ABOUT
Dr Bea Lewkowicz is an orał historian, filmmaker, curator, and photographer. Her work focusses on identity, displacement, trauma, loss, and belonging, often through the lens of her interviews with Holocaust survivors and refugees, who built new lives post WW2.
Throughout her diverse activities, Bea’s work has made a contribution to the larger picture of British Jewish history by creating archives of Jewish migration, pre and post WW2. As an oral historian her overriding quality is her sensitivity to the needs of her interviewees, often maintaining close relationships with the interviewee and their families, long after the interview itself. Moreover, having personally conducted some 350 interviews with survivors and refugees, she has displayed unwavering dedication to the future of Holocaust education and Sephardi/Mizrahi history, recording, preserving and making accessible the stories of Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from MENA countries for the benefit of future generations.
Bea, who grew up in Germany, as the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, and is the co-founder and director of AJR Refugee Voices Testimony Archive and Sephardi Voices UK. Over the years, she has trained many oral history interviewers and has been a consultant on numerous oral history projects.
Bea has an extensive personal archive of interviews, with Salonikan Holocaust survivors and German-Jewish refugees, including the writer and illustrator Judith Kerr OBE and actor Andrew Sachs. Most recently, Bea conceived and led the development of the Holocaust Testimony UK Portal, a project of the Association of Jewish Refugees and the UK government, a legacy project of the British IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) 2024/2025 presidency.
Bea’s oral history projects can be accessed internationally in leading museums and research institutions. They have formed the basis of exhibitions around the world including London’s Jewish Museum, Vienna’s Literaturhaus and Berlin’s Bundestag. They have been used as primary sources for many projects including Daniel Finklestein’s recent book Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad. Bea curated the 80 Objects/80 Lives exhibition, which was launched together with the Holocaust Testimony UK Portal at the IHRA plenary in London.
Bea’s films include Continental Britons, Double Exposure, Voices For A Better World, Two Minutes Silence and, most recently Daisy and Louise. They have been shown internationally and used in major Holocaust remembrance events. Still In Our Hands is Bea’s travelling photography exhibition of her portraits of Kindertransport refugees. It debuted at the Jewish Museum, London, in 2019.
Books include: The Jewish Community of Salonika (2006), This Is The Story Of My Life (2020) and Émigré Voices (2022). Bea is an active speaker and Holocaust educator, with a focus on women’s stories of survival, the Kindertransport, the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, and the Holocaust in Slovakia, including her mother’s story of survival. She has recently joined the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) as a second-generation speaker.
She is a member of the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, University of London, is on the editorial board of Jewish Renaissance, and is a council member of the International Oral History Association.
