Join us for the next installment in the Lessons in Resilience from the Holocaust and Genocide Featuring Joanna Sliwa
An Unlikely Rescue: A Jewish Woman Who Helped Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust
Dr. Joanna Sliwa is a historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) in New York, where she also administers academic programmes. She has taught Holocaust and Jewish history at Kean University and Rutgers University. She has many years of experience working in teacher training on the Holocaust, including in her ongoing role as Faculty Advisor to the Master Teacher Institute in Holocaust Education at the Allen and Joan Bildner Centre for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. Joanna’s scholarship focuses on the Holocaust in Poland and Polish Jewish history. Her first book, Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust won the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize awarded by the Wiener Holocaust Library. Her second book, The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust, is co-authored with Elizabeth B. White.
Dr. Sliwa will be in conversation with Tali Nates, the founder and director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC) and Chair of the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation (SAHGF). She is a historian who lectures internationally on Holocaust and genocide education, memory, reconciliation, and human rights. Born to a family of Holocaust survivors, her father and uncle were saved by Oskar Schindler. Tali has been involved in the creation and production of dozens of documentary films, published many articles and contributed chapters to different books among them God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (2015), Remembering The Holocaust in Educational Settings (2018), Conceptualising Mass Violence, Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations (2021) and The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (2023). South Africa by the Mail & Guardian newspaper and won many awards including the Kia Community Service Award (South Africa, 2015), the Gratias Agit Award (2020, Czech Republic), the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award (2021), the Goethe Medal (2022, Germany), and the US Secretary of State’s International Religious Freedom Award (2023).