January 27 marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a time to reflect on the atrocities of the past and honor the resilience of survivors. To commemorate this day, the Ukrainian Oral History Association invites you to a seminar with Józef Markiewicz. This event will focus on the analysis of oral histories that illuminate the experiences and fates of Jewish survivors in postwar Poland.
There are an estimated over 100,000 recorded accounts of Holocaust Survivors around the world. Some of them document exclusively the war experiences: the beginning of persecution, stigmatization and exclusion, up to the extreme experiences of survival in hiding, the ghetto, a labor or an extermination camp – other accounts cover the entire biography of the Survivors’ lives’ trajectory – showing also the various post-war strategies of rebuilding existence, but also individual subjectivity: place of residence, social position, identity. During the talk, Józef Markiewicz will present interviews with witnesses of history conducted as part of the POLIN Museum’ s oral history program, which reveal the fate of Jewish and Jewish survivors in postwar Poland.
JÓZEF MARKIEWICZ is an anthropologist and museologist, currently works as a Senior Oral History Specialist at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, where he supervises the implementation of research projects documenting the fate of Polish Jews from an individual perspective. A graduate of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw, he also studied at the Department of Ukrainian Philology at the University of Warsaw; has experience in ethnographic field research in the Lviv region and the Polish-Ukrainian borderland (transnational labor migrations in the context of national-state identity discourse; economic, cultural, and symbolic aspects of the Polish-Ukrainian border, social memory). Participant and coordinator of research projects based on oral history method on Eastern borderlands of European Union: Ukraine, Moldova, Russian Federation (e. g “White Karelian remembrance about postwar climate changes”, “Jewish and Roma memory of Transnistria”). Currently he is coordinating a visual ethnography project, documenting the last direct witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto. Starting from May 2022, he is overseeing the development of the conceptual and documentary work of an oral history project based on personal narratives of Jewish refugees from Ukraine, as well aid-providers in Poland within POLIN Museum oral history program.
Event Details
Date: January 27, 2025
Time: 18:00 (Kyiv time)
Language: English
For more details, click here.