The Hour of Revenge. Individual Pursuit of Retribution and Emotional Landscape of Postwar Europe
Dr. Katarzyna Person
Warsaw Ghetto Museum14.10.2025, 18:30
Conference Room of the Center for Urban History
We invite you to the lecture by Dr. Katarzyna Person that continues the series "Source as a Choice".
The aftermath of the Second World War was a landscape of immense destruction and ambitious plans of renewal. A key element in turning from war into the postwar period was dealing with the Nazi crimes and seeking justice. International trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo, as well as multiple national and regional trials across war-damaged countries, set legal and political frameworks for how countries and societies could deliver justice and help move away from the war. At the same time, extra-legal pursuits of justice are as paramount for our understanding of the postwar as setting up international legal procedures and institutions.
The lecture by Dr. Katarzyna Person is based on her recently published book, The Hour of Revenge. Holocaust Survivors and Their Search for Revenge and Retribution (University of Toronto Press, 2025), which focuses specifically on the immediate response of Jewish prewar Polish citizens as they navigated the complexities of their post-war realities. The book offers a nuanced story of individual agency in seeking revenge, taking into consideration gender, age, social status, and geographic location as key aspects in shaping this search. By bringing in the perspective of Jewish survivors who were physically and emotionally exhausted and therefore often seen as incapable of retribution, the lecture will show how individual survivors did attempt to get both physical revenge and retribution. Accounting for these experiences allows one to have a better understanding of postwar Europe.
The lecture and the conversation afterward will offer a possibility to reflect on the multiplicity of how individuals confront traumatic war experiences in new postwar realities and ask what the roles of emotions are in the reconstruction of individual and communities' lives in the face of immense loss. Finally, it will be a possibility to discuss how employing the lens of emotions in studying discourses and practices around the notions of justice, retribution, and revenge can help to grasp a complex emotional landscape of the postwar world and what sources are available for such a type of inquiry.
The lecture will be moderated by historian and Center's researcher Liana Blicharska.
Language: English with simultaneous translation into Ukrainian.
Dr. Katarzyna Person
Warsaw Ghetto MuseumHistorian of the Holocaust and the director of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum. Her work focuses on voices that had been silenced or seen as “unfit” for the transmission of Holocaust memory, such as women, children, those deemed “collaborators”, deportees and refugees. Her publications include “Warsaw Ghetto Police. Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation” (2021), “Polnische Juden in der amerikanischen und der britischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands, 1945–1948” (2023), “Przemysłowa Concentration Camp: The Camp, the Children, the Trials” (2023),” “The Hour of Revenge. Holocaust Survivors and Their Search for Revenge and Retribution” (2025). She holds a PhD in history from the University of London. In 2024, she was awarded the Dan David Prize.
The event will take place as part of the "Overlooked: Revisiting the Histories of Ghettos in Occupied Territories of Contemporary Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Moldova" seminar and "Source as a Choice" public series.
Co-organizers:
- Center for Urban History
- Documenting Ukraine / Institute for Human Sciences
- Research Centre Ukraine / Max Weber Foundation
The partner of the event is Warsaw Ghetto Museum.
Credits
Cover Image: An American lieutenant and a member of the German criminal police in a bakery in Nuremberg, inspecting the hiding place of Arie Liebke Distal, who, along with comrades in the secret group Nakam (Vengeance), poisoned the bread of SS prisoners in 1946 / National Archives and Records Administration, College Park.
Gallery: Maria Urban