UVM Alumni House, Jack & Shirley Silver Pavilion View map Free Event
View map Free Event

The Annual Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture - "One Day in Auschwitz" Nikolaus Wachsmann, Birkbeck College, University of London

 

This lecture examines the history of the Auschwitz concentration camp by looking through a microscopic lens at a single day in its existence. It focuses on the experience of prisoners and perpetrators that day, exploring various spaces across the camp complex and beyond, as well as the sounds, sights and smells associated with them. It highlights sharp differences in prisoner lives, showing that there never was one Auschwitz, as daily experience was profoundly affected by factors like gender and ethnicity. And it focuses on the regular routines (from roll calls to forced labor) and the regular infrastructure (from prisoner infirmaries to SS research institutes) which shaped daily lives. Taken together, these close-up views – of those who lived and died in the camp on a single day – can help us better imagine the “unimaginable reality” of Auschwitz, as one inmate described it at the time.

 

Nikolaus Wachsmann is professor for modern European history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and currently a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin. He is the author of KL. A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, winner of the 2016 Wolfson History Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize (Columbia Journalism School). He is currently writing a new history of Auschwitz and serves on the Academic Advisory Boards at the Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Mauthausen Memorials.

 

 

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