Lecture »Leben, Kampf und Tod im Ghetto Warschau«

On Thursday, February 26, 2026, the exhibition »The Determining Gaze. Images of Jewish Life in Postwar Poland« will end at the Dubnow Institute. The exhibition can be viewed independently on this day from 4 p.m.; this will be followed at 5 p.m. by a lecture entitled "Life, Struggle, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto." The speaker will be Julia Roos, one of the curators of the exhibition.

The current exhibition was created in collaboration with the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. In her lecture Julia Roos will highlight another exhibition that was created in the 1960s in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Institute in her lecture. Entitled »Leben, Kampf und Tod im Ghetto Warschau« she presents a traveling exhibition that the Jewish community of West Berlin wanted to send throughout West Germany in 1963 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. This exhibition represents an unusual cooperation across the Iron Curtain. It is remarkable that the Jewish Community of Berlin is actively participating in the work of remembrance in the land of the perpetrators, while the Jewish communities in West Germany lived largely isolated from the rest of society during this time.

However, the exhibition was accused of bias and Polish propaganda and only shown at a few venues. It was therefore difficult to find out what was on display in the exhibition: it left hardly any traces. It's narrative and visual design could only be reconstructed via detours: The few surviving documents show us a well-thought-out historical documentation. The high-quality exhibition, which was academically supervised by Joseph Wulf and Bernard Mark, would have been an important counterweight to other exhibitions of the time, which often remained stuck in an internal German debate. But it fell between the fronts of the Cold War and German resistance to remembrance (»Erinnerungsabwehr«).

The exhibition »The Determining Gaze. Images of Jewish Life in Postwar Poland« offers insights into the ambivalence of Jewish life in Poland immediately after the Holocaust: between self-determination and violence, mourning and new beginnings, reconstruction and emigration.

The exhibition can be viewed in the framework of public or reserved guided tours.
Thursday, 19 February 2026, 6 p.m.; 
Friday, 20 February 2026, 4 p.m.;
Monday, 23 February 2026, 3 p.m.