Everyday Heroism: Women in Civil and Armed Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto
Registration by April 21 here.
To commemorate the 79th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, we invite you to the event "Everyday Heroism: Women in Civil and Armed Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto" moderated by Katherine Hauptman in conversation with Professor Karolina Szymaniak.
When we think of war, resistance and heroism, we usually think of armed resistance. The creators of the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto - the famous Ringelblum Archive (listed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register) - thought about it differently. When they prepared a project documenting the fate of Jews under the occupation, they devoted particular attention to women. They wrote above all about "silent heroism", the heroism of everyday life that usually escaped the historians' attention. We will talk about different kinds of struggle, both civil and armed, seen from the perspective of women of different age and backgrounds - social activists, teachers, caregivers, writers and, last but not least, female fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (19.04-20.05.1943).
The event is dedicated to the women in Ukraine and other war-torn countries.
Karolina Szymaniak is Assistant Professor at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland, where she heads the Yiddish Culture Unit and at the Wrocław University (Jewish Studies Department). She is a researcher, editor, translator from Yiddish, English, and language instructor with a PhD in literary and cultural studies. She is the editor of Rachel Auerbach's ghetto writings, a first full and annotated edition of Auerbach's most important text from 1941-1942. Her anthology of Yiddish poetry by women, prepared in collaboration with Joanna Lisek and Bella Szwarcman-Czarnota was published in 2019.
Katherine Hauptman, the newly appointed director of The Swedish Holocaust Museum and the former director of The Swedish History Museum.
The event is held in english.
Free entrance
Picture: 1931 Jewish Orphanage Warsaw; NAC