Panel Discussion: ‘Remembering the Holocaust: Languages, Technologies, and Representation’

Matthew Boswell Centre for the Creative Economy at Cardiff University), Dorota Goluch (Cardiff University), Nicola Keller (Cardiff University), Marc Schweissinger (Cardiff University)

Matthew Boswell is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for the Creative Economy at Cardiff University. Matthew has published widely on the cultural representation of the Holocaust and other episodes of historical violence. He has a particular interest in the relationship between digital technologies and Holocaust memory culture. The research for his latest book, Virtual Holocaust Memory (Oxford University Press, 2023), was supported by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship and an AHRC project called ‘Virtual Holocaust Memoryscapes’ that involved a partnership with the Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme memorial sites and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

Dorota Goluch is a Senior Lecturer in Translation in the School of Modern Languages at Cardiff University. She is interested in connections between translation and Holocaust memory, as well as translation and reception of postcolonial literature and theories of solidarity. Together with Dr Agnieszka Podpora (Jagiellonian University), she is currently working on a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded study on translation in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.Dorota will discuss the role of translation in the work of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, drawing on interviews with Museum employees and exhibition analyses. The Museum evokes, as one interviewee put it, ‘one history, many memories’. She will be discussing how translation is used to reach diverse groups of international visitors. She will also introduce a plan to conduct a visitor survey in three Holocaust museums and memorials.

Nicola Keller is in the first year of her PhD, examining how the children of Holocaust survivors relate to their history when it happens in languages they don’t speak. She is learning both her heritage languages to understand documents and letters which record increasing persecution of this middle-class, Hungarian family, most of whom were murdered in the Holocaust.

All Nicola’s family documents are archived at The Wiener Holocaust Library where they will be made available to scholars and historians. Nicola’s PhD looks at the role of translation in the choices descendants of Holocaust survivors make to safeguard the knowledge and understanding of their parents’ and grandparents’ persecution. She is working with voluntary translators to analyze the impact of events documented in hundreds of official notices and personal letters.

The Panel is chaired by Marc Schweissinger, Lecturer in German and author of Interpreting "Third Reich" and Holocaust Narratives. On the symbioses between fact and fiction (2023).