“Sewanee Remembers” Offers Range of Events to Commemorate Holocaust

“Sewanee Remembers” is a week-long commemoration of Yom Ha’Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) to be held Monday, March 30, through Friday, April 3. Events planned include public performances, student research and lectures. All events are free and open to the public. For a complete schedule of events and information about locations, go to <http://yomhashoah.sewanee.edu>. This year is the 70th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust.
At 7:30 p.m., Monday, March 30, at Proctor Hill Theater in the Tennessee Williams Center, University of the South professors David Meola (history), Dan Backlund and Peter Smith (theatre arts), along with their classes, will present a spoken-word project bringing short, meaningful writings of people involved in the Holocaust. More than just a dramatic reading of victim’s diaries and memoirs, this project will weave together the stories of numerous personalities, including perpetrators and bystanders.
The week’s keynote speaker is Dagmar Herzog, distinguished professor of history and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her talk will take place at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 1, in Gailor Auditorium. She will lecture on her current research titled “Post-Holocaust Anti-Semitism and the Psychiatry of Trauma.” Herzog writes on the histories of religion, the Holocaust and its aftermath, and gender and sexuality. Her most recent book is “Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History,” and she is currently working on a transatlantic study of psychoanalysis, trauma and desire in the postwar era.
Tom Lenda, a survivor of the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto-concentration camp (located in what is now the Czech Republic), will be in Sewanee to give a talk at 6 p.m., Thursday, April 2, in the University Arts Gallery. Lenda is a noted Holocaust speaker and he has also written a memoir, “Children on Death Row: Holocaust and Beyond.” Following the talk, a production based on Lenda’s memoir, “Carrying the Remains: One Boy’s Promise to the Children of Terezin,” will take place at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, April 2, in Guerry Auditorium. This production is arranged by Jim Carlson (department of music) and choreographed by Courtney World (theatre arts). It will take audience members through Lenda’s memories of living in the dystopian world of the Nazi camps. Music, narration (performed by David Landon, theatre arts), and dance will create a performance unlike others before.
Through generous support, 40 children’s drawings from Terezin will be on display, on loan from the Jewish Museum of Prague. These images will be displayed from Sunday, March 29, through Thursday, April 30, in duPont Library. These images are not located in a central area, but have been distributed throughout this public space.
Four University of the South students will present their individual research on the Holocaust at 9:30 a.m., Thursday, April 2, in Gailor Auditorium.
A public discussion on anti-Semitism will be held at 4:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 31, on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. Meola will give a short lecture on the “History of Anti-Semitism before the Nazi Era,” and Herzog will speak on “Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.”
An Indigogo campaign is underway to raise funds to make 1,000 DVDs of these remembrance events to be distributed to schools across Tennessee and the country. For more information on this campaign, go to <https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/carrying-the-remains-dvd-project>.
The University Lectures Committee, Sewanee Arts, the Dean of Students, the Dean of the College, the Mellon Globalization Forum, Middle Tennessee State University and Sewanee’s departments of history, German, theatre arts, music and religion sponsor this event.
Contact Meola at 598-1262 or <dameola@sewanee.edu> for more information.