In our new Have Your Say personal essay, Dr. Magdalena Waligórska raises important questions about the impact of the war in Ukraine on the field of Holocaust studies and on Holocaust memory itself.
Dr. Waligórska leads a team of international scholars in a project aimed at investigating what happened in and to the former shtetls of eastern Europe after the Holocaust left them devoid of their Jewish residents.
In her essay, In Search of the Lost Shtetl, she describes the project – and also reflects on the inevitable, dramatic impact that the war in Ukraine will have not just on her project, but on Holocaust research and remembrance in general.
“With the new war, new atrocities against civilians and a new collective trauma, World War II will fade in collective memory, lose its central importance in memorial culture, become overwritten with the experience of the new generations of Ukrainians suffering in the current war,” she writes. “The new war will reconfigure the way WWII will be remembered, but also written about.”
Click here to read the Have Your Say