John Seymour Conway (December 31, 1929 – June 23, 2017) was Professor Emeritus of History at the
University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thre ...
, where he taught for almost 40 years."Remembering Dr. John Conway" Regent College, June 26, 2017. His work focused on the role of the
Vatican
Vatican may refer to:
Vatican City, the city-state ruled by the pope in Rome, including St. Peter's Basilica, Sistine Chapel, Vatican Museum
The Holy See
* The Holy See, the governing body of the Catholic Church and sovereign entity recognized ...
and German churches during the
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
relations; and on the
Holocaust in Hungary
The Holocaust in Hungary was the dispossession, deportation, and systematic murder of more than half of the Hungarian Jews, primarily after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944.
At the time of the German invasion, Hungary had a Jewis ...
and
Slovakia
Slovakia (; sk, Slovensko ), officially the Slovak Republic ( sk, Slovenská republika, links=no ), is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the s ...
.
Author of the landmark study ''The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933–1945'' (1968), Conway was one of the founding contributors, in 1970, to the Scholars' Conference on the Church Struggles and the Holocaust. He was awarded the Queen's Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977.
Early life and education
Conway was born, one of three boys, in London, England, to Elsie Conway, a marine biologist, and her husband. He came from a family that prized education. His mother was a graduate of
Glasgow University
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, image_size = 150px
, caption = Coat of arms
Flag
, latin_name = Universitas Glasguensis
, motto = la, Via, Veritas, Vita
, ...
; his father had graduated from
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...
. Conway's paternal grandfather was the classicist
Robert Seymour Conway
Robert Seymour Conway, FBA (1864–1933) was a British classical scholar and comparative philologist.
Born in Stoke Newington, he was the elder brother of Katharine St John Conway. He was Hulme Professor of Latin Literature, at Victoria Univ ...
.
Katharine Glasier
Katharine Glasier (25 September 1867 – 14 June 1950) was an English socialist politician, journalist and novelist. She became a founder member of the Independent Labour Party in 1893.
Early years
Glasier was born in Stoke Newington as Kathar ...
, the teacher and
Independent Labour Party
The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was a British political party of the left, established in 1893 at a conference in Bradford, after local and national dissatisfaction with the Liberals' apparent reluctance to endorse working-class candidates ...
politician, was his great aunt.
After attending
Sedbergh School
Sedbergh School is a public school (English independent day and boarding school) in the town of Sedbergh in Cumbria, in North West England. It comprises a junior school for children aged 4 to 13 and the main school for 13 to 18 year olds. I ...
, an independent school in Cumbria, Conway joined the British Army in 1948 as a conscript, working in intelligence in Austria. After being allowed to leave the army six months early to pursue his studies, he began reading English literature at St John's College, Cambridge, before switching to history. He completed both his BA and PhD at St John's.
Career
In 1955 Conway moved to Canada and taught international relations at the
University of Manitoba
The University of Manitoba (U of M, UManitoba, or UM) is a Canadian public research university in the province of Manitoba.defend his thesis and met his wife, Ann, on the boat on the way back to Canada. In 1957 Conway joined the history department at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1957, teaching modern European history and international relations. His 474-page study, ''The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933–1945'', was published in 1968 in London by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The book examined the position of several Christian churches during the Third Reich, including the Catholics, Methodists, Baptists and Jehovah's Witnesses. Conway also wrote papers on the role of the government and Jewish organizations during the Holocaust in Hungary and Slovakia, and about
Rudolf Vrba
Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg; 11 September 1924 – 27 March 2006) was a Slovak-Jewish biochemist who, as a teenager in 1942, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. He escaped from the c ...
, the Auschwitz escapee. On the role of the churches, he wrote:
Conway spent nearly 40 years at UBC; he was appointed professor emeritus when he retired in 1995. In 1998 he became the Smallman Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of History at the
University of Western Ontario
The University of Western Ontario (UWO), also known as Western University or Western, is a public research university in London, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on of land, surrounded by residential neighbourhoods and the Thames R ...
. He sat on the editorial boards of ''Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte'' and the ''Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies''; from 1995 he was also director of the Association of Contemporary Church Historians and editor of their newsletter. He delivered a lecture at
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...
in Jerusalem in 1993.
Conway was a member of the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster's Refugee Liaison Committee. On the UBC campus, he had been long associated with the Student Christian Movement, and the World University Service of Canada (WUSC), for which he acted for many years as faculty advisor. He was a member of St James' Anglican Parish, Vancouver.
Selected works
*(1965). Conway, John S. "The Silence of Pope Pius XII". ''The Review of Politics''. 27(1):105–131.
*(1968). Conway, John S. ''The Nazi persecution of the Churches 1933–1945.'' London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. . Reissued in 1997 and 2001 by Regent College Publishing, Vancouver.
**(1969). Conway, John S. ''La Persécution Nazie des Églises, 1933–1945''. Paris: Éditions France-Empire.
**(1969). Conway, John S. ''Die Nationalsozialistische Kirchenpolitik 1933–1945: Ihre Ziele, Widersprüche und Fehlschläge.'' Munich: Kaiser.
*(1973). Conway, John S. "The Vatican, Great Britain, and Relations with Germany, 1938–1940". ''The Historical Journal''. 16(1): 147–167.
*(1973). Conway, John S. "Between Apprehension and Indifference: Allied Attitudes to the Destruction of Hungarian Jewry". ''Wiener Library Bulletin''. 1973/4: 37–48.
*(1974). Conway, John S. "The Churches, the Slovak State and the Jews 1939–1945. ''The Slavonic and East European Review''. 52(126): 85–112.
*(1977). Conway, John S. ''Visit to the Tibetan settlements in northern India, 1977''. New Westminster, B.C.: Institute of Environmental Studies, Douglas College.
*(1978). Conway, John S. ''Bourgeois German Pacifism during the First World War''. Papers of the Canadian Historical Association.
*(1979).
*(1980). Conway, John S. "The Holocaust and the Historians". ''The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science''. 450(1): 153–164.
*(1980). Conway, John S. "The Churches", in Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton (eds.). ''The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide. Millwood, New York: Kraus International Publications.
*(1984).
*(1984). Conway, John S "The First Report about Auschwitz" Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, 1: 133–151.
*(1984). Conway, John S. "Christians and Jews After the Holocaust: New Views in German Theology". ''Shofar''. 2(3): 21–22.
*(1986). Conway, John S. "The Holocaust in Hungary: Recent Controversies and Reconsiderations", in
Randolph L. Braham
Randolph Lewis Braham (December 20, 1922 – November 25, 2018) was an American historian and political scientist, born in Romania, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the City College and The Graduate Center of the City U ...
(ed.). ''The Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry: Essays, Documents, Depositions''. New York: Institute of Holocaust Studies, City University of New York.
*(1986). Conway, John S. "Protestant Missions to the Jews 1810–1980: Ecclesiastical Imperialism or Theological Aberration?". ''Holocaust and Genocide Studies'' 1(1):127–146.
*(1987). Conway, John S. "Catholicism and the Jews during the Nazi Period and After", in Otto Dov Kulka and Paul R. Mendes-Flohr (eds.). ''Judaism and Christianity under the Impact of National Socialism''. Jerusalem: Historical Society for Israel, 435–451.
*(1989). Conway, John S. "Canada and the Holocaust", in
Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer ( he, יהודה באואר; born April 6, 1926) is a Czech-born Israeli historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University ...
et al. (eds.). ''Remembering for the Future: Working Papers and Addenda''. Vol. 1: Jews and Christians during and after the Holocaust. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 296–305.
*(1991). Conway, John S. "Remembering the Holocaust". ''The Sewanee Review''. 99(2): 286–295.
*(1994). Conway, John S. "The Vatican, Germany and the Holocaust", in Peter Kent, John Francis Pollard (eds.). ''Papal Diplomacy in the Modern Age''. Praeger.
*(1994). Conway, John S "The Stasi and the Churches: Between Coercion and Compromise in East German Protestantism, 1949–89" ''Journal of Church and State''.
*(1995). Conway, John S. "Christian-Jewish Relations during the Fifties". ''Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte''. 3(1): 11–27.
*(2002).
*(2005).