Selected Publications
- Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015; Paperback 2018.
- Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age: Refugees, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and Eurasia. Eds. Anika Walke, Jan Musekamp, Nicole Svobodny. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
- “Testimony in Place: Witnessing the Holocaust in Belarus,” East European Jewish Affairs 52, no. 1 (2023): 80-104.
- “’To Speak for Those Who Cannot’: Masha Rol’nikaite on Anti-Jewish and Sexual Violence during the German Occupation of Soviet Territories.” Jewish History 33, no. 1-2 (2020): 215-244.
- “Split Memory: The Geography of Holocaust Memory and Amnesia in Belarus.” Slavic Review 77, no.1 (2018): 174-197.
FRIAS Project
Bones, Dirt, and Ash: Holocaust Testimony Matters in Belarus
In Belarus, the legacy of the Holocaust and of World War II is literally and figuratively part of the landscape, in the form of marked and unmarked mass graves of Jews or others, or of large meadows that were once villages which were erased during the German occupation regime’s campaign to create so-called dead zones. What does it mean to live in and with this space of destruction? How do people relate to the visible and invisible traces of war and genocide? What does it mean to live on, near, and with mass graves? A critical task of Bones, Dirt, and Ash is to offer an inside view on important sites of history and memory in Belarus, and of how people have come to live with sites and material traces of violence and trauma.
The book brings to life a territory that formed major parts of the Pale of Jewish Settlement, was occupied by German forces between 1941 and 1944, and where between 1944 and 1991 Soviet policies provided a frame to both contain and be transgressed by distinct forms of memory, commemoration, and living with the past. The book is an opportunity for the reader to encounter a country that—in the aftermath of the wave of political repression since 2020 and the ongoing war in Ukraine—once more has become largely inaccessible to the foreign visitor.