Einspruch Lectures on the Holocaust: "The Liquidation of the Ghettos, 1942–1943"
Dr. Jan Grabowski, distinguished professor at the University of Ottawa, will present this year's Einspruch Lectures on the Holocaust at The University of Texas at Dallas.
Between 1942 and 1943, Eastern Europe ghettos were destroyed in a wave of "liquidation actions" — operations that followed a chillingly consistent pattern from town to town. This lecture examines how that was organized, how it repeated itself across hundreds of communities, and what it reveals about the machinery behind it. Close to 20% of all Jews murdered at the time were killed not in the death camps, but murdered inside or in the proximity of the ghettos in which they lived. The scale of local participation in these killings remains, to this day, largely unknown. And crucially, this violence was not hidden, it happened in public, in daylight, in full view of the surrounding non-Jewish populations. In the aftermath, the value of Jewish life was, in the eyes of many around them, reduced to nothing — and this made possible the Holocaust's final, merciless chapter: the Judenjagd, the hunt for Jewish survivors that continued relentlessly until the war's end.
This is a lunch-and-learn event. Lunch will be served at 12:30 p.m, and the lecture will start at 1 p.m.
