PhD and a Cup of Tea: The Other Architects of Auschwitz, with Emily Roche

Part of our PhD and a Cup of Tea series of academic seminars. This event series is designed for early-career researchers and PhD candidates to present their research for peer feedback.

This presentation explores the experiences of architects and other forced building labourers in the Auschwitz camp system. In particular, this work sheds light on how professional identity and connections based on professional expertise impacted the experiences and fates of one group of prisoners in Auschwitz and enabled them to resist Nazi control.

Conceived of as a biographical exploration of the mechanism of genocide survival, this work is the first to examine how architects, construction workers, and other forced labourers survived incarceration in the Auschwitz camp system. This story is framed as a collection of entwined biographies, emphasizing not only how architects relied on each other to survive Auschwitz, but also how their lives after the war were shaped by experiences of genocide.

In presenting narratives of a professional group, this project explains how prisoners relied on their professional knowledge to resist Nazi control. This research furthers an understudied approach to interpreting social life within the camp system by using professional identity to reassess how forced labour impacted prisoners from a variety of backgrounds, including both men and women and Jews and non-Jews in the purview of the study.

About the Speaker

Dr Emily Roche is a historian of modern Eastern European Jewish history with research specialisations in Holocaust studies and architectural history. She currently holds the position of Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University and received my PhD in History from Brown University in 2024.

Her first book focuses on the dual biography of Helena and Szymon Syrkus, two Polish-Jewish architects who were central to the modernist architectural movement in Poland, while her second book explores architectural networks and survival at Auschwitz. Her work has been funded by the Association of Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), the Polish Studies Association, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Research Ireland.

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