Seminar questions:

What are the key topics of Roubíčková's diary?

Should the ghettos be studies merely as a transition on the way to the camps or as a proper subject for historical research in their own right?

How does the quotidian in the Theresienstadt ghetto compare to our society?

How to the diarists make sense of their surrounding?

What does Garbarini mean with "epistemological gap"? Think about this concept in historigraphic terms.

Core readings:

Eva Mändlová-Roubíčková, We're Alive and Life Goes On: A Theresienstadt Diary, trans by Zaia Alexander (New York: H. Holt, 1998), entries for 1941-1943

Alexandra Garbarini, “Family correspondents,” Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), ch. 4

Further reading:

USHMM encyclopedia of camps and ghettos.

Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The ‘Final Solution’ in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941-1944 (New York: Berghahn, 2009).

Anna Hájková, The Last Ghetto (New York, 2020).

Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

Barbara Epstein, Minsk ghetto, 1941-1943 : Jewish resistance and Soviet internationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

Evgeny Finkel, Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Amos Goldberg, Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).

Katarzyna Person, Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1940-1943 (Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 2014).

Katarzyna Person, ed., The Ringelblum Archive : underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Warszawa : Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, [2017]).

Daniel Schwartz, Ghetto: A History of a Word (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

Isaiah Trunk, Lodz Ghetto: A History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

Anika Walke, Pioneers and partisans : an oral history of Nazi genocide in Belorussia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter, eds. The Ghetto in Global History : 1500 to the present (New York: Routledge, 2018).