International Conference “Women and Girls in Nazi Concentration Camps: Voices from the Post-War Archives

Conference venue: LUX: C214, Helgonavägen 3, 22362 Lund 
25th January 2024

9.30-10.00, registration
10.00 – 10.30, Welcome
Barbara Törnquist Plewa (Lund University), Introduction
Joanna Michlic (Lund University), The Early Postwar Encounter with Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies: Grasping and not-Grasping their Meanings
Tomasz Leśniak (Lund University), Zygmunt Łakociński - Writer and chief archivist of the Polish Research Institute in Lund (1945-46)

10.30-10.50, Coffee Break

10.50-12.20, Panel 1
Noah Benninga (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel), Female Prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau and their Experience: A Review of Contemporary Scholarship
Na’ama Shik (Yad Vachem, the World Holocaust remembrance Center, Israel) 'The Tings’ that we are not talking about - Early and Later Holocaust Testimonies
Andrea Genest (Mahn  und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück, Germany), Early Knowledge about the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp

12.20–13.30 Lunch
13.30–15.00, Panel 2
Insa Eschebach (Freie Universität zu Berlin), Artefacts and Discourses. The Collection of the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum

Brita Geschwind (Lund University), From Ravensbrück to Detention in Sweden: Female Survivors, Sexuality, and Respectability

Eva Kovacs (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies/HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences und University),  "And then I became the head of the family" - Hungarian Jewish Girls and Women in the Forced Labour Camp

15.00-15.30, Coffee break 
15.30-17.45, Panel 3
Violeta Davoliūtė (Vilnius University), Gendered Returns from the Concentration Camp in Soviet-occupied Europe

Malin Thor Tureby (Malmö University), ‘My future plans?’ Young Women’s Early Accounts on Freedom and Life after the Holocaust

16.30-16.45, Break
Urszula Ula Chowaniec (AFM Krakow University) Friendship, War, and the Imperative of Remembrance: The Experience of War and Imprisonment in Concentration Camps in the Correspondence and Writing of Zenia Larsson and Chava Rosenfarb
Joanna Ostrowska (Lund University), Mothers of “The Last Stage”. Wanda and Gerda and their post-war queer lives in Poland and Germany

18:30-20:00, Conference dinner, LUX: C212
A special presentation during the dinner: Pia-Kristina Garde (Writer and Initiator of “Jewish Memories” at Nordiska Museet, Stockholm),  A Burning Treasure
2nd Day: January 26 
9:00-9:30, Morning coffee 
9:30 – 11:00, Panel 4  
Janine P. Holc (Loyola University Maryland), Representing Multivocality in the Site-Specific Holocaust Experience: Implications for Testimony Methodologies
Barbara Czarnecka (University of Bialystok), The Methods of Torture of Female Prisoners of Nazi Concentration Camps in the Light of Personal Testimonies and Other Documents.
Annika Björkdahl (Lund University) and Johanna Selimovic (Södertörn University), Beyond the Archive. Gendering the Memory of the Holocaust through Women’s Testimonies
11.00 – 11.15,  Conclusions by Joanna  B. Michlic, Barbara Törnquist Plewa

11.45 – 12.45, A visit to the exhibition “Women's concentration camp experience” at the Kulturen museum in Lund

12.45 – 13.45 Lunch, Kulturen, and closing of the conference.

Organisers of the Conference: Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (Lund University), Joanna Michlic (Lund University), Henrik Rosengren (Lund University), Odeta Rudling (Lund University) and Barbara Czarnecka (Bialystok University)

Our sponsors: Einar Hansen Allhem Foundation, Horizon-Europe project EUROPAST and Center for European Studies (CFE) at Lund University.