About this Event
Part of our 2026 Academic Seminar Series, .
As individual Holocaust survivors testify over the span of years or even decades, how do their narratives change – especially when they describe emotional experiences from the past? In Lisa Peschel’s current book project, she follows the narratives of five Czech-Jewish survivors of the Theresienstadt Ghetto who stayed in Czechoslovakia after the war. All of them were involved in the ghetto’s renowned cultural life as theatre artists, and all testified various times between 1945 and 2008 – not only about what they performed, but how they felt about it.
In this lecture she will focus on the testimony of Gertruda Popperová, who began her theatrical career in the ghetto itself and became a professional actress after the war. Comparing her testimony from the 1960s and the 1990s, Peschel argues that the differences in her narratives spring from her different needs in each decade. Each conveys different emotional engagements, and each requires a different method of interpretation. By examining the 1960s testimony in its fraught social and political context, we see how Popperová crafted her testimony to pursue a dearly held goal: integration of the Terezin survivors’ experience into the Czech national narrative of the war. By the 1990s her political project had evolved into a personal one: in an interview conducted by a fellow survivor, she used her memories of theatre in Theresienstadt to regulate her own emotions in the present. Finally, what kinds of conclusions can we draw regarding the emotional effects of theatre in the ghetto itself?
About the speaker
Dr Lisa Peschel is a professor of theatre in the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York, England. She has been researching theatrical performance in the Theresienstadt ghetto since 1998. Her articles on survivor testimony and scripts written in the ghetto have appeared in theatre- and Holocaust-related journals in the US and the UK and in Czech, German and Israeli publications.
She has lectured and conducted performance workshops at institutions in the US and UK, in Europe, South Africa and Australia. Her edited volume based on two reconstructions of a fragmentary script from Theresienstadt, A Holocaust Cabaret: Re-making Theatre from a Jewish Ghetto, was published in autumn 2023.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Wiener Holocaust Library, 29 Russell Square, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
