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. Prof. Bartov's lecture makes us realise how important it is - for a full understanding of the process of shaping the roots of Holocaust studies – that is to turn to the voices of the victims and their (semantic and symbolic) grammar of recording the border experience. These voices are, indeed, exemplified here by the Ringelblum Archive (Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto).
The Third session: Borderland Memories in Europe. Renegotiating Holocaust Remembrance begins with an incredibly heartbreaking (because it painfully makes listeners aware not only of the topicality of the traces of the Holocaust memory in Austria but also of several mechanisms used today to deny it) speech by Professor Éva Kovács of the Vienna Weistental Institute entitled, Forgetting by Remembering: On the Europeanisation of Local Memories of the Shoah. The other speeches of the session, complementary to the introductory lecture, show types of social tensions that, due to traumatic experience at different national levels (especially in borderland spaces), are becoming a task for the entire European community.
The exacerbated problem of local borders/nuances (this time, however, in the scope of language and literature) and recognising the need to consider them on an international scale in contemporary, critical studies on the Holocaust offers us another session: Overlooking the Local Dimensions of the Holocaust. Language and the Cultural/Spatial Politics of Transmission. The programme of the session (in the form of a "special event" was designed by the Jagiellonian University Professor Roma Sendyka and her team). The introductory note, Local Addresses in Holocaust Diaries: Reconstructing the Lifeworlds of Young Jewish Diarists in Vilnius was delivered by Professor Mindaugas Kvietkauskas (Lithuanian literary scholar, acting as Minister of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania at the time of the conference).