Writing a History of Animals During the Holocaust

Join us for a talk with Barnabas Balint, Research Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Animals are hardly ever the focus of Holocaust history, but they do appear throughout its sources. This talk identifies the sources and methodology for writing a history of animals during the Holocaust. It reveals how animals were used as a tool for social exclusion, as perpetrators used laws, regulations, and propaganda about Jews’ treatment of animals to construct an antisemitic ‘other’ and further their policies of persecution. It argues that this history can be accessed through multiple themes, as animals appear as tools of persecution, through elements of the human experience, and in points of memory.

Furthermore, although animals have not been viewed as a category of analysis for the Holocaust before, recent trends in Holocaust studies have developed the idea of an environmental history, paying close attention to nature and the relationship between humans and their environment. This paper reveals how animals are a part of this environment, too. However, the strong emotional connection between humans and animals (such as their pets), as well as the ways animals were often weaponised by perpetrators, highlights certain specificities in the case of animals.

By identifying and exploring the sources that reveal the positions animals held during the Holocaust, this paper develops a methodological approach to finding animals in the archives and acknowledging their contribution to history. It draws mainly on the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, as large repositories for many other local, national, and transnational archives. It uses these extensive collections to identify some of the key themes that emerge from animal focused histories of the Holocaust and suggest further avenues for research in this area.

About the speaker

Barnabas Balint completed his doctorate in History at Magdalen College, with a specific interest in the history of the Holocaust and its impact on society. His PhD project combined the history of childhood, gender, and identity to explore Jewish youth responses to persecution during the Second World War. He has held fellowships at the USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (Yad Vashem), and the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

He is currently the Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance Research Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has published widely in the European Review of History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Jewish Culture and History, and The Journal of Holocaust Research.

Book your place

This talk is free to attend but booking is required.

Please register via this form.

More information

This event is organised by the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds.

For more details, please email Dr Roseanna Ramsden at R.Ramsden@leeds.ac.uk.

Image

Photo of Barnabas Balint.