Journalist Göran Rosenberg discusses his shattering memoir about his father’s attempt to survive the aftermath of Auschwitz in a small industrial town in Sweden. Rosenberg is joined by H.E. Jan Eliasson, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, as Eliasson speaks to the need of remembering the Holocaust and what we must learn from it to ensure that the expression “never again” is not just empty words.
Eliasson will also touch upon the U.N.’s efforts on genocide prevention and the need for early action on mass atrocities, including The Human Rights up Front (HRuF) initiative to improve U.N. action to safeguard human rights around the world.
A brief Q & A follows the program and copies of Rosenberg’s book will be available for purchase and signing.
About the book
On August 2, 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town to begin his life anew. Having endured the ghetto of Łódz, the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany, his final challenge is to survive the survival. In this intelligent and deeply moving book, Göran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood to tell the story of his father: walking at his side, holding his hand, trying to get close to him. It is also the story of the chasm between the world of the child, permeated by the optimism, progress, and collective oblivion of postwar Sweden, and the world of the father, darkened by the long shadows of the past.
“I can’t think of a second generation work that is equal to A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz,” wrote Philippe Sands in The Financial Times.” “It is a towering and wondrous work about memory and experience, exquisitely crafted, beautifully written, humane, generous, devastating, yet somehow also hopeful.”
A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz (translated by Sarah Death, Other Press, 2015) is Rosenberg’s most recent book and has been translated into several languages. In 2012 the memoir won the prestigious August Prize.
About Göran Rosenberg
“Göran Rosenberg is one of Sweden’s best-known journalists and authors. He was born in Sördertälje as the son of David and Hala Rosenberg from Łódz in Poland, who arrived in Sweden after having survived concentration camps during World War II.
From 1966-68 Rosenberg studied at the University of Stockholm and obtained a B.A. in Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science, and Journalism. He received an honorary Ph. D from the University of Gothenburg in 2000.
Rosenberg is the award-winning author of many non-fiction books, essays, and articles that have been translated into several languages and widely published in, among others, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung,Lettre Internationale, Daedalus, New Perspectives Quarterly, The New York Times, and Eurozine.
About Jan Eliasson
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Photo by the American-Scandinavian Foundation
MON – 4-20-2015 – 6:00 pm
free
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