Professor Sarah Cramsey
Leiden University
The Other Holocaust: Care, Children and the Jewish Catastrophe
Please register for the event here.
When:
Wednesday 19 February, 2025: 16:15 – 17:45
Where:
VUB Main Campus Etterbeek
Pleinlaan 2
1050 Elsene
Vergaderzaal LW C5.03
*Free of charge*
The Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Professor Cornelis J. Schilt invite you to a lecture by Professor Sarah Cramsey (Leiden University), entitled “The Other Holocaust: Care, Children and the Jewish Catastrophe”. This lecture is part of the ERC lecture series ‘Knowledge in International Perspective’ (KIIP).
Contact: nicolo.cantoni@vub.be and demetrios.paraschos@vub.be
Professor Sarah Cramsey: “We continue to know very little about how the Holocaust happened to a majority of victims and survivors: babies, toddlers, children designated as Jews by Nazi law and those who cared for them during this extraordinary event. This absence of care and inattention to the “invisible work” of caretaking in existing Holocaust histories is surprising, exceptional and intellectually dangerous. Strikingly, the absence of very young children and their caretakers from the stories we write about the Jewish tragedy warps our most basic understanding of the genocidal crimes that unfolded during the 1930s and 1940s, our consequent memories of this genocide and the longer history of early child-rearing across the Jewish experience.
This talk draws from my ERC Starting Grant Project, “A Century of Care: Early Childcare and Invisible Work in Central and Eastern Europe, 1905-2004”, and from my new book, The Other Holocaust: Care, Children and the Jewish Catastrophe (Under contract, Indiana University Press). In this talk, I use unique and original sources to identify the voices, spaces and materials linked to care of the very young as well as innovative visual, material and conceptual methodologies to systematically visualize how caretakers sustained the youngest victims and the smallest survivors across the World War II and the Holocaust to either the moment of their premature deaths or to their postwar lives. The Other Holocaust reconfigures what we think we know about the Jewish catastrophe and the seemingly-timeless but always-contingent process of nurturing the youngest in our collective midsts across historical time.”
About Professor Sarah Cramsey
Professor Sarah Cramsey is Professor by Special Appointment in the History of Central Europe, Migration, and Diaspora Studies at Leiden University. She is also an Assistant Professor of Judaism and Diaspora Studies and serves as the Director of the Austria Centre Leiden. From 2025 to 2030, she is the Principal Investigator of A Century of Care: Invisible Work and Early Childcare in Central and Eastern Europe, 1905-2004 (CARECENTURY), a project funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant.
Professor Cramsey is a historian of Eastern Europe and the global Jewish experience, with a particular focus on Jewish diasporas formed in the wake of the Holocaust, World War II, and postwar developments. She earned her doctorate in late modern European history with a designated emphasis in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2014. She has since taught courses on modern European history, Central and Eastern Europe, Jewish Studies, and Religious Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Tulane University, and the Université libre de Bruxelles.
Her book, Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the “Ethnic Revolution” in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946 (Indiana University Press, 2023), explores how Jewish citizens of interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia came to be regarded as the ideal population for a postwar Jewish state in the Middle East. Based on her prize-winning doctoral dissertation, the book won the 2024 Kulczycki Prize for the Best Book in Polish Studies and was a finalist for the 2024 Ernst Fraenkel Prize for the Best Book on the Holocaust. Her forthcoming book, The Other Holocaust: Care, Children and the Jewish Catastrophe, is under advanced contract with Indiana University Press.
About Prof. Dr Cornelis J. Schilt
Cornelis J. Schilt is a research professor in History and Philosophy of Knowledge at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, specialising in Renaissance, early modern knowledge formation in general and the life and writings of Isaac Newton in particular. In 2022, he received a prestigious ERC start-up grant. With it, he started the project VERITRACE in which he investigates the influence of ancient wisdom writings on the development of early modern natural philosophy.
