Sterilization and Castration Abuse:
Coping with Holocaust Memories

April 2, 2024 at 12:30 PM
Taper Hall, Room 309K
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A public lecture by Alexandra M. Szabó (PhD candidate in History, Brandeis University)
2023-2024 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow

Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research

In her doctoral research, Alexandra M. Szabó studies the experiences of Hungarian Jews and Romani peoples who endured sterilization and castration experiments in the National Socialist death and concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Lackenbach, and Ravensbrück in the years 1942 to 1945. She examines the repercussions and long-term effects of the forced procedures on the victims’ lives.

In this lecture, Szabó will discuss nonverbal expressions in Holocaust survivor testimonies housed in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) and how these cues point to the silences and silencing surrounding this history, not only in survivor accounts but also in medical documentation and compensation claims. Exploring visual instances of silenced memories centralizes victim perspectives and points to the tangible effects of experiencing a “prolonged genocide.” Szabó will discuss how her approach and findings blur the boundaries of the concepts of “genocide” and “survival,” challenging legal and political definitions, but drawing closer to the experience that victims describe.

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Alexandra M. Szabó studies 20th-century European history and is particularly interested in the medical histories of Jewish and Romani communities. Her dissertation entitled “A Prolonged Genocide: The Sterilization and Castration Experiences of the Hungarian Roma and Jews in National Socialist Camps” focuses on Hungarian Jewish and Romani men’s and women’s experiences of sterilization and castration in Nazi camps and how the mass experiments affected their reproductive and personal lives later. She was the recipient of the EHRI Kristel Fellowship in 2020-2021, the inaugural Strauss Fellowship at Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 2022-2023. She has won graduate research awards from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry in 2022, as well as the 2019 early-career ISCH Essay Prize for Cultural Historians. Read more about her here.

Lecture image: Painting by Lili Orszagh: Lili Ország, Memento, 1957, © Lili Orszag, oil on canvas, Estate of János Pilinszky.

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