(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)January 17, 2018

MAHWAH, N.J. – Dr. Ellen G. Friedman, Professor of English and Holocaust and Genocide Studies at The College of New Jersey, and Dr. Atina Grossmann, Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Cooper Union in New York City, discussed their recent work on the fate of the Polish Jews who during the Holocaust found refuge in the Soviet Union and beyond. While both Friedman and Grossmann are daughters of survivors, Friedman is a literary scholar and Grossmann is an historian. The event took place under the auspices of The Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in October,Numbers provided the basic outline of the story. Approximately 3.3 million Jews resided in

and was moderated by Gross Center Director, Dr. Michael A. Riff.pre- war Poland, of whom approximately 10 percent survived (around 330,000 people), most of whom (between 66 and 80 percent) did so because they escaped to the Soviet Union. While their flight to the Soviet Union often entailed banishment to the prison settlements and Gulags of Siberia and Central Asia, it enabled them to survive.

At the end of last year, Wayne State University Press published works by Friedman and Grossmann on the topic of their conversation. Ellen Friedman’s The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story tells the story of her own extended family’s odyssey from Warsaw to the far reaches of the Gulag archipelago in Soviet Central Asia. Thanks to the family’s pluck and ingenuity, Friedman was born in Kyrgyzstan, a republic of the Soviet Union, within sight of the Tian Shan Mountains bordering China. She began her primary education in Berlin and received her Ph.D. in English from New York University.

Friedman has given lectures and keynote addresses in the US, Britain, Europe, and Russia, and was twice invited to be a visiting professor at the Institute of English and American Studies, J. W. Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, Germany. She has also taught in Paris.

Her books include Joyce Carol Oates, Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, and Morality USA.

Together with Mark Edele and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Atina Grossmann co-edited Shelter from the Holocaust Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, which weaves together the complicated history of how the 1.5 million East European Jews—mostly from Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia—survived World War II behind the lines in the unoccupied parts of the Soviet Union. The essay that Grossmann contributed to the book, “Jewish Refugees in the Soviet Central Asia, Iran and India: Lost memories of Displacement, Trauma and Rescue,” dovetails nicely with Friedman’s biographical account.
Born in New York of German- Jewish parents who found refuge during the Holocaust in India and Iran, Grossmann is 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, 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.

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, as well as many other publications.

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