Conference date: 23-25 April, 2023 (Sunday-Tuesday) | Location: POLIN Museum, Warsaw, Poland | Applications in English until 27 November, 2022.

The conference’s aim is to identify and describe the Jewish experience of life amidst the imminent threat of destruction during the Holocaust. The conference marks the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Organisers, including two EHRI partners:  

• POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
• Polish Center for Holocaust Research, Polish Academy of Sciences
• Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

How did information about mass killings spread? How did Jews adapt to extreme conditions? What was their day-to-day life like under these conditions? What were their experiences and emotions and awareness of their further fate?

Although the period of Nazi persecution as a whole was an extreme situation for Jews, we have chosen the most extreme experiences of European Jews during the Shoah as the theme of this conference. We are interested in the experience of extreme situations, such as:

• daily life in the ghettos during German deportation operations,
• the experience of surviving mass execution,
• participation in death marches,
• living in bunkers, hiding places, in forests, and family camps,
• the experience of traveling on deportation transports and escaping from them
• and finally, daily life in German transit camps, labor and concentration camps, and death camps, including work in the Sonderkommando.

More info and applications

Image: thanks to POLIN Museum