A history professor will discuss her family’s journey during the Holocaust and her recent research about other refugees’ experiences Thursday.
The event, “Remapping Death and Survival: Flight, Displacement and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during the Holocaust,” is today at 7 p.m. at the Thomas Center, 302 NE Sixth Ave.
Atina Grossmann is a history professor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York.
She is also a noted scholar of women’s and gender studies, and German and modern European history.
“The first thing I’m trying to get across is that we need to kind of remap and rethink our understanding of displacement and survival in the Holocaust,” Grossmann said.
Her parents, both German Jews, were never held captive in Nazi concentration camps. Rather, they were refugees who fled from Berlin to Eastern Europe before World War II began.
“It’s not the standard World War II or Holocaust story,” Grossmann said.
“Her talk is a new reading of the Holocaust. Her reading is very closely related to her family story, which makes it even more interesting,”said Anna Muller, a lecturer for the Center for European Studies.
“Certainly, somebody who survived the death camps has a miraculous story. I want to expand that story and say, ‘Well, that’s a very good story, but that’s not the majority of the survivors,’” Grossmann said.
