Greek Refugees in Socialist Czechoslovakia: The State of the Art and Future Research Opportunities by Nikola Tohma The paper analyzes the existing research on Greek Civil War refugees, particularly in the Czechoslovak context, and discusses possible new research trajectories. Highlighting the available archival sources, oral history interviews, and memoirs, the […]
Presentations
84 posts
Nikola Tohma (Masaryk Institute and Archives, Czech Academy of Sciences) and Khalida Azhigulova (Eurasian Technological University) will present in the online session entitled “Unsung asylum: The law and practice of refugee hosting in communist and authoritarian states.” It is organized within the 15th International Refugee Law Seminar Series: Moments in Refugee History […]
On 26 September 2024 at 1 p.m. CET, Michal Frankl will give a presentation entitled East-Central Europe as a Place of Refuge at the HUN-REN Social Sciences Research Center, Institute of Sociology, in Budapest, Hungary. Róza Vajda (HUN-REN TK KDK) and Veronika Kaszás (Unlikely Refuge?) will assume the role of […]
On 29 June 2024, Nikola Tohma and Maximilian Graf participated in the EDUC Summer School at the University of Potsdam, engaging in a debate with students on the differences and similarities of refugee regimes in the West and the East during early Cold War. Political emigration during the Cold War […]
Doina Anca Cretu joined the Eighth Annual Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies on 20-21 June 2024. She participated in the roundtable discussion titled ““Flyover Country”: East-Central Europe as a Global Region” and acted as a discussant for the panel “Migration & Mobility.” The Tartu Conferenceis a venue […]
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum organised the Silberman Seminar ‘Refugees and the Holocaust’ on 5-13 June 2024, an event in which Lidia Zessin-Jurek was invited to participate. Faculty members discussed the tangled history of the Holocaust and the colonial transit points that refugees navigated, and, among other things, considered […]
Michal Frankl and Lidia Zessin-Jurek participated at the Challenging Concepts in Refugee History workshop, organized at the University of Gothenburg, its Faculty of Humanities, and the project Outsiders Within: Internally Displaced Persons in Early Modern Europe (PI Sari Nauman), funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. […]
Several members of the Unlikely Refuge? team joined the 6th Congress on Polish Studies at the Technical University of Dresden (14-17 March 2024), forming a panel entitled “Poland as a Place of Refuge in the ‘Short’ 20th Century between Upheavals and New Beginnings”. Still mostly known as a region producing […]
We cordinally invite you to a public debate titled “Refugeedom: History, Present and Global Context” organized by the Dominikánská 8 cultural and educational centre (Husova 8, 110 00 Prague 1, Czech Republic) on 13 May 2024 at 7:30 p.m. Moderated by Daniela Vrbová, the discussion will be joined by Michal […]
Museum and Research Centre Kazerne Dossin (Mechelen/Belgium) invited Lidia Zessin-Jurek to talk on the political instrumentalisation of Holocaust memory in Europe at the “Holocaust and Human Rights” Conference (21-22 February 2024). Lidia drew a link between the reflection on this topical issue and how coming to terms with genocide does […]
On 20 March 2024 at 9:30 CET, Nikola Tohma will give an online public talk about the Czechoslovak aid to child refugees from Greece as part of the 4EU+ Spring Seminar The Twentieth Century in European Memory: Themes and Approaches in Contemporary European Memory Studies. The series is organized by […]
The Principal Investigator of the ERC project “Unlikely Refuge?” Michal Frankl commented on the interwar Czechoslovak refugee policy for the “SOPADE90” film, produced by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Prag to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the establishment of this Prague-based exile organization of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Available on YouTube in […]
On 6-8 September 2023, the European University Viadrina held a conference „Contesting 21st Century B/Orders”. A member of our team, Lidia Zessin-Jurek composed a panel which generated great interest and lively discussion. “Polish Racial Frontier – Refugees on the Eastern Border of Poland” consisted of an interdisciplinary group of academics: […]
Nikola Tohma participated at the 2023 Conference of the Society for History of Children and Youth (SHCY) at Guelph University, Canada (8-10 June 2023). She presented her paper titled Children’s Homes as Refugee Spaces: Child Refugees and Institutional Care in Socialist Czechoslovakia. Together with Swen Steinberg and Joy Damousi, she […]
The Unlikely Refuge? team members participated at the “Remaking the World in the Shadow of the Cold War. Migrants, Workers, Soldiers, Spies in Post-1945 Reconstruction” workshop that took place at Central European University in Vienna on 1-2 June 2023. Apart from acting as chairs, two our researchers presented their own […]
At the invitation of the EuMePo (European Memory Politics) Jean Monnet Network, Lidia Zessin-Jurek participated in a conference organized in Budapest (June 14-16, 2023), where she presented a paper in the panel “Intergenerational Trauma after Violence: Memory, Narrative, and Agency across Vulnerable Populations” led by Laura Kromják and Oliver Schmidtke. […]
Doina Anca Cretu will participate in the Minorities at War from Napoleon to Putin | BASEES Study Group for Minority History Biennial Conference 2023 on 12 May 2023. She will join the panel on East-Central Europe in the Era of the Great War chaired by Olena Palko (University of Basel) […]
On February 8, 2023, at the invitation of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder (Center for Interdisciplinary Polish Studies´ research colloquium), Lidia Zessin-Jurek presented the results of her research on historiography concerning refugee movements in Poland. Importantly for the author, the topic was exposed and discussed there among German, Polish, […]
Please join us for the talk by Keely Stauter-Halsted (University of Illinois at Chicago) Time: 25 January 2022, 3 p.m. CET Venue: Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University (Smetanovo nábřeží 6, room 212) Also online (via Zoom): https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84043059405 Borders and Bordering in Interwar East-Central Europe: Refugees and the Shaping […]
To mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Józef Gierowski, the precursor of post-war Judaic studies at Polish universities, an online-format conference was organized by the Institute of Jewish Studies, Jagiellonian University on 22.-23.11.2022: “Żydzi polscy w oczach historków – nowe perspektywy” [Polish Jews in the Eyes of Historians – […]
On November 21, 2022 Lidia Zessin-Jurek chaired a discussion accompanying the exhibition on the situation of Jews with Polish citizenship, deported by the Germans to the Polish border in 1938. The fate of Jewish refugees blocked on the Polish side of the border in Zbąszyń is the subject of the […]
The interdisciplinary conference centralises the temporal dimension of borders, borderlands, and border regions in and beyond 19th and 20th century Europe. It is organised in a hybrid format by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and the Transfrontier Euro-Institut Network (TEIN) in collaboration with the Borders in […]
The team members of the “Unlikely Refuge?” ERC Project will participate at this year’s convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). The event will take place in Chicago, USA, between 10-13 November 2022. Chaired by Michal Frankl (Principal Investigator), the panel entitled Humanitarianism and Refugee […]
Michal Frankl and Lidia Zessin-Jurek participated in the workshop “Memory, Migration and Populism: The Post-Imperial Historical Legacy and Heritage of Central and Eastern Europe”, organized by the Department of Mobility and Migration, Institute of Ethnology, CAS, 13th – 14th October 2022. For the event’s full program please click here or […]
Lidia Zessin-Jurek (ERC Project Unlikely Refuge?) was invited to a special session of the Badacze i Badaczki na Granicy (Researchers on the Border) group organised by Kamila Fiałkowska and Natalia Judzińska as part of the 11th Conference of the Migration Research Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), held […]
The UnRef team joined the conference “Humans in Motion: War Crisis and Refugees in Europe 1914-1923”, held at the Institute of History at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland (29 June – 01 July 2022). The conference was convened by Kamil Ruszała (Jagiellonian University) and Petra Svoljšak (ZRC SAZU). The […]
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 […]
The UnRef’s principal investigator Michal Frankl joined a public debate on involuntary migration and integration of refugees in the Czech Republic. The in-person event was organized by the intercultural festival RefuFest in Prague on 24 June 2022 at 6 p.m. CET. The working language was Czech. The recording of 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
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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?) 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 […]
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 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? 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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
November 18, 2019 Discussion at the French Institute in Prague with François Héran, Claire Zalc, Michal Frankl and Antoine Marès.
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/