Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship

Brazil has had a complicated political past. When you learn about the crimes of the military dictatorship (1964-1986), it’s striking how recently it ended. In my case, five years before I was born. My father was briefly part of a resistance movement when he was in his 20s, and we had relatives in both my mother and my father’s family who were persecuted, arrested, and tortured. When I was in college I actually got to read some of their files from the political police archives. And I always thought to myself: what would I have done if I were in their place?

On the day of the ghettoization of the Jews in Kutno in western Poland in June 1940, Wilhelm Hansen, a German teacher and Wehrmacht soldier, took a series of 83 photos.

Raíssa Alonso, a PhD candidate in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, has been awarded the 2022-2023 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center in March 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation, “The ‘Other Germany’ in Brazil and the United States: Intellectuals in Exile and the Fight Against Nazism (1933-1959).”

During her monthlong residency at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, the Center’s 2021-2022 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow Lilia Tomchuk delivered a lecture about her research in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA). In the lecture, entitled “Shades of Agency: Choice, Survival & Resistance of Jewish Women During the Holocaust in Transnistria”, Lilia Tomchuk focused on facets of Jewish women’s agency in different contexts during the Holocaust in Transnistria, a part of Ukraine occupied by Romania from 1941 to 1944. Romanian authorities deported Jews and Roma from Bessarabia and Bukovina there in 1941 and 1942, and local Ukrainian Jews were brought there from neighboring localities.

Lilia Tomchuk, a PhD candidate at the Fritz Bauer Institute at Goethe University Frankfurt, has been awarded the 2021-2022 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center in Spring 2022 in order to conduct research for her dissertation, which is entitled “Dimensions of Jewish Women’s Experiences During the Holocaust in Occupied Ukraine.”