Speakers:
Patricia Heberer Rice (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
In Their Own Words: The World of the Child During the Holocaust
Emily Langer (The Washington Post)
“We Are Very Lucky”: Two Young Italian Sisters Who Survived Auschwitz
Welcoming remarks:
Barbara Faedda (Italian Academy, Columbia University)
Europe and the United Nations commemorate the victims of the Shoah each winter on the date of Auschwitz's liberation in 1945, and the Italian Academy marks Holocaust Remembrance Day with an annual academic event exploring issues of discrimination and crimes against humanity. In previous years, the Academy broadened its focus to explore groups that were targeted in the racism and xenophobia of the Nazi and Fascist regimes, and that suffered and died along with the millions of Jews: the Roma and Sinti (known as Gypsies); homosexuals; women; and the disabled. Last year, the event addressed music, Fascism, and the Holocaust.
Patricia Heberer Rice has served as an historian with the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington since 1994. There she serves as a Museum specialist on medical crimes and eugenics policies in Nazi Germany. Dr. Heberer Rice earned her baccalaureate and masters degrees from Southern Illinois University; she later pursued doctoral studies at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Maryland, receiving her Ph.D from the latter institution. In addition to contributions to several USHMM publications, she has recently authored a source edition, Children During the Holocaust, a volume in the Center’s series, Documenting Life and Destruction, appearing in 2011. A further publication, Atrocities on Trial: The Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes in Historical Perspective, co-edited with Juergen Mattäus, appeared in 2008 with the University of Nebraska Press.
Emily Langer is a reporter for The Washington Post. In working on the obituaries desk, she has had the opportunity to engage with some of the most fascinating assignments in today’s journalism and has written about national and world leaders, celebrated figures in the arts and sciences, and heroes from all walks of life. Before joining the Post in 2007, Langer was an Italian major at Georgetown University and a 2010–2011 Fulbright fellow in Trieste, Italy. While abroad, she researched the Risiera di San Sabba, the only Nazi concentration camp in Italy with a crematorium. Her presentation on the Bucci sisters is derived from two features that she wrote for The Washington Post.
Remembrance Initiatives at the Academy since 2008
