Jewish-Catholic Mixed Marriages Before, During and After the Holocaust

This project has three main themes: gender, Holocaust and interreligious relations, and seeks to understand how mixed Catholic-Jewish couples experienced heterogamy in the changing landscape of antisemitism, discrimination and hostility towards Otherness from mid-1930s until mid-1950s.

The aim is to understand how these circumstances influenced the experience of the couples (their relationships with each other, their respective groups and the group of their partner) and to see how it differed for both genders. For feasibility, the project is limited to Polish citizens, following their lives in Sweden, Israel and Poland.

The importance of the project lies in its relevance for the experiences of mixed couples in general, especially in contexts of intergroup violence, discrimination and genocide.

The body of sources used in this research consists of oral histories/testimonies, which will be examined with a qualitative method successfully applied in my PhD, including coding software and theoretical aparatus (e.g. intergroup contact theory, gender theories).

It is planned for three years, starting from Lund (Ravensbrück Archive), then spending almost two years in Israel (working with the local archives), followed by three months of research at Åbo Akademi focussing on methodological-theoretical aspects, another period in Lund to write down the findings and a month at the Jagiellonian University to consult with experts on Polish-Jewish relations.