27th January, 14:00 – 17:00, British Library, Elliot Room, Knowledge Centre

Taking place on the 27th of January, Holocaust Memorial Day is a designated national day that honours the memory of the millions killed under Nazi persecution and in genocides.

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp complex, built on the territory of Nazi-occupied Poland.

To mark this occasion, the Polish Cultural Institute and the British Library are organising a special event entitled “Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration“, centred around this year’s theme, “For a Better Future“.

These thought-provoking presentations explore how the Holocaust has shaped memory, identity, and culture. The event addresses topics such as antisemitism in post-WWI Hungary, the Jewish resistance to the Holocaust and its commemoration in postwar Poland, Soviet representations of Holocaust events in film, and more.

Scholars, historians, and artists come together to examine the impact of the Holocaust and the various ways its legacy is safeguarded.

Programme:

Antisemitic versus Jewish Humour in Budapest Post-WWI – Prof. Dr Béla Bodó, Department of East-European History, University of Bonn

The Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust – Dr Halik Kochanski, Writer and Historian, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

‘The grave […] has been planted over with potatoes’: Transnational Jewish Fight to Commemorate Holocaust Killing Sites in Poland in the First Postwar Decades – Dr Janek Gryta, Lecturer in Holocaust History, University of Southampton

Representations of the Holocaust in Soviet Cinema – Prof. Jeremy Hicks, Professor of Russian Culture and Film, Queen Mary University of London

There and Not There: (Im)Possibility of a Monument – Paulina Pukyte, Interdisciplinary Artist, Writer, Curator, and Critic

Poetics of the Archive in Marianne Rubinstein’s ‘C’est maintenant du passé’ and Ivan Jablonka’s ‘Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus’ – Dr Diane Otosaka, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Holocaust Literature, University of Leeds

Tickets are FREE, but booking is required.

Find out more about the event and book your tickets HERE.

There is a limited number of tickets, so please book early to register your interest.