This lecture uses oral testimony recorded with people who, as children, spent time at the Maison d’Izieu, a Jewish children’s home in France. The home was set up in April 1943 as a safe-house for children smuggled out of camps elsewhere in France. In April 1944, Izieu was raided by the Nazis: forty-four children and seven adults were arrested. After introducing Izieu and the interviewees, Reader, Dr Dodd will discuss how survivors recall being at Izieu, including environment, people and emotions. She will then consider their return as adults, and how vestiges of the past surfaced through later interactions with a place.
Dr Lindsey Dodd is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Huddersfield. Her research interests include France during the Second World War, oral history theory and practice, children in war, the history of childhood and the history of everyday life. She is currently writing her second monograph, Remembering Wartime Childhoods: Memory, Feeling and Imagination which pulls together over 150 oral histories of French wartime childhoods.
This event is held jointly with the University of Huddersfield’s Centre for History, Culture and Memory
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