Guest Lecture: Homecoming Identities and Memory of the Holocaust Survivors and Greece
This talk examines the complex and layered meanings of “homecoming” for Jews from Greece by tracing a continuum from wartime survival and displacement through liberation and the immediate postwar. It argues that the desire to return did not originate after liberation but crystallized during the war itself, within hiding, flight, forced labor, and deportation, where survival was inseparable from imagined return. Drawing on survivor life stories and archival sources, the presentation shows how the return was mediated by memory, trauma, and shifting political realities, from the Greek Civil War to patterns of Cold War emigration. It reflects on how Jewish identity was renegotiated in this fraught context and how these narratives intersect with broader silences in Greek national memory.
Kateřina Králová is a Professor of contemporary history and a memory studies scholar, expert in modern Greek history with a focus on Nazi persecution and Holocaust studies, at Charles University in Prague and the IE Czech Academy of Sciences.