University of Toronto

Graduate Student, History

Thesis Title: The Inmate Society of Theresienstadt: A Laboratory of the Middle Class? Social History of the Theresienstadt Transit Ghetto

About

My research focuses on the everyday history of the Holocaust, specifically on the Theresienstadt (Terezín) transit ghetto. Before their deportation to Auschwitz and other death camps, heterogeneous groups of Czech, German, Austrian, Dutch and Danish Jews created a temporary society, one that reflected both the deportees’ pre-war backgrounds as well as the extreme circumstances of the ghetto. My research focuses on the inmates’ society: amidst the general misery, fear and hunger the prisoners, who were both similar to each other (most belonged to the former Central European middle class) and different from each other with regard to language, accent and culture, created a new, stratified society. Even small distinctions in the deportees’ cultural backgrounds had an impact on both their positioning in the social field of Theresienstadt and their adaptation mechanisms. These observations lead to my essential thesis: although the Nazis deported all the inmates because of their alleged Jewishness, there was no homogenous mass of victims. Quite on the contrary, the ghetto residents were as much shaped by the countries they came from as by the dynamics of ghetto society, which produced difference rather than a sense of common Jewishness. Their interaction dynamics, stratification, and understanding of each other form the focal point of my research.

My post-doctoral project, "Dreamers of a New Day: A Generational History of Intellectuals of the Left who Built Socialism in Central Europe, 1930-1970" is a longue-durée study of a cohort of educated leftist intellectuals who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and (later East) Germany. Some of them were Jewish, others were gentiles; many of them came from bourgeois backgrounds. I follow their lives between their university studies, their politicization; the occupation and war; their postwar quest to build a better, just society in the 1950s; and finally in the next decade, their contribution to the notion of socialism with a human face.
I am interested in two central questions: first, what is ideology and second, how is it lived. I conceive of ideology as a system of faith, a phenomenon closely related to religion in explaining and structuring the world.

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