Everyday Communication in the Holocaust

See below the call for papers. The programme will be made available here next year. The CFP can also be downloaded here.

This workshop seeks to further our understanding of communication among persecuted groups in the Holocaust. We explore the diverse ways in which these groups used communication to create meaning, express identity, and maintain connections both during and after the Holocaust. By examining the traces of communication that were never formally recorded at the time, we place the focus on the everyday, the ephemeral, and the non-verbal.

We invite papers that recover the texture/s of everyday communication during and after the Holocaust in all its forms. These include informal forms of communication such as rumour, jokes/humour, gossip, hearsay, songs, and languages; hidden forms of communication that are coded, secret, and marginal; and non-verbal forms of communication such as gestures, facial expressions, posture, silences, and physical signs. We also encourage participants to consider how communicative practices functioned emotionally: to sustain hope, manage fear, foster solidarity, or express resistance. Finally, we wish to emphasise the question of how these forms of communication intersected with identity categories including gender, sexuality, religion, age, and nationality. We ask how men, women, queer people, and other groups developed distinct modes of communication under persecution, as well as how intersecting identity categories shaped communicative practices between and among different groups and individuals.

This workshop brings together several aspects of recent historiography in the field of Holocaust studies, as scholars have explored distinct forms of communication. These include Shirli Gilbert’s work on music (2005), Amos Goldberg’s research on rumour (2016) and Rosie Ramsden’s work on gendered rumour (2026), David Slucki, Avinoam Patt and Gabriel Finder’s book on humour (2020), Jennifer Putnam’s research on graffiti (2024), Barnabas Balint’s work on coded language (2023), and Michaela Wolf’s edited collection on interpreting and interpretive communication in Nazi concentration camps (2016). Combining these under the umbrella of communication, we identify common threads as well as exploring how communicative practices of all sorts are often necessarily fleeting, surviving only as traces of experience, emotion, and perception in the past. As a result, we bring the ephemeral, everyday, and non-verbal together into one concept.

Defining ‘communication’ broadly, we encourage contributions about, but not limited to, the following:

• Everyday and informal communication – including rumour, jokes, gossip, graffiti, whispered warnings, hearsay, songs, secrets, myths, letters and postcards, improvised or emergent languages, and interpreting
• Meaning-making through communication – how persecuted groups gathered, shared, and made sense of information in constrained conditions
• Identity formation and communication – how communication both shaped and was shaped by different identities – gender, sexuality, age, religion, nationality etc.
• Informal/ephemeral exchanges – not necessarily formally documented but fragments of communication that shape our understanding of how the Holocaust was experienced/understood
• Hidden forms of communication – coded, hidden, marginal modes of communication
• Non-verbal communication and body language – occurring through the body rather than (or alongside) words, including gestures, facial expressions, posture, silences, physical signs used when speech was dangerous/impossible, and shared bodily practices
• The body as testimony – how the body recorded and communicated the experience of the Holocaust, such as through scars, tattoos, and infertility

Applicants are invited to submit a short biography (150 words) and an abstract (200 words) to Rosie Ramsden (r.ramsden@mmu.ac.uk) and Barnabas Balint (barnabas.balint@vwi.ac.at) by 4 May 2026.

Key dates

Monday 4 May 2026 – Deadline for applications

Monday 11 May 2026 – Notification of successful application

Tuesday – Wednesday 29-30 June 2026 – Workshop

This workshop is partly funded by the Histories of RGSI Research Group at Manchester Metropolitan University and will be held at MMU.