Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Introduction

Abstract

The Beyond Camps and Forced Labour conference, held for the first time in 2003, has welcomed new research on a variety of themes on the postwar period: for example, ‘displaced persons’ in postwar Europe, reception and resettlement, exiles and refugees, trials and justice, reparation and restitution and memory and testimony. Each year it is held the conference stimulates new research in key areas that are gaining traction in the field. Above all it fosters exchange and networking amongst established scholars and early career researchers, with a particular emphasis on supporting the participation of scholars in Eastern Europe. The chapters of this book represent just 10 per cent of the papers given at the conference, whose subjects ranged from Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Italy to the commemoration of the Holocaust in Soviet Latvia, from survivors’ stories of integration in Chile and Mexico to music in Holocaust education, from postwar debates about the behaviour of ‘kapos’ to the resettlement in postwar Palestine of child refugees who had spent the war years in Teheran. Geographically, methodologically and conceptually the presentations given at the conference were extremely varied, and we have sought to capture that wide range in this volume.