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.

The postmodern human condition and relationship to God were forged in response to Auschwitz. Christian theology must now address the challenge posed by the Shoah. Grace in Auschwitz offers a constructive theology of grace that enables twenty-first-century Westerners to relate meaningfully to the Christian tradition in the wake of the Holocaust and unprecedented evil. Through narrative theological testimonial history, the first part articulates the human condition and relationship to God experienced by concentration camp inmates. The second part draws from the lives and works of Simone Well, Dorothee Solle, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alfred Delp, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Sergei Bulgakov to propose and apply a coherent kenotic model enabling the transposition of the Christian doctrine of grace into categories strongly correlating with the experience of Auschwitz survivors. This model centers on the vulnerable Jesus Christ, a God who takes on the burden of the human condition and freely suffers alongside and for human beings. In and through the person ofJesus, God is made present and active in the midst of spiritual desolation and destitution, providing humanity and solace to others.

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.

The ability to forget the violent twentieth-century past was long seen as a virtue in Spain, even a duty. But the common wisdom has shifted as increasing numbers of Spaniards want to know what happened, who suffered, and who is to blame. Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War shows how historiography, fiction, and photography have shaped our views of the 1936-39 war and its long, painful aftermath. Faber traces the curious trajectories of iconic Spanish Civil War photographs by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour; critically reads a dozen recent Spanish novels and essays; interrogates basic scholarly assumptions about history, memory, and literature; and interviews nine scholars, activists, and documentarians who in the past decade and a half have helped redefine Spain's relationship to its past. In this book Faber argues that recent political developments in Spain-from the grassroots call for the recovery of historical memory to the indignados movement and the foundation of Podemos-provide an opportunity for scholars in the humanities to engage in a more activist, public, and democratic practice.

Based on 70 hours of interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka (the largest of the extermination camps), this book bares the soul of a man who continually found ways to rationalize his role in Hitler's final soulution.

"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.""

For centuries Jewish shtetls were an active part of Belarusian life; today, they are gone. The Belarusian Shtetl is a landmark volume which offers, for the first time in English, an illuminating look at the shtetls' histories, the lives lived and lost in them, and the memories, records, and physical traces of these communities that remain today. Since 2012, under the auspices of the Sefer Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, teams of scholars and students from many different disciplines have returned to the sites of former Jewish shtetls in Belarus to reconstruct their past. These researchers have interviewed a wide range of both Jews and non-Jews to find and document traces of Shtetl history, to gain insights into community memories, and to discover surviving markers of identity and ethnic affiliation. In the process, they have also unearthed evidence from old cemeteries and prewar houses and the stories behind memorials erected for Holocaust victims. Drawing on the wealth of information these researchers have gathered, The Belarusian Shtetl creates compelling and richly textured portraits of the histories and everyday lives of each shtetl. Important for scholars and accessible to the public, these portraits set out to return the Jewish shtetls to their rightful places of prominence in the histories and legacies of Belarus.

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.