Hanna (Anna) Abakunova is a postdoctoral researcher at Yad Vashem (Israel). She completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield (UK) with the dissertation titled “The Rescue and Self-Help of Jews and Roma in Ukraine during the Holocaust”.

Dr. Abakunova is the co-author of the “Annotated Bibliography on the Genocide and Persecution of Roma and Sinti”, published by IHRA (2016) and the author of other publications on the extermination and rescue of Jews and Roma in Ukraine published in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Romania, and the USA. From 2008 to 2017 she held positions as a research fellow at a number of institutions including the NIOD (Amsterdam), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the New Europe College (Bucharest), Yahad-in Unum (Paris), and Yad Vashem (Jerusalem). In 2017 and 2018 she was an EHRI fellow and conducted her research at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin and Ludwigsburg. In 2019-2021 she held postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Abakunova’s research interests encompass the history and memory of the Holocaust and the persecution of Roma in Ukraine under German and Romanian occupation. These interests include the rescue and self-rescue of Jews and Roma in Ukraine from a comparative perspective, inter-ethnic relations in Transnistria and southern Ukraine, the Holocaust Historiography in the post-Soviet countries, and memory of the persecution of Roma and Jews.

Abakunova’s current project is titled “Helping Ukrainian Jews by International Jewish and Non-Jewish Organizations”. She will focus on the activity of international Jewish and non-Jewish organizations operating in the territories of occupied Soviet Ukraine with an emphasis on former Polish territories – contemporary western Ukrainian cities Lviv and Ternopil, as well as the Ivano-Frankivsk regions.

Harry Legg is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. He is primarily interested in the everyday lives of those who did not describe themselves as Jewish but were labelled as such by Nazi racial law. His primary contention is that pre-1933 life had a profound impact on post-1933 responses to persecution. Nazi ideology did not arrive in a vacuum but had to push aside strong friendships and identities in its quest to achieve a so-called "Volksgemeinschaft". Harry has a recent article on the topic out in the Journal of Holocaust Research, with several others forthcoming in other journals.

Lovro Kralj is an Assistent at the History Department at the University of Rijeka where he also coordinates the Claims Conference University Partnership Program in Holocaust Studies. He specializes in the fields of fascism, antisemitism, and Holocaust studies with a regional focus on Central and South-Eastern Europe.
In his current project, he examines the impact of antisemitic ideology and policies on multiethnic communities in the borderlands of World War II-era Croatia. By utilizing the comparative approach, he aims to examine both cooperation and conflicting visions on how to solve the “Jewish question” among various fascist movements. He investigates how members of these fascist movements, as well as ordinary citizens, interpreted antisemitism and adapted it to their own agendas, thus producing a variety of competing visions of annihilation. Carefully situating antisemitism into a broader perspective of genocidal policies, Kralj focuses on cases where antisemitism become a tool of competitive nation-building among various Holocaust perpetrators. The results were often a proliferation of novel fantasies of ethnic cleansing and destruction of other ethnic and religious groups besides Jews.