Holocaust Memorial Day Lunch Hour Lecture - A Long Road: Italian Holocaust Survivors’ Journeys Home

About the Lecture:

Lunch Hour Lecture for Holocaust Memorial Day 
A Long Road:  Italian Holocaust Survivors’ Journeys Home

While histories and cultural representations of the Holocaust often end with the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27th, commemorated today globally as Holocaust Memorial Day, the date forms the starting point of this talk. Rather than, as often imagined, a moment of joy and sense of freedom, survivors remember liberation as a time of disorientation. Without papers, without working trains, without maps and directions, freedom meant little. This talk traces the return journeys of Italian Jews who survived the camps in Eastern Europe and travelled across countries devastated by war, often with little or no help from state officials or refugee organizations. Survivors depicted their journey back as a liminal space filled with possibilities. Yet, for most, dreams of reuniting with family and friends collapsed upon arrival as they learned about the deaths of loved ones, and traumatic memories of the camps shattered hopes of a simple return to pre-war lives.

UCL's popular public Lunch Hour Lecture series has been running at UCL since 1942, and showcases the exceptional research work being undertaken across UCL. Lectures are free and open to all and since 2020 have been held online.

About the Speaker:

Anna Koch is DAAD Francis Carsten Lecturer in Modern German History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London. She is the author of Home After Fascism: Italian and German Jews after the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023) and the editor (with Stephan Stach) of Holocaust Memory and the Cold War: Remembering Across the Iron Curtain (Berlin: DeGruyter/Oldenbourg, 2024). Home After Fascism received the 2025 British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2025 Memory Studies Association First Book Award.

Image credit: Fondazione CDEC Archive, Milano