Lecture | Lidia Zessin-Jurek: A Landscape in Motion: Jewish Refugee Spaces in Early Wartime Eastern Europe

EHRI-CZ, in collaboration with the Jewish Museum in Prague, cordially invites you to a lecture by Lidia Zessin-Jurek: A Landscape in Motion: Jewish Refugee Spaces in Early Wartime Eastern Europe which is a part of the lecture series Trends in Contemporary Holocaust Research.

Date: 10th December 2026 at 6pm

Venue: OVK ŽMP, Maiselova 15, 110 00 Prague 1

Eastern Europe features as the geographical epicentre of the Holocaust’s destruction. This lecture asks what has been “crowded out” of prevalent memorials: a landscape marked by Jewish attempts to save themselves through early wartime flight and refuge. Focusing mainly on Poland in 1939–1941, it maps Jewish paths through collapsing states, emerging borders, no man’s lands, and the varied human responses to their plight as refugees.

Dr Lidia Zessin-Jurek is a historian of modern East Central Europe specializing in Jewish history, the Holocaust, the Gulag, as well as refugee movements in Eastern Europe during the two world wars. Her research takes a comparative approach to contemporary refugee situations, including those at the Belarusian-Polish border and in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War.