It's my great pleasure to welcome Dr. Anna Haikova to start our first series. We've had Gresham professors doing their first lectures, but today is the first in the series, Invisible No More, uncovering LGBTQ Histories and Identities. Dr. Haikova is a reader for modern European continental history at the University of Warwick, and she's also the co-director of the Center for Global Jewish Studies. She's been awarded the Orfeo Iris Prize in 2020, and also more recently in 2026, the National Jewish Book Award for her most recent book, People Without History Are Dust, Queer Desire, and the Holocaust. So please help me welcome Dr. Anna Heikova.

Christine, thank you so much for this very kind introduction. I must thank our mutual friend Christine Schmidt for the kind introductions. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. On April 28, 1945, a film crew recorded hundreds of liberated women from the Ravensburg concentration camp arriving to the Swedish harbor of Malmö. Among them are two women with headscarves who kiss. All of these people arrived thanks to the Operation White Buses, the largest humanitarian operation in the Second World War. This footage of hundreds of women, young women and girls arriving was kept in the archive of the Swedish television. Already in May 1945, a short documentary movie, the testimony, was produced from the footage. But maybe you have seen it because on iPlayer on BBC about two years ago, we could see the documentary movie of Magnus Gerten, Nelly Nadine, in which Gerten traced the story of the French resistance fighter Nadine Hwang and her partner Nelly Mousse. But before the camera brings us to Hwang, who we can see because she's a woman of color, she's half Chinese, it dwells on the unknown kissing couple. To this date, we do not know who these women were. We will probably never know. We only know that they survived together. And I want to take this picture of the two unknown lovers as a point of departure to introduce you to queer Holocaust history. What is queer Holocaust history? It's a history of Jews persecuted by the Nazis for their race, deported to concentration camps, ghettos who survived in hiding, or perished, who engage in same-sex love, sexuality, desire, or were forced into relationships of hierarchies and sexual violence, or who engage in gender non-conforming behavior. In this way, it's a new research that looks at victims who were persecuted for their race, not for their sexuality. So I explore something that is important to their subjectivities, to their mentalities. In short, I do classical victim-oriented history, such as Schul Friedlander, Alexandra Garbarini, and many others. Of course, much better known is the research on Nazi persecution of homosexuals, gays, lesbians, and trans people. That is a cousin, much better known cousin to my work. But until I came about 10 years ago, it was as if these were two fields apart, as if all gay and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis were Gentile and all of the Jews were heterosexual. That there is an intersection, and this intersection is meaningful. This is the point of departure in addition to our curly haired kissing ladies. A key reason why this is a silence history, as Christine said in her introduction, is, and this is the first difficult bit of this talk that will put bitter drops throughout, is the homophobia of the prisoner society. When you look at prisoner testimonies, diaries, or memoirs written after the war, people will stress over and over quite courageous resistance fighters, impressive Jewish memoirs, how the Nazis were evil, and there was omnipresent deaths and threat and cold and hunger, but what was particularly disgusting was same-sex desire, not necessarily threats of sexual violence, but the disgusting homosexuals that would be nearby. And this narrative was not questioned until the longest time. And of course, the way how we commemorate, the way how we tell our stories is dictated by social setting. If you are a Jewish lesbian who came back from the camps and everybody around tells you that same-sex desire is disgusting, it's really difficult to say I was in the camps. That's where I met my girlfriend. It was the most meaningful thing that happened to me. And this is why it matters, why we need to talk about silence histories of LGBT love, because of the normativity of Holocaust history. Of course, it's important today more than ever, and we will come back to the politics, and I'm pretty sure it will come in QA in the current age that we live in, not only in the UK but around the world. But the issue with these often very sentimentalized histories of the Holocaust is that we have a black and white history of virtuous people and sinners. But people are people. People are missing and they are full of ambivalences. If we want to humanize the victims, and I think that's incredibly important in writing Jewish histories of the Holocaust, we need to recognize them for the ambivalences and this way, recognize them for the imperfect people that they were. The last two bits before I get to the my first case study, namely, why do I use queer? That may be a bit provocative because after all, nobody says in 1942 I am queer. It may be for those of them who speak English, and of course, England was never occupied by the Nazis, it is an historical term. The important departure here is if I were to say gay or lesbian or homosexual about these people, it will be an ascription of identity. And only about the fraction that I will be speaking about, namely Margot Heumann, can we say that these people come to self-identify as homosexuals? Most of them we just do not know how they self-identified. The modern ascription of sexual identity is for the majority of people in the Western world a relatively modern thing that will come in 1970. Of course, if you are in Berlin and you are friends with Magnus Schwertfeld in 1925, you can say on the street, Ich bin schwul, I'm gay, but most people will not know that. And therefore, I use squeer as an umbrella term, as an adjective and as an averb, as opposed to an ascription to something that one is. And with that, I come to the point that I get to hear quite often, and I think it's an important provocation. Is this not a vogue resage? Is this not an historical work? Am I not coming with my um modern sensitivities into the history of the Holocaust? And I do not think so because we need to historicize being in love, meaning of sexual violence, um, sexual acts that people do together, how keep people keep court, how they propose to each other, what is the meaning of divorce. All these things are important back in the day. And they are quite different how they are exposed. This is also how we make sense of same-sex desire is quite different in 1944 than it is today. And as a historian, I need to basically put on different glasses in order to understand what happened then. So, yes, you have queer desire in the Holocaust too, but it means something different, and that helps us humanize the victims. The last bit that I want to mention, and you see I forgot over my first slide, is trigger warning of sexualized violence. I will briefly come to talk about sexual abuse of children, and I can imagine this is a difficult topic. And let me start with the best-known example, namely Anne Frank. Probably the best-known Holocaust victim, the smart teenager Anne Frank, wrote in her diary while in hiding in the annex on 6th January 1944. I quote, once when I was spending the night at Jacques, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she had always kept hidden from me and which I had never seen. I asked her whether, as a proof of our friendship, we could touch each other's breasts. Jacques refused. I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Every time I see a female nude, such as the Venus in my art history book by Springer, I go into ecstasy. Sometimes I find them so exquisite, I have to struggle to hold back my tears. If only I had a girlfriend. End of quote. This is perhaps the best known queer quote from the diary of Anne Frank, but it's not the only one. The Canadian literature scholar Cheryl Hahn pointed out that just before the Franks go into hiding in June 42, a couple of weeks before the Nazis star deportations from Westerborg to Auschwitz, the diary mentions that Anna did enjoy the attention of the boys, but she enjoyed just the attention, nothing more. As soon as a boy asks if he can bicycle home with me, I can be sure he will become he will become enamored on the spot. Of course, there are those who blow you kisses or try to take hold of your arm, but they are definitively knocking on the wrong door. End of quote. I think that's quite telling. Now, why do we not know it? So much about Anna Frank has been resurged to the Minotier, the chestnut tree that she was looking at and that was giving her so much hope, and then the chestnut tree died, and then the Anna Frank organizations around the world rescued siblings, and when you go to Hempstead Heath, you can find the chestnut tree. When you go to Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, you can find the same baby chestnut tree, all the exact months when she perished of typhus in Bergenbelsum. So why is it that the queer traces in her diary are not better? Now, they are missing in the exhibition of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and in all other memorial work, including that of the Anne Frank Trust here in the UK, because of course, as many of you know, the stepsister of Anne Frank moved after war to England and died relatively recently. Now, the new research engages with the issue. Ruth Franklin's uh excellent biography of Anne Frank looks at the topic as well as that of Tomas Sparr. But Ruth Franklin, who poses the question, was Anne Frank bisexual? I am afraid misses the point because, as I explained just before, looking for hard identities for a 14-year-old is completely missing the point. There are traces of queer desire in her diary. That's something that we can understand when we start asking, was she actually heterosexual? Or was she actually bisexual? We cannot come to grasp it because this concept doesn't let us understand. It was also a topic that was censored from the first Dutch edition. It belonged among the many things that have been removed, but not by the Vater Otto Frank. It was actually the first Dutch publisher who thought this is an uncouth topic and it ought to be removed, and Otto Frank fought and had it removed into the further editions, both in Dutch and in English. But I think the most important reason, and allow me for being a little bit abstract, is the issue with women bearing testimony. Women already are seen as much less reliable than men. It is Ali Wiesel and Primo Levi and Fred Vander who are the famous iconic voices of Holocaust survivors. Anne Frank is well known, but she's a child. When we look at Liana Milu, she's a little bit less famous and she is an important woman's voice, not the voice of Holocaust victims. Women, in short, have lesser epistemic credibility. If women are sexualized, such as if they are queer-coded or otherwise sexually coded, the epistemic credibility drops yet further. And so Anne Frank cannot be recognized for her queerness because basically her legitimacy would disappear. It's horrible, but this is basically how it works when you become iconic. This queerness has quite an interesting second life, and I promise we will talk politics, so we will talk a little bit about politics. It all started so promising, and now I will give you a hint for your Christmas or birthday gifts. In 2017, the Anne Frankfons issued a graphic adaptation of the diary as a graphics diary, as a comics, edited by Ari Follmann, it's illustrated by David Polonsky. Everything in the adaptation is based on diary, of course, it's abbreviated. And I would really say this is tremendously done. It's moving, it's funny. You get to understand if you do not want to read the whole thing or if your kid wants to engage with it, it's really moving. But I read it as someone in my mid-40s and I enjoyed it tremendously. And two pages on page I think 92 and 93 engage with the famous entry from 6 January 1944. On the bottom of page 92, you can see two girls. One has reached the puberty, the dark hurt, Anne, and the second, Jacqueline, hasn't reached the puberty yet. You can also see that Jacqueline is holding a teddy bear and rejects Anne's suggestion to show each other's their breasts. Absolutely not. In the following panel, we see Anne walking through an alley of hysterias and female Roman statues towards a female figure that waits for her there at the end. The text says, I must admit, every time I see a female newt, I go into ecstasy. And if only I had a girlfriend. The panel, I think, does it very skillfully. It contrasts the teenage Anna surrounded by statues that seem to be alive, full-grown newt women who own the femininity and play with the gaze of the girl. And what I also want to stress here is yes, we see her naked women at unlike statues, they do not look just like statues, they look like women, but we see them through female gaze. These are grown-up women who are sexy and they are naked and they are owning it and they look with good wishes at this young queer girl full of confidence. The graphic novel is, with a good reason, I think quite successful. I don't get commission from Lubka. I'm just an uh enthusiast. In the particular in the US, you could find it in a number of school libraries. That all came to an end starting 2021 when the populist conservative group Moms for Liberty that works, among many other activities, to pressure public libraries to remove LGBT of sexual literature or sexual literature for children. And there was really an uproar with Mums of Liberty when they banned the mouse by Art Spiegelman in Tennessee. Why? Because in one of the panels in Mouse's Spiegelman, in Spiegelman's Mouse, you can see The Naked Mother. That was enough to see it as pornographic. And Anne Frank's diary was singled out and banned in a number of libraries, at first only as the graphic novel. The comic has been banned in several places in Florida, three places in Texas have first banned the book, then they fired the teacher who taught it, or allowed only pupils above this age of 16 or 18 to read it. In 2024, then the penny dropped, and someone in Escambia County in Florida realized this is not the vogue crazy graphic novel where somebody depicted it. When you look up the original diary and read 6th January 44, a couple of other entries, you find queer content there. And so it was that in Escambia County, for I think a year, some of the parents managed to have the original Anne Frank banned from the school libraries. The most important, or perhaps the most important, Holocaust representation for children or for grown-ups. Now, that was eventually restored. Some of the library laws in Florida had to be winded down at most recently, just before the summer, Texas puts the original Anne Frank diary on the required reading list. But things that are happening in the US are for me not really the swallow that we can say, okay, this is the US, they are special. I think we should watch it very closely because it's something that can swap over to Europe quite quickly. Let me come to my second example, namely to Margot Heumann, who was the first Holocaust lesbian survivor who spoke out about her love and desire. We have three or four gay male Jewish Holocaust survivors who testified, only Margot Heumann, and she did it in interviews with myself at this moment. I must say, dear audience, not only do I work about this topic, but also I am an out lesbian woman. And when I interviewed Margot, who was a very seasoned Holocaust survivor who testified many, many times, it was only in the interviews with myself, and I came over to visit her in Arizona that she spoke out about the fact that her best friend was in fact her lover. And throughout our conversations, she would assure herself periodically of my queerness. I was able to meet Margot through introduction of mutual friends. What kind of worked is when I started with this work in 2015, 2016, I thought if I will do classical academic work, I will get nowhere. And it's quite important that I find some of the last survivors and to see maybe I will be lucky, maybe I will find someone. So I went to the radio, I published newspapers, I published in Haretz, uh kind of the Israeli guardian. Uh I gave a number of public history talks, and that gamble paid off. I was eventually introduced to Margot, and that was also particularly useful because Margot was first imprisoned in Theresenstadt, and my first book was on Theresenstadt. She was born in 1928 in Western territory of Germany in the Eifel and grew up in Bielefeld. In 1943, when she was 15, she was deported to Theresenstadt. But it was already before her deportation to Theresenstadt that she started registering she's attracted to women. I asked her, when did you realize that you were attracted to women? And with a signature grin, she told me how when she was 10 years old, she had a best friend named Greta. The girl was half a year older than Margot and developed breasts early. Greta wore a tight jumper with a pocket on her chest. Margot chuckled when she shared with me, quote, I used to tell her that I loved her pocket, and could I please put my hand in her pocket? End of quote. When the Hoymans were deported to Theresienstadt in June 1943, Margot and her younger sister Laura were separated from the parents, the Jewish self-administration knowing that everybody above the age of 18 will be sent to work. So children had the possibility of youth welfare, they had better accommodation, they had secret uh education, they could shower once a week, which was the Reisinschad was a quite a reasonable uh improvement. They were sent to work in the fields on the fresh air where they could steal some of the vegetables. In general, the conditions compared to children today were of course horrible, but compared to the life of the prisoners in Theresenstadt, they're much, much, much better. And in this youth home in Terezinstadt, where there were other girls of her age who also spoke German, uh, Margot met the woman who she later described to me as the love of her life, Ditta Neumann. You can see Ditta sitting with the suit with the white collar at Margot's hits uh kind of attached to her to her left. At night, the girls would climb into each other's bed and exchange intimates, but they never spoke about it during the day. They were also not the only couple who became sexual, but the others did not speak about it either. I was able to look up the surviving memoirs. The girls speak about very close friendships, but they do not speak about queer love and intimacy. Margot is the only one from whom we speak it. In May 1944, first the Hoymans and later also Ditta and her aunt and uh her uh grandmother were deported to Auschwitz. They were deported to a specific section of Berkenau, to the so called B2B Therese in Chad family camp, where women, men, children, and the elderly were kept together. We do not quite know for what reasons. Margot and her family arrived first, and for the first time. Three days she thought she was separated from Maragot, uh, from Ditta. Pardon me, I'm getting carried away. And she cried the whole time. She didn't cry because she was sent to the unknown. She didn't cry because she was in this horrible camp where the rumors quickly came about where the smoke is coming from and what it means. She cried because she was away from Ditta and she was completely without comfort. And eventually Ditta and her family were deported to Auschwitz too. And Margot told me that I was happy. And this is the moment when really my skills, this interview completely broke down, and I said, You were happy in Auschwitz? And she said, Ditta was my whole world. That was everything that mattered to me. The both girls worked in the child barracks. They tried to support the children who were there. Everything that Margot really paid attention to was her girlfriend. And eventually in early July 44, the SS decided to close down the family camp to select everyone who was fit for labor and to send them to satellite camps across Germany and today's Poland. At everyone who was not fit for work to send to gas chambers. After six weeks in the family camp, people knew pretty much exactly what selection means. At Margot's parents said, Your sister is too young. She doesn't stand a chance at the selection. We will all go to our desk together. This is the moment that Margot said, I will follow Ditta. I will not follow you. Not because she wanted to live, but because she told me the only thing that I had on my mind was Ditta. She was my whole world. Margot's mother could not understand. Her father said, Okay, if this is what you want to do, and he cried as he spoke to her those words. This was quite a classical old-fashioned German family. It was the only and last time that Margot saw her father die, uh, cry. And then when she was telling me the story as an old lady, she was crying. But back then, the only thing really on her mind was Dittam. And she said goodbye to her family, went through the selection a couple of days later, was sent from the Frauenlage Auschwitz, from the women's camp in Auschwitz to Hamburg to force labor. And in the following nine months, Ditta at Margot went through three satellite camps, had to do forced labor, had to erect interim housing for the hamburgers whose houses were bombed to smitharines in the rough bombing in July 1943. They had to shovel snow, they had to dig trenches against the British army that then came at the end of April 1945. But because Margot was young, because she was slender, because she was short, because she was always a little eater, she told me actually, you know, I did not have a bad time in Hamburg. I was in love, I was with Dita, that was everything that mattered to me. Sometimes the two girls heard the fellow prisoners gossip about them, saying it's not natural that they are so close. Because they spent the nights at the bunk bed together, they hugged, they kissed, they enchaged intimates, and this is for the first time that Margot realized that what she's doing with her girlfriend is something that she needs to be more careful about hiding. There was also a guard who forced a Jewish woman into a relationship. The woman had shown her, was a classical butch, and in describing this guard, Anneliese Kohlmann, the prisoners use the name lesbian. Again, for the first time, Margot understood that she is a lesbian, that this is an inscription that assigns to her, but it's also something that she cannot really be proud about and needs to be quite careful about how she depicts it. Eventually, by the beginning of April 1945, the SS sent all of the Jewish women from the many satellite camps across Hamburg to Bergen-Belsen. Bergen-Belsen, as pretty much everybody in this room knows, at this point was a death camp. The Nazis were using it to dump the prisoners and let them die of the horrible conditions there. And very nearly Margot would have died, but then the British and the Canadian came, liberated her, took care of her, and she was sent in June 45 to recover in Sweden. She was also separated from Ditta, who was not quite as sick. In Sweden, she had a second start in life. She recovered, she ate, she learned Swedish. She was adopted by a very kind woman who let her do anything she wanted. With her big grin, she told me, I met a gorgeous blonde, tall Swedish woman on a summer camp, and for the first time I had real sex with her. I didn't ask what she means with sex. And it's quite interesting how she felt the urge to, you know, boast to me about tall, gorgeous, blonde woman from Sweden. And then she very nearly stayed in Sweden, but didn't, because she had surviving relatives in New York who invited her to come over. And she thought, I will give it a year, and then I can go back to Sweden, which is much better. And then the year in New York and the lesbian subculture in Greenwich Village really attracted her and she made the US her home. She learned English, she started taking college classes, she started working for an advertising agency. If you have seen Mad Men, she was a little bit like Peggy Olsen of her time. And then by the early 1950s, she felt she owed it to her that family to have children of her own to continue the family. And even though she knew she is only attracted to women, and although she was very specific that sexually she was only happy with other women, she married a man, had two children, cheated on him on the weekends, and lived with him until the 1970s, when they got divorced. Not because of her infidelities, but because the marriage fell apart due to problems on the side of the husband. But it was really only when she moved to Arizona, when she was 88 years of age, in 2016, two years before I met her, that she came out to her children, to her grandchildren, to her daughters-in-law, and they said, Finally, we knew all along what Alice knew. They were very happy for the grandmother that she could come out and that she could live on her terms. And that was also the conditions how I could meet her. When she passed away in May 2022 of old age, she had obituar in the Times of London. But I think what would have pleased her the most that she had an obituary in her beloved New York Times, which also went viral. And with that, I want to come to my last case study, namely Humboldt, the German, Jewish, Danish clown, and female impersonator. And it was their position as a clown and female impersonator that is the one example of gender non-conforming person in victim society. And I wouldn't want to give a talk about queer local history in this day and age and not to have a trans figure. Why do I speak about a female impersonator as a trans or gender non-conforming figure when I do not really know what Hambo ever said about that? Because the Doyen of Trans Studies Susan Stryker, or more recently, Jacob Bloomfield, includes female and male impersonator into our trans histories, also making space for what we do not know. And we can say about Humbo, this is a life, they lived their whole life. They also really played with the boundaries, but also with being uttered constantly. Humbo's complexity disturbed the rigid sexual and gender categories in which the prisoner societies in general and in Theresenstadt in particular operated, and yet they persevered. Who was Humbo? Well, by their civil name, Harry Heimann, born in a Balin Jewish family in 1907, grew up in a middle-class Jewish family and trained as an opera singer at the University of Music or Universite de Kunsten. After their education, they started working as a clown under the nickname Humbo, specializing as female impersonator. They were attacked by the SR by the stormtroopers in 1933, escaped Germany via Stettin to Helsing, went from there to Denmark. And then they had some eight years where they did really well. They worked as a member of the famous Cavalinia Clown Group and toured Europe and America. And why do we know it? Because in 1945, just before the liberation, they submitted the CV to the Freizeitgestaltung to the leisure activity in Theresinstadt. And they toured Europe and America. In October 43, Hambo was among those unhappy about 500 Jews in Denmark who were caught by the Nazis and deported to Theresinstadt. In the ghetto, Hambo became a fixture of the cultural life as a comedian, clown, and female impersonator. Here we see the picture by Francischek Lustig after the Wollukash, an established Prague artist who was part of the artist's graphic workshop in the ghetto. Lustig shows Humbo as no longer a young and beautiful man or man, unlike Humbo's friend Ralph Oppenheim, an old gay man from Copenhagen. At this point, Humbo Wesser is seven years old and very thin, and I think this picture shows it quite well. Oppenheim, in his diary that you can find in the Copenhagen Danish Jewish Museum, mentioned this fellow gay inmate a few times in the diary, often in cruel terms, and I really have to stress what will come now is quite in your face. Quote, with mother in the cafe house, where we were invited by the conductor Peter Deutsch, who directed the orchestra. Methambo, who entertained us, much thinner, more sharp in his ways, whatever can have costed, according to hearsay, he fornicates his soul out of his body. He, however, got more to eat more than most people. A part earned by his performing and a part by probably earned by lowering down. How the fuck is this possible with this measly appearance, little one? End of quote. Oppenheim speculated that Humbo earned extra food through sex work. That would indicate that interesting stat we have not only a heterosexual sexual batter, which is evidenced, but also a queer one. But it is also possible that Oppenheim's remark was simply a nesty remark instead of informative. And there is no way to cross-check that. But there is another difficult part to the story of Humbo. Several of the fellow Danish survivors recalled that Humbo made passes on boys and young men. The Czech writer Arnois Lustig, who, when he was imprisoned in Therese, was a teenager himself, wrote a short story in 1958 that includes a singer, Hannibal de Humble. The singer in Lustig's description stroll through the ghetto and quote, jotted down the names of boys in the notebooks, inviting the best-looking ones into his room. End of quote. I mentioned that I will have some difficult bits in this history, and these are difficult facts to digest. We have Holocaust victims performing and acting, acts of sexual violence against each other, in fact, against children. And yet we need to make space for them. Erich Lichtblau was a decorator from Ostrava. In his wartime sketch, Hambo, the pop hit singer that he redrew after the war, and here we see the picture that he drew up in the 60s in the kibbutz in Israel, cemented the ordering of Hambo as the other. The artwork shows Hambo's campness in their red lips and fake eyelashes. Their falsetto voices alluded in the rising notes. But, and that is important, all this is shown in combination with signs of aging, visibly Jewish men. There is the receding hairline, wrinkles, glasses, this big aquiline nose. Together sent a homophobic message. We laugh at Humbo, we don't laugh with them. They are the other, they are a techy, aging track queen. Hambo was lucky and survived in Terezenstadt. Together with the most Danish deportees, at the end of the war, they were brought to Sweden. They returned to Denmark. But after the three years of imprisonment in Theresenstadt, they were no longer able to perform on stage. They got married to a waitress called Edith Jansen, and one of the very few people who were their friends, the young German emigrant Leo Sebel, who I was able to interview in 2010, recalled that it was a marriage of convenience and that Edith supported her spouse. Hambo died in 1995 when I wrote for the Danish newspaper and asked who knew Hambo, no one wrote back. Let me come to the conclusion. What do we get by telling histories of fear desire in the Holocaust? It enables us to question and deconstruct the normal. Memory of the Holocaust produces so many highly normative mass narratives. One chance of queer history of the Holocaust is, I think, a way as a key to open new doors, allowing new perspectives, asking us tough questions, mixing up what we know, making space for a better, a more inclusive and less judgmental history. That is, in the current age of politics, of return fascism. History that is so often instrumentalized, fake facts, and deep divisions, particularly in the liberal and progressive camps, quite important. I believe that we need to build bridges and not trenches. We need to make that happen, a space for an inclusive history, and we need to make space for the difficult parts. Thank you.