Until recently, historians have paid little attention to the experiences of intermarried families and their children during the Holocaust. This was in part a result of the unprecedented scale of the Holocaust as well as an unchallenged popular and scholarly understanding that these were families to whom “not much happened.” In this talk, historian Tatjana Lichtenstein draws on her research on wartime Prague (then possibly the place with the most intermarried Jewish and non-Jewish families in Europe) to challenge this view.  Exploring the diverse, complex experiences of these parents and children, she argues that their stories provide new perspectives on the Holocaust and its legacies.

Tatjana Lichtenstein is an associate professor of Modern Eastern Europe in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her book “Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia: Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Ethnic Belonging” was published in 2016. She is currently working on a book project on intermarried families and their children in the Bohemian Lands during the Holocaust.

This event is the Lou Dunst Memorial Lecture.

About the Series

The Holocaust Living History Workshop (HLHW) series is an education and outreach program co-sponsored by the UC San Diego Library and the Jewish Studies Program. It aims to preserve the memories of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust by offering public events involving witnesses, descendants and scholars and through the use of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive. Past HLHW workshops are now part of the Library’s digital collections and can be accessed online.