Made possible by a generous grant from the Jack Chester Foundation, with additional sponsorshop by the USF Libraries Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center and the USF College of Education, Department of Secondary Education.

About the lecture:
A century ago the Young Turk government carried out deportations and massacres of various peoples in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, Arabs, and others.  Several of these brutal relocations have been designated ‘genocide,’ yet the current Turkish state, along with the United States and other countries, refuses to label any of them ‘genocide.’  The denial of past violence and its erasure from historical memory has allowed violence and human rights abuses to continue, worldwide, to the present day.

Presented by the USF Libraries Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center and cosponsored by the USF Department of History.

Dr. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. She is widely known for her studies of the Holocaust, with particular emphasis on Holocaust deniers, as reflected in her book “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier.”

This event was co-sponsored by the USF Libraries Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center and Congregation Kol Ami.

The Second Annual Armenian Studies Symposium focused on the Armenian genocide within the context of Turkish national security policy and international relations. It featured renowned scholar Dr. Taner Akçam. Dr. Akçam’s presentation was followed by a panel discussion with USF faculty Steven C. Roach and Edward Kissi.

Historian and sociologist Dr. Taner Akçam is the Kaloosdian/Mugar Professor in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University and an internationally-renowned scholar on the subject.

Download a copy of Dr. Akcam’s presented paper.

On March 31st Bill Garrison, Dean of the USF Libraries, welcomed a standing-room-only crowd to the Tampa Library’s Grace Allen Room to hear author Michael Hirsh discuss his new book, The Liberators: America’s Witnesses to the Holocaust. Dr. Mark Greenberg, Director of the Libraries Special and Digital Collections, introduced Hirsh’s longtime friend, Dr. Jay Wolfson, who formally introduced the author. Dr. Wolfson is the distinguished Service Professor of Public Health and Medicine and the Associate Vice President for Health Law, Policy and Safety at USF in Tampa.

In his work, Hirsh allows the people he interviews to tell their own stories and to bear witness to one of the worst events in recorded history:

“The compounds were packed with the skinniest people you ever saw in your life. Huge, huge eyes. The eyes is what I remember most. And they had pajamalike garb on, blue and white stripes. There were hundreds that we could see, and we never did see the full extent of the camp. And the eeriest thing about it was, there was not a sound. It was just incredible; not a sound out of them. You never saw people like this before.” – Norman Fellman Hirsh, M. (2010). The Liberators: America’s Witnesses to the Holocaust. New York: Bantam Books.

Norman Fellman’s account of Berga an der Elster, the Nazi slave-labor camp, is from a perspective much different from that of many of Hirsh’s interviewees. Norman Fellman’s account is from the inside and his story is just one of the many fascinating stories told to author Hirsh for his book.

Pictured here author Michael Hirsh with the family of LeRoy Petersohn.

Another compelling story Hirsh recounted was about LeRoy Petersohn, a medic with the 11th Armored Division who saved the life of a three-week-old baby at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria (liberated May 5, 1945 by the 11th Armored Division).

Mr. Petersohn tells this story during his interview with Michael Hirsh that is available as part of the USF Libraries Oral History Program Concentration Camp Liberators OHP – http://guides.lib.usf.edu/ohp » Mr. Petersohn tells Hirsh how, on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen concentration camp, he was reunited in Austria with Hana Berger Moran, the baby he had saved sixty years earlier. Hana’s story is told in Hirsh’s book, and her story helps the reader to understand the importance of a single life.

What Michael Hirsh conveys with his inspirational book, and what comes through loud and clear in the voices of the liberators he interviewed, is the humanity of the individual.

Speaker Benjamin Madley (Yale University)

Part of USF Libraries Holocaust & Genocide Studies Center 2009 Lecture Series.

October 9th & 10th

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