This interdisciplinary text brings together perspectives from leading psychoanalysts and modern Jewish philosophers to offer a unique investigation into the dynamic between the fundamental trust in the self, other persons, and the world, and the devastating force of emotional trauma. Chapters examine the challenges of witnessing and acknowledging suffering; trust in God; and the traumatic effects of the Holocaust. The result is a deeper understanding of the fundamental relationality of humans, the imperative of responsibility for the Other, the fragility of meaning, and the metaphorical powers of religious language. Authors representing two standpoints, the psychological/ psychoanalytic and the religious/ philosophical, provide key insights. Erik Erikson, Jessica Benjamin, Judith Herman, and Bessel van der Kolk support the psychological discourse, while Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Abraham Joshua Heschel present the Jewish philosophical discourse. This book is written for professionals and advanced students in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and Jewish and religious studies. Its accessible and engaging style will also appeal to general readers with an interest in philosophical, psychological, and religious perspectives on some of the most elemental human concerns.

Commentary on memorials to the Holocaust has been plagued with a sense of "monument fatigue", a feeling that landscape settings and national spaces provide little opportunity for meaningful engagement between present visitors and past victims. This book examines the Holocaust via three sites of murder by the Nazis: the former concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany; the mass grave at Babi Yar, Ukraine; and the razed village of Lidice, Czech Republic. Bringing together recent scholarship from cultural memory and cultural geography, the author focuses on the way these violent histories are remembered, allowing these sites to emerge as dynamic transcultural landscapes of encounter in which difficult pasts can be represented and comprehended in the present. This leads to an examination of the role of the environment, or, more particularly, the ways in which the natural environment, co-opted in the process of killing, becomes a medium for remembrance.

Bohemia and Moravia, today part of the Czech Republic, was the first territory with a majority of non-German speakers occupied by Hitler's Third Reich on the eve of the World War II. Tens of thousands of Jewish inhabitants in the so called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia soon felt the tragic consequences of Nazi racial politics. Not all Czechs, however, remained passive bystanders during the genocide. After the destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, Slovakia became a formally independent but fully subordinate satellite of Germany. Despite the fact it was not occupied until 1944, Slovakia paid Germany to deport its own Jewish citizens to extermination camps. About 270,000 out of the 360,000 Czech and Slovak casualties of World War II were victims of the Holocaust. Despite these statistics, the Holocaust vanished almost entirely from post-war Czechoslovak, and later Czech and Slovak, historical cultures. The communist dictatorship carried the main responsibility for this disappearance, yet the situation has not changed much since the fall of the communist regime. The main questions of this study are how and why the Holocaust was excluded from the Czech and Slovak history.

Filled with new elements that challenge common scholarly theses, this book acquaints the reader with the "Jewish problem" of Sociology and provides what this academic discipline urgently needs: a one-volume history of 'the Sociology of the Holocaust'. The story of why and how the sociologists as well as the school of sociological thoughts came to confront the event has never been entirely told. However, the focus is on the "alleged delay of Sociology" in the comprehension of the Jewish genocide. Did this delay really exist? To this and other arising questions, this book tries to answer: the delay could be an half truth. The volume offers original insights on the nature of American Sociology with implications for the post-Holocaust Sociology development.

This volume examines the changing role which ordinary members of society played in the state-sponsored persecution of the Jews in Bukovina and Bessarabia, both during the summer of 1941, when Romania joined the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and beyond. It establishes different patterns of civilian complicity and discusses the significance of the phenomenon in the context of the exterminatory campaign pursued by the Romanian military authorities against the Jews living in the borderlands.

The White Terror was a movement of right-wing militias that for two years actively tracked down, tortured, and murdered members of the Jewish community, as well as former supporters of the short-lived Council Republic in the years following World War I. It can be argued that this example of a programme of virulent antisemitism laid the foundations for Hungarian participation in the Holocaust. Given the rightward shift of Hungarian politics today, this book has a particular resonance in re-examining the social and historical context of the White Terror.

The book investigates the rather neglected "intellectual" collaboration between National Socialist Germany and other countries, including views on knowledge and politics among "pro-German" intellectuals, using a comparative approach. These moves were shaped by the Nazi system, which viewed scientific and cultural exchange as part and parcel of their cultural propaganda and policy. Positive views of the Hitler regime among intellectuals of all sorts were indicative of a broader discontent with democracy that, among other things, represented an alternative approach to modernization which was not limited to the German heartlands. This book draws together international experts in an analysis of right-wing Europe under Hitler; a study which has gained new resonance amidst the wave of European nationalism in the twenty-first century.

The great majority of Holocaust scholarship concentrates heavily, if not almost completely, on the Final Solution from the German side. The distinctive feature of this book, both individually and as a collection, is its concentration on the Holocaust from a Judeo-centric point of view. The present essays make a unique contribution by exploring issues such as: the effect of events specifically on Jewish women and children; the character of the Nazi policy of slave labor in as much as this essential program resulted in different treatment with regard to Jews as compared to other workers; how the destruction of European Jewry has been responded to by Jewish thinkers; and how Jewish values, such as the well-known principle that "all Jews are responsible for each other," were exemplified and lived out during the war. The collection also includes an essay on Elie Wiesel, and another that explores the much discussed, very controversial issue of Jewish resistance, as well as several essays on philosophical and comparative issues raised by the Shoah.

The mass killings in Rwanda in 1994 shocked the world but the international response was ineffective. The end of the Cold War had created a moral climate supportive of humanitarian intervention and enforcement of the Genocide Convention, but it had not produced adequate legal and structural mechanisms to carry out such action. The book examines the failures of the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity, regional states and major world powers either to prevent or terminate the genocide and draws lessons for intervention in future.

Upon presenting the 1986 Nobel Prize for Peace to Elie Wiesel, Egil Aarvick, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, hailed him as "a messenger to mankind--not with a message of hate and revenge but with one of brotherhood and atonement." Elie Wiesel: Messenger to All Humanity, first published in 1983, echoes this theme and still affirms that message, a call to both Christians and Jews to face the tragedy of the Holocaust and begin again.

The rich history of the German rabbinate came to an abrupt halt with the November Pogrom of 1938. The need to leave Germany became clear and many rabbis made use of the visas they had been offered. Their resettlement in Britain was hampered by additional obstacles such as internment, deportation, enlistment in the Pioneer Corps. But rabbis still attempted to support their fellow refugees with spiritual and pastoral care. The refugee rabbis replanted the seed of the once proud German Judaism into British soil. New synagogues were founded and institutions of Jewish learning sprung up, like rabbinic training and the continuation of "Wissenschaft des Judentums." The arrival of Leo Baeck professionalized these efforts and resulted in the foundation of the Leo Baeck College in London. Refugee rabbis now settled and obtained pulpits in the many newly founded synagogues. Their arrival in Britain was the catalyst for much change in British Judaism, an influence that can still be felt today.

"Writing the Holocaust" provides students and teachers with an accessibly written overview of the key themes and major theoretical developments which continue to inform the nature of historical writing on the Holocaust. Holocaust studies is at a paradox: while historians of the Holocaust defend it as a legitimate and well-defined area of research, they write against a complex political and ideological background that undermines any claim for it as a normative field of historical study. Writing the Holocaust offers a lucid inquiry into this complex field by demonstrating the impact of current theories from the humanities and social sciences upon the treatment of Holocaust studies.

Set within the context of the political and ideological developments of the time, History vs. Apologetics examines the role played by the Catholic Church in the rise and consolidation of the Third Reich and in particular with regard to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Distanced in the beginning, the Catholic Church and the Nazi party drew closer as Hitler's popularity increased. At the ratification of the Concordat in Rome, a commitment not to interfere with the Nazis' "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question" was traded for a verbal promise from Berlin to exclude the baptized converts. While the Nazi government violated the Concordat at every turn, the Church kept zealously its promise. Pope Pius XII never mentioned the persecuted Jews by name and denied any knowledge of the annihilation of the Jews. Even after the war, Pius XII refused to condemn anti-Semitism and Germany's role in the Holocaust. Instead, the Vatican engaged in the protection of genocide perpetrators and assisted in their mass escape. David Cymet's comprehensive critical analysis of the polemical literature on the topic makes it possible to separate legitimate history from apologetic allegations and misrepresentations, bringing to light key elements of Church policy that is intentionally misinterpreted by apologists. By surveying the Church's policy from just before the rise of Nazism to the present, Cymet demonstrates how the Nazis were able to turn the Catholic Church into their ally in their war against the Jews.

As they trudged over the Pyrenees, the Spanish republicans became one of the most iconoclastic groups of refugees to have sought refuge in twentieth-century France. This book explores the array of opportunities, constraints, choices and motivations that characterised their lives. Using a wide range of empirical material, it presents a compelling case for rethinking exile in relation to refugees' lived experiences and memory activities. The major historical events of the period are covered: the development of refugees' rights and the 'concentration' camps of the Third Republic, the para-military labour formations of the Second World War, the dynamics shaping resistance activities, and the role of memory in the campaign to return to Spain. This study additionally analyses how these experiences have shaped homes and France's memorial landscape, thereby offering an unparalleled exploration of the long-term effects of exile from the mass exodus of 1939 through to the seventieth-anniversary commemorations in 2009. -- .

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"".

Patrick Henry, working with more than one thousand unpublished autobiographical pages written by key rescuers and with documents, letters, and interviews never before available, reconsiders the Holocaust rescue of Jews on the plateau of Vivarais-Lignon between the years 1939 and 1944. Henry carefully examines the general research of the last quarter century on rescue in that area of France, illuminating in detail the strengths and weaknesses of Philip Hallie's groundbreaking study Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (1979) as they appear sixty years after the end of World War II. In highlighting the involvement of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in the rescue mission, the book looks closely at the lives and work of two rescuers on the plateau: a young Protestant man, Daniel Trocme, and a Jewish mother of three, Madeleine Dreyfus, both of whom were arrested and deported. Daniel died in the gas chamber at Maidanek; Madeleine survived Bergen-Belsen. Madeleine provides an example of a Jewish rescuer of Jews and raises the issues of so-called Jewish passivity during the Holocaust. Also analyzed is Albert Camus' chronicle, La Peste, written in large part during the fifteen months he spent in a hamlet just outside the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon from August 1942 until late 1943. As an allegorical mirror, the text reflects both the violent and non-violent resistance taking place when and where Camus composed his narrative. Finally, Henry brings together his own findings and those of others who have studied the rescuers throughout Europe in order to understand rescuer motivation and to show incontrovertibly why it is important not only to know about the victims and perpetrators of the Nazi genocide but to study and teach more widely about the rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.

The word "bibliophilia" indicates a love of books, both as texts to be read and objects to be cherished for their physical qualities. Throughout the history of Iberian print culture, bibliophiles have attempted to explain the psychological experiences of reading and collecting books, as well as the social and economic conditions of book production. Bibliophiles, Murderous Bookmen, and Mad Librarians analyses Spanish bibliophiles who catalogue, organize, and archive books, as well as the publishers, artists, and writers who create them. Robert Richmond Ellis examines how books are represented in modern Spanish writing and how Spanish bibliophiles reflect on the role of books in their lives and in the histories and cultures of modern Spain. Through the combined approaches of literary studies, book history, and the book arts, Ellis argues that two strains of Spanish bibliophilia coalesce in the modern period: one that envisions books as a means of achieving personal fulfilment, and another that engages with politics and uses books to affirm linguistic, cultural, and regional and national identities.

After sixty years, Kristine Keese is finally able to share the memories of her years spent in the Warsaw Ghetto as a small child. She owes her survival, and that of her young uncle, to the striking resourcefulness of her mother. The story emerges as vividly as if it happened yesterday, full of details that only a child would notice. Although the the events of the Warsaw Ghetto and the fate of its victims has been described many times, Keese's story is exceptional, as it is told through the eyes of, not a victim, but a child engaged with her daily reality focused on survival.

Through case studies of prominent cultural products, this book takes a longitudinal approach to the influence and conceptualization of the Civil War in democratic Spain. Stafford explores the stories told about the war during the transition to democracy and how these narratives have morphed in light of the polemics about historical memory.

In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando-the "special squads," composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process-buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these "Scrolls of Auschwitz," which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp's liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

This evocative and wide-ranging set of articles is a forceful demonstration of how much the experience of East-Central and Eastern Europe, largely neglected until now, needs to be integrated into evolving scholarship on the era of the world wars. The collection diagnoses the challenge of achieving an enlarged historical and artistic perspective, and then goes on to meet it. Themes that are universal (exile, loss, trauma, survival, memory) and the undying subjects of art and artistic efforts at representation, here find specific expression. The case of Lithuania and its diverse populations is revealed in its full significance for a modern European history of the impact of the age of the world wars.

Holocaust education is a controversial and rapidly evolving field. This book, which critically analyses the very latest research, discusses a number of the most important debates which are emerging within it. Adopting a truly global perspective, it explores both teachers' and students' levels of Holocaust knowledge as well as their attitudes and approaches towards the subject.

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'.

This book contains essays on Fascism, Nazism and the Holocaust by distinguished scholar Professor Dan Stone. It examines issues such as race science and the racial state, Nazi race ideology, slave labour, concentration camps, British reaction to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, the search for missing persons in the chaos of postwar Europe and the postwar revival of fascism. Though mainly focused on Nazi Germany, it also makes comparisons with other fascist movements and regimes in Romania and elsewhere. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of antisemitism, fascism, Nazism, World War II, genocide studies and the Holocaust.