On September 23 at 2 p.m. in the Robert A. Scott Student Center, Freinds Hall (SC219), Dr. Atina Grossmann, Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Cooper Union in New York City, will discuss her recent work on “Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Lost Memories of Displacement, Trauma, and Rescue in the Soviet Union, Iran, and India. ”
 
She will address the less well known Holocaust story about Jewish death, survival, and displacement in the Soviet interior, Central Asia, Iran, and British India.  As Grossmann will explain, between two-thirds and 80 percent of the approximately 330,000 of the Polish Jews who survived the Nazi occupation escaped to the Soviet Union. The refuge may have been inadvertent and involuntary, and conditions were extremely harsh for those who endured them, but they survived.
 
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 (M.A., 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 in Germany.
 
Dr. Grossmann is 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 and the manuscript for the book won the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Wiener Library in London in 2006.