Dr Lidia Zessin-Jurek is a historian of modern East Central Europe specializing in Jewish history, the Holocaust, the Gulag, as well as refugee movements in Eastern Europe during the two world wars. Her research takes a comparative approach to contemporary refugee situations, including those at the Belarusian-Polish border and in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

She holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. From 2019 to 2024, she worked on the ERC-funded project Unlikely Refuge? at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and with the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). From 2024 to 2026, she was a Visiting Professor in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Programme at Stockton University in New Jersey.

As a public historian, she has contributed to, among others, Gazeta Wyborcza, Polityka, Eurozine, Micromega, Deník N, Der Standard, Mémoires en jeu, The New Fascism Syllabus, Public Seminar. New School for Social Research, and Cultures of History Forum.

Her research on violence, forced migration, and memory in twentieth-century Eastern Europe has resulted in publications on the competition between Holocaust and Communist memory cultures, the experiences of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Siberia and Central Asia), and the role of the Polish lands as a space of refuge in the twentieth century. She is currently writing a book on the exodus of Polish Jews at the beginning of the Second World War, examining it through the lens of dual statelessness – personal and territorial – and its impact on the experience of displacement and its remembrance.

Monographs

Polish Risorgimento. Visions of the Modern Polish Nation and their Italian Foundations. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.

Edited volumes

Meier Landau, A Lost World, Galician Shtetl and Siberia. Brill Schöningh, 2023.

Syberiada Żydów polskich. Losy uchodźców z Zagłady, Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 2020. With Katharina Friedla.

Journal articles

No Man’s Land: Between Refugee Geography of Małkinia and Holocaust Memory of Treblinka. In East European Jewish Affairs 2026, 54 (1).

Borderlands to No Man’s Lands: Refugees, Violence and the Eastern Border of Occupied Poland. With Michal Frankl and Wolfgang Schellenbacher. In East European Jewish Affairs 2026, 54 (1).

In-Between: Polish Holocaust Scholarship and Gaza. In Journal of Genocide Research 2026, 28 (3).

On a Melting Ice Floe – Polish Jewish Wartime Refugees in Central Asia. In Journal of Genocide Research 2024, 26 (3).

(Non)responsibility for Refugees – Communicating about the Belarusian-Polish Border (2021–2023). In Migration Studies – Review of Polish Diaspora Special Issue: Refugees on the Polish-Belarusian Border 2023, 189 (3).

Poland, a Country of Refuge: Revisiting the Historiography Patterns of Migration. In Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung (ZfO) 2022, 71(4).

Whose Victims and Whose Survivors? The Memory of Polish-Jewish Wartime Exiles in the USSR. In Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2022, 36 (2).

Refugees Welcome to History and Memory: Polish (and Jewish) World War II Exiles in Hungary. With Ágnes Katalin Kelemen. In Hungarian Studies Review, 2022, 49 (1).

Chapters in edited volumes

Refugee Temporalities: Time Displacement in the Flight of Polish Jews from Nazism (A Conceptual Study). In Michal Frankl (ed.), Refugees and Citizens in Twentieth-Century East Central Europe: An Unlikely Refuge? Amsterdam: Central European University Press, 2026.

Polish Elderly Jews and Holocaust Survival in the Soviet Union. Mit Katharina Friedla. In Christine Schmidt, Betsy Anthony, Joanna Śliwa (ed.), Older People and the Holocaust. Washington: USHMM, 2026.

Holocaust Survivors, Siberians, Refugees, Veterans – Memory and Choice of Jewish Returnees from the USSR to Poland (1945–2024). In Laura Kromjak, Ajlina Karamehic-Muratovi (ed.), Intergenerational Trauma in Refugee Communities. Routledge: 2024.

A Matzeva Amid Crosses: Jewish Exiles in the Polish Memory of Siberia. In Katharina Friedla, Markus Nesselrodt (ed.), Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939–1959). Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021.

The Rise of an Eastern European Community of Memory? – On Lobbying for Gulag Memory via Brussels. In Małgorzata Pakier, Joanna Wawrzyniak (ed.), European Memory: Eastern Perspectives. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015.

Forgotten Memory? The Vicissitudes of the Gulag Memory in Poland. In Simona Mitroiu (ed.), Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Other

A History that Connects and Divides: Ukrainian Refugees and Poland in the Face of Russia’s War. In Cultures of History Forum, 2023.

Long Jewish Roads to Safety – Meier Landau’s Life as a Refugee, Introduction to the Book: Meier Landau, A Lost World. Galician Shtetl and Siberia. Brill Schoeningh: 2023.

Foreword to: Yoram Eckstein, An Involuntary Traveler. A Memoir from the First Twenty Years. Dorrance Publishing: 2022.

Held hostage to one’s values. On the responsibility to refugees at the Belarusian-Polish border. Public Seminar, 2023.

The wrong kind of heroism. Contested memories on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s 80th anniversary. Eurozine: 2023.

Real refugees, fake refugees. Eurozine: 2022.

Who is a ‘true’ refugee? On the limits of Polish hospitality mit Olena Babakova, Kamila Fiałkowska, Marta Kindler. Center of Migration Research Spotlight: 2022, 41 (6). 

Trapped in No Man’s Land: Comparing Refugee Crises in the Past and Present. Cultures of History Forum: 2021.