Anna Hájková, "People without History are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Roland Clark
Episode: Anna Hájková, "People Without History are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust"
Date: December 26, 2025
Guest: Anna Hájková, historian and author

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Episode Overview

Anna Hájková joins Roland Clark to discuss her groundbreaking book, People Without History Are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust (U Toronto Press, 2025). Hájková’s work challenges decades of Holocaust historiography by revealing the deeply suppressed and overlooked histories of queer desire, intimacy, and kinship among Holocaust victims and survivors. The conversation critically examines the silences, taboos, ethical complexities, and the urgency of inclusive history-telling within and beyond academic circles.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Queer History vs. History of Homosexuality

• Queer Holocaust Studies as a New Field: Hájková establishes that traditional histories tended to look for fixed sexual identities in the past (“the first homosexual in 1800,” etc.), which is an anachronism.
• Historicizing Sexual Identity: She draws on the work of scholars like Laura Doan, highlighting that people engaged in same-sex practices but did not identify as “homosexual,” “lesbian,” or “gay” (02:03).
  • Notable quote: “Queer history does not look for hard identities...but looks for queer acts and practices for people who engage in same sex sexuality in various ways and means...without looking for hard identities.” — Anna Hájková [03:20]
• Inclusivity & Ethics: This approach is both more inclusive and avoids the pitfalls of modern labels or ‘outing’ historical figures.

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2. The Silence of Same-Sex Desire in Holocaust Testimonies

• Statistical Silence: Despite the existence of vast Holocaust archives, only a handful of survivors openly acknowledged same-sex intimacy.
• Homophobia in Camps and Historical Memory: Hájková does not focus on those persecuted for sexuality, but on Jews persecuted for race who also had same-sex desire, revealing intersecting oppressions.
  • Notable quote: “The vault of the camps was quite homophobic...People were more afraid of same sex desire than they were of heterosexual sexual violence.” — Anna Hájková [05:18]
• Narrative Constraints: Survivors described queer acts as disgusting or foreign, limiting positive reclamation.
• Longevity of Silence: Even testimonies taken after gay liberation eras remained silent or homophobic, indicating deep-rooted stigma (06:55).

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3. Homophobia in Survivor Testimonies and Interviews

• Patterns Emerge: Survivors (and sometimes their interviewers) often volunteer negative depictions of queer prisoners, frequently as sexual predators, reflecting and perpetuating homophobia (08:22).
  • Notable quote: “You will have people...who volunteer something negative...they will often get a bit contradictory. But here the interviewers also are quite salient, because they don't intervene...Sometimes it is the Interviewers themselves who ask leading questions implying that queer fellow prisoners were particularly scary and disgusting or that queer same sex desire in the camps was one of the particular indignities of the camps.” — Anna Hájková [08:22]
• Responsibility of Historians: Hájková advocates for acknowledging these mentions transparently rather than suppressing them, drawing parallels to how other difficult histories (colonialism, sexual violence) are handled (09:28).

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4. The Challenges of Writing Difficult Histories

• Memorable moment:
  • Roland Clark: “But that makes it incredibly difficult history to do, to research and to write too.” [10:04]
  • Anna Hájková: “But Roland, if it was an easy history—” [10:08]
  • Clark: “Exactly. We do these things because they're hard.” [10:10]
  • Hájková: “Yes, exactly. We do these things because they're hard.” [10:13]

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5. Case Study: Gad Beck’s Memoir

• Complexities and Contradictions: Beck’s celebrated memoir is lively but complicated by “ugly bits”—sexual violence, sexual barter, and the outing of former lovers without consent.
  • Notable quote: “Gad Beck’s response was like, this is my story, they can suck it up. Which I think is a very interesting response. I don't want to weigh in whether this was an ethical decision. I think it's an incredibly interesting decision for us to discuss methodologically in queer history, to show how ambivalent and difficult these histories are.” — Anna Hájková [11:55]

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6. Case Study: Freddy Hirsch—Ambivalence and Abuse

• Dual Nature of Legacy: Hirsch was a heroic, openly gay youth leader, but testimonies accused him of sexual abuse against boys.
  • Hájková: “These are first person testimonies of survivors of sexual violence. There was a man who recalled that when he was 11 or 12 years old, Freddy Hirsch put his hand down his underwear...” [14:38]
• Facing the Uncomfortable: Hájková calls for a nuanced approach, neither excusing abuse nor erasing contributions.
  • Commentary: “I also do not think, you know, Roland, that you need to have someone like me to tell my readers that sexual abuse of teenagers is wrong. I hope everybody knows that shopping is hard, right?” [16:15]

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7. Queer Kinship and Survival: The Story of Margot Hooymann

• Queer Kinship as a Framework: Critiques the binary of “biological” vs. “non-biological” families, showing that bonds of love, support, and survival in camps often fell outside traditional family definitions.
  • Notable quote: “Anthropology of kinship is much more inclusive because it simply speaks of kinship...they serve as this emotional support and also with resources.” — Anna Hájková [19:16]
• Margot & Dita’s Romantic Relationship: Margot prioritized her girlfriend over her birth family in Auschwitz, framing queer kinship as a life-affirming and pragmatic survival choice (20:35).

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8. Coming of Age, Agency, and Sexual Violence: Nate Leipziger’s Experience

• Nuanced Examination: Leans into the complexities of “agency” during sexual barter or assault in the camps.
  • “What starts as sexual assault...becomes violent sexual barter, because Nate chooses with the very minimal choices that he has...to remain in this relationship.” — Anna Hájková [24:29]
• Not Romanticizing or Sanitizing: Highlights the double-edged experience of protection, affection, violence, and shame entwined in survival (23:50-25:23).

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9. Modern Censorship & Anne Frank’s Diary

• Why Ban Anne Frank?: Passages discussing Anne’s crush on a girl and explorations of her sexuality have led to the banning of her diary (and its graphic novel adaptation) by groups like Moms for Liberty.
  • Notable quote: “This is not just an academic question. It shows how epistemology of queerness, of giving young people the sense that they too are part of this society and this history, is being systematically questioned, removed, and destroyed. And that is extremely worrisome.” — Anna Hájková [28:25]

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10. State Socialism, Blackmail, and Survivor Agency: The Case of Jerry Vrbach

• Intersectional Vulnerabilities: Jerry Vrbach, a queer Holocaust survivor, was likely targeted by secret police both for being Jewish and for his sexuality, but also found power and agency through informant status.
  • Notable quote: “Being able to inform on his friends and colleagues gave him...a sense of power and of control...the story is not...black and white and therefore it's the best kind of story because people don't exist on the black and white scheme. We are just people.” — Anna Hájková [32:38]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Queer history does not look for hard identities...but looks for queer acts and practices for people who engage in same sex sexuality in various ways.” — Anna Hájková [03:20]
• “[Camp survivors] were more judged, more afraid of same sex desire than they were of heterosexual sexual violence.” — Anna Hájková [05:18]
• “We do these things because they're hard.” — Roland Clark and Anna Hájková [10:10–10:13]
• “Gad Beck’s response was like, this is my story, they can suck it up.” — Anna Hájková [11:46]
• “I hope that I can alert colleagues in Holocaust studies to what's been happening [with censorship and bans].” — Anna Hájková [28:53]
• “People don't exist on the black and white scheme. We are just people. We are Mackie and we are wonderful.” — Anna Hájková [32:45]

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Important Timestamps

• Difference between Queer History & Homosexual History: 02:03–04:14
• The Silence in Survivor Testimonies: 04:36–08:13
• Homophobia in Testimonies and Interviews: 08:13–10:04
• Gad Beck's Memoir—Ambivalences: 10:16–13:57
• Freddy Hirsch—Heroism and Abuse: 13:57–16:37
• Queer Kinship & Margot Hooymann: 18:06–21:27
• Nate Leipziger—Sexual Violence and Agency: 21:45–25:23
• Anne Frank and Modern Censorship: 25:23–29:06
• Jerry Vrbach—Blackmail and Survival in State Socialism: 29:30–32:49
• Closing Reflections: 32:49–33:18

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Summary Takeaways

• People Without History Are Dust breaks new ground by addressing an almost silenced dimension of Holocaust experience: queer desire and identity.
• Hájková exposes how entrenched homophobia—both during the Holocaust and in later recollection—has shaped whose stories have been told or erased.
• The episode demonstrates the necessity and challenge of writing nuanced, inclusive histories that do not shy away from complexity, contradiction, or ethical discomfort.
• These discussions are urgently relevant amidst present-day struggles over sexuality, memory, and censorship—reminding listeners how history shapes both the past and the present.

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For further insight, listeners are strongly encouraged to read Anna Hájková’s book for its blend of scholarship, empathy, and its commitment to historical truth and inclusivity.

Transcript

[Marshall Po]

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[Roland Clark]

Hello, and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Roland Clark and I'm here today talking to Anna Haikover about her new book, People Without History Are Dust, which is a translation with a few modifications of her earlier book mention Ohne Gesichtis in Staub, which also exists in a Czech translation. Anna is reading of modern continental European history and director of the European History Research center at the University of Warwick. She's prolific and alongside more journal articles and book chapters than you could poke a stick at. She's the author of the Last Ghetto An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, which is a definitive history of Theresienstadt during the Second World War. Welcome to the podcast, Anna.

[Anna Haikover]

Roland, I'm so thrilled to be here. Thank you so much.

[Roland Clark]

So, Anna, the first half of this book looks at how people have approached the topic of queer history and the Holocaust up until now. To help us clarify what we're talking about, can you explain to me the difference between the history of homosexuality and queer history?

[Anna Haikover]

That is an important question because Queer Holocaust is tracing new fields that I developed. Before me, the fields did not exist. And it links to the very question you are posing. Namely, until maybe 20 years ago, people operated with the hard assumption of hard sexual identity that we assumed existed in the Past too. And therefore you would talk about homosexuals in the German army in 1914, or you would talk about homosexual efforts in Romania in 1890. And some 20 years ago, or at least increasingly 20 years ago, scholars started saying we need to historicize what we know about sexual identity too. I guess it's most importantly Laura dawn, who pointed out that in Britain until the 1950s, people engage in queer sexual acts and gender non conforming behavior, but did not self identify as homosexual, as lesbians, as gays, not least because they did not have the vocabulary at hand. And similarly to race and ethnicity, the way how we think about sexuality, the way how we are sexually active is very deeply dependent on social context. So queer history does not look for hard identities, does not look for the first self proclaimed homosexual living in, you know, wherever, in what is today Czech Republic in 1800, but looks for queer acts and practices for people who engage in same sex sexuality in various ways and means, and also for gender non conforming behavior without looking for hard identities. Some of these people did self identify as homosexual, as bisexual, as lesbian and whatnot. But it is not important for including them into that history. And this openness has all kinds of advantages. It's much more inclusive. It also gets us us over the pesky question whether we are not outing people who did not want to be outed because we are not assigning sexual identities to anyone.

[Roland Clark]

One of the first things you point out in the book is that despite there being tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of recorded testimonies by Holocaust survivors, probably it's the most studied period in human history, there are literally only four people who admit to having had same sex intimacy. Why do you think the archives are so silent when it comes to same sex desire?

[Anna Haikover]

Well, this is where my work sets in. I do not look at people who were persecuted by the Nazis for their sexuality. You know, the Pink triangle or lesbians in the concentration camps. I look at Jews who were persecuted for their race and who engage in same sex desire or their gender non conforming. And that is a difficult history because there is the long standing assumption that these are two separate walls. As if all the people persecuted for their sexuality were Gentile and as if all the Jews persecuted for their race were heterosexual. How does it come to be? It is linked to long standing homophobia, to politics of respectability, but most crucially to the fact that the vault of the camps was quite homophobic. People who were scared and did not know what was happening and saw the violence, that were hungry and saw their loved ones being Murdered tried to make sense of the new and scary surrounding. And this making sense was extremely gendered. And the genderedness operated with quite hard assumptions about what the it means to be male, what it means to be female. And people were very judgy about occurrences of same sex desire in their vicinity. They were more judged, more afraid of same sex desire than they were of heterosexual sexual violence. Men raping women was, as we know, thanks to the scholarship of people like Zoe Waxman and Regina Mulhausen, John Ringelheim and many others, fairly frequently. And people definitively condemned appearances, moments of rape. But the particular scorn really singled out same sex desire among fellow prisoners. Now, in any setting or in most settings, people will continue to be sexual. The ways, how they are sexual and the meaning of sexual acts depends and will change. But this homophobia then influenced what can be narrated, what can be recalled. So already in the camps and ghettos set in hiding, people keeping diaries who speak of queer acts, describe them as disgusting and as foreign. And this narrative continued well until this day. Now, how we bear testimony, what we can narrate is again very much given by social context. And therefore, for people who engage in same sex acts, it was excessively hard to speak of that. When your Saronic tells you that something you engaged in or something that you are is disgusting, it's very hard to reclaim it as a positive sexual identity. And what is so interesting also when you look at this story through the prism of queer history or sexual liberation, is that these histories, these old histories, were collected often in the 1980s and 1990s, that is well after Christopher Street's day and gay liberation in the West. And for the example of visual history archive, aka the Spielberg foundation in the 90s, that is after AIDS. There are some exceptions, but they are few and far between. And until my work, the Holocaust archives did not really acknowledge this gap. Or why is it salient?

[Roland Clark]

One of the things you point out is often you see the homophobia of survivors come out in their testimonies. Whereabouts do you see that the homophobia.

[Anna Haikover]

Comes up, really, it grows like mushrooms. You will have people who either the interviewer asks them if they have met any homosexuals, and they will volunteer something negative or framed as sexual predators. They will speak about with fear and with disgust, and they will often get a bit contradictory. But here the interviewers also are quite salient, because they don't intervene, they don't say, why were you so afraid of the lesbian prisoner functionaries? Or what was it so disgusting? In fact, sometimes it is the Interviewers themselves who ask leading questions implying that queer fellow prisoners were part particularly scary and disgusting or that queer same sex desire in the camps was one of the particular indignities of the camps. Now, I want to be clear. This is something that has happened and we are not going to change it. But similarly to some of the difficult histories we have in the archives and in museums, say colonialism or sexual violence, I think we should mark it up and acknowledge and work with it transparently rather than behave. You know, the reaction I sometimes get is like there were no queer people before 2000. You know, there have always been queer people and we want to have a history that is inclusive for everyone. So I think these homophobic, violent mentions needs to be acknowledged, but also treated with care and sensitivity.

[Roland Clark]

But that makes it incredibly difficult history to do, to research and to write too.

[Anna Haikover]

But Rolla David was an easy history.

[Roland Clark]

Exactly. We do these things because they're hard.

[Anna Haikover]

Yes, exactly. We do these things because they're hard.

[Roland Clark]

So the most famous survivor is a gentleman by the name of Gad Beck, who published a celebrated memoir about his experiences in 1995. But as you point out when you write about this memoir, his story is actually quite problematic when read up quite closely. What sort of challenges, what makes it difficult to do to deal with when you're dealing with Beck's memoir?

[Anna Haikover]

Roland, you said in your very kind introduction that my book is a translation from German. And it is a translation from German, but it's also a standalone book that is revised for the English language market. It's been peer reviewed. And one of the great ideas that one of my peer reviewers had was to include Gotbeck's story. I was kind of ducking away from Gadbeck because I felt he's so well known. In a way, it's underwhelming to say something new about him. But then I decided to rise to the challenge and do research about him. I would not say that his story is extremely difficult, but there are, as we call it, warts and all. There are the hairy bits and they are particularly interesting. Gadbeck was a very merry storyteller. He was very bubbly. And that's what makes his memoir also so interesting to read, apart from the very dramatic story that he tells. But under all that bubbliness are ugly bits. There is sexual violence, there is sexual barter, there is sexual violence against teenagers and even children. So we should pretext this whole interview is some trigger warning, by the way. And there is also outing got back during the war was teenager or just 20. Many of his partners were his age or even younger. And pretty much all of them, after the war, chose to have relationship with women. They never had relationships with other men. And they were also quite clear that they do not want to be acknowledged as Got Beck's lovers. Now, Beck did not write his memoir. It was ghostwriting with his friend and copy editor or editor, Frank Hibert. And I interviewed Hibart and talked with him at length about this whole process. And when they were writing the book together, Huibert did ask Gadbeck, why is he using the real names of his lovers, knowing full well that these guys were still alive and were not happy to be outed. And Gadbeck's response was like, this is my story, they can suck it up. Which I think is a very interesting response. I do not really have a position whether it's good or not good. I don't want to weigh in whether this was an ethical decision. I think it's an incredibly interesting decision for us to discuss methodologically in queer history, to show how ambivalent and difficult these histories are. And I also think there is an extra layer of what are the moments? What are the instances of sexualized sexual barter that Gadbeck chooses to talk about with humor as like one of the facts of life? And what are the moments of sexualized violence that he's condemning? So in the chapter about Gotbeck, I tried to write a manual that colleagues teaching Gadbeck in university classes, whether undergraduate or graduated, they can take the chapter, it's not long, it's about 4,000 words, and assign it alongside either Gadbeck's memoir or the grade documentary movie that I was also able to use in the chapter.

[Roland Clark]

Another example you give in the book is that of Freddy Hirsch, who was a prisoner in Theresienstadt during the war. How did different people talk about Hirsch's sexuality?

[Anna Haikover]

Freddy Hirsch is a terrifically interesting example because he was a much loved and much admired Zionist youth leader who worked with children in occupied Czechoslovakia, but also somebody who was a German emigre. He always had an accent in his chicken. He never spoke it well. And it was also someone who was quite openly gay. But not only that, there were always rumors that he was different, that he was effeminate, and that he liked children, not only as a very egoistic teacher, but also sexually. And eventually I realized that these are not just homophobic stories that seek to paint gay men as pedophiles, but that these are first person testimonies of survivors of sexual violence. There was a man who recalled that when he was 11 or 12 years old, Freddy Harrisch put his hand down, put his hand down his underwear and touch his genitals, which of course is sexual violence. And you know under Sexual Offenses act you would go to prison for a couple of years for that. So I looked at this story as an example how we can deal with these difficult histories of somebody who gave the children in Theresienstadt and later in Auschwitz so much hope. In fact, he probably inspired some of them to have the very will to survive, but also somebody who was a sexual predator. And I try to tell this story in a way that we make space for these ambivalences, especially the German context that in the context of men whisping triangle, the dirty secret that lies underneath is that some of the people who were persecuted by the Nazis for paragraph 175 did not only have sex with grown up men but also with children. And scholarship to date usually swept it under the carpet. And I wish and I hope in the future we will find a way to write about these men who bore testimony, who fought for the recognition of sexual minorities, who led a young German gay activist to Auschwitz memorial in the 1980s. But I also had these very complex histories and I also do not think, you know, Roland, that you need to have someone like me to tell my readers that sexual abuse of teenagers is wrong. I hope everybody knows that shopping is hard, right?

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[Roland Clark]

Yeah, but it's still definitely a difficult history to write. One of the theoretical issues you discuss in the book is that of queer kinship, which you illustrate through the case of Margo Hooymann. What sorts of kinship did Margot develop during the Holocaust?

[Anna Haikover]

No, I'm definitely not the first person to engage in the concept of queer kinship. I built here on the last 30, 40 decades of queer theory of people like AKA Swan and Judy Butler and many, many others. But the reason why I applied it is that I was being a bit annoyed at a certain assumption in Holocaust studies of the concept of so called non biological families. That Sybil Milton, a great Holocaust historian who really was an important doyen of feminist studies in the Holocaust. And Milton developed the concept of non biological families to point out that women prisoners survived more frequently in groups than men and that these groups kind of supported each other. But of course, when we say non biological families, it creates a binary between the so called real biological family and the fake non biological family. And here anthropology of kinship is much more inclusive because it simply speaks of kinship. It does not differentiate between biological or non biological kinship. You have these bonds of belonging to that can be contemporary, that can serve all their time. They can also be pragmatic, but they serve as this emotional support and also with resources. And it's a bit of a red thread that I apply in the second part of the book about how the concentration camps, the persecution created these, well, you know, temporary bonds between people for love, for affection, but also through sexualized violence and how it shaped the experiences in the camp specifically for Margot, the first lesbian Holocaust survivor who bore testimony in interviews with me. I met her as a elderly lady in Arizona. She was deported as a teenager from West Germany from Bielefeld to Theresienstadt. And here is where she met her great love, a Viennese girl called Dita. And the two of them became girlfriends. They became intimate at night. And eventually when they were both deported to Auschwitz, Margot said farewell to her family in order to survive the selection together with Dita, because for her, Dita was everything. So she chose to say goodbye to her parents knowing full well at that moment because after that, at that point they had survived some six weeks in Auschwitz. So they knew what selection means. They knew that there are gas chambers. And for her, as she said, Ditta was my everything. And here it really helps us discern how people also make choices. How specifically for Margot it was life affirming. But it also links to my earlier work on recognizing victim agency where it is and not looking for victim agency, how we today in 2025 imagine than it may have looked like.

[Roland Clark]

So especially as you detailed in the book, Margot and Dieter's romantic relationship is really quite beautifully romantic. But not all of the relationships you talk about in the book are like that. What do Nate Leipziger's experiences of same sex relations in the Vomsteichen camp teaches?

[Anna Haikover]

That is an important question. I specifically wrote a large part of the book about queer coming of age because I thought it will be a relatable history. And you know, the book is not only for academic audiences but also it's written as crossover trade so that queer people of all ages can read it and also can give it to their relatives who may have the assumption that they're only like queer people mushroomed out of the soil in 2000. But I also did not want to sentimentalize that history. And here I expand on earlier work by colleagues such as Dorotha Glowacka or Deborah at work or current work by my friend and colleague Will Jones, who also translated one chapter of the book from German into English. Because Nate Leipziger was a teenager deported with his father from Sosnowiec to Auschwitz, from Auschwitz to this satellite camp of Gross Rose in Funfaichen. And because he did not quite go through puberty, he could still be seen as feminine coded. Often young boys in the concentration camps were particularly at danger of sexual assault because, you know, they didn't have Adam's apple, their voice did not drop and they could be seen as more curvaceous and therefore more female coded. And that singles them out for grooming and for sexual assaul. So very soon after arriving to Pfdichen in I think fall 43, the Polish gentile couple of the barrack where Nate and his father were accommodated, asked Nate to become his assistant. Nate did not know that that would probably link to sexual assault. And then there was a period of grooming eventually followed by first sexualized assault and eventually anal rape. And this very violent and horrible relationship becomes something that is, you know, lasts several months, not quite a year, because in exchange, Nate receives nice clothing, he receives some food, he is protected from hard labor. He's also so young, and you know, this is someone who grew up in the 30s and 40s, that he did not have sexual education in high school. His parents did not quite enlighten him, so he's not entirely sure that he cannot get pregnant. And other prisoners are making fun of him that Yannek will knock him up. And of course, we see here all the patterns of grooming. But one of the arguments I make, building on Dorota Glovac and on Deborah at work, that what starts as sexual assault, in which Nate has no choice, becomes violent sexual barter, because Nate chooses with the very minimal choices that he has, but he has them nevertheless to remain in this relationship. And eventually Janek the capo finds himself another enforced lover. And what is so shocking but also so worthwhile about Nate's memoir that came out with Azraeli foundation in Canada, is that he says, I was actually jealous of the new boy because I was missing not only the food but also the affections of the couple. And I take this statement not only as a Stockholm syndrome, but as a desperate boy who's navigating the camps, but has also become acclimatized to the camps. So I show this very hairy and difficult story as one of the ways how also sexualized queer desire in the camps looked like. I also did a fair bit of research into trying to find out who was Janek, but it was impossible to identify him.

[Roland Clark]

One of the other books you talk about, which is probably even more famous, is that of the Diary of Anne Frank. It's been made into a graphic novel that's been banned in several US states. Why do people want to ban Anne Frank?

[Anna Haikover]

That's a very good question. And it's a sign of today's times. Like how come entanglement 3 is banned in libraries? How come Baus by Spiegelman has been banned? Anne Frank has several clear traces in her diary. She has a crush on her best friend and writes how she tried to kiss her and tried to touch her boso. She writes about the fact that she enjoys the flirting with the boys, but actually she doesn't want to be intimate with them. And other moments. And I'm not the first one to write about that. Cheryl Hann and Amy Ellman and others have written about that before me. But this knowledge that kind of is something that usually only queer readers, if at all, have noticed, has become a little bit more publicly known when in 2018 the Anne Frankfonds produced a graphic novel by Arifollmann and Wolonsky, and the two of them deal with same sex desire and anne Frank on two pages out of the, I think 150 of the whole graphic novel. And maybe because now it's visualized and before it was in writing, and often lesbians are deemed invisible. This is the moment when the penny dropped. I thought that treatment was extremely tastefully done. There is no graphic nudity. It's one of the many, you know, moments of coming of age as a teenager and having sexual thoughts that they humanize Anne Frank, but also show her as this brilliant young intellectual that she was, who was not given the time to grow up. And in the last four or five years, US has been influenced by a great deal of populism and fascism as well. And one of the many aspects of all of that is the rise of a group called Moms for Liberty that seek to censor public libraries and school libraries to remove any literature that they deem inappropriate. Now, their definition of inappropriate is very different from mine and yours, but it means that a great deal of literature that touches on queer and trans topics, on sexuality, or, say, Spiegel Mad Smiles have been removed. And then they figured out that the graphic novel also has those topics and. And had that book removed from a number of school libraries. But it was, I think, in the last year and a half that somebody figured out that the original diary has those passages actually, too, that nobody made them out of thin air. So in one counted in Florida, you actually cannot get the original Anne Frank diary in any of the school libraries. That means when you are a queer teenager, or if you are a teenager and you want to read these books, you have to buy them with your own money or you need to go on the Internet. Because libraries are really such an important safe space for all teenagers. I spent a great deal of the time before being, you know, 12 to 18 in my local library in Prague. And it really shaped a great deal of who I am today. So this is something that is not just an academic question. It shows how epistemology of queerness, of giving the young people the sense that they too are part of this society and this history is being systematically questioned, removed and destroyed. And that is extremely worrisome. And I hope that I can alert colleagues in Holocaust studies to what's been happening.

[Roland Clark]

Yeah, it's a good thing they're mums for liberty and not mums for censorship. Can you imagine if they were in favor of censorship? Finally, we have the story of a queer Holocaust survivor from Czechoslovakia who became an informer for the secret police under state socialism to what extent do you think that his sexuality made him particularly vulnerable to being convinced to work for the secret police?

[Anna Haikover]

Thank you. That is the story of Jerry Vrbach, born in 1924, who in Theresienstadt was a part of the underground Communist Party. Later, in Auschwitz, he was intimate for the first time with a man. And when he survived Auschwitz, Blechammer and Buchenwald, he came back as as a gay man who also said so much to his surviving relatives. In the 1950s, he has fallen on hard times. He was kicked out from his work in a communist youth organization because of his relatives who were communist Jews, such as Otto Schlink and the Slansky trials. But he was also persecuted even in the Newman Ujop in Gladn because of the persecution of gay men. Now in Czechoslovakia, homosexuality was decriminalized in early 60s, so way before Great Britain or West Germany. But it still was iffy. And around this time also is the period when VRBA was recruited to work for the secret police. It was however, not the only reason why he stayed working as an informer for the secret police for the next 30 or 35 years. Peers because Vrba was a believing communist and also he was someone who was quite aware of power. So while he could not do the career that he may have foreseen for himself, and eventually he became a theater director, but never a particularly successful one, being able to inform on his friends and colleagues gave him, like so many other informers that, you know, Roland, you have written so eloquently about a sense of power and of control. So that is something that is part of this also difficult story, but the difficult story in a different way that I'm telling In the early 70s, the secret police De Esteban tries to use the knowledge of his queerness to, you know, maybe have upper hand. And they confront him with it again. And this is the very interesting moment where VRBA pushes back and says, you know, I spent time in West Germany. It's perfectly fine to be gay there. They sell a gay magazine. You can use it. I'm not afraid. So that's also interesting how he was able to negotiate and navigate that space. I discussed the story and the chapter about VRBA with several colleagues of mine in the Czech Republic who work on Jews and secret police. And they were, let's say, a little bit more cautious how to tell the story and advised me to frame the whole story. As someone who may have been blackmailed into the corporation and also we do not quite know exactly what he did it. But having reread the file many, many times, I also think there is a fair bit of enthusiasm and using the cooperation with the secret police as a way to navigate the extreme times of being a Czechoslovak Jew in 20th century, but also a story that is not, that is beyond black and white and therefore it's the best kind of story because people don't exist on the black and white scheme. We are just people. We are Mackie and we are wonderful.

[Roland Clark]

That's a great tone to end on. Thank you so much for talking us through this very challenging and delicate topic. And I strongly recommend anyone that has interest to go out and buy the book for Christmas. It's a great time of year to gift it to someone or to read it yourself because it's really readable too.

[Anna Haikover]

Thank you so much. And also I have somewhere a discount code so I will send it to you afterwards in case the readers want to get the book for only £11.

[Roland Clark]

Excellent. So people can drop me an email directly. Thanks a lot Hannah.

[Anna Haikover]

Thank you so much Roland.

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