Lauren Fedewa

Lauren Fedewa is a second-year PhD student in the Department of History and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. Lauren specializes in Holocaust Studies, Conflict, Violence, and Genocide, Twentieth Century Europe,  Modern Germany, and Jewish Studies. Her research focuses on the topic of Polish and Soviet forced labor during WWII, as well as Jewish women who 'passed' as Polish-Christian forced laborers as a survival strategy during the Holocaust. Lauren's master’s thesis, titled “Between Extermination and Child-Rearing: The Foreign Child-Care Facilities of Volkswagen and Velpke,” analyzed two 'foreign child-care facilities,' institutions established to accommodate infants born to Eastern European forced laborers in Nazi Germany between 1943 and 1945. Lauren continued her research on 'foreign child-care facilities' in Hannover, Germany between 2018 and 2019 after being awarded a U.S. Fulbright Student Research Grant.