Biography: Tahel Rachel Goldsmith is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. She holds a B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology and an M.A. in Cultural Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research areas are modern East-Central European and Jewish history and memory. Her dissertation examines the postwar histories of commemoration at four former Nazi concentration and death camps in communist Poland and the two Germanies. She is interested in why and how historical authenticity emerged as a central value of preservation at memorial sites. In the fall of 2021, she interned at the preservation department at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Research Project: Within Space We Feel Time: The Creation of Authenticity at European Memorial Sites for Nazi Genocides, 1944-2004

Tahel’s dissertation follows the stories of four types of material traces: space and architecture, movable objects, human remains, and paper documents. She investigates what happened to such traces left at former concentration and death camps in Poland and Germany from the end of World War II till the early 2000s. Her dissertation asks why and how remnants of atrocities became increasingly important for commemorating Nazi genocides, and why museums/memorial sites were established around them. The research focuses on four sites: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen. She sketches their histories and institutional development across Cold War divides, understanding how Cold War dynamics contributed to their becoming central places for representing past violence. The dissertation’s aim is to understand how museum professionals applied the concept of “authenticity” to arrange space, architecture and objects in tandem with documents and archives in order to research, preserve, and present the history of Nazi crimes to the public. Tahel argues that memorial sites at former camps, paradoxically both perpetually carry an aura of authenticity—i.e., create a connection with an unalterable past—and have changed across time.