The Solomon Schonfeld Lecture: "Packing for an Unknown Destination": Possession and Dispossession in the Holocaust

Visitors to Auschwitz today cannot help but be struck by the sheer range of objects brought there by the victims of the Holocaust. Ordinary and extraordinary, these things were carefully chosen and illustrate the lives of those subject to Nazi persecution. They tell us about where they were from and also where they imagined they were going. Exploring these possessions helps the historian to uncover the experience of dispossession almost in real time. Reading these objects against other forms of testimony, both visual and verbal, provokes significant methodological difficulties, but also offers the possibility of particularising and personalising an otherwise almost unimaginably enormous cataclysm in European history.

Zoë Waxman is Professor of Holocaust History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Writing the Holocaust: memory, testimony, representation (2006), Anne Frank (2015), and Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (2017), as well as numerous articles relating to the Holocaust and genocide.

Refreshments to follow the lecture.

Booking is not required for in-person attendance, but is required to attend online: us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/2ULvDE0uTKO7XJoMmsARtA