Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland
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Book Talk
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland offers an intimate social history of Jewish childhood during and after the Holocaust. Centered on children from German-occupied Poland but informed by experiences across Nazi-occupied Europe, the book highlights the child’s own perspective to illuminate rescue, survival, and relationships with adults under the Nazi occupation. Author Joanna Beata Michlic examines children’s wartime experiences, showing how agency, gender, class, and religious or social background shaped their chances of survival. The book also traces the complex efforts of these young survivors to reclaim both childhood and Jewish identity, revealing the gap between their hopes and the actual opportunities of the immediate post-war period.
Drawing on children’s diaries, letters, testimonies, and memoirs, Michlic illuminates how children experienced and remembered trauma: the destruction of their families, the loss of their pre-war worlds, and the struggle to adapt to a new reality, challenging myths that sentimentalize the children’s endurance and portray the Holocaust as neatly concluded.
Join us for a conversation with Michlic about this book, led by Samuel Kassow.
About the Speakers
Joanna Beata Michlic is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Program Director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Graduate Programs, and Associate Director of the Center for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights at Gratz College. An internationally recognized social and cultural historian of the Holocaust and its aftermath, her scholarship focuses on Jewish children and families, rescue and survival, antisemitism, nationalism, and Holocaust memory and distortion. She has held academic appointments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and Sweden. Michlic is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books, including Poland’s Threatening Other and, most recently, Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland: Family, War, Identity, and Nationhood (University of Nebraska Press, 2026) and Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory (edited volume, Brandeis University Press, 2017). She has received numerous international fellowships and academic awards.
Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History, Emeritus at Trinity College, holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS; was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and has been translated into eight languages. White Goat Press recently published his translation of Warsaw Testament by Rokhl Auerbach, which received a National Jewish Book Award. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.