Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv
Events List
Thursday 12th September | 6pm
Waitman Wade Beorn, PhD, FRHistS
Associate Professor, History
Northumbria University
The Nazis murdered as many as 80,000 Jews in the little-known Janowska concentration camp in what is now Lviv, Ukraine. In this talk, Dr. Beorn will reveal the incredible history of this place through survivor testimony and images. In addition, he will discuss the daring 1943 prisoner uprising and escape and the postwar search for justice.
Waitman Wade Beorn, PhD, FRHistS. Associate Professor, History, Northumbria University | Image provided by promoter
Dr. Beorn was previously the Director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, VA and the inaugural Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. He received his PhD in History from the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill where he worked under the direction of Christopher Browning. His first book examined the complicity of the German Army in the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, focusing on ground level participation. That book, Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Harvard University Press, 2014) won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize for best first book from Harvard Press. The book also received the Honorable Mention for the Sybil Milton Memorial Book Prize for books on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust from the German Studies Association. Dr. Beorn is also the author of The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) and has recently finished a book on the Janowska concentration camp outside of Lviv, Ukraine entitled Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (University of Nebraska Press, 2024).
Camp commandant, Gustav Willhaus, in front of the main gate of the Janowska Camp | Image provided by promoter
Dr. Beorn has published work in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Central European History, German Studies Review, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Politics and Governance, and the Geographical Review in addition to chapters in several edited volumes. He has been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and Claims Conference fellowships.
As a public-facing scholar, Dr. Beorn has published pieces in the Washington Post, Time, The New Republic, and The Forward. He has also appeared on CNN, Richard French Live on WRNN, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and TRT. He is an active contributor to public history and engagement on Twitter as well. Dr. Beorn is also the host of The Holocaust History Podcast.
Dr. Beorn teaches courses in Holocaust History, Comparative Genocide, German history, Eastern European history, Antisemitism, Modern European history, Jewish history, Historical Methodology, Public history, and Digital history. He is also the Scholar-in-Residence for the Auschwitz Jewish Center’s American Service Academy Program where he instructs service academy cadets in military ethical decision-making using the Holocaust. Dr. Beorn’s work also forms the basis for the Ordinary Soldiers lesson program used by ROTC and the US Army.
Dr. Beorn is a 2000 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point.
A LIVE Lit & Phil Event | FREE
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