Nanci Adler – Keeping faith with the party, communist believers return from the Gulag
Date: Friday, October 12, 2012
Venue: UvA, Bungehuis room 1.01, Spuistraat 210, Amsterdam
Time: 15.00 – 17.00, followed by drinks
Registration: huizinga-fgw@uva.nl
On Friday October 12th, the oral history society will celebrate the publication of Nanci Adler’s new book ‘Keeping faith with the party, communist believers return from the Gulag’. (Indiana University Press 2012).
After a short introduction by the author Tomáš Bouška (Aspen Institute, Prague), the following three problems will be discussed:
- A central theme of Nanci Adler’s book is the loyalty to the communist party of ex-prisoners even after persecution. How do both speakers explain this loyalty.
- How do you deal with trauma in the interview. What does trauma mean?
- How does working close to a movement (of dissidents) influence your work. Do you feel hindered, or is it just opposite? How do they manage to keep some distance and analyze such sad stories.
Nanci Adler is senior researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, an organization of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System, Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement, and numerous scholarly articles on the legacy of communism and Stalinism.
Tomáš Bouška works at the Aspen Institute in Prague, and educational and democratic policy directed institution. Till a year ago he was a major organizer at www.politicalprisoners.com the place where oral history with former political prisoners are collected. (see for example http://www.politicalprisoners.eu/film/ ). His oral histories on video bring him as a speaker all over the world.
This event is sponsored by the Huizinga Instituut of the Universiteit van Amsterdam
