“Mapping Catastrophe at the Grassroots Level: Holocaust Maps as Alternative Testimonies”
Professional Background
Aleksandra Szczepan is a literary scholar completing a PhD on post-Holocaust realism in Polish literature at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where she is a co-founder and member of the Research Center for Memory Cultures. She also works as a researcher and interviewer on oral history projects undertaken by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Poland, Spain, and Kazakhstan.
Szczepan’s research interests include Holocaust memory; decoloniality with regard to East-Central Europe; oral history; the Roma Holocaust; and space-based testimonial practices of witnesses to the Holocaust. She has taken part in several research projects, most recently “Uncommemorated Sites of Genocide in Poland” (2016-2020), for which she coedited the volume Non-Sites of Memory: Necrotopographies (in Polish, 2021). Since 2022, Szczepan has been part of a research platform at the Jagiellonian University dedicated to the “Potential Histories of East-Central Europe” project. Her recent English-language publications include “Necrocartography: Topographies and Topologies of Non-Sites of Memory” (with Kinga Siewior in Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1, 2021) and “Terra Incognita? Othering East-Central Europe in Holocaust Studies.” (in European Holocaust Studies book 4, 2022)
Szczepan has received scholarships from various institutions, including the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, and the Polish National Science Centre. She is currently working on a book focused on the role of maps in Holocaust testimony and the biography of Jewish-Polish survivor Krystyna Żywulska, who concealed her Jewish identity not only in Auschwitz but also in her memoirs.
Fellowship Research
During her fellowship at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Szczepan will explore the significance of the map as a form of Holocaust testimony. Her project investigates how maps have constituted an essential framework of Holocaust testimony. They have been sketched by survivors as immediate evidence of mass murder, used as evidence during war crimes trials, published as part of memoirs and Yizkor books, and used during video interviews recorded for the largest, best-known archives. Non-Jewish Holocaust eyewitnesses, who often spent their entire lives near killing sites, also created maps, many of which can be found in local archives in many eastern European countries.
Using the Museum’s rich collections of oral histories, documents, photographs, and objects, Szczepan will examine the many roles that maps play in the act of bearing witness. In the context of testimony, maps may constitute much more than mere visual representations of a given space. They might serve as evidence; as a way of referring to and imagining the past; as a tool for memory; as an intimate medium of experience; or as a mode of witnessing. Maps prompt us to reassess the concept of testimony as a predominantly narrative, temporal, and verbal form of expression, to trace patterns of imagination which have been present in mainstream Holocaust reflection and cartography, and to rethink our expectations and projections related to Holocaust testimony.