Towards a History of the 'Union of Stateless Victims of Fascism'
In June 1945, in Amsterdam, the Union of Stateless Victims of Fascism was formed. They produced a manifesto which they distributed around the world, calling on states to – amongst other things – provide citizenship. And so the manifesto eventually found its way into the National Archives of Australia, to be read by future historians. In this paper I want to tentatively think through what this group was, how they described themselves, and how we can make sense of the longer histories - of statelessness, survival of fascism, resistance politics, and state lobbying - that they were part of.
Dr Jordana Silverstein is a Senior Research Fellow in the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness in the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (2015) and co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (2016) and Refugee Journeys: Histories of Resettlement, Representation and Resistance (2021). A cultural historian, she researches histories of statelessness, Australian child refugee policies, and Australian Jewish history, focusing on questions of belonging, nationalism, identity, historiography, emotions, sexuality, and memory.