Dr. Natalia Aleksiun, Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Graduate School of Touro College, will speak about “Gender and the Daily Lives of Jews Hiding in Nazi Occupied Eastern Europe during the Holocaust,” on October 30 at 7 p.m. in the Robert a Scott Student Center, Alumni Lounges (SC158) at Ramapo College of New Jersey. The lecture will be presented under the auspices of the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and is free and open to the public.

Dr. Aleksiun examines how the hidden Jews of Eastern Galicia passed the time together, cared for one another, worked out survival strategies, and divided resources and labor during their concealment. This research contributes to the understanding of the social and emotional dynamics of the Holocaust experience through its framing as a local case study that analyzes the impact of fear and oppressive conditions on life in the bunkers—in particular, on familial and other relationships, including those that formed within the hideouts, among Jews who spanned the full spectrum of ages and social backgrounds.

Her work draws heavily on survivor testimonies collected by the Central Jewish Historical Commission and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and by Yad Vashem, as well as from the Museum’s oral history and eyewitness testimony collections. Diaries, chronicles, and memoirs written by Jews who hid in East Galicia, as well as the Museum’s International Tracing Service collection, also contributed greatly to her project.

Dr. Aleksiun studied Polish and Jewish history at the Warsaw University, the Graduate School of Social Studies in Warsaw and Hebrew University in Jerusalem and New York University. She received her doctorate from Warsaw University in 2001. Her dissertation won the Polish Prime Minister’s Award for doctoral students and appeared in print as Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944-1950 (in Polish) in 2002. In 2010, she received her second Ph.D. from New York University based on her dissertation, “Ammunition in the Struggle for National Rights: Jewish Historians in Poland between the Two World Wars.” She was a co-editor of the twentieth volume of Polin, devoted to the memory of the Holocaust.