Name: Packing for an unknown destination
Start: 2026-01-26
End: 2026-01-26

Packing for an unknown destination: possession and dispossession in the Holocaust

Professor Zoë Waxman
University of Oxford

Visitors to Auschwitz today cannot help but be struck by the sheer range of objects brought there by the victims of the Holocaust. Ordinary and extraordinary, these things were carefully chosen and illustrate the lives of those subject to Nazi persecution. They tell us about where they were from and also where they imagined they were going.

Exploring these possessions thus helps the historian to uncover the experience of dispossession almost in real time. Reading these objects against other forms of testimony, both visual and verbal, provokes significant methodological difficulties, but also offers the possibility of particularising and personalising an otherwise almost unimaginably enormous cataclysm in European history.

Admission is free, but booking is essential.

The David Cesarani Holocaust Memorial Lecture

Professor David Cesarani (1956-2015) was widely acknowledged to be one of the world’s foremost authorities on Jewish history and particularly the Holocaust. He was a member of the Home Office Holocaust Memorial Day Strategic Group, Director of the AHRC Parkes Centre, part of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations and a regular media contributor. His research included several seminal works; Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (2006), Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism (2009) and Justice Delayed: How Britain became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (1992). His final works Disraeli, The Novel Politician and Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949 were published posthumously in 2016.

In 2005 he was awarded an OBE for services to Holocaust Education and advising the government with regard to the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day. David was a brilliant scholar and an inspirational teacher, supervisor and public lecturer; he was also a man of the highest academic integrity. Those who knew him speak of his warmth and intellectual generosity and he is greatly missed by all at Royal Holloway and amongst the wider academic community.