Oct 28, 2017 | 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM | Studio Theatre

Dr. Carla Ionescu, PhD

An Epidemic of Sexual Violence: The Absence of Women’s Stories in Communist Romania

I come from a line of silent strong women. Silence has been my maternal legacy for at least three generations. Avoidance and distraction were the tools my maternal grandmother would use every time I asked about the past. Despite the absence of women’s story telling, I knew my grandmother raised my mother mostly by herself, in a time where single parenting was taboo. I knew she had a paying job, she never shied away from the word feminist, and unspeakable things happened to her when the Communist party took the Romanian government in 1945. This knowledge bled through the silent pauses of our conversations.

Nearly two million people were killed, or persecuted, by the former communist authorities in Romania. Unlike most of its neighbours in Eastern Europe, Romania is only now addressing the injustices of the recent communist past. There is so much fear still in the hearts of citizens, so much mistrust between victims of political violence, that many prefer to overlook the past – especially women. There are only a small number of women, who were victimized by the regime, still alive today. Many were raped and brutally murdered during the first two decades of the hostile takeover, while the rest were threatened to never speak of their violations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the silence of my women’s history under the violent regime of Communist Romania. In researching this topic I’ve ripped open not just a box of documents and photos of a story long hidden, but have opened the door to a history too long kept behind red tape and political propaganda. Using historical data, both personal and archival, I intend to weave back together a neglected ancestral history as traced through the narratives of women long ignored, but not yet forgotten.

Michael Gesin, PhD

Nazi Anti-Semitism and Jews of the Bolshevik and Soviet Regimes

The failure by the countries of the world to provide asylum to the Jews impressed the Nazis and directly affected their future plans for genocide. Hitler understood that the world cared little about the fate of the Jews, and so he could pursue his ultimate goal of solving the “Jewish problem” unhindered. He also faced no opposition from his own people following his successes during the brief period of time he held power: he had restored the national economy, rearmed the German military, and made Germany a viable force. Thus, the German populace accepted the establishment of concentration camps, the elimination of rivals in politics, and Jewish suffering as necessary steps in the creation of a new order, envisioned by their great Führer, Adolph Hitler. The fact of history is that life for German Jews preceding World War II was going steadily downhill, however a very different picture was emerging for the Jews of Russia. The revolution of 1917 destroyed the Czarist regime and ended discrimination against the Jewish population of Russia, creating an atmosphere of freedom and equal rights unprecedented in the history of Russian Jewry.  At the same time, a negative view of Nazi anti-Semitism was forbidden in the Soviet Union, and besides, the atrocities that were being committed in Europe by the Nazis were kept hidden from the Jews. The Holocaust in all its horror was about to unfold, and the largest Jewish population in the world stood unaided and alone in the face of the extermination that was to follow the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.

Sheheryar Sheikh

The Other Semites: Marginalization and Disenfranchisement of the Muslim Diaspora

Through myriad explorations of it in fictional and non-fictional accounts, the Holocaust has become a singular historical and cultural tragedy. Such mass of representative and interpretive verbiage and images have accreted around the event that it has perhaps become impossible to see it for what it was. Theodor Adorno was especially vocal about the inability of language and consciousness to grasp such an event even shortly after it happened. The only definitive, forceful thing he could say about it was that: “Hitler has placed a new imperative on us: that, quite simply, Auschwitz should not be repeated and that nothing like it should ever exist again.” But Adorno forgets—or ignores—that the Holocaust itself is a repetition, not an original event. What “should not be repeated” can be traced back in iterations, having trudged past the scores of millions of fallen bodies in genocides and killings, to the original murder (not to be confused with the relatively trivial Original Sin)—the killing of Abel by Kane. The only way to accept Adorno’s stance is if “progress” were to have culminated in the 1930’s, and the human project were finished. Then—and only then—would an escalation in the possibilities of barbarism be impossible. But the idea and enactment of “progress” in Western culture is unrelenting. Adorno criticizes it justifiably, and so should current and future generations; what has happened in the name of “progress” is the disenfranchisement of all those communities who do not follow the Western agenda of “progress,” and are therefore (at best) othered, or (at worst) labelled enemies of values that the Western world claims to hold dear. The Holocaust, which was one dot in the picture of atrocities still in process of being completed, when viewed with hindsight, indicates our present world, in which another large community faces discrimination and ghettoization, this time in a much more connected and unipolar world.