Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941–1946

The European Studies Council of the Yale MacMillan Center and the Hellenic Studies Program welcome Dr. Kateřina Králová, Professor in Contemporary History; Institute of International Studies, Charles University and Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. Dr. Kateřina Králová will present her latest book, Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941–1946. Discussant: Dr. Maria Kaliambou, DUS and Senior Lector II, Program in Hellenic Studies (Yale University)

Location: Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, Slifka Chapel (2nd fl) | 80 Wall St

Lunch will be served

This book documents the experiences of the Jews of Greece who returned home after having been in hiding, combatants, deportees and refugees during World War II. These are stories that rarely feature in our discussions of the Holocaust and that raise important questions about the aftermath of the Holocaust across Europe. Greek Jews wanted more than anything to survive and come back home. Yet their expectations of homecoming could not be met in the reality of postwar Greece where they faced isolation, anguish, deprivation, and hostility in the midst of a civil war. Based on exhaustive archival research and new testimonies and interviews with Holocaust survivors across several continents.

Bio: Kateřina Králová is a Professor of Contemporary History and the Head of the Research Center for Memory Studies at Charles University. She also currently serves as a research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on coming to terms with the Nazi past, the Holocaust, the Greek Civil War, post-war reconstruction, and migration related to armed conflicts.

Králová studied political science and German philology at Phillips University in Marburg and has received numerous prestigious international fellowships throughout her academic career, including the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute Fellowship, the USHMM Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship at Yale University. A significant part of her research has thus been conducted in international settings.

In 2017, she received the Prize of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic for outstanding researchers under 40, and in 2024 she was elected a member of the Society. She is a co-founder of the Herzl Center for Israeli Studies at Charles University, the 4EU+ Alliance research cluster “Plurality of Memory in Europe in a Global Perspective,” the CENTRAL project “Institutionalizing Memory in Post-Conflict Societies,” and a leading member of the COST-Action initiative Slow Memory.

In 2022, the Claims Conference supported her proposal for a partnership in Holocaust education, which was granted to Charles University. In 2025, she received the Humboldt Alumni Award. That same year, Králová chaired the board of the Fulbright Commission in the Czech Republic, joined the advisory board of the Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern University, served as the main organizer of the global conference of the Memory Studies Association in Prague, and co-led the GAČR-NCN research grant with Professor Joanna Wawrzyniak (UW).

She is the author of Das Vermächtnis der Besatzung (Böhlau, 2016; BpB, 2017) and Homecoming (Brandeis University Press, 2025), as well as numerous scholarly articles, thematic issues, and collective volumes in Czech, English, German, Greek, and French. She actively serves on several editorial boards.

Co-Sponsored by:

the Hellenic Studies Program; the Jewish Studies Program; the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies; and the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism