Miranda Brethour

I am a historian of modern Eastern Europe focusing on the Holocaust in Poland. My research traces the shifting relationships between Poles and Jews leading up to, during, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. I am especially interested in understanding the intimate dimensions of genocide and mass violence in rural communities; villages and towns where perpetrators and victims were well-known to one another. I am currently working on my first monograph, tentatively titled “‘Faithful German Servants’ or ‘Good Polish Citizens?’ Violence, the Village Head, and Daily Life in Interwar and Occupied Poland,” which examines rural leaders’ responses to the persecution and murder of Jews in their small communities where the physical presence of German authorities was often limited. I have recently published articles and chapters in edited volumes on various topics in Holocaust and genocide studies, including survival strategies and hiding, sexual violence and oral history, knowledge of the “Final Solution” and decision-making, and spatial histories of violence. In both my research and teaching, I place emphasis on testimony as a crucial source of knowledge and further draw on digital tools – especially mapping – as a means of storytelling and unearthing patterns of mass violence.

Recent Publications:

“The Role of Village Heads in Anti-Jewish Policy and Ghetto Deportations in the Lublin District, March–November 1942,” in Local Administrators and the Holocaust, edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Berghahn Books (forthcoming).

“‘I only miraculously escaped death’: Recollections of the Everyday Life of a Jewish Family during the Holocaust, by Maria Plech,” in Jewish Women in Global Perspective: A Documentary History, edited by Elissa Bemporad, Dina Danon, Elizabeth Imber, and Federica Francesconi, Oxford University Press (forthcoming).

“Oral Histories of Sexual Violence in Hiding during the Holocaust in Poland: Memory, Agency, and Reconceptualizing the ‘Rescuer,’” in Shattered Liberation: Sexualized Violence against Holocaust Survivors, 1943-1946, edited by Nina Paulovicova, Joanna Michlic and Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Purdue University Press, 2025.

“Life and Death in the Shadow of Sobibór: Economic Dimensions of Jewish-Gentile Relations in the Town of Włodawa, 1939–1944,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 28, no. 4 (2022): 403–428.

“Visualizing Intimate Geographies of Genocide: A Spatial Analysis of Węgrów County, Poland (1942–1944),” The Journal of Historical Geography 72 (2021): 40–52 (co-authored with Fiona Davidson).

“Jewish-Gentile Relations in Hiding during the Holocaust in Sokołów County, Poland,” The Journal of Holocaust Research 33 no. 4 (2019): 277–301.

„Upamiętnianie Zagłady w kraju multikulturalizmu. Kanada wobec spuścizny Zagłady od lat siedemdziesiątych do chwili obecnej [Remembering the Holocaust in the Land of Multiculturalism: Canada and the Legacy of the Holocaust from the 1970s to the Present],” Zagłada Żydów 14 (2018): 769–789.