The end of the Second World War in Europe gave way to a gigantic refugee crisis. Thoroughly prepared by Allied military planners, the swift repatriation of millions of former forced laborers, concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war nearly brought this dramatic episode top a close. Yet in September 1945, the number of displaced persons placed under the guardianship of Allied armies and relief agencies in occupied Germany amounted to 1.5 million. A costly burden for the occupying powers, the Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian, Yugoslav and Baltic DPs unwilling to return to their countries of origin presented a complex international problem. Massed in refugee camps stretched from Northern Germany to Sicily, the DPs had become long-term asylum seekers.
Based on the records of the International Refugee Organization, this book describes how the European DP crisis impinged on the shape of the postwar order. The DP question directly affected the outbreak of the Cold War; the transformation of the "West" into a new geopolitical entity; the conduct of political purges and retribution; the ideology and methods of modern humanitarian interventions; the appearance of international agencies and non-governmental organizations; the emergence of an international human rights system; the organization of migration movements and the redistribution of "surplus populations"; the advent of Jewish nationhood; and postwar categorizations of political and humanitarian refugees.

Covering Western and Eastern Europe, this book looks at the Holocaust on the local level. It compares and contrasts the behaviour and attitude of neighbours in the face of the Holocaust. Topics covered include deportation programmes, relations between Jews and Gentiles, violence against Jews, perceptions of Jewish persecution, and reports of the Holocaust in the Jewish and non-Jewish press.

If we expose students to a study of human suffering, we have a responsibility to guide them through it. But, is this the role of school history? Is the rationale behind teaching the Holocaust primarily historical, moral or social? Is the Holocaust to be taught as a historical event, with a view to developing students' critical historical skills, or as a tool to combat continuing prejudice and discrimination? These profound questions lie at the heart of Lucy Russell's fascinating analysis of teaching the Holocaust in school history. She considers how the topic of the Holocaust is currently being taught in schools in the UK and overseas. Drawing on interviews with educationalists, academics and teachers, she discovers that there is, in fact, a surprising lack of consensus regarding the purpose of, and approaches to, teaching the Holocaust in history. Indeed the majority view is distinctly non-historical; there is a tendency to teach the Holocaust from a social and moral perspective and not as history. This book attempts to explain and debate this phenomenon.

View the Table of Contents. Read Chapter 1.

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--Choice: Recommended

"An invaluable text. The individual essays are gems, written by recognized authorities in their respective disciplines, and they work as a seamless whole to address the fundamental issues raised by the Holocaust. The volume offers both as a challenge and a stimulus for future thought. . . . Erudite and pathbreaking."
--Alan L. Berger, Raddock Eminent Scholar Chair of Holocaust Studies, Florida Atlantic University

"This is a serious book...The scholars represented here wrestle with substantial issues."
--"Jewish Book World"

The theological problems facing those trying to respond to the Holocaust remain monumental. Both Jewish and Christian post-Auschwitz religious thought must grapple with profound questions, from how God allowed it to happen to the nature of evil.

The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology brings together a distinguished international array of senior scholars--many of whose work is available here in English for the first time--to consider key topics from the meaning of divine providence to questions of redemption to the link between the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Together, they push our thinking further about how our belief in God has changed in the wake of the Holocaust.

Contributors: Yosef Achituv, Yehoyada Amir, Ester Farbstein, Gershon Greenberg, Warren Zev Harvey, Tova Ilan, Shmuel Jakobovits, Dan Michman, David Novak, Shalom Ratzabi, Michael Rosenak, Shalom Rosenberg, Eliezer Schweid, and Joseph A. Turner.

From twins torn away from their family and separated, to a girl shut in a basement, maltreated and malnourished, the world of Jewish children who were hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust becomes painfully clear in this volume. Psychiatrist Bluglass presents interviews with 15 adults who avoided execution in their childhoods thanks to being hidden by Christians, all of whom have since developed remarkably positive lives. All are stable, healthy, intelligent, and share a surprising sense of humor. Together, they show a profound ability to recover and thrive--an unexpected resilience. That their adjustment with such positive outcomes was possible after such harsh childhood experiences challenges a popular perception that inevitable physical and psychological damage ensues such adversity. Their stories offer new optimism, hope and grounds for research that may help traumatized children of today, and of the future, become more resilient. The book's core consists of these remarkable survivors' narratives, told in their own words. Also included are childhood and current pictures of each survivor, a list naming their rescuers (people who hid them), and a detailed bibliography.

"Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War" discusses the participation of volunteers of Jewish descent in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. It focuses in particular on the establishment of the Naftali Botwin Company, a Jewish military unit that was created in the Polish Dombrowski Brigade. Its formation and short-lived history on the battlefield were closely connected to the activities and propaganda of Yiddish-speaking Jewish migrant communists in Paris who described Jewish volunteers as 'Chosen Fighters of the Jewish People' in their daily newspaper "Naye Prese."Gerben Zaagsma analyses the symbolic meaning of the participation of Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company both during and after the civil war. He puts this participation in the broader context of Jewish involvement in the left and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in the communist movement and beyond. To this end, the book examines representations of Jewish volunteers in the Parisian Yiddish press (both communist and non-communist). In addition it analyses the various ways in which Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company have been commemorated after WWII, tracing how discourses about Jewish volunteers became decisively shaped by post-Holocaust debates on Jewish responses to fascism and Nazism, and discusses claims that Jewish volunteers can be seen as 'the first Jews to resist Hitler with arms'.

What was the role played by local police volunteers in the Holocaust? Using eye witness descriptions from the towns and villages of Belorussia and Ukraine, this text reveals local policemen as hands on collaborators of the Nazis. They brutally drove Jewish neighbours from their homes and guarded them closely on the way to their deaths. Some distinguished themselves as ruthless murderers. Outnumbering German police manpower in these areas, the local police were the foot soldiers of the Holocaust in the east.

Thousands of young Jews were orphaned by the Nazi genocide in the German-occupied Soviet Union and struggled for survival on their own. This book weaves together oral histories, video testimonies, and memoirs produced in the former Soviet Union to show how the first generation of Soviet Jews, born after the foundation of the USSR, experienced the Nazi genocide and how they remember it in a context of social change following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The 1930s, a period when the notion interethnic solidarity and social equality were promoted and a partly lived reality, were formative for a cohort of young Jews. Soviet policies of the time established a powerful framework for the ways in which survivors of the genocide understood, survived, and represent their experience of violence and displacement. The book demonstrates that the young Soviet Jews' struggle for survival, and its memory, was shaped by interethnic relationships within the occupied society, German annihilation policy, and Soviet efforts to construct a patriotic unity of the Soviet population. Age and gender were crucial factors for experiencing, surviving, and remembering the Nazi genocide in Soviet territories, an element that Anika Walke emphasizes by investigating the individual and collective efforts to save peoples' lives, in hiding places and partisan formations, and how these efforts were subsequently erased in the construction of the Soviet war portrayal. Pioneers and Partisans demonstrates how the Holocaust unfolded in the German-occupied Soviet territories and how Soviet citizens responded to it. The book does this work through oral histories of atrocities and survival during the German occupation in Minsk and a number of small towns in Eastern Belorussia such as Shchedrin, Slavnoe, Zhlobin, and Shklov. Following particular individuals' stories, framed within the broader historical and cultural context, this book tells of repeated transformations of identity, from Soviet citizen in the prewar years, to a target of genocidal violence during the war, to barely accepted national minority in the postwar Soviet Union.

In this moving account of the life, work, and ethics of four Jewish women intellectuals in the world of the Holocaust, Rachel Feldhay Brenner explores the ways in which these women sought to maintain their faith in humanity while aware of intensifying destruction. She argues that through their written responses of autobiographical self-assertion Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum resisted the Nazi terror in ways that defy its horrifying dehumanization.

Personal identity crises engendered the intellectual-spiritual acts of autobiographical self-searching for each of these women. About to become a nun in 1933, Edith Stein embarked on her autobiography as a daughter of a Jewish family. Fleeing France and deportation in 1942, Simone Weil examined her inner struggle with faith and the Church in her "Spiritual Autobiography." Hiding for more than two years in the attic, Anne Frank poignantly confided in her diary about her efforts to become a better person. Having volunteered as a social worker in Westerbork, Etty Hillesum searched her soul for love in the reality of terror. In each case, autobiographical writing becomes an act of defiance that asserts humanity in a dehumanized/dehumanizing world.

By focusing on the four women's accomplishments as intellectuals, writers, and thinkers, Brenner's account liberates them from other posthumous treatments that depict them as symbols of altruism, sanctity, and victimization. Her approach also elucidates the particular predicament of Western Jewish intellectuals who trusted the ideals of the Enlightenment and believed in human fellowship. While suffering the terror of physical annihilation decreed by the Final Solution, these Jews had to contend with their exclusion from the world that they considered theirs. On yet another level, this study of four extraordinary life stories contributes to a deeper understanding of the postwar development of ethical, theological, and feminist thought. In showing concern about a world that had ceased to care for them, Stein, Weil, Frank, and Hillesum demonstrated that the meaning of human existence consisted in the responsibility for the other, in the protection of the suffering God, in the primary value of relatedness through empathy. Arguing that their ethical tenets anticipated the thought of such postwar thinkers as Levinas, Fackenheim, Tillich, Arendt, and Nodding, Brenner proposes that the breakup of the humanist tradition of the Enlightenment in the Holocaust engendered the postwar exploration of humanist potential in self-givenness to the other.

This book explores the subject of genocide through key debates and case studies. It analyses the dynamics of genocide - the processes and mechanisms of acts committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, religious or racial group - in order to shed light upon its origins, characteristics and consequences. Debating Genocide begins with an introduction to the concept of genocide. It then examines the colonial genocides at the end of the 19th- and start of the 20th-centuries; the Armenian Genocide of 1915-16; the Nazi 'Final Solution'; the Nazi genocide of the Gypsies; mass murder in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge; the genocides in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; and the genocide in Sudan in the early 21st century. It also includes a thematic chapter which covers gender and genocide, as well as issues of memory and memorialisation. Finally, the book considers how genocides end, as well as the questions of resolution and denial, with Lisa Pine examining the debates around prediction and prevention and the R2P (Responsibility to Protect) initiative. This book is crucial for any students wanting to understand why genocides have occurred, why they still occur and what the key historical discussions around this subject entail.

The memoir of Helen Weinberg depicts the plight of a young woman who hailed from Kremenitz, Poland. Separated from her family during World War Two, she was imprisoned, beaten, starved and tortured. This story is told using her own words from stories, essays and poetry translated from Yiddish and Polish, and serve as a guide through the different periods of her life. The pen and paper were her catharsis for the emotional torture she endured and provide a window into her soul. PRAISE FOR WHITE ANGEL "This book is a wonderful tribute to the multifaceted life of an extraordinary grandmother. Written by P'nina Seplowitz with great respect and much love, it traces the story of a woman who was exposed to the most horrific manifestations of human cruelty and who emerged with powerful strength to create a new world, who responded to the assault of death with an outpouring of life. The book is warm, touching and beautifully written; it will inspire its readers, young and not so young alike." - RABBI JACOB J. SCHACTER, Yeshiva University "White Angel is a thought provoking work of Holocaust literature. Helen Weinberg's remarkable story elicits the sorrowful burden of a broken nation and the glimmer of hope that existed with the establishment of the State of Israel. White Angel is an essential staple for any home or school." - RABBI DOV LIPMAN, Member Israeli Knesset "P'nina Seplowitz does a terrific job of telling an inspirational, yet tragic story, through the eyes of her heroic grandmother. This book is a must read for all those looking to be inspired by the strength of the human spirit." - RABBI STEVEN BURG, Simon Wiesenthal Center

Paldiel highlights the role of non-Jews in extending aid and assistance to Jews inside Nazi-dominated Europe. From the testimonies and files housed at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust martyrs and heroes memorial in Jerusalem, Paldiel presents dozens of stories of the circumstances and odds facing Jews and those who would help them. Includes an eight-page photo insert.