Join the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and its partners for a conference focusing on 80 years since the end of World War II and the Holocaust, highlighting memory, responsibility, and the future of remembrance.

Learn from experts Dr. Jens-Christian Wagner (historian and director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation), Dr. Yohai Cohen (director of Yad Vashem’s guiding department), Tal Bruttmann (French historian and writer on the Auschwitz Photographs) with participation of Sylt Foundation’s director, Indra Wussow and JHGC’s director, Tali Nates.

The conference will be followed by the opening of More Important than Life: The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto Exhibition at 6pm.

Dr. Yohai Cohen, current director of Yad Vashem’s guiding department, has worked at Yad Vashem since 2006. He wrote his doctoral thesis in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on the history of the Holocaust in Yad Vashem exhibitions from the 1950s to the present day. Previously, he worked at Yad Vashem as a museum guide, curator of photographs in the museum, and researcher of photographs in the archive.

Born in 1966, Prof. Dr. Jens-Christian Wagner studied medieval and modern history, geography, and Romance philology in Göttingen and Santiago de Chile (M.A.). He completed his doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1999 with a thesis on the history of the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp. In 2000 he was a guest scholar with the Max Planck Society research project “Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im NS” (Berlin). He served as director of the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial (Nordhausen) 2001–2014, as executive director of the Lower Saxon Memorials Foundation 2001–2014, and director of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial (Celle) 2014-2020. He has been director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation since 2020.

Tal Bruttmann is a historian specializing in the Holocaust and antisemitism. His work focuses on antisemitic policies in France during the war, as well as the systematic murder of European Jews and the killing centres. He is notably the author of “Auschwitz” (La Découverte, 2015) and “Les cent mots de la Shoah” with Christophe Tarricone (PUF, 2016), as well as “Microhistories Of The Holocaust” (Berghahn Books, New York, 2016) with Claire Zalc. His latest book, “Un album d’Auschwitz : comment les nazis ont photographié leurs crimes” (Seuil, 2023), written with Stefan Hördler and Christoph Kreutzmüller, is a study dedicated to the photographs taken by the SS at Auschwitz. He also contributed to the script of the graphic novel “Du sang dans la clairière. Mont-Valérien 1941-1944,” alongside historian Antoine Grande and cartoonist Efix.