CANCELLED – Anastasia Fairchild: “Between Testimony and Trial: A Transnational History of the Kamenets-Podolsk Massacre of 1941”

In the wake of Operation Barbarossa, the Hungarian government, on its own initiative, deported Hungarian, Russian and Polish Jews from newly acquired peripheral territories, as well as mainland Hungary, as far as Kamenets-Podolsk – a city beyond the Dniester River on the border of Galicia and Podolia in then German-occupied Western Ukraine. It was there, between August 27 and 29, 1941 that German units and their Ukrainian auxiliaries perpetrated a three-day-long, bullet-ridden genocide of some 23,000 Jews, most of them so-called “stateless” Jews who had been exiled in Hungarian-led deportations.

Anastasia Fairchild’s research focuses on the multifaceted, transnational and intricate process of recording and producing knowledge about the Kamenets-Podolsk Massacre. It explores how the further we move away from the atrocities of 1941, the better we come to know the Kamenets-Podolsk Massacre as a pivotal event in the history of the Shoah. Her discussion follows protagonists – “ordinary individuals” amidst “extraordinary politicization” – who strove to create a public record of the Kamenets-Podolsk Massacre. By highlighting the contrasting ways of narrating this history that emerged in the pursuit of justice between Hungary, the Soviet Union and Israel, she provides a transnational reading of how establishing a historical record around Hungarian complicity in the Kamenets-Podolsk deportations failed for five decades after the fact and why in 1997, one extraordinary protagonist finally succeeded.

This event is co-sponsored by the Jews in Modern Europe Seminar, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and the William Landau Lecture and Publication Fund, Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University.