When in the autumn of 1931 Major Duncan McCallum and his wife Violet were travelling from Kenya to British Somaliland, the local Italian provincial governor Commendatore Massimo Adolfo Vitale hosted them in Italian Somaliland. From this encounter spurred a friendship between the British Major and the Italian Officer, with the both of them remaining in Read More
Most Recent Posts
Historiography of Babi Yar (1991-2023)
The Babi Yar tract in Kyiv is well-known as a site of murder and burial of Holocaust victims. During the Second World War, it was located on the outskirts of the city; now, it is part of the urban metropolis. In the Ukrainian intellectual community, Babi Yar has long been not only an object of Read More
Unraveling “Sabotage Socks”: The Materiality of Nazi Concentration Camps in Sweden
There’s a hole in one of the socks near where the toes should be. Is that where an elderly female prisoner deliberately knitted a defect? Is it traces of use? Or is it just because the socks were knitted eighty years ago? Other than the hole, the socks have held up well. They are a Read More
Holocaust Studies in Ukrainian Academia in the 1990s-2020s: From Translations and Locality to Cultural and Philosophical Comprehension
The development of “witnessing theory”1 and “ego-documents”2 studies in Western academia has stimulated publications3 and online archives4 dedicated to Soviet Jewish life and different types of Jewish identity in post-Soviet countries. In the context of the contemporary relevance of ego-documents studies, I would like to offer my personal experience of studying the Holocaust and Jewish Read More
