Professor Janine Holc of Loyola University Maryland has been awarded a $140,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for collaborative research and writing on the lives of Jewish girls and women during the Holocaust.
Holc, who serves as chair of the Department of Political Science, will conduct research with Marta Kubiszyn, associate professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at Marie Curie-Skłodowska University in Poland, on a project focused on autograph books, which are books made by young people that contain notes, signatures, jokes, poems, drawings and more.
The project is titled “Autograph Albums as Holocaust Objects.”
The grant makes it possible for Holc and Kubiszyn to set aside some of their normal duties over the course of the next two years, as well as travel to see collections of books in archives in Belgium, Hungary, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. Following their research, Holc and Kubiszyn will co-author a book on the subject.
Holc said, to this point, there is almost no research conducted on the autograph books she and Kubiszyn will be looking at. She said diaries have become a well-researched type of document from the Holocaust that the general public can relate to, and she believes the autograph books carry the same potential.
“But, of course [diaries] are only one person, and the autograph book is, each page is somebody different. They often don’t write things of any direct historical significance, they usually just put in a silly drawing. But sometimes you will see some reference to the war, to separation from family and things like that,” she said. “It’s just such a beautiful, creative, hopeful response to a horrific situation in which you’re being terrorized. It’s incredible what people who are being terrorized can find within them the capacity to create.”
Frank D. Golom, dean for Loyola University’s College of Arts and Sciences, said the work Holc will conduct will add to existing understanding of the Holocaust and its context.
“This is important work, and we are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding it,” he said. “Dr. Holc is a renowned scholar. There is no doubt that the insights she and her colleagues uncover will contribute much not only to our historical knowledge of the Holocaust, but also to the challenges we continue to face with antisemitism, even today.”
The genesis of her interest in this subject came about years ago. Holc authored a book in 2023 on Jewish girls and women in labor camps during the Holocaust. She focused on one set of labor camps and how Jewish girls and women dealt with their reality at those camps.
“I found in looking at how they supported each other, and the kind of social life that developed in the camp, that one of them had a little autograph book that Yad Vashem had digitized and put on their website,” Holc said.
Kubiszyn, who Holc had worked with before, came across an autograph book in Poland, and they realized together they both had an interest in exploring the subject further. From there, the project was born.
Holc recently gave a talk on Holocaust autograph books to some faculty at Loyola, and Heidi Shaker, associate professor and director of the Office of Peace and Justice, said it revealed how much can be gleaned from this type of work.
“Her talk was as moving as it was informative, showing how girls functioned inside spaces of persecution, and what these autograph books meant to their owners … we know the outcome [of the research] will be nothing short of a revelation,” she said.
Holc is not Jewish herself — and neither is her collaborator Kubiszyn. She said, however, the stories and lessons that came out of the horrors of the Holocaust should matter to everyone, regardless of their background.
“It’s just very, very important to understand the Jewish experience in the Holocaust, and to really understand the full scope of how Jews reacted to this level of persecution,” she said. “I think there are great lessons in how they reacted for all peoples of the world under persecution.”
aguckes@midatlanticmedia.com
