As part of a major speaking tour across the United States, author and award-winning filmmaker Bernhard Rammerstorfer will present his latest book and DVD project called “Taking the Stand: We have More to Say”.  Accompanying him will be two survivors of the Holocaust, Mrs. Reneé Firestone and Mrs. Hermine Liska, providing one of the last opportunities learn about the Holocaust from those who lived through it.

“Taking the Stand: We Have More to Say” condenses insights and experiences of nine victims of the Nazi movement and their messages to the younger generation. They are from five different countries and were persecuted for reasons of ethnicity, political ideology, or religion. For five years, Rammerstorfer collected questions directed to Holocaust survivors that were posed by schoolchildren and students all over the world. The catalog of questions, unique in the world, consists of 100 questions from 61 schools and universities in 30 countries on 6 continents.

At the event, Mr. Rammerstofer will talk about his latest documentary and present some sequences from the film followed by a Q&A session with Mrs. Firestone and Mrs. Liska, who both appear in it.  Please note that there will be a translator during the Q&A session.

Everyone is welcome to stay after the event for a book signing by the author and the two survivors.

Bernhard Rammerstorfer is an Austrian author and filmmaker who is best known for his numerous books and films about the Nazi regime, including the book “Unbroken Will” and the award-winning documentary “Ladder in the Lions Den”. Besides his work as a writer and producer, he also frequently gives lectures at schools, universities and memorial sites all over Europe and the US.

Reneé Firestone was born in 1924 in Užhorod (today’s Ukraine) into a Jewish family. In spring of 1944, she was deported to the concentration camp in Auschwitz, and later that year she was  sent to the female forced labor camp in Silesia where she stayed until the liberation by the Russian Army in May 1945. After the war, Firestone lived in Prague before emigrating to the United States with her family in 1948. She worked as a fashion designer and ran a successful boutique. In 1998, she told her story in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning documentary “The Last Days”. She regularly speaks about the Holocaust to young people in schools, at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Reneé Firestone lives in Los Angeles.

Hermine Liska was born in 1930 in Austria. As a child of Bible Students (today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses), her parents refused to raise her according to the Nazi ideology. For that reason, she was taken away from her parents in 1941 and put into a “reeducation center”. After the war, she was able to return to her home, got married and had three children. Since almost two decades she has been visiting schools all over Austria and told her story to thousands of students. In 2009, she was invited to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC to tell her story. Hermine Liska lives near Graz in Austria.

This event is co-sponsored by The Europe Center and the Stanford Austria Club


 

What does 20 years mean when we are dealing with traumas of war? How do people symbolize the war, what kind of imaginary do they create when they try to make sense of what happened to them and their country, and how do they come to terms with their losses?

In the last years, I have visited both Srebrenica and St. Louis in Missouri, home of the largest community of Bosnian refugees in the US. The way these two communities deal with trauma is radically different. However, they strangely find similar dilemmas when they search for the remains of their loved ones with the help of forensic analysis.

Trauma, however, has not surpassed also the observers - the Dutch soldiers who witnessed the genocide and did nothing to prevent it. But did the other observers - the international community - learn anything from Srebrenica? Did not the lack of reflection on failure of intervention in Srebrenica, paradoxically, allow other future failures to multiply?

Renata Salecl is a philosopher and sociologist. She is Senior Researcher at the Institute of  Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia, professor at the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London and Recurring Visiting Professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York. Salecl is the author of The Spoils of Freedom (Routledge 1994), (Per)versions of Love and Hate (Verso, 1998), On Anxiety (Routledge 2004), Tyranny of Choice (Profile Books 2010).  Her books have been translated into more than 10 languages.  She also writes commentaries for the leading daily newspaper Delo in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In the last years, she has been named Slovenian Woman Scientist of the Year as well as Woman of the Year.

Co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies, The Europe Center, The Mediterranean Studies Forum, The Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Ilamic Studies, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Film and Media Studies Program in the Department of Art & Art History, Stanford Humanities Center, with funding from the US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Centers program.

For more information on the conference, please visit here: Yugoslav Space Twenty Years After Srebrenica