Understanding Love and Eros in the Holocaust: A German-Jewish Gay Romance in Prague, Featuring Anna Hájková

Where are the stories of great queer love in the Shoah? There are almost none. 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 excluded and marginalized, and how its return to our understanding of the Holocaust can offer an inclusive and feminist history of this genocide. Based on original and extensive archival research, her talk offers an introduction into the queer history of the Holocaust for beginners and advanced alike.

Please note, this talk will include discussion of sexual/ized violence.

This event is the Lou Dunst Memorial Lecture.

How to Attend

This event is offered both in person at Geisel Library and virtually via Zoom beginning at 5 p.m. Pacific time. Click the Register button at the top of this page and select your preferred mode of attendance.

About the Speaker

Anna Hájková is Reader for modern European continental history at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, where she co-directs the Centre for Global Jewish Studies. Her first book, “The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt,” was published in 2020. Hájková’s second book, “People Without History are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust” (2025), was awarded the National Jewish Book Award 2026. She is a pioneer of queer Holocaust history, and her work was awarded the Orfeo Iris Prize in 2020.

About the Series

The Holocaust Living History Workshop (HLHW) series is an education and outreach program co-sponsored by the UC San Diego Library and the Jewish Studies Program. It aims to preserve the memories of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust by offering public events involving witnesses, descendants and scholars and through the use of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive. Past HLHW workshops are now part of the Library’s digital collections and are available online.

Photo Credit: Václav Jirásek