Where are the stories of great queer love in the Shoah? Anna Hájková explains why the history of same-sex desire in the Shoah, that is, queerness among Jews persecuted by the Nazis for their race, has been marginalised, and how its return to our understanding of the Holocaust can offer an inclusive history of this genocide. Based on original and extensive archival research, her talk offers new ways to make sense about the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the return of the extreme right in the recent years.
Anna Hájková is Reader for modern European continental history at the University of Warwick and the founding co-director of the Centre for Global Jewish Studies. Her first book, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, came out in 2020 with Oxford University Press. She is a pioneer of queer Holocaust history and her work has been awarded the 2020 Orfeo Iris Prize. In 2025, she published People Without History are Dust with the University of Toronto Press, the first monograph on queer Holocaust history. The book won the National Jewish Book Award 2026.