Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls delivers annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture

| Staff Writer

A somber, hushed silence enveloped the Clark Fox Forum as professor Caroline Sturdy Colls took to the stage to share her research on archeological evidence found at the sites of the Treblinka I and II Nazi labor and extermination camps. 

Sturdy Colls, professor of Holocaust Archaeology and Genocide Investigation and the Director of the Center of Archaeology at the University of Huddersfield, delivered the speech on Nov. 13 for WashU’s annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture, which was inaugurated in 1989 by Chancellor William H. Stanford. 

The lecture takes place around Nov. 9 each year, in remembrance of the violence against Jewish individuals that took place in Nazi Germany during the November Pogroms of 1939, an event known widely as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass. 

Sturdy Colls’ research at the sites of the Treblinka in Poland has placed her at the forefront of the study of genocide through the lens of forensic archeology, which is the use of archaeological techniques to investigate crime scenes. 

“My archeological investigations have located and interpreted the physical evidence of this camp,” Sturdy Colls said. “This led to the discovery of the camp boundaries, many structures in the reception and administration camp areas, the old and new gas chamber buildings where most people were murdered within 15 to 20 minutes, and various killing sites within the camp terrain, including mass graves and ash disposal sites.”

Sturdy Colls said that she and her team found evidence of extreme brutality and mass murder of both non-Jewish Polish citizens and Jewish individuals occurring in the Treblinka I labor camp before extermination camp Treblinka II was constructed. She explained that they used tools like aerial photography, LIDAR laser scanning, geophysical surveys, and witness testimonies to do so. 

“This area is now covered in trees, and this makes it very, very difficult to see anything on the ground and anything from the air,” Sturdy Colls said. “But one of the great advantages of LIDAR is that you can strip that vegetation away to get a better model, which shows you indicators of where mass graves might be present.”

Unlike some past Holocaust archeologists, Sturdy Colls’ team stressed the importance of adhering to Jewish law, which requires that bodies in mass graves are not disturbed.

“We decided that the compromise would be to strip away some of the surface detritus [at the execution site] to see if we could see human remains present and cover them back over immediately if we confirmed that they were,” Sturdy Colls said.

Sturdy Colls added that the findings she discussed during her lecture will be published next year in a novel named “Finding Treblinka.” 

In an interview with Student Life after her lecture, Sturdy Colls discussed how she first became interested in this completely new field of study.

“At that time, although forensic archeology was a sort of field, Holocaust archeology wasn’t,” Sturdy Colls said. “There wasn’t a job in what I ended up doing at all, and I think, for me as a student, it was the professors I met along the way; it was the communities that trusted me enough to do this research and the people that I met [that inspired me].”

In the Q&A session that followed the lecture, students and community members discussed the reasons they chose to attend. Some described their personal experience having visited concentration camp sites, and others pointed to a general desire to learn more about the Holocaust. 

Wen Gao, a first-year masters of social work student, said that she came to the lecture hoping to gain a more comprehensive understanding of what occurred during the Holocaust.

“I know what happened in that time period, and I just have a very conceptual understanding in my mind,” Gao said. “But some of the examples she talked about today really shocked me emotionally.”

Sturdy Colls stressed the importance of presenting in-depth research at Holocaust remembrance events to allow attendees to gain clarity on the subject.

“I think obviously as time passes with any crimes, it is easier to forget, to overlook, to distort narratives,” Sturdy Colls said. “And so I think it’s really, really important that Holocaust education is rigorous. There are so many narratives about the Holocaust, which often are much more nuanced and complicated than we realize.”

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