Lennert Savenije (the Netherlands), post-doctoral researcher Radboud University Nijmegen, ‘Jewish working camps in the Netherlands, under the supervision of the Nederlandsche Heidemaatschappij/Dutch Heathlandcompany’

This post-doctoral research project concerns the so called Jewish camps in the Netherlands between January and October 1942. These working camps were original unemployment relief camps under the supervison of the Nederlandsche Heidemaatschappij, an ingeneering firm aimed at cultivating and improving heath and marshland for agricultural or recreational purposes. At the beginning of 1942, Dutch Jewish men were brought to the camps. They worked there, untill they were deported alongside with their families in the autumn of 1942.

These ‘Jewish working camps’ have not yet been researched extensively. Why were they set up? What was the aim of the operation? Was it part of the broader programme of excluding Jewish citizens from Dutch society? How did the managers and workers experience the situation? And is this Dutch case comparable with other cases in occupied Europe?

Lennert Savenije (1985) studied in Nijmegen and Paris and obtained his PhD in 2018. He works as a post-doctoral researcher at Radboud University.
 

Alicja Podbielska is a PhD Candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. In her doctoral dissertation, The Memory of Rescue in Poland, she examines when, how, and why Polish Holocaust rescuers were officially designated national heroes. Prior to her doctoral studies, Podbielska worked at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and at the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. She earned a MA in literary studies from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Focusing on gender and the Holocaust, she wrote her thesis on memoirs about concentration camps. She received fellowships from European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies in Vienna, Yad Vashem, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Her research interests include Polish-Jewish relations, collective memory, public history, and Holocaust literature.

 

Denisa Nešťáková, PhD is a historian at the Department of General History at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovakia), where she defended her dissertation thesis titled " `Whoever is not with me is against me.` Arab-Jewish relations during British Mandate for Palestine through the perspective of the German Temple Society" in June 2018. She has previously received Masters degrees in teaching of History and Slovak language and literature at the Comenius University (2012) and in Jewish civilizations at the Hochschule für jüdische Studien in Heidelberg (2016).
Her current post-doctoral project title is, Women and Men in the Labour Camp Sereď, Slovakia (1941-1945). The project aims to analyse different approaches and attitudes of women and men towards various aspects of daily life and events within the camp and their impact on their survival. It will investigate the behavioural principles, social interactions, networks between inmates and camp guards, and among inmates themselves, and explore the agency of the inmates in the camp through comparative gender analysis.
This project does not only offer a comparative analysis of male and female experience, but also responds to research dealing with social structures. The project aims to see inmates not just as passive objects, but as active participants who shaped and influenced the society they were forced to inhabited and challenged its boundaries. By doing, so the project also addresses those Jewish men and women in position of power, and who´s agencies could fit into Primo Levi´s term the “gray zone”. Additionally, by focusing on gender-specific experiences of individuals the aim is to deconstruct the abstract image of a genderless Jewish prisoner/victim which has also appeared in scholarly works as a part of the post-holocaust transmission of the antisemitic vocabulary and perception of former Jewish inmates.
Her academic interests translated into her co-editorship of historical journals, and organizing international workshops and conference. Apart from academic efforts she works on popularization of History in Slovakia. She has received several Slovak and foreign awards and fellowships thanks to which she could conduct and present her research on conferences and workshops in Slovakia, France, Poland, Germany, Israel, United Kingdom, or USA. She received the research scholarship of the DAAD to complete her dissertation with supervision of the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt.

Iwona Guść holds a PhD in film history from the University of Groningen and a MA in Dutch literature and culture from the University of Wroclaw. She has hold postdoctoral fellowships from the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena and the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen where she participated in one of the leading projects of the institute on “The diaries of Anne Frank: Research—Translations—Critical Edition”. Between 2010 and 2014 she has worked as a postdoc researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam and contributed to their project on post-war and contemporary anti-Semitism in a global context.
Her current project on Holocaust diaries examines variety of diaries or memoirs written by child victims of the Holocaust and published during the first decades after the Second World War. It looks at the motives behind the publication of children diaries, and at the reactions these publications provoked. By reconstructing the reception of children diaries in 50s and 60s this research exposes how Holocaust memory took shape in the era before the audiovisual turn (television, film and video-recorded testimonies). It focuses on responses of one group in particular: the so-called “generation 1.5”, c.q. child survivors who by late 50s and beginning of 60s entered the adult life and were from that moment able to actively participate and shape the memory culture.

Gelinada Grinchenko, historian, PhD, Professor of History at the Department of Ukrainian Studies (Faculty of Philosophy, V. N. Karazin National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine), Head of the Ukrainian Oral History Association, Editor-in-Chief of the Ukrainian based academic peer-reviewed journal Ukraina Moderna. Her main areas of research are: Oral History, the history and memory of World War II, Holocaust Studies, Memory Studies, Conflict Studies, Border and Region Studies. She is the co-editor and co-author of the Reclaiming the Personal: Oral History in Post-Socialist Europe (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and Traitors, Collaborators, and Deserters in Contemporary European Politics of Memory: Formulas of Betrayal (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2018).
Her current project title is War, People, and Catastrophe in the Oral Histories of Survivors and Witnesses. The project is focused on the analysis of the specificity of recalling the Holocaust in oral histories of survivors and witnesses from Ukraine. For argumentation this specificity comparison with oral narratives of West and Central European Holocaust witnesses and survivors will be made. The main context (or perspective) of this analysis is the studying of the dynamics of the reception of the Holocaust in Ukrainian memory culture from 1991 to 2014 as a part of all-European post-Cold war transformations.