of Gábor Danyi (ENRS), members of the Programme Council, and above all, trust (in the chance of success of an international academic undertaking in times of the pandemic) of the main partners of the event, i.e. the Berlin Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Institute of Sociology at the University of Warsaw - this year's Genealogies of Memory could not have been implemented to such an extent, in terms of visual quality, and (most importantly) intellectual sensitivity and the attendance of the participants and audience.
The programme of the event - the Holocaust between global and local perspectives - consists of eight meetings and is an 'intellectual journey'. We begin this journey from a universal perspective, in which questions about the ethics and responsibility of Holocaust memory are resolved. We then continue the journey through local stories (including the earliest historiographies of the Holocaust history), memories, languages and landscapes of Central and Eastern Europe to head towards the borders of Western Europe and ask questions about cross-border memory and its contemporary reception. Another direction is Israel, where "living memory" of the past is confronted with the global technologies of the digital age. By asking the question about new media, we naturally return to questions of a universal nature, completing our journey with a global diagnosis of Holocaust studies and discussing the future challenges facing researchers and memory practitioners.
In the first session entitled, Practical Ethics of Holocaust Memory In the 21st century, the subject of 'responsibility' for Holocaust memory and its moral and ethical consequences for the contemporary world (consequences developed in educational, social, academic and museum activities). Piotr Cywiński, PhD, Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial, gave an introductory lecture on Remembrance in - and for - the 21st century fundamental for our event.
The next session entitled, The Ringelblum Archive as the Earliest Historiography of the Holocaust and its Impact on International Research was conducted by the Director of the Jewish Historical Institute, Professor Paweł Śpiewak, and an introductory lecture (Genocide from Below: Rewriting the Holocaust as First-Person Local History) was given by Professor Omer Bartov.