Book Launch and Reception: Older Jews and the Holocaust

About this event

Join us for the London book launch of the volume, Older Jews and the Holocaust , co-edited by The Wiener Holocaust Library’s Acting Co-Director, Dr Christine Schmidt, Dr Joanna Sliwa (Claims Conference), and Elizabeth Anthony (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) and published by Wayne State University Press in cooperation with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Elderly Jews were among the most vulnerable groups during the Holocaust, yet little scholarly and literary work has focused on their experiences. Not only were they often the first to be murdered by the Nazis but they were also less likely to survive the physical strains of persecution. While the chapters explore how age and physical ability made older adults especially vulnerable, they also illuminate life and agency within extremis. This volume is a powerful recovery of history and memory that expands our understanding of the Holocaust and the human experience during genocide. Christine Schmidt will introduce the volume and will be joined by chapter contributors Prof Dan Stone (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Niamh Hanrahan (University of Manchester), who will speak about some of the most compelling stories from the volume. Prof Emeritus Patricia Thane FBA (Kings College London, University of London) will provide a response. Purchase the book here or on the night. Advance Praise This is a ground-breaking volume, wholly original, thoughtfully conceived, and brilliantly executed … Debórah Dwork, author of Saints and Liars. An essential and original work that broadens the scope of Holocaust scholarship … Michael Newman, Association of Jewish Refugees. What did it mean to be old in the Holocaust? In offering answers to this question, this volume offers a plethora of surprising, unsentimental, and innovative insights into the history of the Shoah. The authors reveal our preconceptions, invite us to think inclusively, and present bold new visions of victims’ agency and powerlessness as well as global dimensions of the genocide… Anna Hájková, author of The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt. About the speakers Dr. Christine Schmidt is Acting Co-Director of The Wiener Holocaust Library. Her research has focused on the history of postwar tracing and documentation efforts, the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany, and comparative studies of collaboration and resistance in France and Hungary. She is currently writing a social history and archival biography of a collection of survivor accounts recorded by The Wiener Library in the 1950s-60s. She has a forthcoming chapter in Holocaust Memory in the United Kingdom in the 1960s (Bloomsbury, 2025). Schmidt has recently published articles in the Journal of Transport History, the European Review of History , American Imago, Culture Unbound, and The Journal of Holocaust Research , and is co-editing (with Sandra Lipner, Clara Dijkstra, and Charlie Knight) Letters and the Holocaust: Methodology, Cases, and Reflections (Bloomsbury, 2025) and (with Suzanne Bardgett and Dan Stone) Survivors of Nazi Persecution – Beyond Camps and Forced Labour (Palgrave, 2025). Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of over 100 scholarly articles and some 25 books, including, most recently: The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Penguin, 2023); Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (OUP, 2023); Psychoanalysis, Historiography and the Nazi Camps: Accounting for Survival (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); and volume 1 of The Cambridge History of the Holocaust (CUP, 2025; co-edited with Mark Roseman). His next book is a history of the Holocaust in Romania, to be published by Penguin in early 2027. Niamh Hanrahan recently completed her PhD at the University of Manchester within the Humanitarianism and Conflict Response Institute. Her research focuses on Jewish migration to Japan during the Holocaust, where sh

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