(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)February 1, 2017

MAHWAH, N.J. – Dr. Atina Grossmann, Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Cooper Union in New York City, discussed her recent work on “Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Lost Memories of Displacement, Trauma, and Rescue in the Soviet Union, Iran, and India” on September 23 at an event sponsored by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Dr. Grossmann addressed a transnational Holocaust story that has remained marginalized in both historiography and commemoration. She addressed the less well-known Holocaust story about Jewish death, survival, and displacement in the Soviet interior, Central Asia, Iran, and British India. Numerous photographs, including several of her own parents in Iran and India, enhanced her talk.

As she made clear, approximately 3.3 million Jews resided in pre-war Poland, of whom approximately 10 percent survived (around 330,000 people), most of whom (between 66 and 80%) did so because they escaped to the Soviet Union. While their flight to the Soviet interior (Siberia) and then to Central Asia may have been inadvertent, involuntary and arduous, it was the reason for their survival. It was quite another matter, Grossmann explained, that a mounting wave of anti-Semitic persecution impelled the overwhelmingly majority of those repatriated to Poland after the war to flee to Germany, where they became Displaced Persons and mostly emigrated to Israel and the United States.

Atina Grossmann teaches Modern European and German history, and Women’s and Gender Studies. A graduate of the City College of New York (B.A.) and Rutgers University (MA, Ph.D.), she has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, German Marshall Fund, American Council of Learned Societies, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the American Academy in Berlin, as well as Guest Professorships at the Humboldt University Berlin and the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany.

Dr. Grossmann is the author of Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany 1945–1949 (2007), which won the George L. Mosse Prize in 2007 from the American Historical Association for the best book on European intellectual and cultural history. She is also the author of Reforming Sex: The German Movement For Birth Control and Abortion Reform 1920–1950 (1995) and co-author of After the Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe with Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, and Geoff Eley (2009). She co-edited Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century with Omer Bartov and Mary Nolan (2002), as well as When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, with Renate Bridenthal and Marion Kaplan (1984).

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