Guest Lecture: Dr. Sarah Cramsey
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There is little archival evidence of the invisible world of caretaking. Instead, refugees pass stories down from generation to generation. This is why testimonies are so invaluable to Dr. Cramsey’s research. To prepare for her lecture, students watched the testimony of Rachel Koplwitz, a Holocaust survivor born in Poland in 1915. When Koplowitz became pregnant with her first son in 1943, she thought she had a stomach tumor inside her, not a child. Koplowitz goes on to detail the trials of giving birth, breastfeeding, and caring for a baby while searching for a home. This testimony is just one example of the challenges of parenting in the 1940s in central eastern Europe. Dr. Cramsey’s work urges us to analyze the Holocaust in the context of these complex caretaking networks.
Dr. Cramsey graduated from William & 玛丽 with a BA in History and Religious Studies in 2004. Currently, she is an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Her book Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the Ethnic Revolution in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946 is coming soon from Indiana University Press.
