In Unwritten Rome, a new book by the author of Myths of Rome, T.P. Wiseman presents us with an imaginative and appealing picture of the early society of pre-literary Rome-as a free and uninhibited world in which the arts and popular entertainments flourished. This original angle allows the voice of the Roman people to be retrieved empathetically from contemporary artefacts and figured monuments, and from selected passages of later literature.How do you understand a society that didn't write down its own history? That is the problem with early Rome, from the Bronze Age down to the conquest of Italy around 300 BC. The texts we have to use were all written centuries later, and their view of early Rome is impossibly anachronistic. But some possibly authentic evidence may survive, if we can only tease it out - like the old story of a Roman king acting as a magician, or the traditional custom that may originate in the practice of ritual prostitution. This book consists of eighteen attempts to find such material and make sense of it.

Relations between Jews and their neighbours in eastern Europe have long been perceived, both in the popular mind and in conventional scholarship, as being in a permanent state of conflict. This volume counters that image by exploring long-neglected aspects of inter-group interaction and exchange. In so doing it broadens our understanding of Jewish history and culture, as well as that of eastern Europe. Whereas traditional historiography concentrates on the differences between Jews and non-Jews, the essays here focus on commonalities: the social, political, and economic worlds that members of different groups often shared. Shifting the emphasis in this way allows quite a different picture to emerge. Jews may have been subject to the whims of ruling powers and influenced by broader cultural and political developments, but at the same time they exerted a discernible influence on them - the social, cultural, and political spheres were ones that they not only shared, but that they also helped to create. This model of reciprocal influence and exchange has much to offer to the study of inter-group relations in eastern Europe and beyond. Designed to move the study of east European Jewry beyond the intellectual and academic discourse of difference that has long troubled scholars, this volume contributes to our perception of how members of different groups operate and interact on a multitude of different levels. The various contributions represent a wide cross-section of opinions and approaches - historical, literary, and cultural. Taken together they move our understanding of east European Jewry from the realm of the mythical to a more rational mode. In addition to essays considering interactions between Jews and Poles, other contributions examine relations between Jews and other ethnic groups (Lithuanians, Russians), discuss negotiations with various governments (Habsburg, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and Soviet), analyse exchanges between Jews and different cultural realms (German, Polish, and Russian), and explore how the politics of memory affects contemporary interpretations of these and related phenomena. CONTRIBUTORS Karen Auerbach, Israel Bartal, Ela Bauer, Jan Blonski, Marek Edelman, Michael Fleming, Dorota Glowacka, Regina Grol, Francois Guesnet, Brian Horowitz, Agnieszka Jagodinska, Jeff Kopstein, Sergei Kravtsov, Rachel Manekin, Czeslaw Milosz, Karin Neuberger, Przemyslaw Rozanski, Kai Struve, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Jerzy Turowicz, Scott Ury, Kalman Weiser, Jason Wittenberg, Marcin Wodzinski, Piotr Wrobel

Adolf Hitler was born in Austria in April 1889, and shot himself in a bunker in Berlin in April 1945 with Russian soldiers beating at the door, surrounded by the ruins of the country he had vowed to restore to greatness. Adolf Hitler: The Curious and Macabre Anecdotes - part biography, part miscellany, part historical overview - presents the life and times of der Fuhrer in a unique and compelling manner. The early life of the loner son of an Austrian customs official gave little clue as to his later years. As a decorated, twice-wounded soldier of the First World War, through shrewd manipulation of Germany's offended national pride after the war, Hitler ascended rapidly through the political system, rousing the masses behind him with a thundering rhetoric that amplified the nation's growing resentment and brought him the adulation of millions. By the age of 44, he had become both a millionaire with secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Holland, and the unrivalled leader of Germany, whose military might he had resurrected; six years later, he provoked the world to war. Patrick Delaforce's book is a masterly assessment of Hitler's life, career and beliefs, drawn not only from its subject's own writings, speeches, conversation, poetry and art, but also from the accounts of those who knew him, loved him, or loathed him. The journey of an ordinary young man to callous dictator and architect of the 'Final Solution' makes for provocative and important - thought not always comfortable - reading.

Volume Two of this new documentary history of the Soviet Union comprises over 270 documents and is organised into four chronologically distinct parts, subdivided thematically; it runs from the fraught diplomatic and military preamble of the Great Patriotic War to the final fracturing of the USSR along the national fault-lines of its 15 Union Republics. Slight overlap of chronological coverage with Volume One allows increased attention in Volume Two to foreign affairs. Areas in this volume that attract greatest student interest are the epic dramas at the beginning and end of the period -- the Great Patriotic War and Perestroika. The commentary is by Edward Acton, Professor of Modern European History at the University of East Anglia, who has published widely on the Russian revolution and the history of Russia and the USSR. The documents have been translated by Tom Stableford, Assistant Librarian, Slavonic and East European Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, but this is only half the story. Doris Bergen reveals how the Holocaust extended beyond the Jews to engulf millions of other victims in related programmes of mas-murder. The Nazi killing machine began with the disabled, and went on to target Afro-Germans, Gypsies, non-Jewish Poles, French African soldiers, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexual men and Jehovah's Witnesses. As Nazi Germany conquered more territories and peoples, Hitler's war turned soldiers, police officers and doctors into trained killers, creating a veneer of legitimacy around vicious acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Using the testimonies of both survivors and eyewitnesses, as well as a wealth of rarely seen photographs, Doris Bergen shows the true extent of the catastrophe that overwhelmed Europe during the Second World War, in a gripping story of the lives and deaths of real people.

Did 'sex education' actually exist in eighteenth-century France? Shaped by competing currents of religious dogma, atheist materialism and bourgeois morality, eighteenth-century France marked the beginning of what Michel Foucault called 'une fermentation discursive' on matters related to sex. But when we consult the educational theorists or philosophes of the time for their opinions on preparing a young person for life as a sexual being, we are met with a telling silence. Did an Enlightenment era that dared to make sex an object of discourse also dare to make it an object of pedagogy? Sex education in eighteenth-century France brings together specialists from a range of disciplines to address these issues. Using a wide variety of literary, historical, religious and pedagogical sources, contributors explore for the first time the nexus between sex and instruction. Although these two categories were publicly kept distinct, writers were effectively shaping attitudes and behaviours. Unraveling the complex system of rules and codes through which knowledge about sex was communicated, contributors uncover a new dimension in the practice of education in the eighteenth century.

A masterful history of the great dynasty of the Netherlands' Middle Ages. 'A sumptuous feast of a book' The Times, Books of the Year 'Thrillingly colourful and entertaining' Sunday Times 'A thrilling narrative of the brutal dazzlingly rich wildly ambitious duchy' Simon Sebag Montefiore 5 stars! Daily Telegraph 'A masterpiece' De Morgen 'A history book that reads like a thriller' Le Soir At the end of the fifteenth century, Burgundy was extinguished as an independent state. It had been a fabulously wealthy, turbulent region situated between France and Germany, with close links to the English kingdom. Torn apart by the dynastic struggles of early modern Europe, this extraordinary realm vanished from the map. But it became the cradle of what we now know as the Low Countries, modern Belgium and the Netherlands. This is the story of a thousand years, a compulsively readable narrative history of ambitious aristocrats, family dysfunction, treachery, savage battles, luxury and madness. It is about the decline of knightly ideals and the awakening of individualism and of cities, the struggle for dominance in the heart of northern Europe, bloody military campaigns and fatally bad marriages. It is also a remarkable cultural history, of great art and architecture and music emerging despite the violence and the chaos of the tension between rival dynasties.

Exam board: Pearson Edexcel; OCR Level: AS/A-level Subject: History First teaching: September 2015 First exams: Summer 2016 (AS); Summer 2017 (A-level) Put your trust in the textbook series that has given thousands of A-level History students deeper knowledge and better grades for over 30 years. Updated to meet the demands of today's A-level specifications, this new generation of Access to History titles includes accurate exam guidance based on examiners' reports, free online activity worksheets and contextual information that underpins students' understanding of the period. > Develop strong historical knowledge: In-depth analysis of each topic is both authoritative and accessible > Build historical skills and understanding: Downloadable activity worksheets can be used independently by students or edited by teachers for classwork and homework > Learn, remember and connect important events and people: An introduction to the period, summary diagrams, timelines and links to additional online resources support lessons, revision and coursework > Achieve exam success: Practical advice matched to the requirements of your A-level specification incorporates the lessons learnt from previous exams > Engage with sources, interpretations and the latest historical research: Students will evaluate a rich collection of visual and written materials, plus key debates that examine the views of different historians

The true story of a woman's incredible journey into the heart of the Third Reich to find the man she loves. When the Gestapo seize 20-year-old Olga Czepf's fiance she is determined to find him and sets off on an extraordinary 2,000-mile search across Nazi-occupied Europe risking betrayal, arrest and death. As the Second World War heads towards its bloody climax, she refuses to give up - even when her mission leads her to the gates of Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps...Now 88 and living in London, Olga tells with remarkable clarity of the courage and determination that drove her across war-torn Europe, to find the man she loved. The greatest untold true love story of World War Two.

From the end of the 15th century until the 18th, Spanish Jews carried on Jewish practices in the shadow of the Inquisition. Those caught were forced to recant or be burnt at the stake. Drawing on their confessions and trial documents, this book tells their story.

How did print spread through France to become a major force during the eighteenth century? This question has remained unanswered because we know surprisingly little about the infrastructure of the book trade. Between state and market: printing and bookselling in eighteenth-century France explores the networks of printers and booksellers that covered eighteenth-century France, situating these key cultural intermediaries within their political and socio-economic environments. To draw an overview of printing and bookselling, and to chart their evolution across the century, the author analyzes a series of administrative surveys conducted between 1700 and 1777 by the Direction de la librairie. The hundreds of reports the central administration gathered on every printing shop and bookseller in the kingdom reveal not only where book professionals could be found and who they were, but what materials they were printing and what books they were selling. Survey responses also show that book policing was deficient in most of the provinces, allowing pirated and forbidden books to pour into the kingdom from nearby foreign presses. Unable to control the circulation of books, the administration resorted to an austere Colbertist policy to restrict the number of printing shops. State intervention brought a decline in provincial book publishing, but printers could still thrive on job printing, local-interest publications and pirating. By contrast, the central administration let booksellers of all kinds proliferate, particularly in the second half of the century. Better suited than traditional printer-booksellers to supply whatever books readers wanted, retail booksellers cashed in on a booming market demand. Examining the booktrade from each provincial city upwards, the author tracks the intricate web of relations between state, market, local institutions and book professionals that shaped the diffusion of print, and thereby the development of French literature and the experience of everyday readers.

In this dazzling work of history, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author follows Benjamin Franklin to France for the crowning achievement of his career
In December of 1776 a small boat delivered an old man to France." So begins an enthralling narrative account of how Benjamin Franklin-seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French-convinced France, an absolute monarchy, to underwrite America's experiment in democracy.
When Franklin stepped onto French soil, he well understood he was embarking on the greatest gamble of his career. By virtue of fame, charisma, and ingenuity, Franklin outmaneuvered British spies, French informers, and hostile colleagues; engineered the Franco-American alliance of l778; and helped to negotiate the peace of l783. The eight-year French mission stands not only as Franklin's most vital service to his country but as the most revealing of the man.
In "A Great Improvisation," Stacy Schiff draws from new and little-known sources to illuminate the least-explored part of Franklin's life. Here is an unfamiliar, unforgettable chapter of the Revolution, a rousing tale of American infighting, and the treacherous backroom dealings at Versailles that would propel George Washington from near decimation at Valley Forge to victory at Yorktown. From these pages emerge a particularly human and yet fiercely determined Founding Father, as well as a profound sense of how fragile, improvisational, and international was our country's bid for independence.

A SPECTATOR and PROSPECT Book of the Year 'Ceaselessly interesting, knowledgeable and evocative' Spectator 'A fresh way to write history' Alan Johnson 'A quirky, amused, erudite homage to France . . . ambitious and original' The Times _____ France: An Adventure History is a profoundly original and endlessly entertaining history of France, from the first century BC to the present day, based on countless new discoveries and thirty years of exploring France on foot, by bicycle and in the library. Beginning with the Roman army's first recorded encounter with the Gauls and ending with the Gilets Jaunes protests in the era of Emmanuel Macron, each chapter is an adventure in its own right. Along the way, readers will find the usual faces, events and themes of French history - Louis XIV, the French Revolution, the French Resistance, the Tour de France - but all presented in a shining new light. Graham Robb does not offer a standard dry list of facts and dates, but instead a panorama of France, teeming with characters, full of stories, journeys and coincidences, giving readers a thrilling sense of discovery and enlightenment. France: An Adventure History is a vivid, living history of one of the world's most fascinating nations by a ceaselessly entertaining writer in complete command of subject and style. _____ 'A rich and vibrant narrative . . . clear-eyed but imaginative storytelling' Financial Times 'Full of life' Prospect

Told for the first time from their perspective, the story of children who survived the chaos and trauma of the Holocaust How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressing question for the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, whose prewar memories were vague or nonexistent. In this beautifully written account, Rebecca Clifford follows the lives of one hundred Jewish children out of the ruins of conflict through their adulthood and into old age. Drawing on archives and interviews, Clifford charts the experiences of these child survivors and those who cared for them-as well as those who studied them, such as Anna Freud. Survivors explores the aftermath of the Holocaust in the long term, and reveals how these children-often branded "the lucky ones"-had to struggle to be able to call themselves "survivors" at all. Challenging our assumptions about trauma, Clifford's powerful and surprising narrative helps us understand what it was like living after, and living with, childhoods marked by rupture and loss.

Although the reconciliation of Jewish and Polish memories of the Holocaust is the central issue in contemporary Polish-Jewish relations, this is the first attempt to examine these divisive memories in a comprehensive way. Until 1989, Polish consciousness of the Second World War subsumed the destruction of Polish Jewry within a communist narrative of Polish martyrdom and heroism. Post-war Jewish memory, by contrast, has been concerned mostly with Jewish martyrdom and heroism (and barely acknowledged the plight of Poles under German occupation). Since the 1980s, however, a significant number of Jews and Poles have sought to identify a common ground and have met with partial but increasing success, notwithstanding the new debates that have emerged in recent years concerning Polish behaviour during the Nazi genocide of the Jews that Poles had ignored for half a century. This volume considers these contentious issues from different angles. Among the topics covered are Jewish memorial projects, both in Poland and beyond its borders, the Polish approach to Holocaust memory under communist rule, and post-communist efforts both to retrieve the Jewish dimension to Polish wartime memory and to reckon with the dark side of the Polish national past. An interview with acclaimed author Henryk Grynberg touches on many of these issues from the personal perspective of one who as a child survived the Holocaust hidden in the Polish countryside, as do the three poems by Grynberg reproduced here. The 'New Views' section features innovative research in other areas of Polish-Jewish studies. A special section is devoted to research concerning the New Synagogue in Poznan, built in 1907, which is still standing only because the Nazis turned it into a swimming-pool. CONTRIBUTORS: Natalia Aleksiun, Assistant Professor in Eastern European Jewish History, Touo College, New York; Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, Head, Section for Holocaust Studies, Centre for European Studies, Jagiellonian University, Krakow; curator, International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum; Boaz Cohen, teacher in Jewish and Holocaust Studies, Shaanan and Western Galilee Colleges, northern Israel; Judith R. Cohen, Director of the Photographic Reference Collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC; Gabriel N. Finder, Associate Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia; Rebecca Golbert, researcher; Regina Grol, Professor of Comparative Literature, Empire State College, State University of New York; Jonathan Huener, Associate Professor of History, University of Vermont; Carol Herselle Krinsky, Professor of Fine Arts, New York University; Marta Kurkowska, Lecturer, Institute of History, Jagiellonian, University, Krakow; Joanna B. Michlic, Assistant Professor, Holocaust and Genocide Program, Richard Stockton College, Pomona, New Jersey; Eva Plach, Assistant Professor of History, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada; Antony Polonsky, Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC; Alexander V. Prusin, Associate Professor of History, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro; Jan Schwarz, Senior Lecturer, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago; Maxim D. Shrayer, Professor of Russian and English, Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages, Co-Director, Jewish Studies Program, Boston College; Michael C. Steinlauf, Professor of Jewish History and Culture, Gratz College, Pennsylvania; Robert Szuchta, History teacher, Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz High School, Warsaw; Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Lecturer in Cultural Anthroplogy, Warsaw University; Chair, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Collegium Civitas, Poland; Scott Ury, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University; Bret Werb, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC; Seth L. Wolitz, Gale Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Texas at Austin.

Who was the enigmatic Jean Moulin, a man as skilled in deception as he was in acts of heroism? The memory of this French Resistance hero, who was betrayed to the Gestapo and tortured by Klaus Barbie, the infamous 'Butcher of Lyon', is revered alongside that of other national icons. But Moulin's story is full of unanswered questions and the truth of his life is far more complicated than the legend. Patrick Marnham, winner of the Marsh Prize for biography, thrillingly tells the epic story of France's greatest war hero, bringing to light the shadowy and often deceitful world of the French Resistance, and offers a shocking conclusion to one of the great unsolved mysteries of World War II.

The definitive survey of the countries and territories of Western Europe, comprising expert analysis and commentary, up-to-date economic and socio-political data and extensive directory information. General Survey Essays by leading experts on the area cover issues of regional importance. Country Surveys Individual chapters on each country, comprising: an introductory survey, containing essays on the geography, history and economy of each country, including a chronology and map. an extensive statistical survey of economic and demographic indicators, including area and population, health and welfare, agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, industry, finance, trade, transport, tourism, communications media and education. a comprehensive directory of names and contact details covering the most significant political and commercial institutions. Regional Information a directory of research institutes specializing in the region bibliographies of books and periodicals covering the region.

From the bestselling author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, the fascinating story of how images of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture, and the representation of power for more than 2,000 years What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book-against a background of today's "sculpture wars"-Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the "Twelve Caesars," from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian. Twelve Caesars asks why these murderous autocrats have loomed so large in art from antiquity and the Renaissance to today, when hapless leaders are still caricatured as Neros fiddling while Rome burns. Beginning with the importance of imperial portraits in Roman politics, this richly illustrated book offers a tour through 2,000 years of art and cultural history, presenting a fresh look at works by artists from Memling and Mantegna to the nineteenth-century American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, as well as by generations of weavers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, printers, and ceramicists. Rather than a story of a simple repetition of stable, blandly conservative images of imperial men and women, Twelve Caesars is an unexpected tale of changing identities, clueless or deliberate misidentifications, fakes, and often ambivalent representations of authority. From Beard's reconstruction of Titian's extraordinary lost Room of the Emperors to her reinterpretation of Henry VIII's famous Caesarian tapestries, Twelve Caesars includes fascinating detective work and offers a gripping story of some of the most challenging and disturbing portraits of power ever created. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Poland today is a very different country from the Poland of the past, yet attitudes inherited from the past continue to affect Polish-Jewish relations in the present. In Poland itself, now a free society, memories of the Jewish place in Poland's history, long suppressed by communism, are being re-evaluated. In America the attitudes that had divided the two sides in the Old Country seemed for a long time to be becoming more entrenched. This volume-probably the first comprehensive study of Polish-Jewish relations in North America-explores how this situation came about, and also considers the efforts being made to put the resentments caused by past conflicts to one side as the influences long dominant in the Polish-Jewish relationship in North America begin to lose their formative power. The contributors deal boldly with matters at the heart of the relationship. There is an attempt to quantify the attitudes of both sides to a number of key aspects of the Holocaust, and fascinating questions are raised about how the Holocaust has distorted the perceptions that Poles and Jews have of each other, and why the Holocaust remains a problem in Polish-Jewish relations. Stereotyping is confronted head-on. There is an investigation of how crude stereotypes of Polish peasants have found their way into Jewish history textbooks, crucially affecting the disposition of American Jews towards Poland, and of how the stereotyped world of the shtetl still haunts the American Jewish imagination, with great consequences for attitudes to Poles and Polish Americans. The way in which this stereotype is challenged by realities encountered in the context of the March of the Living is provocatively discussed, along with the options for dealing with a landscape 'poor in Jews, but rich in Jewish ruins'. A number of chapters describe attempts to overcome mutual stereotyping, including a detailed and valuable account of the National Polish American-Jewish American Council, and of the attempts that have been made to steer the Jedwabne debate in a constructive direction. These small beginnings show that it is possible to go beyond past differences and to concentrate instead on what has linked Poles and Jews in their long history. As in earlier volumes of Polin, substantial space is given, in 'New Views', to recent research in other areas of Polish-Jewish studies.

From monarchy to the world's first socialist state, from Communism to Capitalism, from mass poverty to Europe's new super rich, Russia has seen immense revolutions in just the past century, including purges, poisonings, famines, assassinations and massacres. In that time, it has also endured civil war, world war and the Cold War. But the extremes of Russian history are not restricted to the past 100 years. When Napoleon invaded in 1812, the Russians retreated, slashing and burning their own country and Moscow itself, rather than conceding defeat to Napoleon. They were victorious, but at immense cost. Russia's history is also spiked with mystery. Did Stalin shoot his wife? Who ordered the killing of Rasputin? Or the shooting of Anna Politkovskaya and the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko or the Skripals in Salisbury, England? What involvement and influence did Russian intelligence have on the 2016 US Election? In addition, it is a history of appalling disasters, such as at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, the sinking of the Kursk submarine, and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Ranging from medieval Kievan Rus' to Vladimir Putin, The History of Russia explores the murder, brutality, genocide, insanity and skulduggery in the efforts to seize, and then maintain, power in the Slav heartland. Illustrated with 180 photographs and artworks, the book is a fascinating, lively and wide-ranging history from the Mongol invasions to the present day.

Libanius of Antioch (AD 314-393) stands out as a fundamental source for the history of the Greek East in the 4th century AD. Nearly half the important figures in the Eastern empire of his day are known in part or in full through his works alone. Some 700 people, including many of the key players of the age, are known through his vast collection of letters, the largest to survive from antiquity. letters in this volume offer are addressed to a wide range of people, from family members to old schoolmates and pupils, from provincial governors to the most important officials of the imperial court.

In 1837, at the height of the Carlist Wars and a time of conflict between the past and future, a young Prussian man crosses the Pyrenees to fight for the 'Order'. Finding himself trapped in the ruins of an abandoned city, his bewilderment at the war and what it means increases. Friendship, family, religion and politics: everything is distorted, transformed or destroyed. The Others oscillates masterfully between humour and tragedy and is a novel full of music, eccentric characters and extraordinary scenes.

The shtetl is one of the key concepts for our understanding of the Jewish past in Eastern Europe. Although today most Jews live in big cities, the majority of Jews in Poland historically lived in the villages and small towns known as shtetls; even as late as 1931, only 43% lived in towns with a population of more than 20,000. The shtetl was thus the main context and arena for Jewish life in Poland, but much of what we know of shtetl life still comes from literary accounts rather than historical research. This volume attempts to redress that imbalance. Among the topics covered are the Jewishness of the shtetl; Polish--Jewish relations and social relations more widely in the shtetl; inter-religious contacts; the hasidic conquest of shtetl life; cultural evolution in the shtetl; Polish shtetls under Russian rule and Soviet shtetls in the 1920s; and a contemporary account of returning to visit a shtetl. Other articles consider how shtetl life has been reflected in Hebrew, Polish, and Yiddish literature. The New Views section analyses the work of the Russian Jewish writer Lev Levanda and the correspondence of an interwar Polish Jew, Wolf Lewkowicz. There are also two articles on the Gesiowka concentration camp established by the Nazis to clear the remains of the Warsaw ghetto. A special section is devoted to whether the incidents in Przytyk in 1936 constituted a pogrom, while another is devoted to discussing two important documents illustrating Wladyslaw Gomulka's attitude to Jews.

One of the last great untold stories of the Holocaust, The Survivor is an astonishing account of one man's unbreakable spirit, unshakeable faith, and extraordinary courage in the face of evil. At only 16 years old, Josef Lewkowicz became a number, prisoner 85314. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, he and his father were separated from their family and herded to the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp. Forced to carry out hard labour in brutal conditions, and to live under the constant threat of extreme violence and sudden death, before the war was over Josef would witness the unique horrors of six of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee. From salt mines to forced marches, summary executions to Amstetten, where prisoners were used as human shields in Allied bombing, Josef lived under the spectre of death for many years. When he was liberated from Ebensee at the end of the war, conditions were amongst the worst witnessed by allied forces. With his freedom, Josef returned home to find that he was the only one left alive in an extended family of 150. Compelled by the need to do something to avenge that loss, he joined the Jewish police while still in a displaced persons' camp, and was recruited as an intelligence officer for the US Army who gave him a team to search for Nazis in hiding. Whilst rounding up SS leaders, he played a critical role in identifying and bringing to justice his greatest tormentor, the Butcher of Plaszow, Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. He then committed his life to helping the orphaned children of the Holocaust rebuild their lives. The Survivor is Josef's extraordinary testimony.