Pears Annual Lecture: Women Perpetrators in Auschwitz-Birkenau

The Wiener Library is delighted to host Dr Sarah Cushman for the 2019 Pears Annual Lecture.

Scholars have engaged the important task of analysing the roles of women in the Nazi regime, including camp guards, nurses, secretaries, SS and Army auxiliaries, teachers, and wives. Dr Sarah Cushman will discuss her research about SS-affiliated women in Auschwitz-Birkenau: their recruitment and training, their living and working conditions, and their interactions with women imprisoned there. In addition, Cushman will situate these women within the broader context of Holocaust perpetrators.

There will be a small reception following the lecture.

Scholars:

Dr Sarah Cushman is the Director of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University and a lecturer in the Department of History at Northwestern University. Cushman has been involved in Holocaust education and scholarship for nearly two decades, serving as Director of Youth Education at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Long Island and Head of Educational Programming at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Her research centers on women's experiences during the Holocaust. She has written several articles and is currently working on her first book, Auschwitz: The Women's Camp, an adaptation of her dissertation. Sarah Cushman has received numerous fellowships including from the Holocaust Educational Foundation, the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

We are grateful to the Pears Foundation for making this lecture series possible.