The Hoover Institution Library & Archives invites you to a book talk on Thursday, February 16, 2023, at 12:00 pm PT | 3:00 pm ET (60 minutes). Eliyana Adler, associate professor at Penn State University and Atina Grossmann, professor of history at the Cooper Union, New York will discuss the book, I Saw the Angel of Death: Experiences of Polish Jews Deported to the USSR during World War II (Hoover Institution Press, 2022). This event will be moderated by Dr. Katherine Jolluck, senior lecturer in modern East European history, Stanford University.
For over 60 years, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives has preserved the testimonies of more than 30,000 Poles who experienced deportation and imprisonment in the Soviet gulag during World War II. I Saw the Angel of Death is a first-ever scholarly English translation of their stories, more than 150 Polish Jewish survivors offer first-person accounts, allowing a new generation of readers to understand the harrowing experiences of Polish Jews under Nazi and Soviet occupations and in the Siberian forced-labor camps.
PARTICIPANT BIO
Eliyana Adler is an associate professor at Penn State University and historian of the modern Jewish experience in Eastern Europe with particular interests in the history of education, religion, gender studies, Holocaust historiography and memory. Adler has co-edited volumes on the history of Jewish education in Eastern Europe, the memory of Eastern Europe in the American Jewish community, and family and the Holocaust. Her latest book, Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2020) is the first English language scholarly book to describe the experiences of the over 200,000 Polish Jews who survived the war and the Holocaust in the unoccupied regions of the Soviet Union.
Atina Grossmann is a professor of history in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union in New York City. Her current research focuses on “Trauma: Privilege, Adventure in Transit: Jewish Refugees from National Socialism in Iran, India, and Central Asia in Transnational Context.” Her book Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton University Press, 2007, German, Wallstein 2012) was awarded the George L. Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association and the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Wiener Library, London.
Katherine R. Jolluck is a senior lecturer in modern East European history at Stanford University. She is a specialist on the history of twentieth-century Eastern Europe and Russia, she focuses on the topics of women and war, women in communist societies, the Soviet Gulag, nationalism, anti-Semitism, and human trafficking. Interested in public service, she offers service-learning courses and is active in the Bay Area anti-trafficking community.
