Honouring the Righteous

Tuesday, 24 April 2012

The UCL European Institute, the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies and the UCL Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies are pleased to invite you to a joint event honouring the Holocaust survivors and those who saved their lives.

The event will feature the screening of the documentary film The Righteous Enemy (57 min), about the Italian protection of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust directed by Joseph Rochlitz, based on the story of his father Imre Rochlitz.

It will be followed by the presentation of Imre Rochlitz's recently released book Accident of Fate (Wilfrid Laurier University Press). This first-hand account of persecution, rescue, and resistance in the Axis-occupied former Yugoslavia helps clarify and render accessible the complexities and contradictions of conflict and genocide in wartime Yugoslavia.

Budapest born Imre Rochlitz spent his childhood in Vienna. At the age of thirteen, he fled to Yugoslavia following the Nazi Anschluss, leaving his family behind. In January 1942, the Ustaše (Croatian Fascists) deported him to the Jasenovac death camp. On the verge of death, Rochlitz was released due to the extraordinary intervention of a Nazi general. He escaped to the Adriatic coast, where he and several thousand other Jewish refugees were protected by the army of Fascist Italy. After Italy's surrender, he joined Tito's Partisans, becoming an officer and army veterinarian, and rescued dozens of downed Allied airmen. In 1945, he fled Yugoslavia's Communist regime and reached liberated southern Italy. In 1947, at the age of twenty-two, Imre Rochlitz emigrated to the United States.

Speakers

• Imre Rochlitz - Author

• Jasha Almuli - Holocaust survivor, journalist and former Vice President of the Yugoslav Federation of Jewish Communities
• Professor Dr Michael Berkowitz - Professor of Modern Jewish History
• Dr Bojan Aleksov - Lecturer in South-East European History