Task force for international cooperation on Holocaust education, remembrance and research (ITF)

The central interest of the School is focused on opening up the discussion about the memorialisation of the Holocaust experience in Macedonia, and in particular focusing for the first time on Roma people as victims of genocidal violence, by taking the Holocaust as an important factor in the formation of Macedonia’s historic and socio-cultural past. The presence of the Jewish narrative in Macedonia will be compared to the scarce but important data on Roma people among other minority groups - victims of the Holocaust (homosexuals, disabled people, etc.). By promoting the memorialisation of Jewish and Roma experiences in a comparative perspective from the Macedonian context and their “strategies of survival”, in this Summer School we take as a starting point an attempt to further thematise and raise awareness of the systemic violence of the Holocaust through inter-disciplinary academic discussion.

Namely, does the Holocaust create a so-called “place of absence”? To what extent does the political affect of the unanswered “concept of the Holocaust” represent “the chronotope of the silence”, which in turn hinders the continuous articulation of the past at the given historic moment, by marking the then historical presence as a paradigmatic vacuum-space of the continuity of the spiritual and material biography and autobiography of the Holocaust narrative for the future? How much and in what ways does such a historic fact allow for the reconstruction of the past in the  present day? Does political terror signify a rupture in the functionality of the sacral and material aspects of history, within the framework of one diachronic vertical, written not only by the metaphor of terror, violence, vanishing, and forgetting, but also forever sealed by the colonial aspect of death?

The discursive critical approach to Holocaust narratives maintains multidisciplinary nature relating to social sciences and humanities and arts. On the other hand, such a multidimensional approach to Holocaust discourse expands this School’s primary filed of interest to affirm today’s serious methodological need for the techniques of using Holocaust studies as to formulate the cultural and historical picture in educational process about and of Macedonia and the experience of the Holocaust in a broader geographical framework on the Balkans and East and Central Europe.