Workshop: Les égouts de Lviv

Presentation

From June 1943 to the end of July 1944, a group of ten Jews survived the Holocaust by hiding in the sewers of Lviv (Lwów), Western Ukraine, with the help of three non-Jewish Polish sewage workers. This extraordinary story of survival quickly became famous: several survivors testified on several occasions, in a variety of settings and media: documentaries, books, press articles, fiction films… Until, in 2021, a team of Ukrainian researchers and “urban explorers” found the main hiding place and established the path taken underground by the group.
In 2024, the workshop proposed to conduct an original investigation into this story of hiding, survival and transmission, in the company of Henri Berestycki, son of one of the survivors and director of studies at the EHESS. Distancing himself from any anecdotal approach, he combined research into the social history of clandestinity and survival, the paths taken by survivors before and after the war and their relationships with their rescuers, with a study of the stratified and sometimes competing ways in which memory and narratives are enacted. The aim of the workshop was to train students in research through research, and on June 6, 2024, it will culminate in a colloquium giving them the opportunity to present their research findings, at the crossroads of different methodological and thematic approaches.
This workshop is organized by Thomas Chopard (CRH, EJ-HHS), Judith Lyon-Caen (CRH, GRIHL-HHS) & Claire Zalc (IHMC/CRH, HHS) with the support of CRH and of EHESS.