Postdoctoral Candidate, University of Konstanz, Netherlands
Dr. Pim Griffioen’s postdoctoral research project is devoted to Jewish coping strategies, as well as hiding and escape opportunities in the Netherlands from 1940–1945, in a Western European context. How were Jewish behavior and reactions – diverse as they were – shaped by the conditions and possibilities in the context of the occupation, persecution, local society and the background of the Jewish population in the Netherlands? How was Jewish hiding organized and financed in the Netherlands in its various stages, as compared with Belgium and France? Whereas there are several scholarly books and numerous articles on Jewish responses in the latter two countries, a monograph on the various Jewish coping strategies and hiding patterns in the Netherlands is still lacking. Sources include Jewish testimonies, letters, diaries and recollections with regard to attitudes and responses to the persecution in the Netherlands, as well as unpublished archival material and short biographies of non-Jewish rescuers.
Dr. Griffioen studied at Vrije Universiteit (VU University) in Amsterdam and received his Masters in History in 1993, after which he worked at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, Archives and Study Center in Israel. Since 1997, he has worked as a contract researcher for the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and the University of Konstanz. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Amsterdam in 2008. His thesis, carried out jointly with Ron Zeller, was entitled, “Comparing the Persecution of the Jews in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, 1940–1945: Similarities, Differences, and Causes.” A slightly adapted and updated version was published by Boom Publishers in Amsterdam in September 2011 and was a finalist of the 2012 Yad Vashem Book Prize for Scholarly Studies published in 2011. Dr. Griffioen was a postdoctoral research fellow at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem in 2010-2011, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study of the University of Konstanz in 2012.