Notes on Speakers

Natalia Aleksiun (naleksiun@yahoo.com) is Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies (New York), and incoming Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida (Gainesville). She holds doctoral degrees from WarsawUniversity and New York University. She specialises in the social, political, and cultural history of modern East European and Polish Jewry and the Holocaust. Natalia has written extensively on the history of Polish Jews, the Holocaust, Jewish intelligentsia in East Central Europe, Polish-Jewish relations, and modern Jewish historiography. In addition to her book Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021), she is the author of Dokad dalej? Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce 1944–1950 [Where To? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944–1950] (Warsaw, 2002), and co-editor of several special issues, including Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 29 (2017): “Writing Jewish history in Eastern Europe” (with Brian Horowitz & Antony Polonsky), and European Holocaust Studies 3 (2021): “Places, spaces and voids in the Holocaust” (with Hana Kubátová). She edited a critical edition of Gerszon Taffet’s Zagłada Żydów żółkiewskich [The Extermination of the Jews from Żółkiewka](2019). She also serves as co-editor of East European Jewish Affairs. Currently, Natalia is Senior Fellow at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies in Warsaw. She is completing a new book about Jews in hiding in eastern Galicia during the Holocaust.

Giorgos Antoniou (antoniou.giorgos@gmail.com) received his PhD in History and Civilization from the European University Institute of Florence (2007). He was Research Fellow of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah in Paris (2005-2007), and visiting lecturer at Yale University (2007-2008) and at the University of Cyprus (2008-2009). He holds the Chair of Jewish Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki since 2015 and since 2019 he has become a faculty member in the Department of History and Archaeology. In 2019 he was awarded the Baron Velge Prize for research and teaching about World War Two and he held, as a visiting scholar, the International Chair for the Second World War in Brussels (ULB). He is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance since 2018 (Education). He has edited (with Dirk Moses) the volume The Holocaust in Greece (CUP, 2018). He is the national leader on two Horizon 2020 projects: www.repast.eu, on the nexus between troubled past and present societies, and https://www.ehri-project.eu/, on digital infrastructure and Holocaust archives and resources.

Nevena Bajalica (nevena.bajalica@gmail.com) is co-founder and programme manager at Terraforming. With over 25 years of experience as a project manager, researcher, and team leader in international projects, she has facilitated international cooperation focusing on cultural exchange, human rights, discrimination, and tolerance, targeting youth, educators, local authorities, curators, artists, and other stakeholders. Nevena was born in 1967 in Senta in Yugoslavia. When the civil war started in 1991, she left the country and moved to Amsterdam, where she studied Slavic Languages and General Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. She has worked at the educational department of the Anne Frank House, was project officer on the Dutch MATRA programme for international cooperation, and member of the Dutch Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) team as researcher and co-writer of the independent historical report “Srebrenica – A ‘Safe’ Area”. Nevena moved to Novi Sad in 2019 and is currently member of the delegation of the Republic of Serbia to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and a member of the IHRA Working Group for Memorials and Museums.

Joana Bürger (joana.buerger92@gmail.com) is PhD candidate and Fellow at the Stroum Centre of Jewish studies, University of Washington. Her paper “Greek Jews’ Refugee Relief Work (1936-1941)” constitutes part of her ongoing PhD project under the supervision of Professor Devin Naar. Following a BSc in Psychology at Potsdam University (2013-2017), she completed an International Research MA in Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University (2017-2020). A revised version of her dissertation, which was supervised by Professor Eyal Ginio, is published as “Between Corfu and Athens. Moisis Caimis’ contribution to the making of Greek Jewry (1885-1916)”, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 20 (2021): 162-190. Already as an undergraduate student, Bürger was engaged in extracurricular activities in public Holocaust education. In addition to co-organising an international summer school on the Jewish history of Kastoria (2015, 2016), she became familiar with digital approaches to Holocaust remembrance while working as a translator for the oral history project “Memories of the German Occupation in Greece”, Free University of Berlin (2018). These experiences motivated her to continue her interest in the field of History on an academic level and to pursue a PhD. Her research interests are Greco-Jewish identity formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, forced migrations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the interwar period, and comparative Holocaust memory.

Philip Carabott (philip.carabott@kcl.ac.uk; https://greekjewry.wordpress.com/) is Research Associate of King’s College London, where he taught modern and contemporary Greek history from 1990 to 2011; CEO of the Civil Non-Profit Company “Workshop on the Study of the Jews of Greece” (Athens, 2016-); and Commissioned Researcher of the Jewish Community of Athens. He has published widely on politics, society and minorities in Greece of the modern era. Currently, he is completing a monograph on the Shoah in Athens, and is Principal Investigator at the project “Hiding and rescue in German-occupied Athens, 1943-1944: Jewish persecutees and Greek compatriots”, which is financially supported by the German-Greek Future Fund of the German Federal Foreign Office.

Iason Chandrinos (jahandrinos@yahoo.gr) was born in Athens in 1984. He studied modern history and received his PhD from the University of Athens in 2015. From 2007 to 2015 he worked as a special researcher for the Jewish Museum of Greece. He is a founding member of the Civil Non-Profit Company “Workshop on the Study of the Jews of Greece” (Athens, 2016-). From 2016 to 2018, he worked at the Greek-German project “Memories of the Occupation in Greece” (Free University of Berlin). In March 2022, he completed his habilitation thesis on “Internment, forced labour, labour migration: Greeks in the Third Reich, 1939-1945” at the Chair of Modern European History of the University of Regensburg with funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). He has authored (in Greek) The People’s Punishing Arm: The Activities of ELAS and OPLA in Occupied Athens, 1942-1944 (Athens, 2012); Cities at War: European Urban Centres Under Nazi Occupation, 1939-1945 (Athens, 2018); Making It Through the Night: An Oral History of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising (Athens, 2019); Brothers in Arms: The National Liberation Front and the Jews of Greece (Salonika, 2020). Currently, he is Researcher at the project “Hiding and rescue in German-occupied Athens, 1943-1944: Jewish persecutees and Greek compatriots”, which is financially supported by the German-Greek Future Fund of the German Federal Foreign Office.

Angel Chorapchiev (angel_malach@yahoo.com) was born and raised in Bulgaria. In 1998, he graduated from the University of Sofia, earning his BA and MA in General History. His MA dissertation focused on the history of the youth Zionist organisation Maccabi in Bulgaria between the First and the Second World War. After graduating, he moved to Israel where he completed his PhD studies at the University of Haifa. His thesis was on the development of the educational system of the Jewish community in Bulgaria in the interwar period. Between 2003 and 2005, he completed a post doc in Thessaloniki working on the Bulgarian educational policy in Northern Greece during the Second World War. Upon returning to Israel, he was appointed as a lecturer in the Programme for Modern Hellenic Studies at the University of Haifa. For fifteen years, he taught various courses on the history of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth century. In 2010, he started working also for the Archives Division of the Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre. Currently, he is Head of Archival Acquisitions for Central Europe and the Balkans. His research interests are on the history of Balkan Jewish communities in the twentieth century, with special focus of their fate during the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Stratos Dordanas (dordanas@otenet.gr) is Associate Professor of History at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki). His research interests include relations between Germany and the Balkan countries during the nineteenth and twentieth century, and the history of Greek Macedonia. He has authored (in Greek) Greeks Against Greeks: The World of the Security Battalions in Occupied Thessaloniki, 1941-1944 (Thessaloniki, 2005); The Blood of the Innocent: Reprisals by the German Occupation Authorities in Macedonia, 1941-1944 (Athens, 2007); The German Uniform in Mothballs. The Survival of Collaborationism in Macedonia, 1945-1974 (Athens, 2011); (with Vaios Kalogrias) The Lives of Others. Stasi and Greek Political Refugees in East Germany (1949-1989) (Thessaloniki, 2020; The Venal. German propaganda in Greece during the First World War (Athens, 2021). He has also co-edited, and contributed to (in Greek), The German Empire and the Balkan Wars (Thessaloniki, 2012); The German Empire and the Macedonian Question (Thessaloniki, 2013).

Anna Maria Droumpouki (anna.droumpouki@lrz.uni-muenchen.de) holds a BA in History and Archaeology, an MA in Museology and a PhD in Contemporary Greek and European History (all from the University of Athens). She was Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow (Leipzig, 2009); Postdoctoral Fellow at the Research Centre for Modern History (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, 2014-2016); Scientific Coordinator of the Greek-German project “Memories of the Occupation in Greece” (Free University of Berlin, 2016-2018); and Research Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation (2019-2021). She is a founding member of the Civil Non-Profit Company “Workshop on the Study of the Jews of Greece” (Athens, 2016-). She has authored (in Greek): Monuments of Oblivion. Traces of the Second World War in Greece and Europe (Athens, 2014); Endless Negotiations: The Reconstruction of the Jewish Communities of Greece and German Reparations, 1945-1961 (Athens, 2019); and co-edited (with Agiatis Benardou) the volume Difficult Heritage and Immersive Experiences (Routledge, 2022). At present, she is Scientific Coordinator of the project “Tales from Block 15 – A virtual journey to a grim past”, financed by the German Federal Foreign Office, and Research Assistant at the History Department of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, working on the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-funded project “The worst times are not yet over: Jewish life in post-war Greece, 1944-1949”.

Dienke Hondius (d.g.hondius@vu.nl;https://research.vu.nl/admin/workspace/personal/overview/) is Assistant Professor of Contemporary and Political History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Faculty of Humanities; Staff member at the Anne Frank House; Co-chair of the Oral History Commission, Huizinga Instituut of Humanities Research (Utrecht); Member of the Jewish Studies Commission of the Menasse Ben Israel Institute (Amsterdam); and Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Professor of  Holocaust Studies at Stockton University, Galloway (New Jersey). At the Anne Frank House, she helped to establish the international department by making international travelling exhibits in many countries. She combines teaching and research and is also active in the field of Oral History and Memory Studies. In her research project “Mapping Hiding Places”, Hondius has build maps with information about locations where Jews hid during the Shoah in Europe. This international research initiative has stimulated a new focus on the history of Jews in hiding during World War II – e.g., student research projects on hiding places in Amsterdam, international grant proposals and presentations on international comparative studies, in particular on urban histories of hiding in the Netherlands, Jerusalem (Yad Vashem), Paris, Athens, New York, and in New Jersey. In 2012, she initiated the research project “Mapping Slavery”at Vrije Universiteit. In cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Oral History department, she has directed the oral history project “Bystander Memories” with interviews of non-Jewish eyewitnesses of the Holocaust. Hondius has published extensively in the broad field of Holocaust Studies and anti-Semitism, and on race, racism and Slavery Studies. She has authored Absent: Herinneringen aan het Joods Lyceum in Amsterdam, 1941-1943 [Absent: Memories of the Jewish Lyceum in Amsterdam, 1941-1943] (Amsterdam, 2001); “Oorlogslessen”: Onderwijs over de oorlog sinds 1945 [“War Lessons”: Education on the War since 1945]  (Amsterdam, 2010); Return: Holocaust Survivors and Dutch Anti-Semitism (Westport, 2004); Blackness in Western Europe: Racial Patterns of Paternalism and Exclusion (New Brunswick, 2014); Amsterdam Slavery Heritage Guide (Arnhem, 2014); (co-author) Dutch New York Histories: Connecting African, Native American and Slavery Heritage (Washington DC, 2017); (co-author) Netherlands Slavery Heritage Guide / Gids Slavernijverleden Nederland (Edam, 2019).

Kateřina Králová (kralova@fsv.cuni.cz) is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the Institute of International Studies, Charles University (CUNI). Her work focuses on reconciliation with the Nazi past, the Holocaust, the Greek Civil War, conflict-related migration, and post-war reconstruction. An alumna of Phillips University Marburg, she has been awarded major international fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt (HU Berlin 2021-22). Králová is one of the founders of the Herzl Centre for Israel Studies at CUNI, and recently she became a member of the COST-Action Slow Memory leadership. In 2022, the Claims Conference supported her application for Holocaust Teaching Partnership, which has been awarded to CUNI. She is the author of Das Vermächtnis der Besatzung: Deutsch-griechische Beziehungen seit 1940 (Böhlau, 2016). She has published numerous articles and volumes in Czech, English, German and Greek, and is an active member of several editorial boards. The manuscript of her second book on Holocaust survivors in Greece is currently under review by a US university press.

Joanna Beata Michlic (j.michlic@ucl.ac.uk) is a social and cultural historian, and founder and first director of the HBI (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute) Project on Families, Children, and the Holocaust at Brandeis University. She is Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Collective Violence, the Holocaust and Genocide (Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London), and Research Fellow at Weiss-Livnat International Centre for Holocaust Research and Education (University of Haifa, June 2019 – May 2022). She is also co-editor-in-chief of Genealogy. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of Poland and East European Jews, the Holocaust and its memory in Europe, East European Jewish childhood and antisemitism and nationalism in Europe. She has received many prestigious academic awards and fellowships, most recently Gerda Henkel Fellow (2017-2021). She has authored Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), translated into Polish in 2015 and in Hebrew, with a new epilogue, in 2021. She has co-edited TheNeighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton University Press, 2004); Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (University of Nebraska Press, 2008); Jewish Family 1939 – Present: History, Representation, and Memory, (Brandeis University Press, 2017). Her latest book is a collection of essays about child Holocaust survivors entitled Piętno Zagłady [Mark of the Holocaust] (Warsaw, 2020). Her forthcoming new book on child Holocaust survivors from Poland will appear in English and German translation in 2023.

Paris Papamichos Chronakis (pchronakis@gmail.com) is Lecturer in Modern Greek History at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he teaches and researches the history and memory of the Modern Mediterranean. His work explores questions of transition from empire to nation-state, bringing together the entangled histories of Jewish, Muslim and Christian urban middle classes from the late Ottoman Empire to the Holocaust. In recent years, his research and publications have expanded to post-imperial urban identities, Balkan War refugees, Salonica in World War One, Greek interwar Zionism and anti-Zionism, the Holocaust of Sephardi Jewry and digital Holocaust Studies. He was a member of the scientific committee developing the “Database of Greek Jewish Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies”, and is on the editorial board of the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique Moderne et Contemporaine. Currently, he is spearheading a digital history project on the social networks of Greek Jewish Holocaust deportees and escapees.

Odette Varon-Vassard (o_varon@otenet.gr) is an historian of the Resistance, the Holocaust and the Sephardic Diaspora. She studied History and Archaeology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Modern Greek History at the Université de la Sorbonne, Paris IV, Institut Néohellenique. She has taught Greek history as professor/advisor at the Department of Greek Civilisation, Hellenic Open University (2001-2017). She is associated with many projects of the Jewish Museum of Greece (JMG, Athens). Since 2011, she directs her own seminar at the JMG on “The genocide of European Jews: History, memory and representations”. She also lectures at the JMG’s annual seminar on “Teaching about the Holocaust in Greece”. She has given keynote lectures at the Mémorial de la Shoah (Paris), Yad Vashem (Jerusalem), Fondation pour la Mémoire Auschwitz (Brussels), the Faculty of Modern Greek (Strasbourg University), INALCO (Paris), EHESS (Paris), Maison d’Izieu (France), UNESCO (Paris), Museum of the Diaspora (Beit Hafutsot, Tel Aviv), Sydney Jewish Museum, Macquarie University (Sydney). She has authored in Greek: Greek Youth Press 1941-1945. An Inventory (2 vols, Athens, 1987); A Generation Comes of Age: Young Men and Women under the Occupation and in the Resistance (Athens, 2009); The Emergence of a Difficult Memory. Essays on the Genocide of Jews (Athens, ²2013); and in French: Des Sépharades aux Juifs grecs. Histoire, mémoire et identité (Paris: Le Manuscrit, ²2021). She has edited the testimony of Holocaust survivor Berry Nahmias, A Cry for Tomorrow (in Greek, Athens, 2020), and a special issue on “Holocaust memory” of the journal Synchrona Themata (Athens, 2021). She is a member of the Society for the Study of Modern Hellenism (Athens), and of the Atelier Albert Cohen (Paris), in her capacity as translator in Greek of his novels Solal and Mangeclous. She was also founding member of the Society for the Study of Greek Jewry (Athens). She sits at the Scientific Board of the journal Synchrona Themata, of The Books’ Journal (Athens), and was editor of the journal Metafrassi (1995-2008). In 2006, Varon-Vassard was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Currently, she is co-responsible for the research programme “Armenians and Jews in the cities of South-Eastern Europe” at the École Française d’Athènes (2022-2026).

Geraldien von Frijtag (g.g.vonfrijtagdrabbekunzel@uu.nl) leads the research team at the section of Political History at Utrecht University, which she joined in 2004. She has published widely on the Nazi era and the Holocaust and has a long track record of coordinating international and national collaborative research. Currently, von Frijtag engages with the micro and local history of the Holocaust. Her most recent publication, Een stad op drift: Hilversum tijdens de Duitse bezettingi (Boom, 2020) concerns the history of Hilversum under Nazi rule.

Bart Wallet (B.T.Wallet@uva.nl) is Professor of Early Modern and Modern Jewish History at the University of Amsterdam. His field of specialisation is the history and culture of Dutch Jewry, on which he has authored a range of publications. In his PhD dissertation (2012), he analysed a corpus of eighteenth-century Yiddish historiography written in Amsterdam, whereas other studies dealt with the integration of Jews in Dutch society, the relations between the House of Orange and the Jews, and the reconstruction of the Jewish community after the Second World War. He is one of the authors and editors of the authoritative Reappraising the History of the Jews in the Netherlands (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021). Wallet is the editor of the much acclaimed war diary of Rotterdam Jewish girl Carry Ulreich, which was published in Dutch and translated into Hebrew, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. He is co-editor-in-chief of Studia Rosenthaliana. Journal of the History, Culture and Heritage of the Jews in the Netherlands,and editor of the European Journal of Jewish Studies. He is also a member of the steering committee of the Digital Forum of the European Association of Jewish Studies.