Tatsiana Vaitulevich (Germany), PhD candidate, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, “The Public Memory of the Holocaust in Post-War Netherlands and in Belarus”.

Tatsiana Vaitulevich MA studied History in Belarus, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany and is now a PhD candidate in History at the Georg-August-University Goettingen. The topic of her doctoral thesis is a critical comparison of the return of former forced labourers to the post-war Netherlands and to Belarus.

During her stay at NIOD, Tatsiana will work with ego-documents concerning the homecoming of former forced labourers from the territories of the German Reich to the Netherlands after World War II. The main question is under which circumstances former forced labourers returned home, how they could return to “normalcy“ and how they were treated by their home-states, societies and families upon their return; how they rebuilt their lives, and what political dimensions and social differentiations accompanied this process.

Another project Tatsiana will be working on during her EHRI fellowship is a comparison of historiography on the public memory of the Holocaust in post-war Netherlands and in Belarus. For this project she will study secondary literature on the topic.