of the holocaust

Wednesday, December 5, 2012: École normale supérieure
Issues of focus
9h Welcome
9h30 Opening, Guillaume Bonnet, École normale supérieure
General introduction : Claire Zalc (CNRS-IHMC)
Micro/macro levels of analysis
10h-11h15 Biographical trajectories (Chair-discussant Paul-André Rosental, Sciences Po)
10h00 Christoph Kreutzmuller (Humboldt University Berlin), An Incredible Emigration

10h15 Melissa Jane Taylor (Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State), The Katz Family’s Escape: A Micro History Examined

10h30 Liora Israël (EHESS-CMH), Injured identities. The Paths of Three Jewish lawyers in Occupied France analyzed through their diaries

Break: 11h15-11h45

11h45-13h00 Reflecting upon group boundaries (Chair-discussant: Claire Zalc, CNRS-IHMC)
11h45 Kenneth Waltzer (Michigan State University), Moving Together, Moving Alone: The Story of Boys on a Transport from Auschwitz to Buchenwald

12h00 Henriette Rika Benveniste (University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece), For a micro history of camp survivors: The Salonika Jews in Feldafing

12h15 Alina Skibinska (USHMM, Washington D.C. and Polish Center for Holocaust Research, Polish Academy of Sciences), Fate of the Jews in the small town of Szczebrzeszyn during the years 1939-1945

Lunch break: 13h00-14h30

14h30-16h00 Two panels

1 - Spaces (Chair-discussant Nicolas Mariot, CNRS-CURAPP) : sale des Actes
14h30 Birte Klarzyk (Cologne University), Life in a ghetto house. Social impacts of the spatial segregation of Cologne’s Jewish population between 1938 and 1942 – A case study

14h45 Ilaria Pavan (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa), Space and deportation, space and escape. For a micro–history of interned foreign Jews in Italy (1940–1945)

15h00 Leon Saltiel (University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki), The Destruction of Salonika’s Jewish Cemetery

15h15 Silvia Goldbaum (Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, TU Berlin), Neighbours relationships and the arrest of Jews in Denmark

Break: 16h15-16h45

2 - Ghettos: a distinct space? (Chair-discussant Jean-Luc Pinol, Ecole Normale supérieure de Lyon), salle Dussane 14h30 Svenja Bethke (University of Hamburg), Definitions of 'Criminality' and 'Law' in the Jewish Ghetto. The Perspective of the Jewish Councils

14h45 Ingo Loose (Institute of Centemporary History Munich-Berlin), Ghettos as microcosms. Pictures taken by Jewish photographers as a source to the Holocaust
15h00 Katarzyna Person (The Center for Jewish History, New York), Jewish Police in the Warsaw Ghetto. Microhistory of the margins

15h15 Lenore J Weitzman (George Mason University) and Zvi Gitelman (University of Michigan), Individual Decisions and Collective Fates in Belorussian Ghettos

Break: 16h15-16h45

16h45-18h45 Micro history shedding light on macro events (Chair-discussant: Christophe Charle, IHMC-Université de Paris 1) – Salle Dussane
16h45 Tim Cole (University of Bristol), Micro histories, micro geographies: Budapest, 1944 and scales of analysis

17h00 Martin Dean (USHMM, Washington DC), Micro History as Macro History: Understanding the Holocaust from the Bottom Up – A Case Study of 1,142 Ghettos

17h15 Havi Dreifuss (Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem), Exploring the Micro History of the Holocaust. Religious Life in Poland during the Holocaust: Between the Micro and the Macro

17h30 Tal Bruttmann (Ville de Grenoble), Echirolles, August 7 1944: Three executions

19h Cocktail at the Ecole normale supérieure

Thursday, December 6, 2012: Mémorial de la Shoah
Face-to-face: victims and perpetrators
9h00. Welcome of the participants
9h30-10h00 Keynote presentation by Jan Grabowski (University of Ottawa) « New methodological perspectives in micro-research on the Shoah »
10h00-12h00 Interactions (Chair-discussant Florent Brayard, EHESS-CRH)
10h00 Froukje Demant (University of Amsterdam), Living in abnormal normality? The daily relations of Jews and non-Jews in the German-Dutch border region during the Third Reich

10h15 Jean-Charles Szurek (CNRS-ISP), Jews, Poles and Germans in the Lukow region

10h30 Carlo Greppi (University of Turin), Bystanders or participants? Civilians facing racial persecution in Turin (1943-1945)

10h45 Daniel Uziel (Yad Vashem), Jewish Slave Workers in the German Aviation Industry

11h00 Judit Molnar (University of Szeged, Hungary), “Everyone has an equal right to life”. Gendarmes saving Jews among gendarmes deporting Jews in 1944

Lunch break: 12h00-13h30

13h30-14h45 Face-to-face (Chair-discussant Tal Bruttmann, Ville de Grenoble)
13h30h Tomasz Frydel (University of Toronto), A Historical Forensics of Jewish Refugees in Mielec County: Toward a Social History of Rescue

13h45 Vladimir Solonari (University of Central Florida), On the Persistence of Moral Judgment: Local Perpetrators in the Districts of Golta and Berezovca, Transnistria as Seen by the Victims, Bystanders, and Perpetrators Themselves

14h00 Wolf Gruner (University of Southern California), Individual Defiance and Protest. A Reassessment of Jewish Responses towards Persecution in Nazi Germany

Break: 14h45-15h15

Arrests, executions, acts of killing
15h15-16h30 Acts of killing (Chair-discussant Christian Ingrao, CNRS-IHTP)
15h15 Markus Roth (University of Giessen), The Murder Of The Jews In Ostrów Mazowiecka In November 1939

15h30 Alexandru Muraru (Alexandru Ioan Cuza university of Iasi, Romania), The first Massacres of Jews in the Romanian Holocaust. Level of Decision, Genocidal Strategy and Killing Methods in the Dorohoi and Galati Pogroms (June-July, 1940)

15h45 Nicolas Mariot (CNRS-CURAPP), Bypassing Birkenau, Autumn 1942

Break: 16h30-17h00

17h00-18h15 Imaginaries confronting reality (Chair-discussant Maurice Olender, EHESS)

17h00 Johann Chapoutot (University Grenoble II-Institut Universitaire de France), German sanitary action and the Jews living in the General Government: biomedical imaginary and the legitimization of Nazi crimes

17h15 Barbara Engelking (Polish Academy of Sciences), Dreams in the times of the Shoah

17h30 Amos Goldberg (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Rumors in the Warsaw Ghetto: A case study in the Cultural History of the Jews in the Holocaust

Friday, December 7, 2012: Archives nationales (site de Pierrefitte-sur-Seine)
The material for shifting scales: sources
9h00. Welcome of the participants
9h30 Keynote presentation by Annette Wieviorka (CNRS-IRICE), « New trends in the treatment of testimonies»
10h-11h45 Judicial Archives (Chair-discussant Jan Grabowski, University of Ottawa)
10h Liviu Carare (Institute of History, Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Czernowitz Ghetto (1941-1942). A Perspective of War Crimes Trials

10h15 Diana Dumitru (Moldova State Pedagogical University Ion Creanga), To Trust or Not to Trust? An Analysis of Soviet Postwar Investigation and Trial Documents for the History of the Holocaust

10h30 Andrew Kornbluth (University of California, Berkeley), “There Are Many Cains Among Us” Judging Wartime Crimes
Against Jews at the Regional Courts of Warsaw and Siedlce in Poland, 1946-1949

Break: 11h30-11h45

11h45-13h00 New collections, new sources (Chair-discussant Sophie Coeuré, Université Paris-Diderot)
11h45 Diane Afoumado (USHMM, Washington, DC), How can we use the ITS collection to shed light on the history of the Holocaust?

12h Stefan Ionescu (Clark University), The Challenges of Assessing the Sabotage of Aryanization (Romanianization) in World War II Bucharest: Sources and Interpretations

12h15 Marta Janczewska (Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Polish Center for Holocaust Research), Medical documents as a source to The Warsaw ghetto history studies

Lunch Break: 13h – 14h30

14h30-16h15 The relationship to testimonies (Chair-discussant Annette Wieviorka, CNRS-IRICE)
14h30 Elissa Mailander (Centre d’histoire de Sciences-po), A multitude of witnesses: probing the memory of a hanging in the Maïdanek camp (1943)

14h45 Jared McBride (University of California, Los Angeles), Microhistory and the Holocaust in Olevs’k: Ethics, Archives and Memory

15h00 Hannah Pollin-Galay (Tel Aviv University), To Accuse, To Chronicle or to Compare? Micro-History through the Eyes of the Witness: A Case Study of Lithuanian Jewish Testimony 15h15 Joanna Michlic (Brandeis University and International History Department, LSE), The Symbolic Categorization of Dedicated Polish Women Rescuers, as Violators of the Ethno-Nationalistic Cultural Code and its Everyday Practice, During the Second World War and its Aftermath

Break 15h45 – 16h15

16h30-18h00 Witnesses and archives: which dialogues? (Chair-discussant Sarah Gensburger, CNRS-ISP)
16h30 Ivan Jablonka (Université du Maine-Collège de France), Searching for missing sources: methodological issues

16h45 Jeffrey Wallen (Hampshire College), The Witness against the Archive

17h00 Audrey Kichelewski (University of Strasbourg), A Lost World? The Children of Lublin: a Society of descendants of Polish Jews in France

18h00 Conclusions: Ivan Ermakoff (University of Wisconsin - Madison)