This year’s Alfred Wiener Holocaust Memorial Lecture will take place once again at Gresham College, and will be delivered by esteemed historian Professor Debórah Dwork.

This lecture unearths the hidden history of Americans who risked their lives to save others during the Nazi era. These intrepid people travelled the globe to aid victims of Nazi Germany and its allies, often staying to rescue as many as possible when the victims’ peril turned lethal.

Discover the stories of these individuals, particularly women who embraced the independence and transformative impact of their relief efforts. This lecture highlights how luck, timing, and spontaneous decisions shaped their fates, urging us to reframe the way we think about, analyse, and write about the past.

About the speaker:

­Professor Debórah Dwork (deborahdwork.com) is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center – City University of New York. Pathbreaking in her early oral recording of Holocaust child survivors, Dwork weaves their narratives into the histories she writes.

Her award-winning books include Children With A Star; Flight from the Reich; Auschwitz; and Holocaust. Her most recent work, Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis, will be published by W.W. Norton in January 2025.  Dwork is also a leading authority on university education in this field: she envisioned and actualized the first doctoral program anywhere in the world specifically in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies.

Register to attend online or in person here.

Last year we welcomed professor Sir Richard Evans to deliver the 4th Annual Alfred Wiener Holocaust Memorial Lecture, he spoke about the historical origins of antisemitic conspiracy theories. You can catch up on his fascinating lecture here.