Shapiro Scholar Atina Grossmann presents on Jewish refugees in the Global South

On April 21, 2025, Atina Grossmann, Professor of History at The Cooper Union and 2024-2025 Shapiro Scholar in Residence, delivered the annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar Lecture about new research on the global transit of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. The first half of the lecture was a broad overview of global transit as a field, and the second half of the lecture covered Professor Grossmann’s research about German Jewish refugees in Iran and India.

Professor Grossmann began with two quotes from German refugees – one from a testimony found in the Visual History Archive and the other from one of her father’s letters – reflecting on their respective journeys and experiences in the Global South. These quotations served as a starting point for considering the value of expanding global transit studies to the Global South. Testimonies and artifacts, Professor Grossmann argued, can offer valuable insight into the diverse range of experiences that European Jews had during the Holocaust.

In addition to the Visual History Archive and her family’s own collection, Professor Grossmann shared an extensive list of both public and private archives that contain a wealth of sources. Yet, as she noted, global transit in Holocaust studies has remained an understudied area of research until recently, when increased accessibility to materials has contributed to the field’s expansion.

Important questions for Professor Grossmann that have emerged from the global turn in Holocaust Studies have been: How were refugees impacted by identity and geographic location? What was the emotional geography that formed as European Jews fled to non-western, colonial, and semi-colonial countries? And how did these experiences shape their post-war lives? She commented that to answer these questions, it is necessary to examine the day-to-day lives of refugees including encounters with their own positions of privilege as white Europeans living in multicultural, colonial environments that were also entangled in global politics.

The field of global transit has enabled scholars to address the intersectionality of race, class, and gender in the experience of Jewish refugees. Refugees had vastly different experiences depending on their distinct identities as well as the ports and countries in which they found themselves. Some countries such as Bolivia readily welcomed Jewish refugees while other countries like Cyprus required refugees to stay in British internment camps. In Central Asia, where hundreds of thousands eventually went, refugees frequently encountered hunger, disease, and violence from the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs).

The postcolonial turn in Holocaust Studies moves even further beyond the encounter framework towards an intersectional model. This shift, Professor Grossmann observed, has allowed scholars to think about the Holocaust and National Socialism within a broader global and political landscape. The field must now grapple with situating the specific narrative of Jewish refugees within this larger narrative of persecution and migration including questions about whether or not Jewish refugees participated in a form of settler colonialism.

While the globalization and decolonization of Holocaust Studies and its consequent expansion have led to an important diversification of the field, Professor Grossmann commented that much of this rapid growth could not have happened without avoiding the topic of Palestine. She stated that not addressing Palestine has the potential to halt the field’s forward momentum. Even so, scholars who are from the region – whose expertise is essential to advancing global transit studies as it regards Palestine – are some of the most vulnerable due to the U.S.’s current political situation.

Professor Grossmann then wondered why the field had recently shifted from focusing on survivors in the Soviet Union to countries with a much smaller Jewish population. She speculated that political and pedagogical priorities have changed as the student population has diversified. A postcolonial approach to the Holocaust may speak more closely to students who may not have any European heritage yet have their own family histories of displacement and immigration.

In the second half of the lecture, Professor Grossmann shared the story of her father, Dr. Hans Sigismund Grossmann, a German Jew who fled to Tehran, as an entry point into her current research. She discussed her parents’ lives as both citizens and tourists of Tehran and the multiple roles and identities that shaped their experiences as refugees.

Professor Grossmann then showed two letters – one from her father in Tehran and one from family in Berlin – to highlight that even privilege was complicated for the Jewish refugee. While her father’s letter discusses traveling throughout Iran, the letter sent from family members trapped in Berlin thanks Dr. Grossmann for sending beans, sugar, and lard. Many of Dr. Grossmann’s detailed letters were accompanied by travel photographs. Professor Grossmann showed one photograph of her parents in the mountains, noting that such images show how refugees were in a precarious position of privilege – one in which they could partake in leisurely adventure but with the knowledge that the precondition of their situation was the ongoing war and persecution of Jews.

Professor Grossmann closed with an image of her father’s makeshift badge that lists British internment camps on one side and a silver Star of David with “P.O.W. 1941-1945” written on the other. With this image, she pointed out that Jewish refugees, who were both fleeing violence yet occupying positions of privilege in their host countries, always existed in multiple, overlapping worlds.

Questions posed during the Q&A addressed the field of global transit as well as Professor Grossmann’s own research. There was discussion about the nuances between different Jews and the class distinction of European Jews who resided or were imprisoned in non-Western countries. There were also questions regarding methodology and the personal nature of Professor Grossmann’s research, as well as the significance of personal artifacts and their role in the research, testimonies, and daily lives of refugees.

Read more about Professor Atina Grossmann here.