The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust

Join this Annual Holocaust Commemoration Lecture with Lisa Leff, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Free and open to the public.

This lecture focuses on the story of Zosa Szajkowski, a Polish-born Jewish historian who took tens of thousands of Jewish documents from Europe in the 1940s and 50s and moved them, illicitly, to New York, and eventually sold them to Jewish research libraries in the United States and Israel. Was this a heroic act of salvage or simply theft? Through this question, we will examine larger issues about Jewish nationalism, the aftermath of the Holocaust, and more generally speaking, the historical project to gather and safeguard the remnants of the past.