Seventy-one years ago last Wednesday, Allied soldiers liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp — the most notorious of the Holocaust death camps — in Nazi-occupied Poland. In 2005, the United Nations designated Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

On Wednesday, six scholars from the Women’s Studies Research Center commemorated the day by sharing poetry, film, research and monologues about their relationships to and reflections on the Holocaust. The six women were members of the WSRC’s Holocaust Research Study Group, and each approached the event from different professional and academic backgrounds.

First to present was Prof. Shulamit Reinharz, Ph.D. ’77 (SOC), the WSRC’s founding director and wife of former University President Jehuda Reinharz. A sociologist, Reinharz titled her talk “The Holocaust: A Slippery Concept” and discussed the Holocaust’s lack of universally agreed-upon beginning and ending dates. Reinharz said that, as a Jew, she has “internalized” the Holocaust and thinks about it all the time; when she learned of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., “I instinctively, immediately, tried to imagine what it must have been like for the one and a half million Jewish children who were murdered. What has that enormous loss done to the Jewish people? Obama cried for the 20. Which Americans cried for the one and a half million?”

Reinharz added that it is difficult to distinguish survivors from victims of the Holocaust, saying that in her view, all Jews are the survivors of the genocide and that “survivors are different from victims only in that survivors were not caught.”

Rachel Munn, a writer and architect, then read three poems responding to the Holocaust. She preceded her reading with an anecdote about telling her sick 11-year-old son to put on socks one morning, when her husband said that his father used to tell him that if one could find socks in the concentration camps, they would live. One of Munn’s poems, told in two voices, contrasted a family wedding in the present with the Holocaust and how the event then informs who the family is now.

Karin Rosenthal, a fine art photographer, then spoke about recovering family photos and searching to find out the identities and lives of her family members who lived and died in the Holocaust. Through family connections, Rosenthal found the names of deceased family members in a photograph and was able to discover old documents about her family. A collaborator on her research is now writing a book about Rosenthal’s family, and she said that her photographic themes have shifted since the research began to include “impermanence and fragility of life.”

Jutta Lindert then took the stage. Lindert is a German mental health epidemiologist who spoke about her research on the health impact of the Holocaust on survivors and their children, and she said that though the number of Holocaust survivors has dwindled over the years, the event’s impact on both Jewish and German populations remains massive. Lindert stated that as the surviving generation ages, the “post-memory generation” has a responsibility to research and remember the Holocaust. Her research team from Germany, the U.S. and Israel investigated the impact of the Holocaust on the psychopathology of children of Holocaust survivors and found no impact on psychopathology. She explained, “We know that studies are needed which do not only measure psychopathology by resilience, meaning life and social health, such as social relationships and trust. It might be that we missed dimensions of the long-term impacts of the Holocaust such as worldview changes, changes in integral trust and changes in cognitive skills.”

Ornit Barkai then presented a film compiled of footage she took on an August 2002 family trip through Poland to Auschwitz. The first section of the film contrasted the town around Auschwitz preparing for a visit from the Pope with the solemnity of the institution itself, and then followed Barkai’s son as he walked through barracks, showers and ovens. Later, Barkai used audio to juxtapose a girl reading her diary entry about visiting the home of Anne Frank to Frank’s own famous diary about her experiences hiding from the Gestapo. As the two diaries were read by the same young woman, video footage showed the cramped house that hid Frank and the statue of her that now stands outside.

Karen Frostig, an artist and writer, completed the event with a discussion about her family and its legacy with the Holocaust. She said that growing up as the daughter of immigrants, she noticed a contrast between the idealized vision of the American dream she saw around her and her own noisy, tumultuous home life. Her father was arrested by the Gestapo and expelled from Vienna, and her grandparents were subsequently deported and killed. Frostig’s father did not understand how she would react as a young child to the graphic imagery and shocking realities of the Holocaust; according to Frostig, he once pointed to a photograph of a mound of human hair and said, “That’s your grandparents.”

After Frostig inherited letters written by her grandparents in 2004, she traveled to Austria and regained citizenship. In 2009, Frostig began the Vienna Project, a multimedia art project throughout the city that included video projections, performance art and photography. The event culminated in a “Naming Memorial” projection at Josefsplatz at the Hofburg Palace on Oct. 18, 2014. At this event, the names of victims of the genocide were projected onto the palace “to unequivocally communicate that this happened here,” said Frostig.