Homecoming with Kateřina Králová

In her guest lecture, historian Kateřina Králová examined the complex meanings of “homecoming” for Jewish Holocaust survivors from Greece. Tracing a continuum from wartime survival and displacement through liberation and the immediate postwar years, she argued that the desire to return home did not emerge only after liberation but had already taken shape during the war itself within experiences of hiding, flight, forced labor, and deportation.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, including unpublished archival materials, survivor testimonies, newspapers, and her own interviews with survivors, Králová explored how the process of return was shaped by memory, trauma, and shifting political circumstances, such as the Greek Civil War and later patterns of Cold War emigration.

A central aspect of her methodology is the use of extensive life-history interviews. Rather than focusing solely on the Holocaust period, Králová encouraged survivors to share broader autobiographical narratives. These interviews are now accessible for research through the Jewish Museum of Greece and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The lecture also addressed how questions of agency, responsibility, and guilt appear in survivor narratives. While responsibility for persecution was often externalized and frequently attributed to German occupiers or Jewish leadership structures, feelings of guilt were frequently internalized, expressed in reflections on whether more could have been done to save others. Králová also highlighted different forms of silenced memory, ranging from institutional pressures and family dynamics to deeply personal experiences of loss.

Kateřina Králová is a Professor of contemporary history and a memory studies scholar, expert in modern Greek history with a focus on Nazi persecution and Holocaust studies, at Charles University in Prague and the IE Czech Academy of Sciences. Králová has authored key publications, including Das Vermächtnis der Besatzung: Deutsch-griechische Beziehungen seit 1940 (Böhlau, 2016; BpB, 2017), Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941–1946 (Brandeis University Press, 2025), and, most recently, co-edited Fluidity of Memory (Bloomsbury, 2026).