During this seminar, we will discuss personal experiences related to the reception of world war two and the Holocaust in the Polish, German and Belarussian society, and the importance of these historical events for the private and national memory cultures. The topics of the first seminar are politics of occupation in Poland, the fate of Jewish population, the origins and functions of KL Auschwitz and the changing historical memory after the liberation and the end of the war. In Warsaw we will learn about approaches to commemoration on the examples of the permanent exhibitions of the Museum of Warsaw and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The history of the Holocaust in Belarus, the memory about the victims and the issue of post-war trauma, will be the focus of the second seminar in Minsk. Belarus, like the majority of the countries of the former USSR, is going through a difficult period of breaking with the tradition of Soviet historiography and moving on towards a reflection and an inclusion of own past into a European and global context. Exemplary cases of preserving historical memory and its gradual transformation is the ghetto in Minsk and the camp in Trostieniec, which, as sites of mass murder of Jews, deported from, among others, Germany, Czech Republic and Austria, are still little known in Europe. The participants will hear lectures of experts and will learn about various national institutions and non-governmental organisations which focus on commemoration. They will be also introduced to the oral history method and they will have an opportunity of conducting interviews with the witnesses of events. A one-day visit in Bobrujsk is also planned. During the visit in a reviving Jewish community there we will consider the issue of preserving and nurturing Jewish culture in Belarus after the war, we will visit the most important sites related to the Jewish history of the town. We will also pay a visit in a memory site “Krasnyj bereg” (the red shore), which is dedicated to the memory of children who died in the war and we will learn about the art work reflecting on the wartime experiences created by children who survived. In Germany we will focus on the perspective of perpetrators. In Nuremberg we will visit the Documentation Centre Reichsparteitagsgelände and we will learn about the role of the city in the period of national socialism. The key issues to be discussed will be the Nuremberg trials and the persecution of wartime criminals. The additional topic explored in the program will be the role of Nuremberg as “the city of Human Rights”. We will consider, together, how commemoration should look like today.