Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland
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Book Talk
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland offers an intimate social history of Jewish childhood during and after the Holocaust. Centered on children from German-occupied Poland but informed by experiences across Nazi-occupied Europe, the book highlights the child’s own perspective to illuminate rescue, survival, and relationships with adults under the Nazi occupation. Author Joanna Beata Michlic examines children’s wartime experiences, showing how agency, gender, class, and religious or social background shaped their chances of survival. The book also traces the complex efforts of these young survivors to reclaim both childhood and Jewish identity, revealing the gap between their hopes and the actual opportunities of the immediate post-war period.
Drawing on children’s diaries, letters, testimonies, and memoirs, Michlic illuminates how children experienced and remembered trauma: the destruction of their families, the loss of their pre-war worlds, and the struggle to adapt to a new reality, challenging myths that sentimentalize the children’s endurance and portray the Holocaust as neatly concluded.
Join us for a conversation with Michlic about this book, led by Samuel Kassow.
About the Speakers
Joanna Beata Michlic is a social and cultural historian specializing in the history of the Holocaust and its memorialization, antisemitism and nationalism, and Eastern European Jewish childhood and families in Europe. She is a Senior Honorary Fellow at the UCL Institute of Education and is one of the three editors-in-chief of Genealogy journal. Between January 2023 and October 2024, she was a Visiting Hedda Andersson Professor of Holocaust and Contemporary History at Lund University, Sweden. Michlic is an author of eight books, including Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present, Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Representations of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, and Jewish Family 1939 –Present: History, Representation, and Memory.
Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History, Emeritus at Trinity College, holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS; was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and has been translated into eight languages. White Goat Press recently published his translation of Warsaw Testament by Rokhl Auerbach, which received a National Jewish Book Award. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.