Eastern European Displaced Persons, Refugees, and POWs during and after the Holocaust
The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Latvia, and the Museum “Jews in Latvia” are pleased to invite applications for an international conference entitled, “Eastern European Displaced Persons, Refugees, and POWS during and after the Holocaust.” The conference is scheduled for September 5–September 9, 2022 in Riga, Latvia.
The conference will focus on the experiences of POWs, Displaced Persons (DPs), and refugees hailing from Eastern Europe throughout the course of the Holocaust and in its aftermath. For POWS, topics include, but are not limited to studies of prisoners’ experiences in camps, Jewish and Roma POWs, survival strategies, filtration back to the Soviet Union after the war, escape to the West after the war, portrayals of POWs in literature and film, and memory studies of POW experiences. For DPs and refugees, topics include, but are not limited to, projects focusing on the dislocation of individuals from Eastern Europe during the Soviet Occupation resulting from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, citizens who fled to the Soviet interior from the advancing German army, citizens made refugees during the war, people forcefully resettled for forced labor, citizens who fled the Red Army as it advanced westward, Jewish displaced persons made stateless after the war, and the experiences and considerations shaping the lives of individuals who found themselves in DP camps after the war, especially regarding their attempts to return home or flee to the West.