Events Calendar

Product Description

Wednesday 22 May
1.15pm

FREE 

In this Lunchtime Lecture, Dr Simon Holloway will talk about the forgotten death camp of Chelmno.

Over two extended periods from 1941 to 1945, the Polish town of Chełmno nad Nerem played host to one of the least known death camps of Nazi-occupied Europe. Despite having claimed the lives of over 150,000 people, very few today have even heard of Chełmno, nor know what transpired there. With reference to the testimonies of a handful of people who survived this little-known camp, and with reference to the testimonies of perpetrators and other witnesses, this lecture aims to redress that imbalance. In so doing, we hope to draw attention to the crimes perpetrated at the first death camp of the Holocaust, but also to the remarkable endurance of those who survived it.

Please note, some of the images in this lecture might be confronting.

Bio

Dr Simon Holloway is an Education Officer at the Sydney Jewish Museum, where he runs seminars on Nazi racial science, Jewish resistance and the history of the Holocaust. Simon holds a PhD from the University of Sydney, for which he investigated the function of metaphors in the Hebrew Bible. His current research concerns the textual transmission of the early rabbinic literature and the use of humour in halakhic texts.