Markus Nesselrodt

Ph.D. candidate, Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg and Free University Berlin Markus Nesselrodt’s dissertation examines individual experiences of Polish Jews who survived Nazi persecution during World War II by flight or deportation to the interior of the Soviet Union. The history of more than 230,000 Polish Jews in wartime exile in the Soviet Union has…

Sofija Grandakovska

Dr. Sofija Grandakovska holds a doctorate degree in Comparative Literature, obtained from the Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Philology “Blaze Koneski”, SS Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia, and actively engages in the fields of Cultural, Jewish and Holocaust Studies. In 2014 she was recognized as Associate Professor and from 2009-2013 she held…

Aliza Luft

Aliza Luft’s research focuses on the decision-making processes underlying individuals’ behaviors in high-risk contexts, particularly in genocides as they decide whether to support or resist violent state regimes. Luft’s dissertation, Defecting from the Episcopate, examines the process by which French bishops during the Holocaust in France deviated from their support for the Vichy to help save Jews, despite the…

Fielder Valone

Fielder Valone earned a dual bachelor’s degree in History and American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 2011. He is the author of “Destroying the Ties that Bind: Rituals of Humiliation and the Holocaust in Provincial Lithuania” (2012), which received the American Historical Association’s Raymond J. Cunningham Prize for the best…

Talia Farkash

Talia Farkash’s doctoral thesis, supervised by Prof. Sara Bender, studies the history of the Jews of the town Tarnow, located in the Krakow district in Poland, during World War II and the Holocaust, 1939-1944. The research aims to examine the response of Tarnow’s Jewish population to the various stages of the German occupation, from its…

Allison Somogyi

Allison Somogyi received a B.A. in History at Grinnell College in 2009 and an M.A. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation chronicles the history of everyday life of the Jewish community in Budapest under Nazi occupation, with a focus on widespread, small-scale resistance efforts.

Joanna Sliwa

Joanna Sliwa’s research examines daily life and inter-ethnic relations in extremis. Specifically, Ms. Sliwa’s dissertation focuses on the Holocaust in Krakow, Poland from the perspective of Jewish children’s experiences. She approaches the topic from multiple angles – the German authorities, Jewish community, gentile neighbors, the Jewish family, and the youth themselves – thus widening the…

Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

Dr. Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe investigates the Polish collaboration with the Germans during the Second World War. In contrast to the Polish resistance and the German occupation of Poland, the subject of the German-Polish collaboration has not yet been investigated in depth. As a result, the knowledge about this complex and important subject is still fragmented, and…

Irina Rebrova

Irina Rebrova is originally from the South of Russia and is studying at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism, Technical University Berlin. In her Ph.D. project, she studies early evidence of the Holocaust and the memory politics about it in the North Caucasus, South Russia. This region is not typically part of Holocaust history, but it…

Melanie Hembera

Melanie Hembera received an MA in Medieval and Modern History and Political Science at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She successfully defended her PhD thesis, “The Shoah in the District of Cracow in the General Government; The City of Tarnów as a Case Study” in December 2014. Melanie Hembera is a researcher at the Forschungstelle…