Alum pursues research in Prague with follow up in Israel

Laura Brade graduated from PLU in 2008, summa cum laude, with a double major in History and German. She took Bob Ericksen’s Holocaust course in the spring of 2006. She then studied for a year abroad in Freiburg, Germany. She completed her History Capstone Seminar with Bob Ericksen on the topic of the “Kindertransport,” the saving of about 10,000 Jewish children who were sent to England just before the outbreak of World War II.

Brade’s dissertation is titled “Coerced Voluntary Migration: Jewish Flight from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 1939-1941.” She is investigating the ways in which networks of transnational relief organizations facilitated the successful emigration of a quarter of the Protectorate’s Jews by helping them to overcome significant obstacles.

By tracing the connections among individuals, local communities, state institutions, and international groups, she investigates why individuals chose to leave the Protectorate; how they implemented emigration strategies; and how they experienced the process of emigration.

Brade was awarded both a Claims Conference Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Holocaust Studies and a Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship to support her dissertation research at a number of archives in the Czech Republic, including the National Archive and the Archive of the Jewish Museum in Prague. This summer, Brade will be presenting at the Sixteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, Israel. Brade intends to return to the U.S. in August 2013 to finish her research and hopes to defend her dissertation in the spring of 2015.