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.