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 […]
Yearly Archives: 2021
39 posts
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 […]
What are the synergies and differences in usage of various interviewing techniques in history and across social sciences? How will oral history and biographic interviewing fit in the Unlikely Refuge? project? What ethical aspects need to be considered? These and other questions were under discussion during the project January meeting. […]
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 […]