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.

Peter Hayes has been teaching Holocaust studies for decades and Why? grows out of the questions he's encountered from his students. Despite the outpouring of books, films, memorials, museums and courses devoted to the subject, a coherent explanation of why such carnage erupted still eludes people. Numerous myths have sprouted, many to console us that things could have gone differently if only some person or entity had acted more bravely or wisely; others cast new blame on favourite or surprising villains or even on historians. Why? dispels many legends and debunks the most prevalent ones, including the claim that the Holocaust never happened. Hayes brings scholarly wisdom to bear on popular views of the history, challenging some of the most prominent interpretations and arguing that the convergence of multiple forces at a particular moment resulted in this catastrophe.

Thank god that occasionally books of the stature of Laurence Reess superb Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution re-published that try to redress the balance. - fascinating. - Andrew Roberts, Evening Standard Laurence Rees tells the definitive history of the most notorious Nazi institution of them all. we discover how Auschwitz evolved from a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners into the site of the largest mass murder in history - part death camp, part concentration camp, where around a million Jews were killed. broader context. He argues that, far from being an aberration, the camp was a uniquely important institution in the Nazi state, one that played a vital role in the 'Final Solution'. makers, and perpetrators of appalling crimes speak here for the first time about their actions. Fascinating and disturbing facts have been uncovered - from the operation of a brothel to the corruption that was rife throughout the camp. The book draws on intriguing new documentary material from recently opened Russian archives, which will challenge many previously accepted arguments. throughout Nazi Europe. Rees addresses uncomfortable questions, such as why so few countries under Nazi occupation protected their Jews and why the Allies did little directly to prevent the killing even after they knew about the existence of the camp. powerful account of how a human tragedy of such immense scale could have happened.

'Extraordinary ... The beating heart of this novel is the exquisite empathy it demonstrates ... There is a gentle magnificence at work in its pages' Irish Times 'Tender, poignant and heartfelt ... A generous novel that celebrates communication, connection and courage' Daily Mail Marie owes Michka more than she can say - but Michka is getting older, and can't look after herself any more. So Marie has moved her to a home where she'll be safe. But Michka doesn't feel any safer; she is haunted by strange figures who threaten to unearth her most secret, buried guilt, guilt that she's carried since she was a little girl. And she is losing her words - grasping more desperately day by day for what once came easily to her. Jerome is a speech therapist, dispatched to help the home's ageing population snatch and hold tight onto the speech still afforded to them. But Michka is no ordinary client. Michka has been carrying an old debt she does not know how to repay - and as her words slide out of her grasp, time is running out. Delicately wrought and darkly gripping, Gratitude is about love, loss and redemption; about what we owe one another, and the redemptive power of showing thanks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A rediscovered masterpiece by the 16 million copy bestselling author of Man’s Search For Meaning

Just months after his liberation from Auschwitz renowned psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl delivered a series of talks revealing the foundations of his life-affirming philosophy. The psychologist, who would soon become world famous, explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience and his conviction that every crisis contains opportunity.

Published here for the very first time in English, Frankl's words resonate as strongly today as they did in 1946. Despite the unspeakable horrors in the camp, Frankl learnt from his fellow inmates that it is always possible to say ‘yes to life’ – a profound and timeless lesson for us all.

With an introduction by Daniel Goleman.

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.

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.

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

Historic WWII reproduction map. A detailed map of Normandy at a scale of 1:200,000 showing the main sites of the summer 1944 battle. This map is an antique-feeling reproduction of the map originally published by Michelin in 1947. The main map includes place names and features special icons denoting battle dates and parachute drops, as well as an inset showing the broader movements of the military forces.

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.

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.

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.

Sociology is concerned with modern society, but has never come to terms with one of the most distinctive and horrific aspects of modernity - the Holocaust.

The book examines what sociology can teach us about the Holocaust, but more particularly concentrates upon the lessons which the Holocaust has for sociology. Bauman's work demonstrates that the Holocaust has to be understood as deeply involved with the nature of modernity. There is nothing comparable to this work available in the sociological literature.

Shortlisted for the History Book of the Year category of the 2009 Saltire Literary Awards The Spanish Civil War was a call to arms for 2,300 British volunteers, of which over 500 were from Scotland. The first book of its kind, Homage to Caledonia examines Scotland's role in the conflict, detailing exactly why Scottish involvement was so profound. The book moves chronologically through events and places, firstly surveying the landscape in contemporary Scotland before describing volunteers' journeys to Spain, and then tracing their every involvement from arrival to homecoming (or not). There is also an account of the non-combative role, from fundraising for Spain and medical aid, to political manoeuvrings within the volatile Scottish left. Using a wealth of previously-unpublished letters sent back from the front as well as other archival items, Daniel Gray is able to tell little known stories of courage in conflict, and to call into question accepted versions of events such as the 'murder' of Bob Smillie, or the heroism of 'The Scots Scarlet Pimpernel'. Homage to Caledonia offers a very human take on events in Spain: for every tale of abject distress in a time of war, there is a tale of a Scottish volunteer urinating in his general's boots, knocking back a dram with Errol Flynn or appalling Spanish comrades with his pipe playing. For the first time, read the fascinating story of Caledonia's role in this seminal conflict.

Drawing on hitherto neglected archival materials, Zohar Segev sheds new light on the policy of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) during the Holocaust. Contrary to popular belief, he can show that there was an impressive system of previously unknown rescue efforts. Even more so, there is evidence for an alternative pattern for modern Jewish existence in the thinking and policy of the World Jewish Congress. WJC leaders supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine but did not see it as an end in itself. They strove to establish a Jewish state and to rehabilitate Diaspora Jewish life, two goals they saw as mutually complementary. The efforts of the WJC are put into the context of the serious difficulties facing the American Jewish community and its representative institutions during and after the war, as they tried to act as an ethnic minority within American society.