April 15, 2021
The Auschwitz Album is the only collection of photographs known to show the arrival and selection process at a death camp. This presentation explores the Auschwitz Album and what it reveals about the Nazi process of destruction.
Dr. Sternberg is affiliated with the University of Kansas Jewish Studies Program, where she teaches a range of Jewish history courses – among them, modern Jewish History, medieval and early modern Jewry, the Holocaust, Hitler and Nazi Germany and the history of Jewish women. Her research and areas of interest include 19th and 20th century East European Jewry, interwar Polish Jewry, the shtetl, antisemitism, and the Holocaust.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
This panel discussion explores the perspectives of survivors, liberators, the military command staff, and President Truman on liberation and the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.
Panelist are: Jessica Rockhold, Midwest Center for Holocaust Education; Jeff Nelson, Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum; Mark Adams, Truman Presidential Library and Museum.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City, in partnership with the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum and Truman Presidential Library and Museum, in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
Camps like Auschwitz were only one of the many landscapes where the Holocaust was enacted and experienced. In this talk Dr. Cole situates the place of Auschwitz within the wider geography and chronology of a genocide that was constantly on the move as it first moved east, and then west, and then east again across Europe.
Dr. Cole is Professor of Social History and Director of Brigstow Institute, University of Bristol. His core research has focused on Holocaust landscapes – both historical and memory landscapes – writing books on Holocaust representation (Images of the Holocaust/Selling the Holocaust, 1999), the spatiality of ghettorization in Budapest (Holocaust City, 2003), social histories of the Hungarian Holocaust (Traces of the Holocaust, 2011) and the spatiality of survival (Holocaust Landscapes, 2016).
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
Every Jewish person murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau had been friends or neighbors with at least some non-Jewish people at one time. This talk will take a step back to the communities in which Jews lived before deportation or Nazi occupation. It will explore the topic of violence among people who had previously coexisted in a civil society. How did friends and neighbors turn into Aryans and Jews? Why did some communities begin killing their Jewish neighbors? What made others more resilient, such that they did not join in these mass atrocities? How might we build those more resilient communities?
Dr. Andrew Stuart Bergerson is professor of History and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is a historian of modern Germany with particular interest in the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte), ethnographic/oral history, interdisciplinary German studies, and the public humanities. He teaches a range of courses on modern German, modern European, and modern global history. He has authored or coauthored various monographs including: Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times, The Happy Burden of History, and Ruptures in the Everyday.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
On the eve of the Holocaust, Polish Jewry – Europe’s largest Jewish community and most of American and Israeli Jewry’s historic “heartland” – was a vital and dynamic society: a forward looking “brave new world” filled with potential, brimming with life, and caught up in and grappling with a process of transformation that was informed not only by old tensions and conflicts, but also by new attitudes and institutions and , above all, by new relationships with the wider world.
Dr. Sternberg is affiliated with the University of Kansas Jewish Studies Program, where she teaches a range of Jewish history courses – among them, modern Jewish History, medieval and early modern Jewry, the Holocaust, Hitler and Nazi Germany and the history of Jewish women. Her research and areas of interest include 19th and 20th century East European Jewry, interwar Polish Jewry, the shtetl, antisemitism, and the Holocaust.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
Dr. Baumgartner is the director of research at the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance. He has held numerous prestigious lecture and researchships throughout Europe and Israel. Before taking up his post at the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance, he was a senior research fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies.
His research focuses on resistance and persecution from 1938 to 1945, the history of persecution of the Roma and Sinti, and how the Republic of Austria dealt with the Nazi past and the history of the national minorities of Burgenland. Dr. Baumgartner is the author of numerous works on the Roma and Sinti, including The Fate of the European Roma and Sinti during the Holocaust.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
Terezín was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for murder in the East. The Last Ghetto offers both a modern history of this Central European ghetto and the first in-depth analytical history of a prison society during the Holocaust. During the three and a half years of the camp’s existence, prisoners created their own culture and habits, bonded, fell in love, and forged new families. Based on extensive archival research in nine languages and on empathetic reading of victim testimonies, The Last Ghetto casts light on human society works in extremis.
Dr. Anna Hájková, Associate Professor of Modern Continental European History, University of Warwick, is the author of The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt. Awarded the Irma Rosenberg and Herbert Steiner Prizes, the book focuses on the everyday history of the Holocaust, using the Terezín transit ghetto as a springboard to examine larger issues of human behavior under extreme stress. Her work examines the society in the camps, Jewish social and political elites, issues of nationalism and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and the Jewish Councils.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
September 13, 2021
When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, eugenicists welcomed his appointment. Many in the eugenics community believed that Hitler would be the one to put their theories into real practice to “cleanse” the population of Germany. They were correct. Moving first against those deemed to be “unhealthy” and “unfit” to be members of the People’s Community, the Nazi regime began forced sterilizations. By 1939, Hitler was ready to move to eliminate the mentally ill and physically disabled in what came to be called the “Euthanasia” Project. Learning about the “Euthanasia” Project is critical to understanding the evolution of Nazi killing methods.
Dr. Griech-Polelle is Kurt Mayer Chair of Holocaust Studies, Pacific Lutheran University. She is the author of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: Language, Rhetoric and the Traditions of Hatred, Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and its Policy Consequences Today, Bishop von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
Nearly 5 million non-Jews were murdered in the course of the Holocaust. This panel will explore the experiences of three of those victim groups – the Roma, queer victims, and the mentally and physically disabled. Dr. Gerhard Baumgartner, Dr. William Spurlin, and Dr. Beth Griech-Pollele address the unique policies, pressures and persecution of these non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
Although Auschwitz and its industrialized killing facilities have become synonymous with the Holocaust, it is far from where the Nazis began their genocidal project. This talk by Dr. Shelly Cline will look at the beginnings of the Nazi death camps in places like Belzec and Treblinka and how it evolved over time.
Dr. Shelly Cline is the historian and Director of Education at the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
More than 75 years after the Holocaust, antisemitism is again on the rise in Europe. But it is also increasing here in the United States. After the recent killings in Pittsburgh, Poway, Jersey City, Monsey, and the continuous attacks against Jews in Brooklyn, the American Jewish community is worried. Nearly nine out of ten American Jews believe antisemitism is a problem in the U.S. today, and more than eight in ten believe it has increased over the last five years. And yet nearly half of U.S. adults, are not familiar with the term ‘antisemitism,’and even once the term was explained, 53% of Americans believe antisemitism has stayed the same or decreased in the past five years—the opposite of what the data shows.
How do we push back against antisemitism and other forms of hate and intolerance when the broader society is ignorant? Why is combating antisemitism also a problem for non-Jews? And how do we work together to lower the levels of antisemitism in America? This presentation is a timely conversation to address these pertinent questions.
Holly Huffnagle serves as AJC’s U.S. Director for Combating Antisemitism, spearheading the agency’s response to antisemitism in the United States and its efforts to better protect the Jewish community.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. in partnership with Jewish Community Relations Bureau/AJC.
This presentation provides a contextual overview of the experiences of gay men and lesbians under National Socialism, especially the ways in which the Nazi regime targeted gay men, and the varying degrees of tolerance and actual persecution directed by the regime toward lesbians. However, the surveillance, management, prosecution, and punishment of same-sex affectional and erotic bonds must be understood in relation to the evidence of juridical laws and practices and their precedents in German cultural history, such as Paragraph 175 and its subsequent revision by the Nazis, as well as the perceived threat of homosexuality to racial and national fantasy, the family, reproductive and population politics, and the elimination of so-called social degeneracy. This means that Nazi homophobia, rather than being a separate axis of power, was part of a larger system of social and cultural organization and was an effect of historically specific cultural, material, and ideological conditions.
Professor William Spurlin is Professor of English and Vice-Dean/Education in the College of Business, Arts & Social Sciences, Brunel University London. He has written extensively on the politics of gender and sexual dissidence and is widely known for his work in queer studies. His monograph, Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (2009), uses queer theory to read against the grain of hetero-textual narratives of the Holocaust and as a way for locating sexuality at its intersections with race, gender, and eugenics within the National Socialist imaginary. His book also challenges prevailing assumptions in the received scholarship that lesbians were not as systematically persecuted by the Nazis.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
Oct. 26, 2021
During World War II Jews resisted not only with guns but also with pen and paper. Even in the face of death they left “time capsules” full of documents that they buried under the rubble of ghettos and death camps. They were determined that posterity would remember them on the basis of Jewish and not German sources. The Ringelblum archive in the Warsaw Ghetto buried thousands of documents. But of the 60 people who worked on this national mission, only three survived. This will be their story.
Dr. Samuel Kassow is Charles Northam Professor of History, Trinity College and author of Who Will Write Our History: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archives (Indiana University Press, 2007). He served as a consultant for the documentary film version of Who Will Write Our History. He is the author of The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
While most accounts of Jewish resistance to the Nazis focus on the armed uprisings in ghettos and the exploits of Jewish partisans in the forests, in fact Jewish resistance took many others forms as well including writing, schooling, religious observance, smuggling and collective cultural activity. This lecture will explore this little-understood way that Jews defied Nazi attempts to dehumanize them and break their morale.
Dr. Samuel Kassow is Charles Northam Professor of History, Trinity College and author of Who Will Write Our History: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archives (Indiana University Press, 2007). He served as a consultant for the documentary film version of Who Will Write Our History. He is the author of The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in partnership with the Kansas City Public Library in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
November 2, 2021
We are still learning lessons from the horrors of the Holocaust as we remember the past and redefine the present and future. This lecture explores the human suffering that occurred as individuals were permanently harmed and killed to explore the limits of human life. They had become a means to an end. The world responded with imperatives that would guide all future human subjects research. How do the heinous atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust provide a constant vigil over the increasing complexities of modern research? Can lament and hope coexist?”
Rev. Dr. Dane R. Sommer has been the Director of Spiritual Services at Children’s Mercy – Kansas City since 1987. He is also the Assistant Director of Bioethics Policy and Practice and Co-Chair of the CM Institutional Review Board. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy and Religion cum laude from the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa, where he was the recipient of the Purple and Old God Award for Meritorious Achievement in Philosophy and Religion. He received his Master of Divinity degree from the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, New Brighton, Minnesota. He received his Doctor of Ministry degree from Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
November 9, 2021
This talk explores the era of the great trials of the Holocaust, beginning 75 years ago at Nuremberg and ending a decade ago with the conviction of John (Ivan) Demjanjuk in Munich. Professor Douglas will consider the aims and limitations of criminal justice when dealing with crimes of genocidal sweep.
Professor Douglas is James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought (LJST), Amherst College and is the author of seven books, including The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (Yale, 2001) and The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton, 2016), a New York Times “Editor’s Choice.” The recipient of major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for International Education, and American Academy in Berlin, and the Carnegie Foundation, Douglas has lectured throughout the United States and in more than a dozen countries, and has served as visiting professor at the University of London and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. in partnership with the Truman Presidential Library and Museum.
In this talk, Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls will discuss two infamous Holocaust landscapes – the camp complexes at Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen. She will discuss the wide range of material traces that derived from genocidal actions at both sites and illustrate how forensic archaeological approaches have been utilized to locate and record surviving evidence. Reflecting on more than a decade of research, Professor Sturdy Colls will illustrate how the material and forensic turns in Holocaust studies have facilitated new understandings of Holocaust landscapes and the experiences of those who encountered them, whilst also providing new opportunities for commemoration and education.
Caroline Sturdy Colls is a Professor of Conflict Archaeology and Genocide Investigation at Staffordshire University specializing in Holocaust studies, identification of human remains, forensic archaeology and crime scene investigation
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
Members of MCHE’s Second Generation Speakers Bureau Alice Jacks Achtenberg, Regina Kort and Matilda Rosenberg share the experiences of their mothers Bronia Roslawowski, Sonia Warshawski, and Alegre Tevet.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
Much of what we think we know about Auschwitz has been shaped by a relatively small number of iconic photographs. In a previous talk in this series, Frances G. Sternberg took a fascinating and detailed look at the history of the infamous “Auschwitz Album”, compiled by the SS. Now, in this talk, we will explore further how to read these photographs as evidence, looking beyond the image to examine not only what each one shows but to ask what it reveals. But we will also go further, asking how we can break this perpetrator’s gaze and how other rare photographs of Auschwitz provide radically different perspectives of the same time and place.
Paul Salmons discusses how to analyze the visual evidence of the Holocaust. Dr. Salmons is one of the experts who curated the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
January 27, 2022
The exhibition Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away., was conceived by a young Spanish entrepreneur and created by the smaller of curatorial teams, which began the journey that led from San Sebastian (Spain) to Kansas City with no external financial support, no artifacts, and the ambition to make an exhibition worthy of the gravity of the subject matter. In an illustrated presentation, Chief Curator Robert Jan van Pelt will tell the story of the opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls to transform the story of history’s most lethal extermination camp into a traveling exhibition.
Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt is one of the world’s leading experts on Auschwitz. He initiated and chaired the workgroup that created the master plan for the Auschwitz museum and was one of the four internationally renowned historians who served as expert witnesses for the defense in the Irving-Lipstadt trial. Dr. van Pelt is the Chief Curator of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
Historian David G. Marwell will talk about his recent book on Josef Mengele, in which he strips away the myths that have attached themselves to the Auschwitz doctor and replaces what is a frightening caricature with an perhaps even more unsettling picture of the human being that he was.
Dr. Marwell has had a distinguished career in public history. He spent nine years at the US Department of Justice, where, as Chief of Investigative Research, he conducted research in support of the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the United States. As a part of this effort, he played major roles in the Klaus Barbie and Josef Mengele investigations and helped to author the two major reports that resulted. In 2000, Marwell was appointed Director & CEO of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. He is the author of MENGLE: Unmasking the Angel of Death.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.
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