Medien

Vortragsmitschnitte

Julia Fröhlich: Odyssey across the Aegean. The Jewish Exodus from Greece (1943–1944)

How did approximately 1,000 Jews succeed in escaping from Axis-occupied Greece? How could they escape against all odds from a political and military context that drastically limited the agency of Jewish individuals and collectives? Which factors influenced them during their flight?


These questions are at the core of this lecture, which discusses the exodus of Jews from Greece to Turkey in 1943 and 1944 from the perspective of individual refugee agency and local networks of relief and rescue. The geographical focus is on the microcosm between Euboea and Çeşme, which was the scene of various forms of migration during the Second World War, but also shifts towards other ›scenes of relevance‹ such as Thessaloniki, Athens, Izmir and Tel Aviv. The exodus highlighted in this lecture was part of a network of migration movements and the fleeing individual thus became part of a context in which structures of flight, evacuation, smuggling and secret service activities overlapped. Within this framework, the lecture illuminates the actions of individuals and small collectives, thereby bringing the individual and their agency to the fore: revealing what is often left buried and untold.