Milan Kundera warned that in in the states of East-Central Europe, attitudes to the west and the idea of 'Europe' were complex and could even be hostile. But few could have imagined how the collapse of communism and membership of the EU would confront these countries with a life that was suddenly and disconcertingly 'modern' and which challenged sustaining traditions in literature, culture, politics and established views on identity. Since the countries of East-Central Europe joined the European Union in 2004 the politicians and oppositionists of the centre-left, who once led the charge against communism, have often been forced to give way to right-wing, authoritarian, populist governments. These governments, while keen to accept EU finance, have been determined to present themselves as protecting their traditional ethno-national inheritance, resisting 'foreign interference', stemming the 'gay invasion', halting 'Islamic replacement' and reversing women's rights. They have blamed Communists, liberals, foreigners, Jews and Gypsies, revised abortion laws, tampered with their constitutions to control the Justice system and taken over the media to an astonishing degree. By 2019, amid calls for the suspension of their voting rights, both Poland and Hungary had been taken to the European Court of Justice and the European Parliament and had begun to explore ways to put conditions on future EU funding. This book focuses on the interface between tradition, literature and politics in east-central Europe, focusing mainly on Poland but also Hungary and the Czech Republic. It explores literary tradition and the role of writers to ask why these left-liberals, who were once ubiquitous in the struggles with communism, are now marginalised, often reviled and almost entirely absent from political debate. It asks, in what ways the advent of capitalism 'normalised' literature and what the consequences might be? It asks whether the rise of chauvinism is 'normal' in this part of the world and whether the literary traditions that helped sustain independent political thought through the communist years now, instead of supporting literature, feed nationalist opinion and negative attitudes to the idea of 'Europe'.

There has been extensive research into the impact of the Holocaust on the children of survivors who immigrated to the US and Israel. But very little work in this space has looked at children whose parents fled Nazi persecution before the Holocaust. Even less attention has been paid to those who ended up in Britain from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. What was the impact on this second generation? How have the lives of these ordinary people been shaped by their parents' dislocation? Using a series of interviews with members of the second generation, Breaking the Silence is a qualitative, interdisciplinary exploration how their lives were shaped by their parents escape from persecution. It offers an insight into how the exile and fear of persecution of the parents and the deaths/murder of unknown relatives has left this generation both bereft of memories and haunted by the past.

The lens of apartheid-era Jewish commemorations of the Holocaust in South Africa reveals the fascinating transformation of a diasporic community. Through the prism of Holocaust memory, this book examines South African Jewry and its ambivalent position as a minority within the privileged white minority. Grounded in research in over a dozen archives, the book provides a rich empirical account of the centrality of Holocaust memorialization to the community's ongoing struggle against global and local antisemitism. Most of the chapters focus on white perceptions of the Holocaust and reveals the tensions between the white communities in the country regarding the place of collective memories of suffering in the public arena. However, the book also moves beyond an insular focus on the South African Jewish community and in very different modality investigates prominent figures in the anti-apartheid struggle and the role of Holocaust memory in their fascinating journeys towards freedom.

As the third and concluding volume of the series, this work examines the persecution of the Gypsy people in Hungary, Norway, Slovakia and Yugoslavia during World War II, together with Switzerland's policy towards refugees. It also looks at the intertwined fates of the Jews and the Gypsies. Included in the coverage is an overview of the events following 1945--reparations and the postwar trials. Various methodologies associated with research and writings about the Holocaust are also discussed.

A publishing sensation, the publication of Victor Klemperer's diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. 'A classic ... Klemperer's diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank's' SUNDAY TIMES 'I can't remember when I read a more engrossing book' Antonia Fraser 'Not dissimilar in its cumulative power to Primo Levi's, is a devastating account of man's inhumanity to man' LITERARY REVIEW The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages at Dresden. Over the next decade he, like other German Jews, lost his job, his house and many of his friends. Klemperer remained loyal to his country, determined not to emigrate, and convinced that each successive Nazi act against the Jews must be the last. Saved for much of the war from the Holocaust by his marriage to a gentile, he was able to escape in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of Dresden and survived the remaining months of the war in hiding. Throughout, Klemperer kept a diary. Shocking and moving by turns, it is a remarkable and important account.

This book aims to show the many resources at our disposal for grappling with the Holocaust as the darkest occurrence of the twentieth century. These wide-ranging studies on philosophy, history, and literature address the way the Holocaust had led to the reconceptualization of the humanities. The scholarly approaches of Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot are examined critically, and the volume explores such poignant topics as violence, evil, and monuments.

This book is the translation of the Yizkor (Memorial) Book ( in Hebrew: Ayara be-lehavot; Pinkas Yampola, Pelekh Volyn- A City in Flames) of the destroyed Jewish Community of Yampol, Ukraine, written by the former residents who survived the Holocaust (Shoah) or emigrated before the war. It contains the history of the community in addition to descriptions of the institutions (synagogues, prayer houses), cultural activities, personalities (Rabbis, leaders, prominent people, characters) and other aspects of the town. It also describes the events of the Shoah in the town and lists the victims. All information is either first-hand accounts or based upon first-hand accounts and therefore serves as a primary resource for either research and to individuals seeking information about the town from which their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents had immigrated; this is their history The book was originally written in Hebrew and Yiddish in 1963, translated into English by volunteers in the Yizkor Book Project of JewishGen, Inc. and then published by the Yizkor-Books-In-Print Project. The town is also known as: Yampol Russian], Yampil Ukrainian], Yampola Yiddish], Jampol Pololish], Yambol, Yampol (Wolyn), Iampol, Jampil Yampol, Ukraine, in the District of Volhyn. 49 58' N 26 15' E, 191 mi West of Kyyiv Not to be confused with a larger Yampol, in Podolia, at 48 15' 28 17'].

"In this insightful book, Stephanie Homer interrogates how different genre conventions (memoir, autobiographical fiction and novels) influence the representation of the Kindertransport. Her theoretical approach is sophisticated, her selection of texts judicious and representative. Homer's contribution to the study of the reception history of the Kindertransport is important and timely." (Bill Niven, Professor of Contemporary German History, Nottingham Trent University) "An immensely valuable intervention into studies of Kindertransport representations, this book invites readers into the ambiguities of memory. With clarity and confidence, the book explores the liberating creative potential of autobiographical fiction and polyphonic fictional voices which have reimagined the places and perspectives on Kindertransport as a migratory experience and literary compulsion. The book makes an important contribution to our understanding of Kindertransport literature as a genuinely transnational genre of witnessing and re-witnessing." (Dr Simone Gigliotti, Senior Lecturer in Holocaust Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London) With the dwindling number of Kindertransportees alive today, the living memory of this rescue operation is being transformed into cultural memory, a trend noticeable in the publication of popular Kindertransport fiction since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This change in memory invites the following questions: how is the child refugee's experience remembered, represented and reimagined in literature? And, consequently, what understanding of the Kindertransport is being transmitted to the following generations? Drawing on understandings of genre, narratology and empathy, this book examines works in English, German and Dutch from three literary genres: memoirs and autobiographical fiction by Kindertransportees and recent fiction by authors with no first-hand experience of the Kindertransport. This study exposes the various conventions, tensions and reader expectations attached to each genre and how these influence the author's construction of the text and, in turn, the nature of the representation. This topical research engages in debates at the heart of current discussions on Holocaust and Kindertransport memory, such as the limits of representability, the "unspeakability" of trauma, and issues of ethics and aesthetics.

This is the extraordinary story of the author's twenty year quest to find gold coins which his father's family buried in their backyard in Poland just prior to being deported by the Nazis into concentration camps. His father survived the war but died when the author was a teenager, leaving him only with the knowledge that he had buried coins somewhere in Poland, and no information about his family. During his quest, Biederman uncovers many interesting and disturbing facts about his father and mother and their families, such as the fact that his father was the third person on Oskar Schindler's list and had a chance meeting with Adolph Hitler, and that his mother was selected as a cook for the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. The book details the author's quest to unearth his family's past and his father's treasure and continues with his parent's amazing post-war years in Europe and their eventual arrival in North America.

This work covers the international importance of the War in Spain through the two organizations that marked the multilateral action towards the conflict: The League of Nations and the Non-Intervention Committee. France and the United Kingdom diverted both deliberations as well as decision-making processes and mechanisms from Geneva. Non-intervention was appeasement's specific variable applied to Spain. Despite its name, it meant an intervention, depriving the Spanish government from its own defense while the fascist governments provided massive and regular support to the rebels. The League was damaged in its authority through the violation of its Covenant in Manchuria and Abyssinia. Once the War in Spain began, non-intervention was articulated with the main objective to confine the conflict to the Spanish borders. To this end, the designation of the conflict as a civil war (not a mere nominal nor anecdotal issue) in both London and Geneva was essential. By abandoning the Spanish democracy and foreclosing the collective security system, European democracies were also removing all that stood between their own societies and another world war. The failure of the collective security system that the League was supposed to safeguard, prompted by the impossibility of reconciling the British-led policy of appeasement with active anti-fascism, led to a climate of collective insecurity, during which arose a Second World War. This was precisely the main objective to avoid in the international order established in 1919 after the major collective catastrophe on a worldwide scale - soon to be overcome as that. The scholarship herein will prove essential for scholars of the interwar years' crisis, twentieth-century Spanish history and international relations.

A historical investigation of children's memory of the Holocaust in Greece illustrates that age, generation and geographical background shaped postwar Jewish identities. The examination of children's narratives deposited in the era of digital archives enables an understanding of the age-specific construction of the memory of genocide, which shakes established assumptions about the memory of the Holocaust. In the context of a global Holocaust memory established through testimony archives, the present research constructs a genealogy of the testimonial culture in Greece by framing the rich source of written and oral testimonies in the political discourses and public memory of the aftermath of the Second World War. The testimonies of former hidden children and child survivors of concentration camps illuminate the questions that haunted postwar attempts to reconstruct communities, related to the specific evolution of genocide in Greece and to the rising anti-Semitism of postwar Greece. As an oral history of child survivors of the Holocaust, the book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of the history of childhood, Jewish studies, memory studies and Holocaust and genocide studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory serves as a timely and unique resource for the current boom in thinking around translation and memory. The Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of a contemporary, and as yet unconsolidated, research landscape with a four-section structure which encompasses both current debate and future trajectories. Twenty-four chapters written by leading and emerging international scholars provide a cross-sectional snapshot of the diverse angles of approach and case studies that have thus far driven research into translation and memory. A valuable, far-reaching range of theoretical, empirical, reflective, comparative, and archival approaches are brought to bear on translational sites of memory and mnemonic sites of translation through the examination of topics such as traumatic, postcolonial, cultural, literary, and translator memory. This Handbook is key reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in translation studies, memory studies, and related areas.

The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered brings together leading authorities in a transnational, international, and supranational study of Adolf Eichmann, who was captured by the Israelis in Argentina and tried in Jerusalem in 1961. The essays in this important new collection span the disciplines of history, film studies, political science, sociology, psychology, and law. Contributing scholars adopt a wide historical lens, pushing outwards in time and space to examine the historical and legal influence that Adolf Eichmann and his trial held for Israel, West Germany, and the Middle East. In addition to taking up the question of what drove Eichmann, contributors explore the motivation of prosecutors, lawyers, diplomats, and neighbouring countries before, during, and after the trial ended. The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered puts Eichmann at the centre of an exploration of German versus Israeli jurisprudence, national Israeli identities and politics, and the conflict between German, Israeli, and Arab states.

In the spring of 1944, nearly 500,000 Jews were deported from the Hungarian countryside and killed in Auschwitz. In Budapest, only 150,000 Jews survived both the German occupation and dictatorship of the Hungarian National Socialists, who took power in October 1944. Zsuzsanna Ozsvath's family belonged among the survivors. This memoir begins with the the author's childhood during the Holocaust in Hungary. It captures life after the war's end in Communist-ruled Hungary and continues with her and her husband's flight to Germany and eventually the United States. Ozsvath's poignant story of survival, friendship, and love provides readers with a rare glimpse of an extraordinary journey.

Expands the definition of second-generation literature to include texts written from the point of view of the children of Nazi perpetrators. Among historical events of the 20th century, the Holocaust is unrivaled as the subject of both scholarly and literary writing. Literary responses include not only thousands of autobiographical and fictional texts written by survivors, but also, more recently, works by writers who are not survivors but nevertheless feel compelled to write about the Holocaust. Writers from what is known as the second generation have produced texts that express their feeling of being powerfully marked by events of which they have had no direct experience. This book expands the commonly-used definition of second-generation literature, which refers to texts written from the perspective ofthe children of survivors, to include texts written from the point of view of the children of Nazi perpetrators. With its innovative focus on the literary legacy of both groups, it investigates how second-generation writers employsimilar tropes of stigmatization to express their troubled relationships to their parents' histories. Through readings of nine American, German, and French literary texts, Erin McGlothlin demonstrates how an anxiety with signification is manifested in the very structure of second-generation literature, revealing the extent to which the literary texts themselves are marked by the continuing aftershocks of the Holocaust. Erin McGlothlin is Assistant Professor of German at Washington University in St. Louis.

In Central Europe, limited success in revisiting the role of science in the segregation of Roma reverberates with the yet-unmet call for contextualizing the impact of ideas on everyday racism. This book attempts to interpret such a gap as a case of epistemic injustice. It underscores the historical role of ideas in race-making and provides analytical lenses for exploring cross-border transfers of whiteness in Central Europe. In the case of Roma, the scientific argument in favor of segregation continues to play an outstanding role due to a long-term focus on the limited educability of Roma. The authors trace the long-term interrelation between racializing Roma and the adaptation by Central European scholars of theories legitimizing segregation against those considered non-white, conceived as unable to become educated or "civilized." Along with legitimizing segregation, sterilization and even extermination, theorizing ineducability has laid the groundwork for negating the capacity of Roma as subjects of knowledge. Such negation has hindered practices of identity and quite literally prevented Roma in Central Europe from becoming who they are. This systematic epistemic injustice still echoes in contemporary attempts to historicize Roma in Central Europe. The authors critically investigate contemporary approaches to historicize Roma as reproducing whiteness and inevitably leading to various forms of epistemic injustice. The methodological approach herein conceptualizes critical whiteness as a practice of epistemic justice targeted at providing a sustainable platform for reflecting upon the impact of the past on the contemporary situation of Roma.

The Holocaust in Hungary provides a comprehensive documentary account of one of the most brutal and effective killing campaigns in history. After Nazi Germany took control of Hungary late in World War II, Jews were rounded up with unprecedented speed and sent directly to Auschwitz. They would form the largest group of victims who perished in that camp. The complex interplay between German and Hungarian actors brought about the annihilation of a once-thriving Jewish community and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children. The authors present extensive reports, testimonies, and other primary sources of these events accompanied by in-depth commentary that spans the years from the late 1930s to the fractured political landscape of postwar Hungary.

The second edition of this book frames the Holocaust as a catastrophe emerging from varied international responses to the Jewish question during an age of global crisis and war. The chapters are arranged chronologically, thematically, and geographically, reflecting how persecution, responses, and experience varied over time and place, conveying a sense of the Holocaust's complexity. Fully updated, this edition incorporates the past decade's scholarship concerning perpetrators, victims, and bystanders from political, national, and gendered perspectives. It also frames the Holocaust within the broader genocide perspective and within current debates on memory politics and causation. Global in approach and supported by images, maps, diverse voices, and suggestions for further reading, this is the ideal textbook for students of this catastrophic period in world history.

Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust is a decisive text of intellectual reflection after Auschwitz, in which Bauman rejected the idea that the Holocaust represented the polar opposite of modernity and saw it instead as its dark potentiality. Bringing together leading scholars from across disciplines, this volume offers the first set of focused and critical commentaries on this classic work of social theory, evaluating its ongoing contribution to scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. Addressing the core messages of Modernity and the Holocaust that continue to sound amidst the convulsions of the present, the chapters situate Bauman's volume in the social, cultural and academic context of its genesis, and considers its role in the complex processes of Holocaust memorialisation. Offering extensions of Bauman's thesis to lesser-known and undertheorised events of mass violence, and also considering the significance of Janina Bauman's writings in their own right, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, intellectual history, Holocaust and genocide studies, moral philosophy, memory studies and cultural theory.

The study of genocide and mass atrocity abounds with references to emotions: fear, anger, horror, shame and hatred. Yet we don't understand enough about how 'ordinary' emotions behave in such extreme contexts. Emotions are not merely subjective and interpersonal phenomena; they are also powerful social and political forces, deeply involved in the history of mass violence. Drawing on recent insights from philosophy, psychology, history, and the social sciences, this volume examines the emotions of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Editors Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang have brought together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars to provide an in-depth analysis of the nature, value, and role of emotions as they relate to the causes and dynamics of mass atrocities. The result is a new perspective on the social, political, and moral dimensions of emotions in the history of collective violence and its aftermath.

For decades scholars have pored over Hitler's autobiographical journey/political treatise, debating if Mein Kampf has genocidal overtones and arguably led to the Holocaust. For the first time, Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Holocaust sees celebrated international scholars analyse the book from various angles to demonstrate how it laid the groundwork for the Shoah through Hitler's venomous attack on the Jews in his text. Split into three main sections which focus on 'contexts', 'eugenics' and 'religion', the book reflects carefully on the point at which the Fuhrer's actions and policies turn genocidal during the Third Reich and whether Mein Kampf presaged Nazi Germany's descent into genocide. There are contributions from leading academics from across the United States and Germany, including Magnus Brechtken, Susannah Heschel and Nathan Stoltzfus, along with totally new insights into the source material in light of the 2016 German critical edition of Mein Kampf. Hitler's views on Marxism, violence, and leadership, as well as his anti-Semitic rhetoric are examined in detail as you are taken down the disturbing path from a hateful book to the Holocaust.

Far from the image of an apolitical, "clean" Wehrmacht that persists in popular memory, German soldiers regularly cooperated with organizations like the SS in the abuse and murder of countless individuals during the Second World War. This in-depth study demonstrates that a key factor in the criminalization of the Wehrmacht was the intense political indoctrination imposed on its members. At the instigation of senior leadership, many ordinary German soldiers and officers became ideological warriors who viewed their enemies in racial and political terms-a project that was but one piece of the broader effort to socialize young men during the Nazi era.

An unputdownable tale of one man's quest to recover his family's property, plundered by the Nazis. Menachem Kaiser's brilliantly told story is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather's former battle to reclaim the family's property in Sosnowiec, Poland. Here, he meets a Polish lawyer known as 'The Killer' who agrees to take his case and becomes involved with a band of Silesian treasure-seekers, all the while piecing together his family's complex history. Propelled by rich, original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living? Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance - material, spiritual, familial, and emotional.

Even before Japan joined Nazi Germany in the Axis Alliance, its leaders clarified to the Nazi regime that the attitude of the Japanese government and people to the Jews was totally different than that of the official German position and that it had no intention of taking measures against the Jews that could be seen as racially motivated. During World War II some 40,000 Jews found themselves under Japanese occupation in Manchuria, China and countries of South East Asia. Virtually all of them survived the war, unlike their brethren in Europe. This book traces the evolution of Japan's policy towards the Jews from the beginning of the 20th century, the existence of anti-Semitism in Japan, and why Japan ignored repeated Nazi demands to become involved in the ""final solution.

The Spanish Civil War has been the most important, decisive and traumatic event in contemporary Spain, but also one of the most iconic events in the recent history of the Western world. However, musicology has not devoted a great deal of attention to the war of 1936-1939 until very recently. This volume is the first collective book dedicated to music and the Spanish Civil War. The contributions, drawn from musicologists, historians and anthropologists from Spain, Mexico, Australia, and the United States, explore the songs at the front, war soundscapes, propaganda and music policies, censorship, music in prisons, different music genres, exiled composers and critics, musical diplomacy, memory, and Spanish Civil War as a topic in contemporary music.