People Without History Are Dust

“This book is excellent both with respect to Anna Hájková’s deep immersion in the historiography and theoretical literature pertaining to the topic, but also with regards to her remarkable research of finding traces of people and the lives they lived that have remained invisible and inaudible in the history of the Holocaust.” -- Alexandra Garbarini, Hans W. Gatzke ’38 Professor of Modern European History, Williams College “Powerful, urgent, and deeply moving. Anna Hájková’s beautiful new book is a primer on queer kinship and proves by example the extraordinary value of writing history from the margins. It also represents a profound act of recovery, restoring to us precious fragments from lives long lost and exposing the normative assumptions that have for too long structured what we are allowed to mourn and to remember.” -- Dagmar Herzog, author of <em>The New Fascist Body</em> and <em>The Question of Unworthy Life</em> “Anna Hájková is that rarest of historians, the kind who on virtually every page delivers some startling new insight. People without History Are Dust not only does a brilliant job of giving us a much fuller and richer understanding of Nazi crimes, its central concern about the link between historical understanding and humanity could not be a more urgent and timely message.” -- Benjamin Carter Hett, author of <em>The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic</em> “Anna Hájková’s pioneering work brings the stories of queer Holocaust victims to the fore, unearthing the bonds of kinship that sustained them in a time of genocide. This book is a passionate reminder of the power of queer desire in the midst of fascist violence.” -- Samuel Clowes Huneke, Associate Professor of History, George Mason University “Anna Hájková’s People without History Are Dust is at once an act of recovery – rescuing from obscurity and reframing stories of Holocaust-era same-sex desire and intimacy that had fallen through the cracks – and a courageous and powerful historiographic meditation. Hájková urges us not only to create more inclusive Holocaust narratives but also to queer Holocaust history, that is, to think beyond the assumptions and categories that have structured and continued to limit the historiography and memory of Nazi persecution. The book is a tour de force combining rigorous historical detective work with nuanced historiographic sophistication.” -- Paul Lerner, Professor and Chair of History, University of Southern California “Now available in English, People without History Are Dust does the vital work of historizing homophobia during the Holocaust and in its memory. Anna Hájková pinpoints the silence in survivor testimony as a calculated disavowal of queer desire to remove its stain on remembrance: an intentional archival absence that she restores with unflinching accounts of the complex and sometimes uncomfortable interplays between queer desire and Jewish experiences of the Shoah. To queer the Holocaust, then, is to refuse to look away.” -- Zavier Nunn, Assistant Professor of History and Gender and Sexuality Studies, Northwestern University “A remarkable and brave work of holocaust history, People without History Are Dust is the first exploration of the intersection of queerness and Jewishness in the Holocaust. Like Anna Hájková’s previous work, this is not the Hollywood version of the Holocaust with neat boundaries and binaries. Instead, Hájková offers us the bare truth: that sex, death, and life intersected in the camps in messy ways still inconvenient for today’s mainstream narratives.” -- Eli Rubin, Professor of History, Western Michigan University “Carefully researched, innovative, and moving, this is one of the most original contributions to Holocaust Studies of recent years. Anna Hájková makes an insurmountable case for a queer approach to the Holocaust, demonstrating how a focus on what has been marginalized sheds light on the phenomenon as a whole. People without History Are Dust is a short book, but a genuinely significant one.” -- Dan Stone, Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway, University of London “A truly groundbreaking book, it explores the long-overlooked same-sex experiences of Jewish victims and survivors to reveal the hidden history of queerness during the Holocaust. Transforming our understanding of figures such as Anne Frank, Anna Hájková is not just a brilliant historian but a trailblazer demonstrating why an inclusive approach to the past is essential for understanding our present and future.” -- Zoë Waxman, Professor of Holocaust History, University of Oxford “This vital book intervenes in the explicit and implicit homophobic erasure of survivors’ and scholars’ narratives with nuanced case studies that prioritize women and teenagers, to whom Anna Hájková grants what she calls ‘historical citizenship’ at the intersection of queer acts and Jewish identity. Hajkova excels at uncovering agency even where consent is impossible; her tender and incisive writing positions desire as part of the will to survive.” -- Mir Yarfitz, Associate Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wake Forest University