This volume is a brief history of the Jewish community of Volodymyr-Volynsky, going back to its first historical mentions. It explores Jewish settlement in the city, the kahal, and the role of the community in the Va'ad Arba Aratsot, and profiles several important historical figures, including Shelomoh of Karlin and Khane-Rokhl Werbermacher (the Maiden of Ludmir). It also considers the city's synagogues and Jewish cemetery, and explores the twentieth-century history of the community, especially during the Holocaust. Drawing on survivor eyewitness testimonies, the author pays tribute to the town's Righteous among the Nations and describes efforts to preserve the memory of its Jewish community, including the creation of the Piatydni memorial, and lists prominent Jews born in Volodymyr-Volynsky and natives of the city living abroad. This book will be of interest to historians of the Jewish communities and the Holocaust in Ukraine, as well as to the general reader

With great immediacy, the diaries of Willy Cohn, a Jew and a Social Democrat, show how the process of marginalization under the Nazis unfolded within the vibrant Jewish community of Breslau--until that community was destroyed in 1941. Cohn documents how difficult it was to understand precisely what was happening, even as people were harassed, beaten, and taken off to concentration camps. He chronicles the efforts of the community to maintain some semblance of normal life at the same time as many made plans to emigrate or to get their children out.
Cohn and his wife Gertrud were able to get their three oldest children out of Germany before it was too late. However, burying himself in his work chronicling the history of the Jews in Germany, his diaries, and his memoirs, Cohn missed his own chance to escape. In late 1941, he, Gertrud, and their two young daughters were deported to Lithuania, where they were shot.
Willy Cohn was a complex individual: an Orthodox Jew and a socialist; an ardent Zionist and a staunch German patriot; a realist but also an idealist often unable to cope with reality; a democrat and an admirer of certain Nazi policies and of their resoluteness. These contradictions and the wealth of detail that poured from his pen give us a unique view of those disorienting and frightening times in Germany.

From interpretations of the Holocaust to fascist thought and anti-fascists' responses, and the problems of memorializing this difficult past, this essay collection tackles topics which are rarely studied in conjunction. As well as historical analyses of fascist and anti-fascist thinking, Stone analyses the challenges involved in writing history in general and Holocaust historiography in particular. Following an introductory essay on 'history and its discontents', the wide-ranging chapters deal with individual thinkers of very different sorts, such as Hannah Arendt, Rolf Gardiner, Jules Monnerot and Saul Friedlander, movements such as interwar rural revivalism, the contested translation of Mein Kampf, emigre anti-fascists' writings, and the relationship between memory and history, especially with respect to atrocities like genocide. This unique collection of essays on a wide variety of topics contributes to understanding the roots and consequences of mid-twentieth-century Europe's great catastrophe.

During a 1931 trial of four Nazi stormtroopers, known as the Eden Dance Palace trial, Hans Litten grilled Hitler in a brilliant and merciless three-hour cross-examination, forcing him into multiple contradictions and evasions and finally reducing him to helpless and humiliating rage (the transcription of Hitler's full testimony is included.) At the time, Hitler was still trying to prove his embrace of legal methods, and distancing himself from his stormtroopers. The courageous Litten revealed his true intentions, and in the process, posed a real threat to Nazi ambition.
When the Nazis seized power two years after the trial, friends and family urged Litten to flee the country. He stayed and was sent to the concentration camps, where he worked on translations of medieval German poetry, shared the money and food he was sent by his wealthy family, and taught working-class inmates about art and literature. When Jewish prisoners at Dachau were locked in their barracks for weeks at a time, Litten kept them sane by reciting great works from memory. After five years of torture and hard labor-and a daring escape that failed-Litten gave up hope of survival. His story was ultimately tragic but, as Benjamin Hett writes in this gripping narrative, it is also redemptive. "It is a story of human nobility in the face of barbarism."
The first full-length biography of Litten, the book also explores the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic and the terror of Nazi rule in Germany after 1933. [in sidebar] Winner of the 2007 Fraenkel Prize for outstanding work of contemporary history, in manuscript. To be published throughout the world.

Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History is a brief but comprehensive survey of the Third Reich based on current research findings that provides a balanced approach to the study of Hitler's role in the history of the Third Reich. The book considers the economic, social, and political forces that made possible the rise and development of Nazism; the institutional, cultural, and social life of the Third Reich; World War II; and the Holocaust. World War II and the Holocaust are presented as logical outcomes of the ideology of Hitler and the Nazi movement. This new edition contains more information on the Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany), as well as Nazi complicity in the Reichstag Fire and increased discussion of consent and dissent during the Nazi attempt to create the ideal Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). It takes a greater focus on the experiences of ordinary bystanders, perpetrators, and victims throughout the text, includes more discussion of race and space, and the final chapter has been completely revised. Fully updated, the book ensures that students gain a complete and thorough picture of the period and issues. Supported by maps, images, and thoroughly updated bibliographies that offer further reading suggestions for students to take their study further, the book offers the perfect overview of Hitler and the Third Reich.

"The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010" is the first major study of how postwar Italy confronted, or failed to confront, the Holocaust. Fascist Italy was the model for Nazi Germany, and Mussolini was Hitler's prime ally in the Second World War. But Italy also became a theater of war and a victim of Nazi persecution after 1943, as resistance, collaboration, and civil war raged. Many thousands of Italians--Jews and others--were deported to concentration camps throughout Europe. After the war, Italian culture produced a vast array of stories, images, and debate through which it came to terms with the Holocaust's difficult legacy. Gordon probes a rich range of cultural material as he paints a picture of this shared encounter with the darkest moment of twentieth-century history. His book explores aspects of Italian national identity and memory, offering a new model for analyzing the interactions between national and international images of the Holocaust.

Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This volume addresses manifestations of Holocaust-engendered global discourse by critically examining their function and inherent dilemmas, and the ways in which Holocaust-related matters still instigate public debate and academic deliberation. It contends that the contradiction between the totalizing logic of globalization and the assumed uniqueness of the Holocaust generates continued intellectual and practical discontent.

This book focuses on an important but neglected aspect of the Spanish Civil War, the evolution of medical and surgical care of the wounded during the conflict. Importantly, the focus is from a mainly Spanish perspective - as the Spanish are given a voice in their own story, which has not always been the case. Central to the book is General Franco's treatment of Muslim combatants, the anarchist contribution to health, and the medicalisation of propaganda - themes that come together in a medico-cultural study of the Spanish Civil War. Suffusing the narrative and the analysis is the traumatic legacy of conflict, an untreated wound that a new generation of Spaniards are struggling to heal.

Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past is a comprehensive consideration of the role of empathy in historical knowledge, informed by the literature on empathy in fields including history, psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and sociology. The book seeks to raise the consciousness of historians about empathy, by introducing them to the history of the concept and to its status in fields outside of history. It also seeks to raise the self-consciousness of historians about their use of empathy to know and understand past people. Defining empathy as thinking and feeling, as imagining, one's way inside the experience of others in order to know and understand them, Thomas A. Kohut distinguishes between the external and the empathic observational position, the position of the historical subject. He argues that historians need to be aware of their observational position, of when they are empathizing and when they are not. Indeed, Kohut advocates for the deliberate, self-reflective use of empathy as a legitimate and important mode of historical inquiry. Insightful, cogent, and interdisciplinary, the book will be essential for historians, students of history, and psychoanalysts, as well as those in other fields who seek to seek to know and understand human beings.

Over the last seventy years, memories and narratives of the Holocaust have played a significant role in constructing Jewish communities. The author explores one field where these narratives are disseminated: Holocaust pedagogy in Jewish schools in Melbourne and New York. Bringing together a diverse range of critical approaches, including memory studies, gender studies, diaspora theory, and settler colonial studies, Anxious Histories complicates the stories being told about the Holocaust in these Jewish schools and their broader communities. It demonstrates that an anxious thread runs throughout these historical narratives, as the pedagogy negotiates feelings of simultaneous belonging and not-belonging in the West and in Zionism. In locating that anxiety, the possibilities and the limitations of narrating histories of the Holocaust are opened up once again for analysis, critique, discussion, and development.

Between 1935 and 1940, the Nazis incorporated large portions of Europe into the German Reich. The contributors to this volume analyze the evolving anti-Jewish policies in the annexed territories and their impact on the Jewish population, as well as the attitudes and actions of non-Jews, Germans, and indigenous populations. They demonstrate that diverse anti-Jewish policies developed in the different territories, which in turn affected practices in other regions and even influenced Berlin's decisions. Having these systematic studies together in one volume enables a comparison - based on the most recent research - between anti-Jewish policies in the areas annexed by the Nazi state. The results of this prizewinning book call into question the common assumption that one central plan for persecution extended across Nazi-occupied Europe, shifting the focus onto differing regional German initiatives and illuminating the cooperation of indigenous institutions.

"The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010" is the first major study of how postwar Italy confronted, or failed to confront, the Holocaust. Fascist Italy was the model for Nazi Germany, and Mussolini was Hitler's prime ally in the Second World War. But Italy also became a theater of war and a victim of Nazi persecution after 1943, as resistance, collaboration, and civil war raged. Many thousands of Italians--Jews and others--were deported to concentration camps throughout Europe. After the war, Italian culture produced a vast array of stories, images, and debate through which it came to terms with the Holocaust's difficult legacy. Gordon probes a rich range of cultural material as he paints a picture of this shared encounter with the darkest moment of twentieth-century history. His book explores aspects of Italian national identity and memory, offering a new model for analyzing the interactions between national and international images of the Holocaust.

Describes the life of the author's family in Vilnius before and during WWII and under the Nazi occupation, depicting their miraculous survival thanks to the German officer Karl Plagge. Plagge played a vital role in the survival of more than one hundred Jews, and for this is known as "the Schindler from Darmstadt." After liberation by the Red Army, the author's family moved first to Poland and then to France, forging their lives as refugees with gratitude and courage.

Catastrophic scenarios dominate our contemporary mindset. Catastrophic events and predictions have spurred new interest in re-examining the history of earlier disasters and the social and conceptual resources they have mobilized. The essays gathered in this volume reconsider the history and theory of different catastrophes and their aftermath. The emphasis is on the need to distance this process of reconsideration from previous teleological representations of catastrophes as an endpoint, and to begin considering their "operative" aspects, which unmask the nature of social and political structures. Among the essays in this volume are analyses, by leading scholars in their respective fields, concerning the role of catastrophes in theology, in the history of industrial accidents, in theory of history, in the history of law, in "catastrophe films", in the history of cybernetics, in post-Holocaust discussions of reparations, and in climate change.

Dr. Juan Negrin Lopez (18921956) was a man of immense talent, energy, and socialist convictions who served the Spanish people in different capacities: as a physiologist of international reputation and as chairman of the medical faculty of the Complutense University in Madrid during the 1920s; as an active member of the Parliamentary wing of the Socialist Party, 19311936; during the Civil War as Minister of Finance in the Popular Front government led by Francisco Largo Caballero (September 1936May 1937); and as Prime Minister from late May until March 1939. In all these roles he was highly competent: improving the laboratories and experimental methods in physiology, obtaining scholarships for students, suggesting subjects for doctoral theses, encouraging his students to learn foreign languages and read scientific literature in the original, and also to think of public health as a national, public responsibility. As Minister of Finance he conceived of Spains relatively large gold reserve as the only means by which the Republic could buy the quality of modern arms that were being supplied to General Franco by Hitler and Mussolini. In European politics of the mid-1930s he understood much better than did the English, French, and United States political classes that Nazism and Fascism were a much greater threat to European democracy than was Soviet Communism. But the appeasement policy culminating in the Munich Pact of September 29, 1938 sealed the fate of the Spanish Republic as well as that of the Republic of Czechoslovakia. From 1940 onward Negrin was reviled in Franco Spain for having supposedly delivered the Republic into the hands of the Communists; many republican and socialist exiles also rejected him for continuing his Numantian policy of resistance when, after Munich, the military possibilities of the Republic were truly hopeless. Gabriel Jackson sets out to understand the moral and political thinking of Dr. Negrin of those who supported him to the end and of those who felt that the last months of the war merely prolonged the suffering of the population. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies

For many years, histories of the Holocaust focused on its perpetrators, and only recently have more scholars begun to consider in detail the experiences of victims and survivors, as well as the documents they left behind. This volume contains new research from internationally established scholars. It provides an introduction to and overview of Jewish narratives of the Holocaust. The essays include new considerations of sources ranging from diaries and oral testimony to the hidden Oyneg Shabbes archive of the Warsaw Ghetto; arguments regarding Jewish narratives and how they fit into the larger fields of Holocaust and Genocide studies; and new assessments of Jewish responses to mass murder ranging from ghetto leadership to resistance and memory.

This book explores portrayals of Anne Frank in American literature, where she is often invoked, if problematically, as a means of encouraging readers to think widely about persecution, genocide, and victimisation; often in relation to gender, ethnicity, and race. It shows how literary representations of Anne Frank in America over the past 50 years reflect the continued dominance of the American dramatic adaptations of Frank's Diary in the 1950s, and argues that authors feel compelled to engage with the problematic elements of these adaptations and their iconic power. At the same time, though, literary representations of Frank are associated with the adaptations; critics often assume that these texts unquestioningly perpetuate the problems with the adaptations. This is not true. This book examines how American authors represent Frank in order to negotiate difficult questions relating to representation of the Holocaust in America, and in order to consider gender, coming of age, and forms of inequality in American culture in various historical moments; and of course, to consider the ways Frank herself is represented in America. This book argues that the most compelling representations of Frank in American literature are alert to their own limitations, and may caution against making Frank a universal symbol of goodness or setting up too easy identifications with her. It will be of great interest to researchers and students of Frank, the Holocaust in American fiction and culture, gender studies, life writing, young adult fiction, and ethics.

This book explores how the women's orchestra at Auschwitz-Birkenau has been remembered in both media and popular culture since the end of the Second World War. In particular it focuses on Fania Fenelon's memoir, Playing for Time (1976), which was subsequently adapted into a film. Since then the publication has become a cornerstone of Holocaust remembrance and scholarship. Susan Eischeid therefore investigates whether it deserves such status, and whether such material can ever be considered reliable source material for historians. Using divergent source material gathered by the author, such as interviews with the other surviving members of the orchestra, this Pivot seeks to shed light on this period of women's history, and questions how we remember the Holocaust today.

This significant new study is concerned with the role of interpreting in Nazi concentration camps, where prisoners were of 30 to 40 different nationalities. With German as the only official language in the lager, communication was vital to the prisoners' survival. While in the last few decades there has been extensive research on the language used by the camp inmates, investigation into the mediating role of interpreters between SS guards and prisoners on the one hand, and among inmates on the other, has been almost nonexistent. On the basis of Primo Levi's considerations on communication in the Nazi concentrationary system, this book investigates the ambivalent role of interpreting in the camps. One of the central questions is what the role of interpreting was in the wider context of shaping life in concentration camps. And in what way did the knowledge of languages, and accordingly, certain communication skills, contribute to the survival of concentration camp inmates and of the interpreting person? The main sources under investigation are both archive materials and survivors' memoirs and testimonials in various languages. On a different level, Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps also asks in what way the study of communication in concentration camps enhances our understanding of the ambiguous role of interpreting in more general terms. And in what way does the study of interpreting in concentration camps shape an interpreting concept which can help us to better understand the violent nature of interpreting in contexts other than the Holocaust?

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.

The Jewish community of the Polish border town of Brzesc (Brisk in Yiddish), which had numbered almost 30,000 people, was wiped out during the Holocaust, with only about 10 of its members surviving. One of them was Masza Pinczuk, who escaped from the Brzesc ghetto on the eve of its liquidation on Oct.15, 1942. Her future husband succeeded in escaping from the Warsaw ghetto. They were the sole survivors of their respective families, and in this volume their daughter, Regina Grol, shares their story and meditates on the legacy of the Holocaust, exploring the lingering impact of the Holocaust on the following generations. Based on interviews and letters, and checked against historical facts, the book includes supporting documents and photographs. It also contains an account of the author's "internal flanerie" (to use Walter Benjamin's term), i.e., a retrospective and introspective look at her own life as a child of Holocaust survivors.

The complicity of the Hungarian Christian church in the mass extermination of Hungarian Jews by the Nazis is a largely forgotten episode in the history of the Holocaust. Using previously unknown correspondence and other primary source materials, Moshe Y. Herczl recreates the church's actions and its disposition toward Hungarian Jewry. Herczl provides a scathing indictment of the church's lack of compassion toward--and even active persecution of--Hungary's Jews during World War II.

This book focuses on the fate of Polish Jews and Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust and its aftermath, in the ill-recognized era of Eastern-European pogroms after the WW2. It is based on the author's own ethnographic research in those areas of Poland where the Holocaust machinery operated. The results comprise the anthropological interviews with the members of the generation of Holocaust witnesses and the results of her own extensive archive research in the Polish Institute for National Remembrance (IPN). "[This book] is at times shocking; however, it grips the reader's attention from the first to the last page. It is a remarkable work, set to become a classic among the publications in this field." Jerzy Jedlicki, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Marking the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, this volume takes a close look at the initial political moves, military actions and consequences of the fratricidal conflict and their impact on both Spaniards and contemporary European powers. The contributors re-examine the crystallization of the political alliances formed in the Republican and the Nationalist zones; the support mobilized by the two warring camps; and the different attitudes and policies adopted by neighbouring and far away countries. Spain 1936: Year Zero goes beyond and against commonly held assumptions as to the supposed unity of the Nationalist camp vis-a-vis the fragmentation of the Republican one; and likewise brings to the fore the complexities of initial support of the military rebellion by Nazi Germany and Soviet support of the beleaguered Republic. Situating the Iberian conflict in the larger international context, senior and junior scholars from various countries challenge the multitude of hitherto accepted ideas about the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War. A primary aim of the editors is to enable discussion on the Spanish Civil War from lesser known or realized perspectives by investigating the civil wars impact on countries such as Argentina, Japan, and Jewish Palestine; and from lesser heard voices at the time of women, intellectuals, and athletes. Original contributions are devoted to the Popular Olympiad organized in Barcelona in July 1936, Japanese perceptions of the Spanish conflict in light of the 1931 invasion to Manchuria, and international volunteers in the International Brigades.