Mykola Borovyk, Associate Professor of History, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine). Project: (Un)expected Enemies: Local Collaborators in the Jewish Survivors Memory About the Holocaust in Ukraine

The project investigates the memory on the interethnic relations in Ukraine during the Second World War, in particular, the memory of Jewish Holocaust survivors about their persecutors among the local population. Representation of attitudes and behaviour of the local non-Jewish population in the Jewish collective memory of Holocaust is often influenced by some common patterns and stereotypes. Obviously, such stereotypes can be traced back to the real wartime experiences and attitudes. At the same time, such generalisations hardly reflect the variety of historical experience and are selective by nature. This project aims to understand how the Jewish communities in the USSR and abroad have formed the language for describing the phenomenon of local collaboration, which factors influenced its formation and what was the distinctiveness of a language formed in different social and political contexts.
The project is a part and extension of his current habilitation project “Memory about the Second World War as a factor of collective identities in Ukraine”.

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.

Mathew Turner is an academic historian in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Education, at Deakin University, Australia. He has taught various undergraduate units including the Holocaust and Global Twentieth Century History. He is also a member of the University’s Contemporary Histories Research Group. A former German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) research scholar, his main research interests are the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, German antisemitism and responses to Holocaust denial. He has presented at several international conferences, including the 2017 International Association of Genocide Scholars Conference held in Brisbane, the 2016 German Studies Association Annual Conference in San Diego, and the 2014 Sechstes Doktoranden-Seminar des Fritz Bauer Instituts in Frankfurt. His book, titled Historians at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial: their Role as Expert Witnesses, will be published by I.B.Tauris in 2018.

Project title: Holocaust Erklärungsarbeit and German Historians, 1960-2000: ‘Hyperaffirmation’ or Historicisation?

His project focuses on the concept of West German historians as Holocaust educators, a role they undertook within research institutes, universities, as independent scholars and public intellectuals, and, critically, as advisors to state and federal education agencies. The research is focussed on a three-part interaction between: an established Federal Republic and its (younger) citizens’ renewed appetite for confrontation of the past from the 1960s onwards; fears of rising antisemitism and right-wing extremism and a perceived social and political need to counter such forces through public education of the Holocaust; and a maturing historical profession increasingly able to meet such needs. In their various roles, historians taught history, wrote scholarship, gave public lectures, testified in Nazi crimes trials, participated in debates, and provided advice on Holocaust education to government. The effectiveness of these engagements – in acting to combat antisemitism and historical distortions, in transmitting historical knowledge effectively, and in positively influencing the drive of German historical scholarship on the Holocaust – will be scrutinised. The project aims to strike a balance between the tendency of some contemporaries to condemn West German historians for failing to confront and detail the worst of Nazi crimes at the earliest opportunity, and to unreservedly applaud the didactic role of compulsory Holocaust education in combating antisemitism and raising historical awareness of Nazi crimes.

Philipp Dinkelaker, M.A. studierte Neue Geschichte, Alte Geschichte und Philosophie in Berlin. Seine 2017 als Monographie im Metropol Verlag erschienene Magisterarbeit "Das Sammellager in der Synagoge Levetzowstraße 1941/1942" widmet sich einem bisher unerforschten Tatort der Shoah in Berlin und dessen Wahrnehmbarkeit im Alltag der damaligen Reichshauptstadt. Philipp Dinkelaker verfasst am Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung (ZfA) der Technischen Universität Berlin (TU) bei Prof. Dr. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum eine Dissertation zum Umgang mit vermeintlicher jüdischer Kollaboration im post-nationalsozialistischen Deutschland im Spiegel von Ehrengerichts-, Sozialgerichts-, Entschädigungs- und Strafverfahren gegen Überlebende der Shoah in beiden deutschen Nachkriegsstaaten.  Er engagierte sich im Arbeitskreis “Fragt uns, wir sind die Letzten", der speziell für Jugendliche oder bisher wenig mit NS-Geschichte in Berührung gekommene Leser*innen aufbereitete Interviews mit Überlebenden der NS-Verfolgung und/oder Widerstandskämpfer*innen publiziert. Nach seinem Aufenthalt als Junior Fellow am Zentrum für Holocaust-Studien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) in München wird Philipp Dinkelaker 2018 als EHRI Fellow in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem recherchieren.

Paula Oppermann is a PhD candidate in Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on the Latvian Fascist Pērkonkrusts (Thunder Cross) Organisation, how it developed its ultra-nationalist, antisemitic ideology in the 1930s, and how this influenced its members’ actions during WWII. The level of Pērkonkrusts’ involvement in the German occupation and annihilation apparatus has not yet been systematically investigated, while more attention has been paid to their anti-German activity after the organisation was closed in August 1941. In order to understand the (dis-)continuities in Pērkonkrusts’ relationship to the German occupiers, Paula is using her EHRI fellowship to conduct research at the German Federal Archives (Berlin / Ludwigsburg) and at the Institute for Contemporary History (Munich).
Paula previously studied History and Baltic Languages at the University of Greifswald and completed an M.A in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Uppsala University. Her research interests are the Holocaust and its commemoration in Latvia, and she has published articles on the history of the Rumbula and Salaspils Memorials. She has worked as a research assistant at Berlin’s Topography of Terror Documentation Centre curating a special exhibition entitled ‘Mass Shootings. The Holocaust Between the Baltic and the Black Sea 1941–1944’, and as a sub-editor for the online-project ‘Pogrom: November 1938. Testimonies from “Kristallnacht”,’ developed by the Wiener Library, London.