Important Note
This event is online only.
Please join the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University for a discussion with Svitlana Teluka. Discussed by Tanya Domi, Columbia University.
Dr. Svitlana Telukha will discuss the Holocaust in Ukraine, with a focus on learning from oral testimonies and biographies recorded with survivors in Ukraine in 2019-2021. The interviews cover a wide variety of subjects and themes, including daily life under occupation, entrepreneurship, the struggle for life, and various strategies for surviving extreme conditions and constant mortal threats. Learn about a Jewish baby redeemed for a piece of jewelry and of how a little chicken saved the lives of two Jewish boys. How did a two-year-old girl manage to escape a firing pit and mass grave? How did changing one’s appearance enable some to survive? Only by allowing personal stories and experiences to pierce the meta-narratives we build for thinking about the Shoah can we approach understanding.
Dr. Svitlana Telukha holds a PhD in history. She is a lecturer at the National Technical University, “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute.” Her research interests include social history, trauma studies, everyday-life and gender studies. Her research methods relate to oral history. To that end, Dr. Telukha participates in many oral history projects, such as: “Don’t Forget! Kharkiv,” “Chernobyl Historical Workshop,” “Right to Life,” War Childhood Museum,” and “Unspoken.” She has interviewed over 200 witnesses of and participants in World War II, including Holocaust Survivors in Ukraine. Her publications cover cultures of remembrance, traumatic memory, and the politics of memory: Traumatic memory: following by biographical narratives (examples of the Holocaust, Chornobyl, Fukushima) (Kiev, 2022), Holocaust memorials in Kharkiv. Memorialization in urban space (Berlin,2022), Traumatic memories of Chernobyl (Wrocław, 2019), Antisemitism, Discrimination or Humanism? The position of the ROC hierarch on Jewishness (Kiev, 2019); Vilcha the resettled village (Kharkiv, 2018).
Professor Tanya Domi (Columbia) will respond to the talk, after which there will be time for questions and answers.