Members

Members

Chair Holder: Marie Moutier-Bitan

Marie Moutier-Bitan, PhD in Contemporary History (EHESS), devoted her dissertation to the first waves of violence against Jews in Eastern Galicia in June–July 1941, under the supervision of Denis Peschanski. From 2009 to 2020, she worked as a researcher with the association Yahad – In Unum. In this capacity, she carried out more than twenty field research missions in Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the H2020 project “Visual History of the Holocaust” (2022–2023), within the CERCEC (EHESS/CNRS). She was also a Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies (Claims Conference, 2023–2024), during which she began working on the Dniester as both a site of mass killings and a point of deportation of Jews and Roma during the Holocaust.

She is co-leader of the Holocaust Diaries Project with Sarah Gruszka (EHESS/Sorbonne University), as well as of the ANR-DFG H-Diaries project, together with Sarah Gruszka, Judith Lyon-Caen (CRH/GRIL-EHESS) and Andrea Löw (IfZ, Munich). She co-directs the seminar “The Catastrophe in the First Person: Mass Violence and Diary Writing in the 20th Century” (CRH/EHESS), with Judith Lyon-Caen and Sarah Gruszka (EHESS/Sorbonne University).

Marie Moutier-Bitan is the author of Lettres de la Wehrmacht (Perrin, 2014, translated into ten languages), Les Champs de la Shoah. L’extermination des Juifs en Union soviétique occupée, 1941–1944 (Passés Composés, 2020, awarded the Prix de la Fondation Stéphane Bern – Institut de France), and Le Pacte antisémite. Le début de la Shoah en Galicie orientale, juin–juillet 1941 (Passés Composés, 2023).

As part of her habilitation à diriger des recherches (accreditation to supervise research), she is working on the uses of the Dniester in the extermination of the Jews, with Paul Gradvohl (SIRICE/Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne) as academic guarantor.

She is a research associate at ERLIS (Équipe de recherche sur les littératures, les imaginaires et les sociétés – UR 4254) and at CERCEC (Centre d’études russes, caucasiennes, est-européennes et centrasiatiques, UMR 8083), and a member of the Occupation Studies Research Network.

Accreditation: Section 22 of the C.N.U. (2022)

Research topics:

  • Holocaust in the occupied Soviet Union
  • Borders, lived spaces, and representations of space in mass violences
  • Holocaust diaries

Working languages: French (native), English (fluent), German (fluent), Russian (reading knowledge), Yiddish (reading knowledge), Polish (basic), Ukrainian (basic), Romanian (currently learning).

Postdoctoral Researcher of the Chair: Pauline Anicet

After defending her PhD in History in November 2024, Pauline Anicet joined the Chair of Excellence on the Holocaust and Genocidal Enterprises as a postdoctoral fellow. Her dissertation, supervised by Professor Christophe Lastécouères (Université Bordeaux Montaigne, CEMMC), is entitled “Come with us, you are going to watch!” Representation and Transmission of the Genocide through the Accounts of Holocaust Witnesses in Belarus (1941–1944). This research adopts a multidisciplinary and interactionist approach to the mechanisms, practices, and spaces of genocide in Belarus.

Between 2020 and 2022, Pauline Anicet was a Fellow of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (FMS/Paris). She subsequently held teaching positions at Université Bordeaux Montaigne, first as a teaching assistant (chargée de TD), and then as a Temporary Teaching and Research Attachée (ATER).

Her work has resulted in several publications, including the article “La violence était en nous, parmi nous, partout. Violences extrêmes et génocidaires dans l’univers urbain pendant la Shoah en Biélorussie (1941–1944)” in Urban Fears, co-edited by Caroline Le Mao, Adèle Delaporte, and Philippe Chassaigne. She is also the author of the review “Hersh Smolar, Le Ghetto de Minsk. Les partisans juifs contre les nazis [translated from Yiddish by Johann-Frédérik Hel Guedj, preface by Masha Cerovic], Paris, Payot et Rivages, ‘Histoire’, 2022”, published in issue no. 217 of the Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah.

Pauline Anicet places particular emphasis on the dissemination of research. She participates in academic events (study days, conferences, international workshops), as well as in educational settings (secondary schools, universities) and cultural contexts (associations, bookstores, etc.). She also took part in two research trips to Latvia with the teams of Yahad–In Unum and has carried out regular missions for the Mémorial de la Shoah and the production company Nota Bene (conducting oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors and children hidden during the Second World War in Europe).

She is a research associate at ERLIS (Équipe de recherche sur les littératures, les imaginaires et les sociétés – UR 4254) and a member of the GER group. She has also recently obtained her accreditation (qualification) for the position of maîtresse de conférences (associate professor) in Section 22 of the CNU.

Pauline Anicet’s current research is structured around several main areas:

  • The study of written and oral testimonies concerning the situation in Brest-Litovsk between 1939 and 1944.
  • The study of violence within genocidal processes, with particular attention to the concept of “cruelty.”
  • The study of the involvement of the LVF (Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme) in crimes committed in the East, particularly in Belarus. This third line of research intersects with the second, as it focuses on analyzing the violent practices of LVF members, examining the impact of colonial experiences, and questioning the transfer of violent knowledge.

Research topics:

  • History of practices of violence
  • Mechanisms of mass killing
  • Holocaust in Belarus
  • Oral testimonies / Oral history

Working languages: French (native), English (reading, writing, speaking), German (reading), Russian (basic).

Associated member : Sarah Gruszka

Sarah Gruszka holds a PhD in History and Slavic Studies from Sorbonne University. She is a specialist in the Second World War in the USSR and in diary-writing practices in the Soviet context. For more than ten years, her research has focused on understanding subjectivities in situations of violence (wars, famines, the Holocaust, authoritarian regimes).

Her doctoral dissertation, defended in 2019 and awarded the Prize of the Chancellery of the Universities of Paris, examined Stalinist USSR at war, with particular attention to the siege of Leningrad (1941–1944). In her book Le siège de Leningrad (Tallandier, 2024, with a preface by Nicolas Werth), she proposed a “history from below” based on the personal diaries of those under siege. She is also interested in the memory of the Second World War in Russia.

After a H2020 postdoctoral fellowship, she has been working since 2023 on the diaries of the Holocaust. She co-founded the “Holocaust Diaries Project,” a research program supported by the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, within which she and Judith Lyon-Caen, Marie Moutier-Bitan, and Andrea Löw (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich) obtained a joint ANR/DFG (FRAL project) grant for three years (2025–2028).

Sarah Gruszka is a research fellow at the Centre de Recherches Historiques (EHESS / CNRS), and an associate researcher at the Chair of Excellence “Holocaust and Genocide Studies” at the University of Caen, as well as at UMR 8224 Eur’ORBEM “Cultures et sociétés d’Europe orientale, balkanique et médiane” (CNRS / Sorbonne University, Faculty of Letters).

Since 2023, she has co-organized, with Judith Lyon-Caen and Marie Moutier-Bitan (CRH, EHESS), the research and teaching seminar “La catastrophe en ‘je’. Violences de masse et pratiques diaristes.”.

Research fields

  • Subjectivities in wartime
  • Diary-writing practices in the face of mass violence
  • Testimonies in times of crisis (war and authoritarianism)
  • History and memory of the Soviet period (Stalinism, Second World War, siege of Leningrad)