Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week

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Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week Events 2024

Holocaust Legacy Foundation Gideon Klein Presentation by Andie Weiner ’24, 2023-2024 Holocaust Legacy Foundation Gideon Klein Scholar.

Joop’s Story: A Veiled Resistance

Monday, March 25 at 06:00 pm – Cabral Center, John D. O’Bryant African American Institute, 40 Leon St

This exhibit tells the story of one family’s bravery in hiding a Jewish baby and another family’s pain of separation. Through photographs, artifacts and narration, Andie Weiner explores the rise of antisemitism in the Netherlands during World War II, the role of women during the Holocaust, and the legacy of storytelling.

Andie Weiner is the 2023-2024 Holocaust Legacy Foundation Gideon Klein Scholar. A fourth year theatre and psychology major, Andie is devoted to spreading awareness about the Holocaust through storytelling and education.

Presented by the Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week Committee, the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, the Jewish Studies Program and the Humanities Center. Supported by the Holocaust Legacy Foundation.

Philip N. Backstrom Jr. Survivor Lecture by Eva Paddock

Wednesday, March 27th, 12:00 PM – Renaissance Park 909

Eva Paddock was born in Czechoslovakia in 1935. Her mother Sonia (born Ziv) was a physician (an emigre from Soviet Latvia) and her father Rudolf Fleischmann worked as an editor and political activist.

In July 1939 Eva and her sister Milena were sent to safety in England on the last Kindertransport train to leave Prague. The Czech kindertransports were masterminded and organized by Nicholas Winton, a young British banker.

When they arrived in Britain, Eva and her sister were taken into foster care by a warm and loving English family. Eva is one of the very few children whose parents survived. Her parents escaped separately and the family was reunited in the north of England in 1940.

Eva grew up in Britain, married Jim Paddock, an British architect in 1955 and the family moved to Cambridge MA in 1965. Eva has had multiple careers in education, teaching at all levels from early childhood to graduate school. She speaks of herself as a “serial retiree”. She retired from her position as K-8 school principal in Cambridge, MA, taught at U.Mass for five years, retired again and then returned to graduate school and launched her new career as a mental health clinician. She worked as a group therapist in a community-based day-treatment center for another nine years. Her clients were adults of all ages suffering from long-term and persistent mental illness.

Eva was widowed in 2016. She has three children, three grandchildren and two great grandchildren. She currently serves on the boards of the Cambridge Council on Aging, and the Boston Group of the World Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants. She co-facilitates a weekly support group for local Child Holocaust survivors and supports Holocaust education as a speaker in schools locally and throughout the country.

Presented by the Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Committee, the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, the Jewish Studies Program, and the Humanities Center.

31st Annual Robert Salomon Morton Lecture

Rape and Reproduction in the Holocaust

Featuring: Zoë Waxman

Wednesday, April 3rd, 05:30 PM – Alumni Center Pavilion, 716 Columbus Ave., 6th floor

Exploring the testimonies of both the women who survived and those who did not survive the Holocaust reveals that even under extreme conditions gender continues to operate as an important arbiter of experience. Whilst men and women were both sentenced to the same fate, gender nevertheless operated as a crucial signifier for survival.

Zoë Waxman is Professor of Holocaust History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Writing the Holocaust: memory, testimony, representation (2006), Anne Frank (2015), and Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (2017), as well as numerous articles relating to the Holocaust and genocide.

Presented by the Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Committee, the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, the Jewish Studies Program, and the Humanities Center.

Sponsored by the Robert S. Morton Lectures and Events Endowed Fund, the Gustel Cormann Giessen Memorial Fund – Morton Lecture, and the Gustel and Ernst Giessen Morton Lecture Fund

–HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE AWARENESS WEEK EVENTS ARE SPONSORED BY THE COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES, THE JEWISH STUDIES PROGRAM, THE HUMANITIES CENTER, AND THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE AWARENESS COMMITTEE.