Before the Photographs: Lili Jacob, Bilky, and the Auschwitz Album

John C. Swanson will present a book project exploring the lives of the people we see in the Auschwitz Album, a collection of nearly 200 photographs of Jews deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the spring of 1944. As a work of microhistory, the book examines life at local level through the voices of specific individuals, places, and objects, told as a triple biography of Lili Jacob (the woman who discovered the Auschwitz Album in 1945), her home village of Bilky (today in Ukraine), and the Auschwitz Album itself. Compelling in their own right, the stories of these three protagonists contribute significantly to our understanding of the region and the 20th century. At the same time, the microhistorical approach allows Swanson not only to complicate but also to complement more familiar narratives of the Holocaust, East Central Europe, and the modern world. He draws on traditional top-down sources, alongside materials from Jacob and other survivors. (she did not write a memoir, and gave just two interviews during her lifetime.) Swanson also examines personal records—birth registers, school records, census reports, and related documents—to better understand how people (Jews, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and others in Transcarpathia) understood their own world. His aim is to give a voice to those who are often not seen, heard, or remembered.

John C. Swanson is a historian of modern East Central Europe whose work focuses on question of belonging, inter-ethnic relations, nationalism, and minorities. His last book, Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), won the ASEEES Barbara Jelavich Book Prize, as well as the Hungarian Studies Book Prize. In addition to his first book on the postwar situation in East Central Europe, The Remnants of the Habsburg Monarchy: Shaping Modern Austria and Hungary, 1918-1922 (East European Monographs, 2001), he has also been involved with documentary filmmaking. He currently teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Prior to that, Swanson taught at Utica University in New York State.

IWM Senior Research Fellow Taras Fedirko will moderate the discussion.