The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) and Dr. Jacob Labendz hosted Dr. Anna Hájková’s talk titled “Why We Need an LGBT History of the Holocaust: The Romeo and Juliet of Wartime Prague” on Nov. 7 in Trustees Pavilion.
CHGS’s mission, according to their website, is to “assist students, educators, and the community-at-large in learning the history and lessons of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and other similar tragedies.”
Dr. Hájková is a Reader — an academic rank at European universities — at The University of Warwick in modern European continental history and has been researching sexuality and the Holocaust. She is the author of the award winning book “The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt.”
As defined by Dr. Hájková during the talk, queer Holocaust history is “a field … where [she] look[s] at Jews who were prosecuted by the Nazis as Jews who engaged in same sex desire or acts, some of them out of coercion, some of them for romantic reasons.”
The talk focused on two men who lived together in Prague, Czechoslovakia for 18 years between 1924 and 1942. Before World War II, the Prague police ended up arresting the pair for homosexuality, citing Paragraph 175, a law that criminalized same-sex sexual acts. The two men ended up sentenced to prison and one was eventually sent to Auschwitz for being Jewish, where the other, who was not Jewish, was released from prison in 1945.
Dr. Hájková specifically asked attendees to refrain from disclosing the names of these men outside of the discussion. She also noted that these men, and many other LGBTQ+ individuals, are excluded from Holocaust history that is taught across the nation.
Near the end of her talk, Dr. Hájková notes that the story of these two men is important to uncover because their story is not just about homophobia or antisemitism: it is a story about intersectionality.
“They went to their death and their imprisonment apart,” said Dr. Hájková. “They did not have the emotional support of going to the best or the worst moments.”
Following this event, CHGS will host Dr. Carly Goodman from Rutgers University for their second Foundation Concepts talk titled “Foundational Concepts: Refugees and Human Rights” Nov. 25 at 6:30 p.m. in Friends Hall.
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Featured photo by Jessica Hammer
