Lessons in Resilience from the Holocaust and Genocide Featuring Johana Sliwa: An Unlikely Rescue: A Jewish Woman Who Helped Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust

Join us on this transformative journey; let this series serve as your source of empowerment, inspiring our community to find their own light within the encompassing shadows.

Johana Sliwa:
An Unlikely Rescue: A Jewish Woman Who Helped Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust

Dr. Joanna Sliwa is a historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) in New York, where she also administers academic programs. She has taught Holocaust and Jewish history at Kean University and at Rutgers University. Joanna has many years of experience working in teacher training on the Holocaust, including in her ongoing role as Faculty Advisor to the Master Teacher Institute in Holocaust Education at the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. Joanna’s scholarship focuses on the Holocaust in Poland and Polish Jewish history. Her first book, Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust won the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize awarded by the Wiener Holocaust Library. Her second book, The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust, is co-authored with Elizabeth B. White.

Tali Nates

Tali Nates is the founder and director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC) and Chair of the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation (SAHGF). She is a historian who lectures internationally on Holocaust and genocide education, memory, reconciliation, and human rights. Born to a family of Holocaust survivors, her father and uncle were saved by Oskar Schindler. Tali has been involved in the creation and production of dozens of documentary films, published many articles and contributed chapters to different books among them God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (2015), Remembering The Holocaust in Educational Settings (2018), Conceptualizing Mass Violence, Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations (2021) and The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (2023).

In 2021 she was part of the 12-member Expert Group of the Malmö Forum, serving in an advisory capacity to the Secretariat of the Malmö Forum on their programme on Holocaust remembrance, education and actions to combat antisemitism. Tali serves on many Advisory and Academic Boards including that of the Contested Histories Initiative, the Interdisciplinary Academic Journal of Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center and the Academic Advisory Group of the School of Social and Health Sciences, Monash University (IIEMSA), South Africa.

In 2010, Tali was chosen as one of the top 100 newsworthy and noteworthy women in

South Africa by the Mail & Guardian newspaper and won many awards including the Kia Community Service Award (South Africa, 2015), the Gratias Agit Award (2020, Czech Republic), the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award (2021) and the Goethe Medal (2022, Germany).

In the midst of uncertainty and shadows, our series on resistance stands as a beacon of hope.

Over the course of our 8-part series, we aim to shed light on the stories of individuals and communities courageously facing prevailing challenges. Our mission is to create a space where narratives of resilience take center stage, unveiling the indomitable strength of the human spirit in adversity.

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Future Events in this Series:

• May 22, 2024 – Khatchig Mouradian: Resisting the Armenian Genocide: Lessons in Resilience from a Clandestine Network of Humanitarians
• August 28, 2024 – Wolf Gruner: Resisters in Hitler’s Germany (Tentative)
• September 25, 2024 – Asya Darbinyan: Chhange and Holocaust Education (Tentative)
• October 23, 2024 – Paul Lowe: Capturing the Siege of Sarajevo (Tentative)
• November 20, 2024 – Sarah Brown, PhD: Women as Perpetrators and Rescuers (Tentative)