The Role of Auschwitz in Holocaust Narratives – May 5, 2025, Toronto

Click HERE to register for the Livestream!

  
The Role of Auschwitz in Holocaust Narratives Conference 2025 will bring together leading international scholars to critically examine how Auschwitz has shaped survivor narratives and influenced collective memory. Marking the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation, the conference coincides with the Toronto exhibition of Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). Through four interdisciplinary panels, the conference will explore a range of themes, from the spatial and material realities of Auschwitz to the linguistic, gendered and cultural frameworks that shape survivor testimonies. Scholars from institutions in North America and Europe will share their latest research, shedding light on how Auschwitz has been remembered, represented and narrated across different survivor communities and historical contexts. 

Rooted in two decades of the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program, this international gathering seeks to deepen our understanding of the camp’s enduring significance and the critical importance of survivor narratives in shaping how we remember Auschwitz and, more broadly, the Holocaust.

Monday, May 5, 2025

9:00 AM - 9:15 AM
Opening remarks from Naomi Azrieli, O.C., DPhil, Chair and CEO, Azrieli Foundation

Panel 1: Auschwitz as Physical Space

9:15 AM - 10:45 AM

Chair: Carson Phillips, Gratz College; Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program, Azrieli Foundation

Carson Phillips (PhD) is the manager of academic initiatives at the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program. He earned a doctorate and a master’s degree from York University and a diploma in Holocaust and genocide education from OISE (University of Toronto). Phillips has held fellowships with the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous and USHMM (Hess Faculty Seminar). His publications include a chapter in The Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquiries into the Presence and Absence of Men (2020), and his forthcoming book chapter in Teaching Holocaust Geographies: Approaches for Integrating Inquiry into Space, Persecution and Civic Engagement will be published in 2026. Phillips is adjunct faculty at Yeshiva University and Gratz College, as well as a Canadian delegate to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and incoming chair (2026) of the Academic Working Group.

Panelists:

• Emily Roche (Maynooth University, Ireland)  
  The Structure of Survival: Experiences of Builders in Auschwitz

  Emily Roche is a Holocaust historian with a focus on the experiences and careers of Jewish architects. She received her PhD in history from Brown University and currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at Maynooth University. Her work explores how architectural networks functioned to both resist and uphold restrictive views of national belonging through the biographies of Helena and Szymon Syrkus, two prominent Jewish Polish modernist architects. Roche’s research also provides a history of architectural labour in the Auschwitz camp system from the perspective of architect prisoners. She has recently published articles on suicide in the Warsaw ghetto and on architectural networks in Poland during the Holocaust.
  

• Helga Thorson (University of Victoria, Canada)  
  Proximity and Perspective: The Prisoner Revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau

  Helga Thorson is a professor of German studies and a faculty member in the Holocaust studies graduate program at the University of Victoria, the only program of its kind in Canada. Her research focuses mainly on the Holocaust and early twentieth-century German and Austrian literature and cultures. Her recent book publications include After the Holocaust: Human Rights and Genocide Education in the Approaching Post-Witness Era (co-edited with Charlotte Schallié and Andrea van Noord) and Grete Meisel-Hess: The New Woman and the Sexual Crisis. Thorson co-developed and runs the I-witness Field School, a course on Holocaust memorialization that takes place in Europe. She has received numerous teaching awards throughout her career, including a 3M National Teaching Fellowship awarded by the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) and 3M Canada.

• Svetlana Ushakova (USC Shoah Foundation, USA) 
  Geographic Perception of Auschwitz in Survivors Memoirs and Testimonies 

  Svetlana Ushakova holds an MA and PhD in Russian history from Novosibirsk State University and an MLIS from San José State University. She is an archivist at the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, where she began working in 2014 as an indexer and thesaurus specialist. Since 2019, she has been contributing to the Dimensions in Testimony program, which facilitates lifelike conversations with pre-recorded video interviews of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides.

10:45 AM - 11:15 AM
Coffee Break

Panel 2: Auschwitz as Gendered Space

11:15 AM - 12:45 PM

Chair: Sara Horowitz, Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, York University

Sara R. Horowitz is a professor of humanities and comparative literature and the former director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. She is the author of the award-winning Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction and the co-editor of Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Post-War French Jewish Writing and Hans Günther Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy (2016), which was awarded the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. She served as the senior founding editor of the first two series of the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program. A long-time member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she received the 2022 Holocaust Educational Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award and was recently elected to the Royal Society of Canada in recognition of her groundbreaking writing on Holocaust literature and gender.

Panelists:

• Charlotte Gibbs (USC Shoah Foundation, USA)  
  Women Guards, Non-Human Animals and Memoirs of Female Violence in Auschwitz

  Charlotte Gibbs is a PhD student in history at the University of Southern California, supervised by Wolf Gruner. Her PhD research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the USC Van Hunnick History Department. In her research, she explores gender and sexual violence in concentration camps and killing sites. She also holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Toronto.  
  

• Barnabas Balint (Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK)
  Comparing the Representation of Auschwitz in Memoirs and Interviews from Hungarian Holocaust Survivors

  Barnabas Balint completed his doctorate in history at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, researching the wartime generation of Jewish youth in Hungary. He has held fellowships at the USHMM Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, the University of Southern California, the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London and at Yad Vashem under the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Conny Kristel Fellowship. He has published widely on Holocaust history, with research articles in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, European Review of History, Jewish Culture and History and The Journal of Holocaust Research. 
  

• Hannah Wilson (Nottingham Trent University, UK)
  The Materiality of Auschwitz in the Memoirs of Felix Opatowski and Nate Leipciger: A Forensic Re-Reading

  Dr. Hannah Wilson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester and a former teaching fellow in Holocaust history at the University of Leicester. In 2023 she obtained her PhD from Nottingham Trent University for her thesis on the material memory of the Sobibor death camp, where she participated in a series of archaeological excavations. Wilson has published numerous articles and chapters on the subject of Holocaust memory and is the co-editor of the volume New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust. In addition to her academic studies, Wilson works as the outreach officer for the Holocaust charity Generation 2 Generation and is the former content director of World ORT’s Music and the Holocaust project.

12:45 PM - 1:45 PM
Lunch

Panel 3: Auschwitz as Linguistic Space

1:45 PM - 3:15 PM

Chair: Gavin Wiens, University of Toronto; Advisor to the ROM’s Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away. , Toronto exhibit

Gavin Wiens teaches the history of modern Europe, Germany, the Holocaust, and war and society at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the German army and politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the ideological indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and its participation in the Holocaust. He served as an expert advisor to the Royal Ontario Museum for the exhibition Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away., and he is currently working with the Toronto Holocaust Museum to offer training to educators who plan to visit the exhibition with their students.

Panelists: 

• Lia Deromedi (Butte College, USA)  
  Here There is No Why: Auschwitz as Metonym for the Holocaust in Survivors’ Literary Reckoning with Memory

  Dr. Lia Deromedi teaches English at Butte College in Northern California. Her doctoral work with Robert Eaglestone in Holocaust literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, focused on child protagonists in survivor fiction. Deromedi’s publications include “Holocaust Literature” for Oxford Bibliographies’ Jewish Studies and “‘Which self?’: Jewish Identity in the Child-Centred Holocaust Novel” in Boundaries, Identity and Belonging in Modern Judaism. As a creative writer, Deromedi also aims to share untold Holocaust stories with her novels, The Beauty Still Left and We Are the Ghosts, as well as other works in progress.

• Laura Miñano Mañero (Universitat de Valencia, Spain)
  Gendered Otherness: Linguistic Aggression Against Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau

  Laura Miñano Mañero is an assistant professor in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Valencia. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English philology and translation studies from the University of Valencia, where she also earned a PhD in sociolinguistics, focusing on language contact and linguistic aggression in Nazi concentration camps. Her research focuses on translation in extreme contexts, post-memory and Holocaust studies, particularly examining gender and intergenerational trauma. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at Yad Vashem and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich under the Conny Kristel Fellowship, supported by the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure.
  

• Michael Polgar (Pennsylvania State, USA) 
  Hungarian Survivor Memoirs: Devastation and Rediscovery

  Michael Ferenc Polgar (PhD) is a professor of sociology at Penn State University. He received a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree from Virginia Tech and a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University. Polgar is a child and grandchild of Hungarian-born Holocaust survivors Steven, Sophie and Ferenc Polgar. He has a record of published research on Holocaust education, families, health care and homelessness. With Dr. Suki John, he created an open educational resource as part of the Sh’ma project called The Holocaust: Remembrance, Respect, and Resilience.

3:15 PM - 3:45 PM
Coffee Break

Panel 4: Auschwitz as Focused Memory Narratives

3:45 PM - 5:15 PM

Chair: Debórah Dwork, Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, The CUNY Graduate Center

Debórah Dwork is the director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the CUNY Graduate Center. Pathbreaking in her early oral recording of Holocaust child survivors, Dwork weaves their narratives into the history she writes. Her award-winning books include Children With A Star; Flight from the Reich; Auschwitz; and Holocaust. Her most recent work, Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis, was published this year. Dwork is also a leading authority on university education in this field: she envisioned and actualized the first doctoral program specifically in Holocaust history and genocide studies. Dwork has received numerous honours, including the Distinguished Achievement Award in Holocaust Studies (2024) from the Holocaust Educational Foundation, the Annetje Fels-Kupferschmidt Award (2022) bestowed by the Dutch Auschwitz Committee and the International Network of Genocide Scholars’ Lifetime Achievement Award (2020).

Panelists: 

• Alicja Jarkowska (Jagiellonian University, Poland)
  Narratives of Auschwitz from Krakow’s Jews

  Alicja Jarkowska (PhD) is a historian working at the Institute of History of the Jagiellonian University. She is the co-editor of two volumes of the Ringelblum Archive and has published widely on collaboration and crime during the Holocaust. Her book Wymuszona współpraca czy zdrada? Wokół kolaboracji Żydów w okupowanym Krakowie (Forced Cooperation or Treason? On Jewish Collaboration in Occupied Krakow) was the 2019 winner of the T. Strzembosz Prize for the best book on recent Polish history. Recent publications include “Powojenne mapy i plany krakowskiego getta” in Studia Żydowskie. Almanach (2024) and “The Jewish Aid Agency in the Generalgouvernement in Occupied Kraków, 1942–44” in More Than Parcels: Wartime Aid for Jews in Nazi-Era Camps and Ghettos (2022). She is an associate at the Center for the Study on the History and Culture of Krakow Jews and the leader of several projects researching Krakow Jews in the Generalgouvernement.
  

• Heléna Huhák (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary)
  Diary Writers and Survivors: Images of Auschwitz in the Hungarian Jewish Testimonies

  Heléna Huhák (PhD) is a historian specializing in personal accounts of the Hungarian Holocaust, everyday life and the social history of Hungarian deportees in concentration and forced labour camps. She is a research fellow at the Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities in Budapest. In 2023 she received fellowships at the USHMM Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and at Yad Vashem for her research on Hungarian Jewish camp diaries. Her recent publications include “The Taste of Freedom, the Smell of Captivity: Sensory Narratives of the Hungarian Camp of Bergen–Belsen” in the Journal of Contemporary History. 
  

• Lara Raabe (Goethe University, Germany)
  The “Gypsy Family Camp” in Auschwitz-Birkenau in Survivors’ Memories

  Lara Raabe is a historian and PhD candidate at Goethe University and the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. She currently holds a scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Her doctoral research focuses on the legal reappraisal of the crimes committed against Roma and Sinti at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Previously, she worked at the Research Centre on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University and for the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma. Lara Raabe is also the founder of the online platform called The Other Side of Persecution. Testimonies of the 19th and 20th Centuries Revisited.

5:15 PM
Closing Remarks