Abstract The “spatial turn” in Holocaust studies has led to renewed interest in mapping the Holocaust as both event and experience. This article explores experiments with more multifaceted—and “integrated” (per Saul Friedländer)—mapping of Holocaust space and place to include the emotional dimensions of spatial experience. Drawing on Agnew and Duncan's influential introduction of place as a triad that encompasses location, locale, and sense of place, we seek to map the Holocaust as a complex spatial experience. Agnew and Duncan's definition incorporates the idea of abstract space as it is understood in GIScience (location); the social, cultural, political, economic, and material dimensions of place (locale); and the behavioral and emotional component of place (sense of place). Drawing on a close reading of two Holocaust survivors’ narratives, we map their shifting experiences (over both and time and space) at different spatial scales with a particular focus on exploring the relationships between people, place, events, and emotions. The two survivors—Gilberto Salmoni and Gabor Somjen—represent trajectories at two different scales (the continental and city scale, respectively) and two different national contexts (Italy and Hungary) that went through several different locales, not only locations. The article offers a representational model that allows for comparative research of the Holocaust experience at the resolution of the individual that is scalable in two ways: It can include any number of testimonies, and it can graphically render the events and places of the Holocaust at multiple scales and for different spatiotemporal experiences. While critically assessing the limits of the model—specifically vis-à-vis representing emotions and sense of place—the article suggests the value of comparative cartographic analysis in understanding the shifting emotional landscapes of the Holocaust and the place-based nature of victim experience.

Abstract German-British Jewish scholar, Dr Eva Gabriele Reichmann made significant contributions to the postwar historiography of the Holocaust, well before ‘Holocaust studies’ was established as a field. She was a prolific author on the history of antisemitism, German Jewish emancipation, and National Socialism; an early documenter of the experiences of Holocaust refugees, victims, and survivors; and a Jewish community activist within Germany during the rise of the Nazis and after her compulsory migration to England. Forced to leave Berlin in 1939 for London, Reichmann’s experiences as a German Jewish refugee woman devoted to communal defense, Jewish diaspora ‘as task,’ and interfaith dialogue shaped her work and intellectual legacy. Despite her publications and contributions to multiple fields, and although a contemporary of the renowned philosopher Hannah Arendt, her work as a producer of Holocaust knowledge has been neglected. This is in part due to her gender, her work outside the traditional academy, as well as the split between German (and German Jewish) historiography and Holocaust historiography. However, Reichmann’s contributions not only to scholarship on the political and cultural identity of German Jewry and National Socialist antisemitism but also to postwar Holocaust-related archives-building secure her rightful place in the historiography of the Holocaust.

abstract: Focusing on the biography and literary work of the Austrian-Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Fred Wander, this article interrogates a conceptual divide within the literary scholarship on exile, refuge, and persecution during the Nazi period that rigidly separates the experience of exile from the Third Reich from that of persecution within the Holocaust. Wander's work, particularly his 1991 autobiographical novel Hôtel Baalbek , challenges the simplistic binary division implied by the longstanding divergence between Holocaust studies and exile studies, thereby establishing potentially productive points of contact between the two fields.

Between the end of the Second World War and the late 1970s, artists in Romania responded to the trauma of the Holocaust through theatre and literature, navigating censorship, ideology, and the disappearance of witnesses. In 1945, orphaned survivors of the Transnistrian camps performed their memories at the Barasheum Theatre, assisted by theatre practitioners. That same year, under Iacob Mansdorf’s direction, the IKUF Theatre developed a new model that combined socialist realism with collective mourning. Holocaust themes remained central in postwar Jewish theatre, including productions such as Night Shift (1949) and The Diary of Anne Frank (1957), which introduced more personal and psychological dimensions. These artistic forms gradually reflected the shifting ideological and social climate of socialist Romania. The article incorporates an autotheoretical approach that combines personal narrative with critical theory, drawing on memoir, philosophy and political reflection. Through this hybrid method, the text engages with key issues in Holocaust studies, including post-witness memory, archival research and the politics of imagination. It argues that Romanian representations of the Holocaust contribute to a broader understanding of the functions and challenges of historical representation today.

ABSTRACT This article examines how Holocaust survivor testimony changes over time by focusing on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s First Person programme, a unique longitudinal archive that records survivors’ voices across multiple decades. Drawing on distant and close listening methodologies, I analyse subtle yet meaningful shifts in vocal delivery – such as tone, cadence, tempo and emotional inflection – that occur as survivors age and as their relationship to memory, audience and institutional setting evolves. By tracking survivors’ voices over time, this article argues for the value of vocal analysis in Holocaust studies, voice studies and sound studies, demonstrating how sound enhances our understanding of survivor experiences. Using spectrogram analysis of audio recordings from two recurring participants, Nesse Godin (1928–2024) and Fritz Gluckstein (1927–2021), I show that the ageing voice is not merely a symptom of time but a dynamic site of memory work, affective resonance and ethical listening.

This article examines how gender shapes Holocaust memory through close analyses of two canonical women’s memoirs: Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After and Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive (2001), a considerably rewritten and culturally reinterpreted version of her earlier German book Weiter leben (1992). Delbo, a French political deportee, and Klüger, an Austrian Jewish survivor, provide testimonies that challenge the male-centered paradigms that have long dominated the Holocaust literature. Although pioneering feminist scholars have shown that women experienced and remembered the Holocaust differently, gender-based analysis remains underused—not only in Holocaust studies but also in broader memory studies, where it is often assumed to be already complete or exhausted. This view of theoretical saturation reflects a Eurocentric bias that equates critical maturity with Western academic prominence, thereby masking the ongoing influence of gender on the production, circulation, and reception of testimony worldwide. Drawing on trauma theory, concepts of multidirectional memory and postmemory, systems theory of media, and ethical approaches to testimony, this article argues that gender is not merely descriptive of Holocaust experience but also constitutive of how trauma is narrated, circulated, and archived. Testimony, as a cultural form, is inherently mediated, and that mediation is fundamentally gendered. This analysis illustrates how Delbo and Klüger create gendered testimonial forms through unique aesthetic strategies. Delbo’s writing focuses on seeing by invoking a feminist aesthetics of voir as imagined and ethical visualization, while Klüger’s narrative emphasizes voice, utilizing rhetorical sharpness and ambivalent narration to challenge postwar silencing. Instead of equating gender with femininity, the article understands gender as a relational and intersectional system—one that includes masculinity, non-binary identities, and structural power differences. It also questions Eurocentric assumptions that feminist critique has been fully explored within memory studies, urging renewed engagement with gender in transnational contexts, such as the often-overlooked testimonies from wartime Shanghai. Ultimately, this article argues that feminist approaches to Holocaust testimony expose the gendered structures of grievability that determine which kinds of suffering are preserved—and which remain unspoken.

Abstract Memorial museums frequently use models of the crematoria and death camps to help visitors visually represent aspects of the Holocaust; however, scholars in the field of Holocaust studies have often ignored or marginalized these representational strategies. This article analyzes dioramas, architectural models, maquettes, and miniatures in relation to their materiality and mediality. It historically surveys key seminal models including Mieczysław Stobierski’s model of Crematorium II at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Jankiel Wiernik's model of Treblinka. The author assesses these works’ contribution to the field's understanding of the Holocaust as an industrialized killing process, which the Nazis perpetrated in purpose-built environments. Using an arts-based analytical approach, the author demonstrates these objects’ multifaceted functions as works of art, historical evidence, didactic props, and invisible objects.

Abstract Nonprofessional efforts to depict the Holocaust, archived in Poland’s ethnographic collections, force audiences to confront a specific genre of “awkward objects.” Viewers may perceive these vernacular representations as brutal, explicit, and voyeuristic. In response to a set of postwar works that Lehrer, Sendyka, Wilczyk, and Zych identified through their research—which they presented at the exhibition Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust—commentators and researchers have invoked the categories of “obscenity,” “perversion,” or “kitsch” to describe Holocaust folk art. By exploring how and why Holocaust-related folk (naive) art from Poland transgresses accepted norms of Holocaust representation, the author reveals how these critical concepts darkly mirror society’s perceived violation of shared standards; how “obscenity” transgresses moral norms, “perversion”—sexual conventions, and “kitsch”—aesthetic expectations. Consequently, viewers may easily interpret folk art’s departure from the mainstream visual language of the Holocaust as a distortion or corruption of memory. The author, however, argues that it is more productive and illuminating to understand this kind of art as a unique, vernacular commemorative format that challenges dominant epistemologies in Holocaust studies and Holocaust representation

ABSTRACT Scholars have juxtaposed genocide in four ways: they compare them; they incorporate them into a single master narrative; they offer causal explanations linking the emergence of one genocidal campaign to another; or they focus on relations between victim groups. Building on the essays in this journal issue, this article explores how new research on Roma and Jews can help us break with some common arguments in Holocaust studies that emerge from these approaches. Emphasizing the power of local analyses of interactions between victim groups, it discusses how we can challenge familiar chronologies and overcome a Berlin-centric focus in depictions of the Romani Holocaust. It highlights the possibility of an integrated history of Nazi and Axis war crimes that allows the experiences of different victim groups to shape our questions.

Abstract Immediately after the Holocaust, survivors created scores of graphic albums as testimonial and commemorative objects recounting their individual and collective histories under Nazi oppression. Despite their large number, these works are dispersed in public and private collections and are rarely reproduced or exhibited in their entirety. Largely neglected by Holocaust studies (which privileges word-based testimonies), they are also overlooked by art history (which privileges unique paintings). Unsettling disciplinary, exhibitionary, and archival categories, these hyphenated “imagetexts” (art-books, pictorial-albums, image-stories, visual-testimonies) fall between the cracks of the Holocaust archive and its well-entrenched taxonomies of format, medium, subject, and periodization. In so doing, they prompt questions about how the archive was assembled in the past and how archival practices today assign and maintain hierarchies of value that determine which things count as historical evidence or testimony. This article examines one graphic album discovered by chance in the open stacks of the circulating library at the Ghetto Fighters’ House in Israel: Dezső (David) Izraeli’s Memento 1942–45 created in Cluj, Romania in 1947. Using Memento as a touchstone, I argue that these graphic albums constitute one of the most important and overlooked mediums of early Holocaust memory. They open a window onto a vibrant but still buried history of early Jewish survivor activities and the central role that art played in efforts to document the past and commemorate the dead.

ABSTRACT Indian Holocaust educationalists, including Navras Jaat Aafreedi, have discussed extensively on insufficient Holocaust education in India. The current study aims to demonstrate how including Holocaust studies in a comparative mode with Indian texts could help improve Holocaust discourse in India. The article shows the influence of The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman on Chhotu: A Tale of Partition and Love, by Varud Gupta and Ayushi Rastogi. The primary objectives of the study include comprehending the steps undertaken to achieve anthropomorphic representation by employing Epley et al.’s three-factor theory of anthropomorphism, demonstrating the various methods of maintaining postmemorial distance in Chhotu inspired by Maus, significant differences in the two texts and the advantages of employing anthropomorphism in trauma narratives. The different techniques of performing postmemorial distance include the establishment of an unreliable narrator, incorporating silent pages, gutter communication, Bollywood references, and inserting a frame tale. The study concludes that selecting a non-human agent for anthropomorphism in Chhotu involves morphological and cultural influences, whereas, in Maus, it is exclusively cultural. The paper further argues that anthropomorphism helps postmemorial artists to alleviate themselves from the responsibilities of maintaining historicity in the narrative and helps in refamiliarising the barbarity in ethnic violence through defamiliarisation.

ABSTRACT This article seeks to recover the conversation between Christopher Browning and Hannah Arendt, which has been obscured by common misinterpretations of Arendt. I aim to show that reading Browning's account of “ordinary” German perpetrators alongside Arendt's analysis may help us re-think the way perpetrators often participated in mass murder because they adapted themselves to the Nazi order the same way they adapted themselves to the pre- and post-Nazi order. The return of this repressed Arendtian insight in Browning's work, I suggest, marks a realization that remains underexplored in Holocaust studies.

ABSTRACT In 2023, an essay alleged Wikipedia's “intentional distortion” of the Holocaust. Subsequently, the Wikipedia community largely dismissed these claims during a formal investigation. The allegations repeated a narrative of a former Wikipedia volunteer banned from all Wikimedia projects for unethical behavior. While Wikipedia undoubtedly contains errors in its coverage of the Holocaust, there is no convincing evidence to prove that most of it is ‘intentional’, or that it can be attributed to the parties identified by the essay authors. Doing so breaches best practices in ethics and results in the promotion of a conspiracy-theory-like narrative and fake news. With permission of the author, the editors of Holocaust Studies invite reader responses to this article. Please submit your response via the online submission system within six months of the online publication date of the article.

Abstract Through the lens of contemporary ecopoetics, this article focuses on three post-Holocaust female authors who explore their Jewish-American identity through a poetic reflection on the Shoah and its aftermath that places nature at the heart of their narratives. This article examines Elizabeth Rosner’s connection to bodies of water in Gravity (2014), Cheryl J. Fish’s advocacy for environmental justice in The Sauna Is Full of Maids (2021), and Lyn Lifshin’s imagined Holocaust landscapes in Blue Tattoo (1995). Though these poets remain ontologically and experientially distanced from the Shoah in different ways, they perceive their Jewish-American identity as deeply intertwined with the Holocaust. Their works do not merely instrumentalize nature as a symbolic device but adopt it with agency in order to emphasize an underlying sense of responsiveness and interspecies empathy that offers significant ramifications on identity and trauma. This article examines how their posthuman poetic reconfigurations of the events render nonhuman agents as bearers of memory, mediating the experiences of victims during the war and subsequent generations’ efforts to confront the unassimilable past. This discussion contributes to the dialogue between environmental humanities and Holocaust studies, providing new possibilities for understanding ecocide and genocide, past and present injustice, and gender and oppression.

Abstract Memory studies, when intersecting with Jewish studies, is often narrated as stories of loss. The gains of futurity usually involve the work of recovery. This essay surveys a range of texts that concern the reclaiming of Jewish identity in the contemporary world. Its primary focus is a reading of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes as a product of Jewish memory, as a memoir, and as an example of intergenerational legacy. This essay includes autobiographical elements relevant to the histories of Jewish modernity, intermarriage and conversion, Jewish “westernization,” and immigration. Theoretical perspectives are introduced and major artists considered. The relationship between history and memory, the Jewish and non-Jewish, is interrogated with special attention given to the place of individuals of “mixed” identities. Holocaust studies informs this essay, as do post-memory, life-writing, and twenty-first century technologies and discourses around ancestry.

Abstract: The article discusses music as a cultural processor of a social trauma within the Holocaust. According to psychoanalytic music research, music is especially capable of representing trauma via its nonverbal, affective, and bodily-based means of expression. As an analytical example, the study focuses on the vocal and orchestral work The Song of Terezin (1965), composed by the German-American, Jewish composer Franz Waxman (1906–1967) and based on poems written by children in the concentration and transit camp of Terezín (There-sienstadt in German). By drawing on psychoanalytic music analysis, cultural trauma studies, Holocaust studies, and the concept of transitional space, the article outlines the sonic mechanism by which the composition Song of Terezin constructs a discourse of trauma and mourning. By this, the aim is to illuminate the workings of music as a communal vehicle for dealing with collective trauma, and hence as a site for the social healing process. As an art form based on listening, music may create an ethical space for encountering the Other, which is resonant with the psychoanalytic method of attentive listening.

Abstract Loïc Wacquant's “A Checkerboard of Ethnoracial Violence” offers a sharp analysis of racial violence, highlighting its varying forms, functions, and scales. We aim to enrich Wacquant's framework by unpacking the idea of cumulative radicalization. Originally developed in Holocaust studies, this concept allows one to specify connections between different forms and functions of violence by interrogating the interplay between different levels of analysis. It also sheds light on why the scale of violence sometimes shifts in destructive ways and provides mechanisms for why racialized boundaries lend themselves to mass murder. Deeper engagement with cumulative radicalization transforms checkers into simultaneous chess, as it helps us formulate a multilevel theory of violent escalation.

This study explores the resilience and resistance strategies of Mischlinge (individuals of mixed Jewish and non-Jewish ancestry) under Nazi rule in Germany from 1933 to 1945, a topic often overlooked in Holocaust research. By examining the unique legal, social, and psychological challenges Mischlinge faces, this paper highlights their multifaceted responses to systemic oppression. The analysis begins with the historical and ideological underpinnings of Nazi racial policies, emphasizing how Mischlinge was classified and treated as neither fully accepted nor entirely rejected within the Nazi hierarchy. It then delves into the innovative strategies employed by Mischlinge to navigate oppressive laws, including exploiting legal loopholes and forming supportive networks. Social resilience emerged through community solidarity, relationships with Jewish and non-Jewish allies, and underground resistance. Psychological strategies such as coping mechanisms and navigating dual identities further demonstrate their agency in surviving a hostile regime. Case studies, including figures like Hannah Arendt and Kurt Weill, illustrate these themes by showing how Mischlinge adapted to their precarious status and contributed intellectually and culturally to resist dehumanization. This research enriches Holocaust studies by addressing the complexity of mixed identities and emphasizing the diverse forms of resistance during this period, thereby challenging binary narratives of victimhood and complicity.

The history of the creation and activities of the Lodz Ghetto is a tale of escalating terror techniques. The structure of repression included isolation, starvation, slave labor, persecution on personal, cultural and religious grounds, as well as measures that reinforced social and material stratification. Against this background, practices of resistance of an acoustic nature – one of the few forms of resistance that could slip through the dense web of oppression – take on particular significance. Acoustic strategies of survival include, on the one hand, artistic creation or singing during work, strikes and opposition gatherings, and on the other, practices that ensured survival: deliberate silence, listening to the radio, or secret communication systems between those in hiding. The article illustrates the multifaceted nature of the resistance undertaken by those imprisoned in the ghetto, emphasizing the importance of sound strategies – hitherto overlooked in Holocaust studies. Key-words: Holocaust audiosphere, sound history, holocaust, Lodz ghetto, sound studies

The article critically analyzes various types of narratives of the former KL Auschwitz prisoner – August Kowalczyk – related to the issue of (homo)sexual relations in Nazi concentration camps. The juxtaposition of excerpts from his archival account, a published memoir and two oral accounts reveals a consolidating pattern, which is being used by Kowalczyk to cut himself off from the condition of being a potential victim of sexual abuse, condition of pipel and taboo – especially in the male-centered concentration camp discourse – themes: sexual barter and sexual violence. The theoretical framework, constructed with the use of Holocaust studies and gender studies’ findings, shows the possibility of finding expressions of gendered experiences in the Polish concentration camp and combatant discourse.