Nikola Karasová and Julia Reinke presented today their joint paper entitled “We provide aid, like we would help brothers or sisters”? Practicing Solidarity with Greek Civil War Refugees in Socialist Czechoslovakia and the GDR. They participated in the workshop Comparing cultures of solidarity: socialist internationalism and solidarity across the Eastern […]
Nikola Karasová
81 posts
The UnRef’s principal investigator Michal Frankl will join a public debate on involuntary migration and integration of refugees in the Czech Republic. The in-person event is organized by the intercultural festival RefuFest in Prague on 24 June 2022 at 6 p.m. CET. The working language is Czech. Please visit the […]
Today, on 17 June 2022 at 4:30 CET, you can join online a webinar entitled “And then came the law”, commemorating the 1942 constitutional law on Jewish deportations from Slovakia. Michal Frankl will present a paper on first deportations of 1938, comparing the case of Nazi Germany and the Slovak […]
Please visit the official website of the German Historical Institute Warsaw The event will be transmitted by Zoom (June 30, 10 a.m. CET) Join Zoom Meeting
In this interpretation of his family’s refugee trajectory of survival, Yoram Eckstein touched upon the questions of fate and the room for maneuver within the context of the Second World War and the Holocaust, in which European Jewry found itself: Could Jews really decide their fate? […] It is also […]
In the Western public imagination, there is a certain image of a refugee deserving of our help: poor rather than rich, a woman rather than a man, frail rather than healthy. At the same time, the “ideal refugee” is supposed to be very similar to us, which would make it […]
In a recent interview for the online podcast of a popular Czech newspaper Blesk, Michal Frankl explained the public responses to the current refugee influx from Ukraine to Czechoslovakia by putting it into a historical perspective. For the full video in Czech please click here.
On 23-26 May 2022, Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) participated in a conference at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw entitled Bridging Divides. Rupture and Continuity in Polish Jewish History. She presented a paper entitled “Three times a refugee – exile as a leading motif in the memoirs of Polish Jews” […]
Together with Ivan Jeličić (University of Rijeka) and Dominique Reill (university of Miami), UnRef’s Francesca Rolandi will discuss their recently published article within the EUI seminar series Social Politics in European Borderlands. The title of the paper is “Redefining Citizenship after Empire: The Rights to Access Welfare, to Work, and […]
The international conference Spaces and Locations of Migration, organized by the University of Vienna on 12-13 May 2022, will feature two presentations by the UnRef team. The project PI Michal Frankl will present on No Man’s Land for Refugees. Scrutinizing Spaces of Migration Beyond the Nation State, while Lidia Zessin-Jurek […]
The UnRef PI Michal Frankl was invited to give a public lecture titled Support and Control: Refugees in the Czech Lands. The event will take place in the Prague Municipal Library on 19 May 2022 from 5 p.m. The working language will be Czech. The lecture will focus on two […]
In a new online interview, the UnRef Principal Investigator Michal Frankl assessed the current humanitarian efforts aiding Ukrainian refugees, putting them in a wider historical perspective. You can access the text in Czech at Lidovky.cz.
The UnRef’s Doina Anca Cretu published an article titled “Ukraine’s Refugees and the Muddy Waters of Aid: Some Early Thoughts” as part of the New Fascism Syllabus’ blog series Ukrainian Dispatches. You can access the full text here in English.
The Principal Investigator of the Unlikely Refuge? project, Michal Frankl, commented on the First World War Jewish Refugees to Moravia for iDnes.cz. The article was published on 4 April 2022 and its full version in Czech is available here.
After pushing back Middle Eastern refugees into the forests on its northern border with Belarus, Poland is now welcoming an unprecedented number of displaced Ukrainians. Deep racial and gender stereotypes are at play in this double standard, and an idea of heroic patriotism that doesn’t understand the people who don’t […]
Research position for a scholar at risk ERC project Unlikely refuge? Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences Initial deadline May 15, 2022 Full-time position for 24 months The ERC-Consolidator project Unlikely refuge? Refugees and citizens in East-Central Europe opens a new position for a scholar at […]
We invite you to join the hybrid event titled Staatsbürgerschaft: Norm und Praxis politischer Zugehörigkeit im Europa, 1914–1945, organized by the German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP) on April 11, 2022, at 6-8 p.m. (CET). Discussants: Dieter Gosewinkel (Berlin), Michal Frankl (Prague), Claire Zalc (Paris)Moderator: Axel Dröber (DHIP) The discussants are […]
Exploratory workshop Among the multifaceted transformations of East-Central Europe in the 1990s, mobility and open borders turned into one of the symbols of the new attachment to the “West”, in both the physical and symbolical way. The quick adoption of the 1951 refugee convention, the introduction of national asylum procedures […]
The UnRef’s PI Michal Frankl was interviewed by a Czech-language online magazine Reportér. In the article, published on 2 March 2022, he reminds of WWI refugees from the territory of today’s Ukraine arriving in Austria-Hungary (including the Czech lands) during the First World War. Not only the Volhynian Czechs but […]
Maximilian Graf (Unlikely Refuge?) will give a lecture titled Mythos und Realität: Österreich als Ziel osteuropäischer Migration im Kalten Krieg at University of Basel on 2 March 2022. The presentation examines how and why the Austrian state’s dealing with migration from Eastern Europe changed from the 1970s to the early […]
Images of refugees being trapped at the eastern Polish border have evoked memories of another time: in 1939, Polish Jews fleeing from Nazi-occupied Poland eastwards were denied entry to the Soviet Union and were stuck right at the same place as people today, along the river Bug. Reflecting on the […]
On 16 January 2022, an article titled The war has not yet broken out and Tiso has already launched deportations. People languished in no man’s land (in Slovak) was published online by Aktuality.sk. The text is based on the research of UnRef PI’s Michal Frankl as well as on an […]
Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) was invited to offer a scientific commentary in a debate titled “Solidarity on the Border: The Role of Civilian Activists in the Poland-Belarus Migrant Crisis” organized by the German think-tank Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde on 13 December 2021. She participated together with humanitarian activists representing the […]
Michal Frankl and Lidia Zessin-Jurek (ERC Project Unlikely Refuge?) participated in the 53rd ASEEES Annual Convention, New Orleans + Virtual (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). In their virtual panel, titled “From Borderland to No Man’s Land: Jewish Refugees and Statelessness on the Demarcation Line of German-Occupied Poland” […]
Doina Anca Cretu (UnRef) will participate in the upcoming 2-day Digital Workshop “Pieces and Bits From The Past: Children’s Agency in Migration” (In Search of the Migrant Child Network) organized by Bettina Hitzer (HAIT), Friederike Kind-Kovács (HAIT), Swen Steinberg (Carleton University, Ottawa / German Historical Institute Washington with its Pacific […]
The refugee situation unfolding on the Polish-Belarusian border is reminiscent of similar events in the past. There were two moments in Polish history when thousands of migrants, pushed out by violence or fleeing danger, were stuck on the border, often under the barrels of soldiers and policemen. Our UnRef team […]
On November 6, 2021, Lidia Zessin-Jurek (UnRef) gave a public talk at the scientific session during the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the post-war transfer of population from Polesie to Western Poland. She presented a comparative text (in Polish): Inpatriation? Postwar homeward migrations in European collective memory – the […]
Listen to the final episode of the Experiencing Epidemics Podcast series with Doina Anca Cretu (UnRef), co-hosted by Ian Hathaway, Jorge Díaz Ceballos, and Gašper Jakovac. In the episode titled The World War, refugees, and the long history of epidemics, Doina Anca Cretu explores some facets of a terrible humanitarian […]
The Unlikely Refuge? team members took part in the “Refugees and the (Global) Cold War” workshop, hosted by the Cluster of Excellence ‘Contestations of the Liberal Script’ (SCRIPTS), Freie Universität Berlin, at Harnack-Haus on 29-30 October 2021. Maximilian Graf and Nikola Karasova presented their paper, suggesting a comparison of Western […]
On 14 October 2021, Ágnes Katalin Kelemen (UnRef) presented her paper entitled From the “Gang of Thirteen” to the “Brno Group” at a conference Radical Left in Central Europe and its Development since WWI until 1933, organized by the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the National […]
Michal Frankl (Unlikely Refuge?) will give a lecture titled Languages of loyalty. Revocation of Jewish citizenship in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1938-1939 (in English). The event is organized by the Masaryk Institute and Archive and the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Prague […]
On Wednesday, 14 October 2021 the Graduate School and the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) hosts a lecture by Francesca Rolandi and Michal Frankl (Unlikely Refuge?) entitled “Making Sense of Refugees: Historiography of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia”. The presenters will analyze and compare the approaches to refugees in […]
Listen to the second episode of the “Eastern Europe’s Minorities in a Century of Change”, a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Stud soundcloud.com. In this episode, Michal Frankl, principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “Unlikely […]
Nikola Karasová (Unlikely Refuge?) participated in the 59th International Academic Week Memory Cultures since 1945: German-Southeast European Entangled History, organized by the Südosteuropa Gesellschaft in Tutzing, Germany, between 4 and 8 October 2021. She presented a paper titled “The memory of Greek civil war refugees in Czechoslovakia: Conflicting narratives, differing […]
Francesca Rolandi (Unlikely Refuge?) will take part in the 5th International Conference entitled Socialism on the Bench, organized by the Center for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism at the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, September 30 – October 2, 2021. On Saturday, October 2 at 9 am, she will […]
On 28-29 September 2021, a conference took place in Wrocław entitled “Conflict-Stabilization-Assimilation? Consequences of migration in the life of inhabitants of Lower Silesia.” Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) presented a paper In Search of “Lost Refugees”: Historiographical Paradigms of Postwar Migration in Poland. Her presentation in simultaneous translation into Polish (albeit […]
Michal Frankl and Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) co-authored a short article titled “Desperate Situation of Refugees in the Polish-Belarusian Borderland Brings Back Gloomy Memories of the 1939 Limbo.” The text was published online in Czech by Deník N on 27 September 2021. You can access it here.
International Conference of SKÖTH on 16 & 17.9.2021 Austria and the Czech Republic as Immigration Countries: Transnational Labor Migration since 1780 in Historical Comparison Location: Institute for Eastern European History, University of Vienna, Campus, Hörsaal Spitalgasse 2/ Hof 3/ Eingang 3.2; 1090 Wien Please find the conference report on H-Soz-Kult. […]
Michal Frankl (Principal Investigator of the Unlikely Refuge?) joined as a keynote speaker the “Borderlands of Memory: Nationalism, Religion and Violence in Europe” 4EU+ Summer School 2021. His presentation was titled “No Man’s Land: Space and statelessness in East-Central Europe at the end of the 1930s.” The “Borderlands of Memory: Nationalism, Religion […]
Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) wrote an article titled “Polish refugees in no man’s land. When the borderline was a legal vacuum” (in Polish Polscy uchodźcy na ziemi niczyjej. Gdy linia graniczna była próżnią prawa). The text, which deals with refugees trapped in no man’s land on the German-Soviet border in […]
Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) took part in the programme of the 18th Festival of Jewish Culture – Singer’s Warsaw on August, 26th, 2021. In a session on Jewish education organized at the Yiddish Cultural Center by Anna Szyba, she presented the paper titled Raised to Resist. The School of the […]
By Doina Anca Cretu / Francesca Rolandi, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences Scholarship has increasingly dealt with Central and Eastern Europe as a space of local, national, and transnational humanitarian mobilization in response to the human costs of abrupt political ruptures. In this context, the […]
On 22 July 2021, Ágnes Katalin Kelemen (Unlikely Refuge?) participated at an online conference Jewish Crossroads: Between Italy and Eastern Europe, organized by the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and by the Fondazione Per i Beni Culturali Ebraici in Italia. She gave a talk on […]
Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) took part in the Memory Studies Association Fifth Annual Conference in Warsaw on 6 July 2021, chairing a panel titled “Nostalgia for the Lost Jewish World.” For more information, please visit the MSA Conference Website.
Nikola Karasova and Julia Reinke (Unlikely Refuge?) participated in the online conference Humanitarian Mobilization in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth Century (23-25 June 2021). In their talks, both of them focused on the Greek Civil War refugees. Humanitarian Mobilization under the Conditions of an Emerging State Socialist Regime: […]
Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) participated at a conference Between War and Mass Murder – 80 years to “Operation Barbarossa”, organized by Western Galilee College between 22-24 June 2021. She presented a paper titled “Snatched away to Siberia while standing in a line to a gas chamber” – Polish Jewish Survivors […]
The Unlikely Refuge? team organizes an online workshop titled Humanitarian Mobilization in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth Century (23-25 June 2021). The event will be open to the public via Zoom. Please register at karasova@mua.cas.cz no later than 22 June to receive a link to join the workshop. […]
The Unlikely refuge? team member Ágnes Katalin Kelemen participated at the annual conference of the Hungarian Association of Canada with a paper on Hungarian Jews at German Universities in interwar Czechoslovakia. A Rarely Told Central European Story: Hungarian Jews at German Universities in Czechoslovakia (1918-38) Abstract Hungarian Jewry was shocked […]
The Unlikely refuge? (UnRef) team members contributed to the latest issue of the Czech public history journal Dějiny a současnost (The History and the Present). Under the title “Unconventional” Refugees, among others, they attempt to draw attention to the often-neglected topic of refugees to socialism, which fell out of the scope […]
The Unlikely Refuge? team member Doina Anca Cretu published an essay titled “A Regime of Immobility” in the History Workshop journal. Can refugee assistance become a way to contain? Doina Anca Cretu explores how those fleeing Austria-Hungary’s peripheries in the First World War could also be immobilised, as they were […]
The Unlikely refuge? team member Doina Anca Cretu participates in this year’s European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC 2021). She gives her presentation on Thursday 25 March 2021 as part of the panel titled Abandoned, Orphaned & Displaced: Histories of Children’s Destitution and Relief, organized by Friederike Kind-Kovács (Hannah-Arendt-Institute for […]
Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) and Katharina Friedla were invited to present their book “Syberiada Żydów polskich” by the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. The meeting took place on March 11, 2021, as part of the Department of Research on Eastern Europe’s History and […]
We are pleased to invite you to a book presentation “Syberiada of Polish Jews” by Lidia Zessin-Jurek and Katharina Friedla, organized in German by the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). It will take place online on Thursday 25 February 2021 from 11.15 to 12.45 am. Please register at klodnicki@europa-uni.de. For […]
On Thursday, 11 February, the CAS SEE Weekly Seminar in cooperation with the Unlikely Refuge? ERC Project (UnRef) hosted historian Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan). After a brief introduction on the UnRef by its Principal Investigator Michal Frankl, Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan) presented her book The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the […]
On Thursday, 11 February at 3:30 pm (CET), the CAS SEE Weekly Seminar will host historian Pamela Ballinger. After a brief introduction on the ‘Unlikely refuge?’ project by Michal Frankl (principal investigator), Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan) will present her book ‘The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy’ (2020), in dialogue […]
While emigration of the bulk of German-speaking Jews merged into the paradigmatic of the refugee phenomenon, wartime refugeedom of Polish Jews is perceived as a delayed and marginal attempt to save one’s life. The possible reasons for these interpretative differences are analysed in the article by the Unlikely Refuge? member […]
On 14 January 2021, Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) and Katharina Friedla were invited to present their book “Syberiada Żydów polskich” at a seminar organized by the Faculty of History at the University of Warsaw. Literature often describes the experience of refugees as an ‘odyssey’. Lidia Zessin-Jurek and Katharina Friedla together […]
The Unlikely Refuge? member Francesca Rolandi will participate in the CAS SEE Weekly Seminar on Thursday, January 14, 2021 at 10 am. The seminar will be dedicated to the presentation of a new book titled Fiume Crisis by Dominique Kirchner Reill (University of Miami). Francesca Rolandi will be involved in […]
“Saved” in the East, or “Survivors” of the East? Even today there is still a disagreement on how we should perceive Jewish refugees from Poland, who were deported by Stalin to Siberia. Only now the memory of their experience and loss comes out of the great shadow cast by the […]
Doina Anca Cretu, the member of the Unlikely refuge? ERC research project, published a short article titled “Epidemics in Europe’s Refugee Camps: A Tale of Two Eras.” Her text was released in the last issue of the Papiers d’actualité/Current Affairs in Perspective (No. 11, December 2020), issued by the Pierre […]
The Unlikely Refuge? ERC project’s Principal Investigator Michal Frankl published his new article titled “Citizenship of No Man’s Land? Jewish Refugee Relief in Zbąszyń and East-Central Europe, 1938–1939” in the last issue of the S:I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation (02/2020), the open-access journal of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust […]
The Unlikely Refuge? team member Ágnes Katalin Kelemen participated at the Online Conference “Anti-Jewish Quotas in Central Europe” organized by the Nationalism Studies Program and Jewish Studies Program at Central European University (Budapest/Vienna) and the Tom Lantos Institute (Budapest) between 23-24 November 2020. She gave a presentation titled “Rebels against […]
Photo: Radek Miča, Universitas Chci vepsat uprchlíky zpátky do dějin Evropy, říká historik Michal Frankl Pro svůj ambiciózní projekt věnující se uprchlíkům ve středovýchodní Evropě ve 20. století získal před dvěma lety ERC konsolidační grant. Historik Michal Frankl z Masarykova ústavu a Archivu Akademie věd se tak stal prvním humanitněvědním badatelem na […]
Doina Anca Cretu and Maximilian Graf, members of the Unlikely refuge? ERC research project, joined the Annual ASEEES Convention, which took place virtually this year on November 5-8 and 14-15. Together with Sielke Beata Kelner (Leiden University), they formed a panel titled “Feared ‘Mobilities’: Policy, Discourse, and Experience of Migration […]
Prague, June 23-25, 2021 Organisers: Doina Anca Cretu, Michal Frankl (ERC-funded project Unlikely refuge?, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences) Humanitarianism has become one of the defining features of our contemporary world, as governments, private associations, and international organizations are increasingly responding to human suffering across […]
The talk addresses the origins of significant differences in perception of various refugee waves that occurred after the Nazis’ ascent to power. While emigration of the bulk of German-speaking Jews merged into the classic example of the refugee phenomenon, perhaps even paradigmatic of the experience, refugeedom of Polish Jews continues […]
Online Conference: Slovakia and the Holocaust. Histories and Legacies of a Model Nazi Ally | 8 September 2020 | Dokumentačné stredisko holokaustu/Fakulta sociálních věd Univerzity Karlovy https://www.facebook.com/events/dokumenta%C4%8Dn%C3%A9-stredisko-holokaustu/virtual-conference-slovakia-and-the-holocaust/1512682472237102/
Conference: Jewish-Polish-German Realms of Memory. A Triple Neighbourhood | Berlin, 4-5 September 2020 http://www.cbh.pan.pl/de/jewish-polish-german-realms-memory-triple-neighbourhood
Lidia Zessin-Jurek, the member of the ERC project Unlikely refuge?, gave a public speech at a memory event organized today by the municipality of Frankfurt (Oder) on the occasion of the European Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Stalinism and National Socialism. The title of her presentation was “European […]
During a two-day internal workshop in January 2020, the Unlikely Refuge? research team discussed the use of anthropological methods in the historical research of refugeeness and humanitarianism. Our debate developed around similarities and differences between the historical and anthropological theoretical approaches and research methods. Furthermore, we considered the applicability of […]
In December 2019, the Unlikely Refuge? team met at Polin Museum in Warsaw to discuss various aspects of space and border in refugee studies. Forced migration is intrinsically connected to space as it entails displacement, leaving home, the challenges of traversing long distances and arriving somewhere else. This new place, […]
The Unlikely Refuge? ERC project members Michal Frankl and Nikola Karasová participated in a workshop titled “Citizenship until further notice? Refugees and revocation of nationality,” that took place in Villa Lanna in Prague, Czech Republic (19-20 November 2019). For a full program in pdf please click here Michal Frankl: “Appalling […]
International Holocaust Conference: Silence, Speech, Memory, Message, Understanding – After 75 Years | Halle (14-16 November 2019) http://wcms.itz.uni-halle.de/download.php?down=53681&elem=3253118
Special Lessons & Legacies Conference Munich | November 4-7, 2019 The Holocaust in Europe Research Trends, Pedagogical Approaches, and Political Challenges https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/zentrum-fuer-holocaust-studien/lessons-legacies/