Born into poverty in Russian Poland in 1911, Zosa Szajkowski (Shy-KOV-ski) was a self-made man who managed to make a life for himself as an intellectual, first as a journalist in 1930s Paris, and then, after a harrowing escape to New York in 1941, as a scholar. Although he never taught at a university or even earned a PhD, Szajkowski became one of the world's foremost experts on the history of the Jews in modern France, publishing in Yiddish, English, and Hebrew. His work opened up new ways of thinking about Jewish emancipation, economic and social modernization, and the rise of modern anti-Semitism. But beneath Szajkowski's scholarly success lay a shameful secret. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the scholar stole tens of thousands of archival documents related to French Jewish history from public archives and private synagogue collections in France and moved them, illicitly, to New York. There, he used them as the basis for his pathbreaking articles. Eventually, he sold them, piecemeal, to American and Israeli research libraries, where they still remain today. Why did this respectable historian become an archive thief? And why did librarians in the United States and Israel buy these materials from him, turning a blind eye to the signs of ownership they bore? These are the questions that motivate this gripping tale. Throughout, it is clear that all involved-perpetrator, victims, and buyers-saw what Szajkowski was doing through the prism of the Holocaust. The buyers shared a desire to save these precious remnants of the European Jewish past, left behind on a continent where six million Jews had just been killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. The scholars who read Szajkowski's studies, based largely on the documents he had stolen, saw the treasures as offering an unparalleled window into the history that led to that catastrophe. And the Jewish caretakers of many of the institutions Szajkowski robbed in France saw the losses as a sign of their difficulties reconstructing their community after the Holocaust, when the balance of power in the Jewish world was shifting away from Europe to new centers in America and Israel. Based on painstaking research, Lisa Leff reconstructs Szajkowski's story in all its ambiguity by taking us backstage at the archives, revealing the powerful ideological, economic and scientific forces that made Holocaust-era Jewish scholars care more deeply than ever before about preserving the remnants of their past.

One of the youngest survivors of the Warsaw ghetto, author Sahbra Anna Markus lived a life only those who have survived Hitler's hell can imagine. In Only a Bad Dream? she narrates the drama of her early years through her most vivid memories. Sahbra courageously recounts those childhood experiences in her compelling voice, now freed from the repeated warnings: "Don't tell anyone you're a Jew." "Don't forget you're a Jew." "It was only a dream." "Hang on tight, or you'll get lost and die."

She tells of traipsing through forests at night, fleeing certain death, of her parents hiding her in a church, desperate to save her life. A frantic search for surviving family found the Markuses traveling throughout Europe on foot, by rowboat, military train, farm wagon, trucks, and finally the ship Caserta that delivered them to the land of hope, freedom, and new beginnings-the only Jewish homeland, Israel.

Only a Bad Dream shares how, in the midst of hunger and deprivation, Sahbra still found joy in simple things like cats, the moon, wolves, and fireflies. A story of the triumph of the human spirit, this memoir provides strong insight into the courage, strength, and dignity possessed by those who endured the Holocaust.

"Holocaust Remembrance Between the National and the Transnational" provides a key study of the remembrance of the Jewish Catastrophe and the Nazi-era past in the world arena. It uses a range of primary documentation from the restitution conferences, speeches and presentations made at the Stockholm International Forum of 2000 (SIF 2000), a global event and an attempt to mark a defining moment in the inter-cultural construction of the political and institutional memory of the Holocaust in the USA, Europe and Israel. Containing oral history interviews with British delegates to the conference and contemporary press reports, this book explores the inter-relationships between global and national Holocaust remembrances.The causes, consequences and 'cosmopolitan' intellectual context for understanding the SIF 2000 are discussed in great detail. Larissa Allwork examines this seminal moment in efforts to globally promote the important, if ever controversial, topics of Holocaust remembrance, worldwide Genocide prevention and the commemoration of the Nazi past. Providing a balanced assessment of the Stockholm Project, this book is an important study for those interested in the remembrance of the Holocaust and the Third Reich, as well as the recent global direction in memory studies.""

While the coerced human experiments are notorious among all the atrocities under National Socialism, they have been marginalised by mainstream historians. This book seeks to remedy the marginalisation, and to place the experiments in the context of the broad history of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Paul Weindling bases this study on the reconstruction of a victim group through individual victims' life histories, and by weaving the victims' experiences collectively together in terms of different groupings, especially gender, ethnicity and religion, age, and nationality. The timing of the experiments, where they occurred, how many victims there were, and who they were, is analysed, as are hitherto under-researched aspects such as Nazi anatomy and executions. The experiments are also linked, more broadly, to major elements in the dynamic and fluid Nazi power structure and the implementation of racial policies. The approach is informed by social history from below, exploring both the rationales and motives of perpetrators, but assessing these critically in the light of victim narratives.

This book is a translation of the Ruzhany Memorial (Yizkor) Book that was published in 1957 in Hebrew and Yiddish; it is based upon the memoirs of former Jewish residents of the town who had left before the war. Ruzhany, called Rozana in Polish and Ruzhnoy in Yiddish, is now a small town in Belarus. It was part of Russia at the time of World War I and Poland afterwards for a short period, and then the Soviet Union. In 1939, the Jewish population was at its peak 3,500, comprising 78% of the town's population. In November 1942, every Jewish resident was murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Founded in the mid-1500s, Jews were welcomed by the private owner, the Grand Chancellor, Duke Leu Sapeiha. He valued Jewish settlers who would create a variety of businesses that would produce profits and generate collectable taxes. They opened schools, built many small synagogues, and the Great Synagogue in the main square. In addition they established many social institutions. The market town thrived. Starting in the early 1900s, many young Jews immigrated to the United States so that the young men could avoid prolonged conscription into the Czar's army.

During the Nazi regime many children and youth living in Europe found their lives uprooted by Nazi policies, resulting in their relocation around the globe. "The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime" is a significant attempt to represent the diversity of their experiences, covering a range of non-European perspectives on the Second World War and aspects of memory. The book is unique in that it places the experiences of children and youth in a transnational context, shifting the conversation of displacement and refuge to countries that have remained under-examined in a comparative context. Featuring essays from a wide range of international experts in the field, it analyses these themes in three sections: the flight and migration of children and youth to countries including England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, and Brazil; the experiences of children and youth who remained in Nazi Europe and became victims of war, displacement and deportation; and finally the challenges of rebuilding lives and representing war traumas in the immediate and recent post-war periods respectively. In its comparisons between Jewish and non-Jewish experiences and how these intersected and diverged, it revisits debates about cultural genocide through the separation of families and communities, as well as contributing new perspectives on forced labour, families and the Holocaust, and Germans as war victims.

Once regarded as a vibrant centre of intellectual, cultural and spiritual Jewish life, Lithuania was home to 240,000 Jews prior to the Nazi invasion of 1941. By war's end, less than 20,000 remained. Today, approximately 4,000 Jews reside there, among them 108 survivors from the camps and ghettos and a further 70 from the Partisans and Red Army. Against a backdrop of ongoing Holocaust dismissal and a recent surge in anti-Semitic sentiment, Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania presents the history and experiences of a group of elderly Holocaust survivors in modern-day Vilnius. Using their stories and memories, their places of significance as well as biographical objects, Shivaun Woolfson considers the complexities surrounding Holocaust memory and legacy in a post-Soviet era Lithuania. The book also incorporates interdisciplinary elements of anthropology, psychology and ethnography, and is informed at its heart by a spiritual approach that marks it out from other more conventional historical treatments of the subject. Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania includes 20 images, comes with comprehensive online resources and weaves together story, artefact, monument and landscape to provide a multidimensional history of the Lithuanian Jewish experience during and after the Holocaust.

In the 1930s, Carl Goerdeler, the mayor of Leipzig and, as prices commissioner, a cabinet-level official, engaged in active opposition against the persecution of the Jews in Germany and in Eastern Europe. He did this openly until 1938 and then secretly in contact with the British Foreign Office. Having failed to change Hitler's policy against the Jews, Goerdeler joined forces with military and civil conspirators against the regime. He was hanged for 'treason' on 2 February 1945. This book describes the actions of Carl Goerdeler, the German resistance leader who consistently engaged in efforts to protect the Jews against persecution. Using new evidence and thus far under-researched documents, including a memorandum written by Goerdeler at the end of 1941 with a proposal for the status of the Jews in the world, the book fundamentally changes our understanding of Goerdeler's plan and presents a new view of the German resistance to Hitler.