Event Details:

Tuesday, April 18th, 7:00-8:30 pm, JMC Library, Case Hall

GenCen is excited to be co-sponsoring this hybrid event, in-person and livestreaming on YouTube: Serling Institute for Jewish Studies.

What can we know of one person's story? How can we reconsider who is remembered, and how? How do we better understand the war by unpacking the dissolution of public life for Jews and others demonized and marginalized by Nazis? In this talk we'll look at how narrative is passed to subsequent generations and how subsequent generations address wartime trauma. What responsibility do we have to those whose words we find? How do we find new ways to look at Holocaust narratives? Whose voices were left out in early Holocaust histories?

Years ago, journalist Sarah Wildman came across a cache of letters her refugee grandfather had hidden away from the family during the Second World War and the immediate postwar period. Dozens were from one woman: Valy, Valerie, Scheftel, a fellow medical student, and the woman he left behind when he fled Vienna in the fall of 1938. Wildman set out on a search for that woman's story, combing through archives in Europe and America, through letters and ultimately, interviewing eyewitnesses. In her book, and her talk, Wildman addresses the wounds still open for third generation descendants of the war - victims and perpetrators and bystanders -- and looks for ways to tell a single story in an effort to combat erasure.

Sarah Wildman is the author of Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind. She is currently an editor and writer at the New York Times in Opinion. She was previously an editor at Foreign Policy Magazine, for which she hosted and co-produced the podcast First Person. Sarah has also been on staff at NBC News online, Vox and The New Republic. She has long contributed to a number of other publications and she has received numerous fellowships and awards in support of her work, including a German Marshall Fund Peter R. Weitz Prize for excellence and originality in coverage of Europe, a Milena Jesenska Fellowship in Vienna, and an Arthur F. Burns Fellowship in Germany as well as two Pulitzer Center grants for covering issues shaping Jerusalem and Paris, among others.