After World War II, the Girls Club of Brooklyn, New York, became both home and safe haven to orphaned teenagers who were Holocaust survivors. They are a small group, but taken together these women's stories represent the broad range of experiences that most Jews suffered during and after the Holocaust. Some endured the ghettos and camps. Some survived in hiding, with partisans, or in the remote far-eastern reaches of the Soviet Union. Consequently this collective, personal history-enriched with relevant information about places, people, events and issues-tells not only their story, but also the story of tens of thousands of child survivors. The work of scholars from various disciplines and genres provides background information and historical detail as this book traces the women's experiences from their childhood days in pre-war Europe to the present. Contrary to what early literature on child survivors predicted, they built successful lives in America.

Pitting fascists and communists in a showdown for supremacy, the Spanish Civil War has long been seen as a grim dress rehearsal for World War II. Francisco Franco's Nationalists prevailed with German and Italian military assistance-a clear instance, it seemed, of like-minded regimes joining forces in the fight against global Bolshevism. In Hitler's Shadow Empire Pierpaolo Barbieri revises this standard account of Axis intervention in the Spanish Civil War, arguing that economic ambitions-not ideology-drove Hitler's Iberian intervention. The Nazis hoped to establish an economic empire in Europe, and in Spain they tested the tactics intended for future subject territories. "The Spanish Civil War is among the 20th-century military conflicts about which the most continues to be published...Hitler's Shadow Empire is one of few recent studies offering fresh information, specifically describing German trade in the Franco-controlled zone. While it is typically assumed that Nazi Germany, like Stalinist Russia, became involved in the Spanish Civil War for ideological reasons, Pierpaolo Barbieri, an economic analyst, shows that the motives of the two main powers were quite different. -Stephen Schwartz, Weekly Standard

This book tells the largely unknown story behind the rescue activities of several remarkable young Jewish women in Vichy France during World War II and their role in the resistance against Nazi and Vichy France deportation policies. Few studies of Vichy France and the Holocaust have looked at the rescue of Jews by those prepared to risk everything to escort them to safety in the border regions, and even fewer have considered Jewish rescue of Jews, specifically of Jewish children by women. This work will be arguably the first book in which the experiences and efforts of a number of female rescuers-all of whom knew or knew of each other-have been brought together in a single volume, with the object of honoring their memory and showing how the value of human life was sustained through the Holocaust. Focusing on a number of young Jewish women who defied the Nazis, this narrative highlights their courage and sacrifice in their efforts to rescue Jews in France during World War II. Additionally, it shows how these French women responded to Nazi and Vichy France policies of deportation through resistance activities. This is a story that will captivate anyone with an interest in the innate goodness of human beings that can shine even when confronted with the darkest expressions of depravity that occurred during the Holocaust. Grounds a captivating narrative in extensive field research conducted in France, which focused especially on holdings at the Memorial de la Shoah (Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation) in Paris, the Resistance and Deportation Center and Museum in Lyon, and the Departmental Archives of Haute Savoie Offers compelling profiles of the resisters and gives voice to those who were rescued in addition to speculation as regards their respective fates after the Holocaust Reflects the expertise of Paul Bartrop, a well-known scholar of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Samantha Lakin, an emerging scholar with a track record of achievement in Genocide Studies who has undertaken extensive research for this project while on a Fulbright fellowship in Switzerland Appeals to a broad audience at both public and academic libraries, with readers of World War II history and Holocaust studies

How is it possible, after the Shoah, to declare one's faith in the God of Israel? Breaking the Tablets is David Weiss Halivni's eloquent and insightful response to this question. Halivni, Auschwitz survivor and one of the greatest Talmudic scholars of the past century, declares that at this time of God's near absence, Jews can still observe the words of the Torah and pray for God to come near again. Jews must continue to study the classic texts of rabbinic Judaism but now with greater humility, recognizing that even the greatest religious leaders and thinkers interpret these texts only as mere people, prone to human error. Breaking the Tablets is important reading for anyone who feels burdened by the question of how it is possible to believe in God and practice their religion.

Before Pep Guardiola and before Jose Mourinho, there was Bela Guttmann: the first superstar football coach, and the man who paved the way for the celebrated coaches of the modern age. He was also a Holocaust survivor. In 1944, much of Europe had wanted Guttmann dead. He hid for months in an attic near Budapest as thousands of fellow Jews in the neighbourhood were dragged off to be murdered. Later, he escaped from a slave labour camp before a planned deportation and almost certain death. His father, sister and wider family were murdered. But by 1961, as coach of Benfica, he had lifted Europe's greatest sporting prize, the European Cup, a feat he repeated the following year. This biography spans two contrasting visions of Europe: one of barbarism and genocide, and one of beauty, wonder and romance, of balmy evenings in magnificent cities, where great players would stretch every sinew in a bid to win football's holy grail. With dark forces rising once again in that continent, the story of Bela Guttmann's life asks the question: which vision will triumph in our times?

Gerald Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth has become the classic account of the background to the Spanish Civil War. Written during and immediately after the Civil War, this book has all the vividness of the author's experience. It represents a struggle to see the issues in Spanish politics objectively, whilst bearing witness to the deep involvement which is the only possible source of much of this richly detailed account. As a literary figure on the fringe of the Bloomsbury group, Gerald Brenan lends to this narrative an engaging personal style that has become familiar to many thousands of readers over the decades since it was first published.

This is the first work in any language that offers both an overarching exploration of the flight and evacuation of Soviet Jews viewed at the macro level, and a personal history of one Soviet Jewish family. It is also the first study to examine Jewish life in the Northern Caucasus, a Soviet region that history scholars have rarely addressed. Drawing on a collection of family letters, Kiril Feferman provides a history of the Ginsburgs as they debate whether to evacuate their home of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia and are eventually swept away by the Soviet-German War, the German invasion of Soviet Russia, and the Holocaust. The book makes a significant contribution to the history of the Holocaust and Second World War in the Soviet Union, presenting one Soviet region as an illustration of wartime social and media politics.

Historical revisionism, far from being restricted to small groups of 'negationists, ' has galvanized debates in the realm of recent history. The studies in this book range from general accounts of the background of recent historical revisionism to focused analyses of particular debates or social-cultural phenomena in individual Central European countries, from Germany to Ukraine and Estonia. Where is the borderline between legitimate re-examination of historical interpretations and attempts to rewrite history in a politically motivated way that downgrades or denies essential historical facts? How do the traditional 'national historical narratives' react to the 'spill-over' of international and political controversies into their 'sphere of influence'? Technological progress, along with the overall social and cultural decentralization shatters the old hierarchies of academic historical knowledge under the banner of culture of memory, and breeds an unequalled democratization in historical representation. This book offers a unique approach based on the provocative and instigating intersection of scholarly research, its political appropriations, and social reflection from a representative sample of Central and East European countries.

Taking early 21st century Britain as a case study, Rethinking Holocaust Film Reception: A British Case Study presents an intervention into the scholarship on the representation of the Holocaust on film. Based on a study of audience responses to select films, Stefanie Rauch demonstrates that the reception of films about the Holocaust is a complex process that we cannot understand through textual analysis alone, but by also paying attention to individual reception processes. This book restores the agency of viewers and takes seriously their diverse responses to representations of the Holocaust. It demonstrates that viewers' interpretative resources play an important role in film reception. Viewers regard Holocaust films as a separate genre that they encounter with a set of expectations. The author highlights the implications of Britain's lessons-focused approach to Holocaust education and commemoration and addresses debates around the supposed globalization of Holocaust memory by unpacking the peculiar Britishness of viewers' responses to films about the Holocaust. A sense of emotional connection or its absence to the Holocaust and its memory speaks to divisions along ethnic, generational, and national lines.

Offering an up-to-date historical perspective which should enable readers to fathom how the brutal massacres of 800,000 Rwandese came to pass in 1994, this volume includes a new chapter that brings the analysis up to the end of 1996. Gerard Prunier probes into how the genocidal events in Rwanda were part of a deadly logic - a plan that served central political and economic interests - rather than a result of primordial tribal hatreds, a notion often invoked by the media to dramatize genocide.

From the French Revolution to Vatican II, the institutional Catholic Church has opposed much that modernity has offered men and women constructing their societies. This book focuses on the experiences of German Catholics as they have worked to engage their faith with their culture in the midst of the two world wars, the barbarism of the Nazi era, and the uncertainties and conflicts of the post-World War II world.

German Catholics have confronted and challenged their Church's anti-modernism, two lost wars, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich, the Cold War, German reunification and the impulses of globalization. Catholic theologians and those others nurtured by Catholicism, who resisted Nazism to create their own private spaces, developed a personal and existential theology that bore fruit after 1945. Such theologians as Karl Rahner, Johannes Metz, and Walter Kasper, were rooted in their political experiences and in the renewal movement built by those who attended Vatican II. These theologians were sensitive to the horrors of the Nazi brutalization, the positive contributions of democracy, and the need to create a Catholicism that could join the conversation on human rights following World War II. This dialogue meant accepting non-Catholic religious traditions as authentic expressions of faith, which in turn required that the sacred dignity of every man, woman, and child had to be respected. By the twenty-first century, Catholic theologians had made furthering a human rights agenda part of their tradition, and the German contribution to Catholic theology was crucial to that development. The current Catholic milieu has been forged through its defensive responses to the Enlightenment, through its resistance to ideologies that have supported sanctioned murder, and through an extensive dialogue with its own traditions.

In focusing on the German Catholic experience, Dietrich offers a cultural approach to the study of the religious and ethical issues that ground the human rights paradigm that will be of particular interest to students of religion, historians, sociologists, and human rights specialists.

Anti-Semitism in Poland has always been a deeply problematic subject. In the years since the Holocaust, much has been written about the willingness of Poles to collaborate with the Nazis, willingly handing over Polish Jews and often profiting from it in the process. Such assertions have led to a widespread and ongoing stereotype that Poles are a deeply, inherently anti-Semitic people. In fact, Adam Michnik argues, while there are certainly anti-Semites among Poles, resistance to anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in the culture. The essays he has gathered in this unique and important anthology-with contributions by a who's who of Polish writers and intellectuals across the decades-both testify to and elaborate on that premise. Michnik offers an overview of the subject, in which lays out the four myths he argues continue to circulate in Polish thought: that in the eastern territories occupied by the USSR between 1939 and 1941, many Jews collaborated with the occupying authorities; that Jews were only delivered into German hands by Polish criminals; that after 1945 Jews formed the core of the Department of Security and therefore bear the blame for the suffering of the Home Army soldiers in communist Poland; and fourth, that anti-Semitism in Poland today is so marginal as to be almost exotic. A prologue by poet Czes?aw Mi?osz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, focuses on the first third of the 20th century, the period of crisis before the outbreak of World War II. The essays that follow, including works by, among other leading figures, Maria D?browska, Leszek Ko?akowski, and Jan B?o?ski, include writings from the years leading up to World War II, and draw from periodical and newspaper articles in addition to scholarly essays across the twentieth century. Collectively, the works by these writers put Polish anti-Semitism in context and in the process reflect upon the full story of Polish history in the 20th century.

The astonishing story of the efforts of scholars and activists to rescue Jewish cultural treasures after the Holocaust In March 1946 the American Military Government for Germany established the Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt to store, identify, and restore the huge quantities of Nazi-looted books, archival material, and ritual objects that Army members had found hidden in German caches. These items bore testimony to the cultural genocide that accompanied the Nazis' systematic acts of mass murder. The depot built a short-lived lieu de memoire-a "mortuary of books," as the later renowned historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it-with over three million books of Jewish origin coming from nineteen different European countries awaiting restitution. A Mortuary of Books tells the miraculous story of the many Jewish organizations and individuals who, after the war, sought to recover this looted cultural property and return the millions of treasured objects to their rightful owners. Some of the most outstanding Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Dawidowicz, Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, and Gershom Scholem, were involved in this herculean effort. This led to the creation of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc., an international body that acted as the Jewish trustee for heirless property in the American Zone and transferred hundreds of thousands of objects from the Depot to the new centers of Jewish life after the Holocaust. The commitment of these individuals to the restitution of cultural property revealed the importance of cultural objects as symbols of the enduring legacy of those who could not be saved. It also fostered Jewish culture and scholarly life in the postwar world.

Stephen E. Ambrose draws from more than 1,400 interviews with American, British, Canadian, French, and German veterans to create the preeminent chronicle of the most important day in the twentieth century. Ambrose reveals how the original plans for the invasion were abandoned, and how ordinary soldiers and officers acted on their own initiative.

D-Day is above all the epic story of men at the most demanding moment of their existence, when the horrors, complexities, and triumphs of life are laid bare. Ambrose portrays the faces of courage and heroism, fear and determination -- what Eisenhower called "the fury of an aroused democracy" -- that shaped the victory of the citizen soldiers whom Hitler had disparaged.

Given their geographical separation from Europe, ethno-religious and cultural diversity, and subordinate status within the Nazi racial hierarchy, Middle Eastern societies were both hospitable as well as hostile to National Socialist ideology during the 1930s and 1940s. By focusing on Arab and Turkish reactions to German anti-Semitism and the persecution and mass-murder of European Jews during this period, this expansive collection surveys the institutional and popular reception of Nazism in the Middle East and North Africa. It provides nuanced and scholarly yet accessible case studies of the ways in which nationalism, Islam, anti-Semitism, and colonialism intertwined, all while sensitive to the region's political, cultural, and religious complexities.

Heda Margolius Kovaly (1919-2010) was a renowned Czech writer and translator born to Jewish parents. Her bestselling memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her crime novel Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street based on her own experiences living under Stalinist oppression was named an NPR Best Book in 2015. In the tradition of Studs Terkel, Hitler, Stalin and I is based on interviews between Kovaly and award-winning filmmaker Helena Trestikova. In it, Kovaly recounts her family history in Czechoslovakia, starving in the deprivations of Lodz Ghetto, how she miraculously left Auschwitz, fled from a death march, failed to find sanctuary amongst former friends in Prague as a concentration camp escapee, and participated in the liberation of Prague. Later under Communist rule, she suffered extreme social isolation as a pariah after her first husband Rudolf Margolius was unjustly accused in the infamous Slansky Trial and executed for treason. Remarkably, Kovaly, exiled in the United States after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, only had love for her country and continued to believe in its people. She returned to Prague in 1996. Heda had an enormous talent for expressing herself. She spoke with precision and was descriptive and witty in places. I admired her attitude and composure, even after she had such extremely difficult experiences. Nazism and Communism afflicted Heda's life directly with maximum intensity. Nevertheless, she remained an optimist. Helena Trestikova has made over fifty documentary films. Hitler, Stalin and I has garnered several awards in the Czech Republic and Japan. PRAISE FOR KOVALY'S INNOCENCE A luminous testament from a dark time, Innocence is at once a clever homage to Raymond Chandler, and a portrait of a city - Prague - caught and held fast in a state of Kafkaesque paranoia. Only a great survivor could have written such a book. - John Banville Innocence is an extraordinary novel ... in 1985, Kovaly produced a remarkable work of art with the intrigue of a spy puzzle, the irony of a political fable, the shrewdness of a novel of manners, and the toughness of a hard-boiled murder mystery ... Just as few will anticipate the many surprises and artful turns of Innocence, a book sure to dazzle and please a great many readers. - Tom Nolan, The Best New Mysteries, The Wall Street Journal Kovaly's skills as a mystery writer shines, as she uses suspense, hints, and suggestions to literally play with the reader's mind ... Innocence is an excellent novel for readers who are up for a challenging, intelligent, and complex story - one that paints a masterful picture of a bleak, Kafkaesque, and highly intriguing time, place, and cast of characters. - The New York Journal of Books Although not out of love for Hegel, Heda Margolius Kovaly makes a very Hegelian point: actions, as Hegel tells us in the section on Antigone in Phenomenology of Spirit - even seemingly small, meaningless actions - always reach beyond their intent; and the impossibility of foreseeing how the consequences will ripple outwards does not absolve us of guilt. As for innocence, the woman who went to hell twice wants her readers to know that there is no such thing. - The Times Literary Supplement

This collection is the first of its kind, bringing together Holocaust educational researchers as well as school and museum educators from across the globe, to discuss the potentials of Holocaust education in relation to primary school children. Its contributors are from countries that have a unique relationship with the Holocaust, such as Germany, Israel, neutral Switzerland, and Allied countries outside the UK. Their research provides new insight into the diverse ways in which primary aged students engage with Holocaust education. Chapters explore the impact of teaching the Holocaust to this age group, school and museum teaching pedagogies, and primary students' perspectives of the Holocaust. This book will appeal to school and museum educators of primary aged students whose work requires them to teach the Holocaust, Citizenship (or Civics) or Human Rights Education. Since the turn of the twenty-first century there has been a transformation in school and museum-based Holocaust education. This book clearly demonstrates that primary education has been included in this transformation.

Set in the tumultuous moments of 1944-45 Budapest, this work discusses the operations of the Budapest Relief and Rescue Committee. Drawing out the contradictions and complexities of the mass deportations of Hungarian Jews during the final phase of World War II, Szita suggests that in the Hungarian context, a commerce in lives ensued, where prominent Zionists like Dr. Rezso Kasztner negotiated with the higher echelons of the SS, trying to garner the freedom of Hungarian Jews. Szita's portrait of the controversial Kasztner is a more sympathetic rendition of a powerful Zionist leader who was later assassinated in Israel for his dealings with Nazi leaders. Szita reveals a story of interweaving personalities and conflicts during arguably the most tragic moment in European history. The author's extensive research is a tremendous contribution to a field of study that has been much ignored by scholarship-the Hungarian holocaust and the trade in human lives.

An extraordinary and unique document: Hoess was in charge of the huge extermination camp in Poland where the Nazis murdered some three million Jews, from the time of its creation (he was responsible for building it) in 1940 until late in 1943, by which time the mass exterminations were half completed. Before this he had worked in other concentration camps, and afterwards he was at the Inspectorate in Berlin. He thus knew more, both at first-hand and as an administrator, about Nazi Germany's greatest crime than did any save two or three other men. Taken prisoner by the British, he was handed over to the Poles, tried, sentenced to death, and taken back to Auschwitz and there hanged. During the period between his trial and his execution, he was ordered to write his autobiography. This is it. Hoess repeatedly says he was glad to write the book. He enjoyed the work. And finally the most careful checking has shown that he took great pains to tell the truth. Here we have, painted by his own hand, a vivid and unforgettable self-portrait of one of the great monsters of all time. To this are added portraits of some of his more spectacular fellow-criminals. The royalties from this macabre but historically important book go to the fund set up to help the few survivors from the Auschwitz camps.

The memoir of Stipe Mesic which anatyzes events,personalities and motivations inside Yugoslavia and its former nations, as well as in the international arena.

Based on new archival evidence, examines Soviet Empire building in Hungary and the American response to it.

Twentieth-century Southeastern Europe endured three, separate decades of international and civil war, and was marred in forced migration and wrenching systematic changes. This book is the result of a year-long project by the Open Society Institute to examine and reappraise this tumultuous century. A cohort of young scholars with backgrounds in history, anthropology, political science, and comparative literature were brought together for this undertaking. Guided by renowned editors, they drew on transnational approaches that extended beyond their own country's histories, in a fashion that Budapest's Central European University has done so much to encourage. The studies invite attention to fascism, socialism, and liberalism as well as nationalism and Communism. While most chapters deal with war and confrontation, they focus rather on the remembrance of such conflicts in shaping todayis ideology and national identity. Experts on these issues, and in particular young researchers, must compare and contrast the original sources of conviction in order to fully grasp the topics that are too often uncontested both inside and outside the region.

Perfect for readers of Last Stop Auschwitz, The Volunteer and The Tattooist of Auschwitz 'This is an extraordinary biography. A gripping narrative that opens as derring-do wartime escape drama rapidly turns into a horror story about man's inhumanity to man...Important and unforgettable' JONATHAN DIMBLEBY The awe-inspiring and gripping true story of the young man who survived not one, but three concentration camps, only - in the final days of the war - to be bombed while aboard a Nazi prison boat. Stowed away on top of a train, twenty-year-old Wim Aloserij escapes the obligatory work camps in Nazi-ruled Germany in 1943. The young man from Amsterdam then goes into hiding on a farm - sleeping in a wooden chest hidden underground. But it's not to last. In the cover of night, Wim is captured during a raid and transported to the infamous Gestapo prison in Amsterdam. There, his life changes forever as he is thrown into the nightmare of the Holocaust and transported to Camp Amersfoort - the first of three concentration camps he must endure. Drawing on the lessons he learned as a child as the victim of an alcoholic and abusive father, Wim is forced to adapt quickly and urgently to his hellish surroundings. However, it is with the end of the war in sight, that Wim must draw on every last strength he has when he finds himself caught in the very centre of Allied-Nazi crossfire. At the age of 94, Wim finally felt ready to tell his incredible story, which he kept secret for most of his life. A true story of bravery, courage and resilience, The Last Survivor will leave you amazed by one young man's determination - against the odds - to survive.

Teaching about Genocide presents the insights, advice, and suggestions of secondary-level teachers (social studies, history, English, language arts), and professors (political scientists, historians, psychologists), in relation to teaching about various facets of genocide. The contributions are extremely eclectic [this sounds negative rather than positive], ranging from basic concerns when teaching about genocide to a discussion about why it is critical to teach students about more general human rights violations during a course on genocide, and from a focus on specific cases of genocide to a range of pedagogical strategies for teaching about genocide.