Ms. Vesta Svendsen

Professional Background

Vesta Svendsen is a master’s candidate at Yeshiva University’s Fish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, where she is a FISH Center Student fellow for the “Holocaust in Lithuania Speaker Series.” Svendsen holds a Bachelor’s degree in Russian studies, with a minor in political science and business from Tulane University.

Svendsen is an interviewer for the USC Shoah Visual History Archive, where she gathers Russian-language testimonies from Holocaust survivors. She also provides translations for The Together Plan (TTP), where she currently translates two Russian-language Belarusian-Jewish Holocaust memoirs. Svendsen also assists the French-Belarusian “Une communauté et un espace: La population juive du ghetto de Brest-Litovsk (1941-1943)” project, memorializing the Jewish ghetto population.

Fellowship Research

During her time at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Summer Graduate Student Research Fellow, Svendsen will be working on her research project, "'Sovietization' on the Eve of the Nazi Invasion: Brest, Belarus, 1939 – 1941," which examines the impact of Soviet policy on the Brest Jewish population in the 21 months between the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Operation Barbarossa, and scrutinizes the Jewish-gentile dynamics of western Belarus on the eve of the Nazi invasion. By integrating previously gathered sources from archives in Belarus and the United States, her study delves into various historical archives from different periods. Additionally, her research analyzes multilingual and multinational historiography, testimonies, memoirs, and newspapers, to illustrate the intricacies of the Nazi invasion on June 22, 1941. Svendsen’s project aims to fill a gap in English-language historiography on western Belarus by examining the effects of the influx of Polish Jewish refugees, subsequent deportations, nationalization and asset seizures, persecution of Poles, anti-religious Communist policy, Nazi-Soviet economic policy, language use, and religious tensions within the Jewish inter-community.

Svendsen will utilize the Museum's multilingual regional video testimonies from both Jewish survivors and gentiles, as well as Slavic-language local histories and memoirs, to develop a comparative microhistory of 1939–1941 on both sides of the Bug River. Her work aims to offer a snapshot of a Jewish population cleaved apart by Nazi and Soviet colonialism.

Residency Period: June 1, 2023–August 31, 2023