Arizona Humanities Presents: Women's Resilience and Survival in the Holocaust

Trace the lives of two women Holocaust survivors who both grew up in traditional Jewish families in Bedzin, Poland and later became residents of Arizona: Jane Lipski (Tucson) and Doris Martin (Flagstaff) as they managed to survive the Nazi onslaught as adolescent girls. While Jane was able to escape the ghetto and join the resistance movement in Slovakia, Doris was sent to Auschwitz and selected for labor at a women’s camp near the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. When Doris was liberated in 1945 by the advancing Soviet forces and ended up in a Displaced Person Camp in Germany, Jane was arrested by the Soviets as a suspected spy and remained in captivity in Soviet labor camps until 1947. Professor Björn Krondorfer will present an introduction into the complex history of the Holocaust through the lives of Doris and Jane, with particular attention to women’s resourcefulness in their struggle so to survive.

Björn Krondorfer is Regents’ Professor and the Director of the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University. As Endowed Professor of Religious Studies, he also teaches in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies. His field of expertise is religion/gender/culture and (post-) Holocaust and reconciliation studies. He received a Senior Research Fellowship at the Vrije University in Amsterdam and held visiting faculty positions in Germany and South Africa. He is currently the VP of the “Association for Public Religion and Intellectual Life”; in 2020 he became chair of the “Consortium of Higher Education Centers for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies.”

This program is made possible by Arizona Humanities.