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This book project is a triple biography of Lili Jacob (the woman who found the Auschwitz Album in 1945), her home village of Bilky (today in Ukraine), and the Auschwitz Album itself. The Album contains the only photographs of Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau. My project is a microhistory that investigates life at the local level from voices of specific individuals, places, and things. The stories of Lili, her village, and the Album are themselves fascinating and add much to our knowledge of the region and of the twentieth century, yet the methodology of microhistory also allows me to complicate as well as complement more common narratives of the Holocaust, of East Central Europe, and of the modern world. I work with traditional top-down sources, but I also consult material from Lili and other survivors. (Lili did not write a memoir. She gave two interviews during her lifetime.) I read personal sources, such as birth records, school records, census reports, etc. in order to better understand how people (Jews, Ukrainians, Hungarians, etc. in Transcarpathia) understood their own world. My objective is to give a voice to those who are often not seen, heard, or remembered.John C. Swanson is Guerry Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His recent book, Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary, won the 2018 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize as well as the 2019 Hungarian Studies Association Book Prize. His research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, the Humboldt Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Fulbright, and numerous other organizations. He is also active as a documentary filmmaker.
Image: Postcard of Bilky from the 1920s
RSVP Agnes Bendik at [email protected]
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