The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) and the Northern Ireland War Memorial (NIWM) welcome you to a talk by Daniel Kowalsky.

Spring 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Europe. The starting point for this talk is the arrival of the Soviet Red Army at Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27 January 1945. In the months that followed, Allied armies fought through eastern France, Austria and into Germany. By early May of that year, British, American and Soviet troops had entered Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and Stutthof, liberating the entire concentration camp archipelago. The discovery of these sites of internment and extermination provoked widespread anger and disbelief, but also collective dilemmas: first over the question of justice, and later, representation and memorialisation. Primo Levi observed that thousands of new words would need to be invented to describe what he experienced at Auschwitz. Levi’s memoirs were soon canonical, central to a new literary genre: survivor testimonies. Year by year, decade by decade, the camps and the crimes committed therein were documented and remembered. On the page, on the screen, through school visits, with the creation of museums, research centres and memorials large and small, and at talks like this one, the victims of fascism have been remembered. Today we look back, eighty years later, and reflect on humanity’s response to a rupture in civilization.

Daniel Kowalsky, lecturer in European Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast, is the author of numerous books and articles on twentieth-century Europe, the civil war in Spain, but also the cinema, photography and music. His publications include La Unión Soviética y la guerra civil española (Barcelona, Editorial Crítica, 2003), Stalin and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), and History in Dispute: The Spanish Civil War (Detroit: St. James Press, 2005). In 2021, his two-part article on Soviet-Spanish diplomacy during the Spanish Civil War appeared in the Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. In 2024, he published “The Soundtrack of Extermination”, in the De Gruyter anthology, Pained Screams from the Camp. At Queen’s, he teaches the European Civil Wars, 1914-1945, with special attention to the Spanish Civil War, WWII and the Holocaust.

The lecture will take place on Thursday 10 April 2025 at PRONI (2 Titanic Boulevard, Titanic Quarter, Belfast, BT3 9HQ) starting at 1pm.

*Register for a FREE ticket via Eventbrite: Speak for the Dead: The Camp Liberations, Eight Decades On *