World War II Survivors As Displaced Persons: Through The Eyes Of A Daugther
A daughter of Holocaust survivors reflects on her parents’ lives in post-World War II Displaced Persons camps. How do photographs of their experience shed light on this little-known time and help us to understand both their trauma and their resilience to the trauma? How can teachers—and the rest of us—use this presentation to think about the impact of trauma and loss in our own lives?
These issues will be explored in a Zoom presentation entitled “Displaced and Dreaming in Postwar Germany: Memory, Photography, and My Parents as Displaced Persons,” by Dora Apel, on Wednesday, November 11, from 5 to 6:15 p.m. It is free and open to the public.
This presentation, followed by a question-and-answer workshop, is presented by South Jersey Holocaust Coalition and by New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, with additional funding from One Jewish Community—Jewish Federation of Cumberland, Gloucester & Salem Counties.
Dora Apel, PhD, is the W. Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair Professor Emerita in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is an art historian, cultural critic, and author whose work focuses on issues of trauma, memory, gender, race, national identity, globalization, and the ruins of capitalism.
Dr. Apel grew up in Vineland on a poultry farm. She has written about her parents’ Holocaust experience and its traumatic effects, among other topics, in her recent book Calling Memory into Place. She examines memorials, photographs, artworks, and her own experiences of illness and recovery to explore strategies for “unforgetting” the past, “building on the trauma and the resilience inherited from her mother’s survival of the Holocaust,” as Marianne Hirsch notes.
The chairperson of the Holocaust Coalition is Harry Furman, a former Social Studies teacher who pioneered the first New Jersey high school semester course on the Holocaust and genocide, The Conscience of Man.
Educators, students, and the public are invited to take part and, for professionals, 1.5 Professional Development (PD) hours will be granted by New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education.
Registration (password protected) is required. Please register by visiting the Coalition website—www.holocaustcoalition.com.
For more information on this and all South Jersey Holocaust Coalition events and activities, please visit the Coalition’s website at www.holocaustcoalition.com or their Facebook page at “South Jersey Holocaust Coalition.” You may also email holocaustcoalition@gmail.com.
