Lecture | LIAS Lunch Talk Series
“This Way to the Gas...": Children and their Caretakers at Auschwitz-Birkenau
- Date
- Thursday 16 November 2023
- Time
- Address
-
- Room
- 1.04 (Verbarium)
Abstract
The invisible work done by caretakers often evades the historical record. And yet, if we look closely at daily life during ordinary and extraordinary times, caretakers are everywhere. I have found this disconnect between lived reality and history’s telling of it to be especially true in narratives exploring the Jewish experience of the 1940s more generally and during the Shoah specifically. And so, how did the youngest victims of the Holocaust and their caretakers go to the "gas" upon their arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau? Using pictures taken by SS photographers, memoirs produced by the Sonderkommando and eyewitness testimonies this paper outlines part of my larger book project which explores caretaking and caretakers of young children before, during and after the Holocaust.
About the speaker
Sarah Cramsey is Special Chair for Central European Studies and Assistant Professor of Judaism & Diaspora Studies at Leiden University. She is also director of the Austria Centre Leiden. Along with her husband, she cares for two daughters, age 5 and 2.