This is the story of Lili Pohlmann's incredible childhood and survival. During the Second World War she was helped by many people, sometimes by simply 'looking the other way'; but of especial significance were two remarkable non-Jews: a German woman working for the Nazi occupying forces in Lemberg, and a Greek Catholic Metropolitan Archbishop. After the war Lili came to London in the first of three transports of Jewish children from Poland. She arrived in the British capital on her sixteenth birthday. She still lives in London. The book consists of interviews with Lili, revealing her own voice, which is vivid, colourful and engaging. The conversations focus on Lili's childhood, wartime experiences, her arrival in London and years shortly after the war. They are accompanied by historical commentaries, as well as more personal pieces from the author, Anna Blasiak, framing and contrasting Lili's story and experiences with the story of somebody from a different generation, growing up years after the war in Poland, a place where the vanished Jews left a painful, gaping hole. Introduction by Philippe Sands Historical Context by Clare Mulley Illustrated with photographs throughout

This compelling book on Hitler and Stalin - the culmination of thirty years' work - examines the two tyrants during the Second World War, when Germany and the Soviet Union fought the biggest and bloodiest war in history. Yet despite the fact they were bitter opponents, Laurence Rees shows that Hitler and Stalin were, to a large extent, different sides of the same coin. Hitler's charismatic leadership may contrast with Stalin's regimented rule by fear; and his intransigence later in the war may contrast with Stalin's change in behaviour in response to events. But at a macro level, both were prepared to create undreamt of suffering, destroy individual liberty and twist facts in order to build the Utopia they wanted, and while Hitler's creation of the Holocaust remains a singular crime, Rees shows why we must not forget that Stalin committed a series of atrocities at the same time. Using previously unpublished, startling eyewitness testimony from soldiers of the Red Army and Wehrmacht, civilians who suffered during the conflict, and those who knew both men personally, bestselling historian Laurence Rees - probably the only person alive who has met Germans who worked for Hitler and Russians who worked for Stalin - challenges long-held popular misconceptions about two of the most important figures in history. This is a masterwork from one of our finest historians.

Published in sixteen languages and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Andre Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just is considered by many the single greatest novel of the Holocaust. This classic work -- long unavailable in a trade edition -- is one of those few novels that, once read, is never forgotten.

On March 11, 1185, tn the old Anglican city of York, the Jews of the city were brutally massacred by their townsmen. As legend has it, God blessed the only survivor of this Medieval pogrom, Rabbi Yom Tov Levy, as one of the Lamed-vov, the thirty-six Just Men of Jewish tradition, a blessing which extended to one Levy of each succeeding generation. This terrifying and remarkable Legacy is traced over eight centuries, from the Spanish Inquisition, to expulsions from England, France, Portugal Germany, and Russia, and to the small Polish village of Zemyock, where the Levys settle for two centuries in relative peace. It is in the twentieth century that Ernie Levy emerges, the Last of the Just, in 1920s Germany, as Hitter's sinister star is on the rise and the agonies of Auschwitz loom on the horizon.

Combining accessible prose with scholarly rigor, The Participants presents fascinating profiles of the all-too-human men who implemented some of the most inhuman acts in history. On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior German government officials attended a short meeting in Berlin to discuss the deportation and murder of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. Despite lasting less than two hours, the Wannsee Conference is today understood as a signal episode in the history of the Holocaust, exemplifying the labor division and bureaucratization that made the "Final Solution" possible. Yet while the conference itself has been exhaustively researched, many of its attendees remain relatively obscure. From the introduction: Ten of the fifteen participants had been to university. Eight of them had even been awarded doctorates, although it should be pointed out that it was considerably easier to gain a doctorate in law or philosophy in the 1920s than it is today. Eight of them had studied law, which, then as now, was not uncommon in the top positions of public administration. Many first turned to radical politics as members of Freikorps or student fraternities. Three of the participants (Freisler, Klopfer and Lange) had studied in Jena. In the 1920s, the University of Jena was a fertile breeding ground for nationalist thinking. With dedicated Nazi, race researcher and later SS-Hauptsturmbannfuhrer Karl Astel as rector, it developed into a model Nazi university. Race researcher Hans Gunther also taught there. Others, such as Reinhard Heydrich, joined the SS because they had failed to launch careers elsewhere, and only became radical once they were members of the self-acclaimed Nazi elite order.

True story from the major motion picture "In Darkness," official 2012 Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1943, with Lvov's 150,000 Jews having been exiled, killed, or forced into ghettos and facing extermination, a group of Polish Jews daringly sought refuge in the city's sewer system. The last surviving member this group, Krystyna Chiger, shares one of the most intimate, harrowing and ultimately triumphant tales of survival to emerge from the Holocaust. Originally published as "The Girl in the Green Sweater, In Darkness" is Chiger's harrowing first-person account of the fourteen months she spent with her family in the fetid, underground sewers of Lvov.
"In Darkness" is also the story of Leopold Socha, the group's unlikely savior. A Polish Catholic and former thief, Socha risked his life to help Chiger's underground family survive, bringing them food, medicine, and supplies. A moving memoir of a desperate escape and life under unimaginable circumstances, "In Darkness" is ultimately a tale of intimate survival, friendship, and redemption.

A single word - Auschwitz - is often used to encapsulate the totality of persecution and suffering involved in what we call the Holocaust. Yet a focus on a single concentration camp - however horrific what happened there, however massively catastrophic its scale - leaves an incomplete story, a truncated history. It cannot fully communicate the myriad ways in which individuals became tangled up on the side of the perpetrators, and obscures the diversity of experiences among a wide range of victims as they struggled and died, or managed, against all odds, to survive. In the process, we also miss the continuing legacy of Nazi persecution across generations, and across continents. Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book attempts to expand our understanding, exploring the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. At its heart, Reckonings seeks to expose the disjuncture between official myths about "dealing with the past," on the one hand, and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded justice, on the other. In the successor states to the Third Reich-East Germany, West Germany, and Austria - the attempts at justice varied widely in the years and decades after 1945. The Communist East German state pursued Nazi criminals and handed down severe sentences; West Germany, seeking to draw a line under the past, tended toward leniency and tolerance. Austria made nearly no reckoning at all until the 1980s, when news broke about UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim's past. Following the various periods of trials and testimonials after the war, the shifting attitudes toward both perpetrators and survivors, this major book weighs heavily down on the scales of justice. The Holocaust is not mere "history," and the memorial landscape covering it barely touches the surface; beneath it churns the maelstrom of reverberations of the Nazi era. Reckonings uses the stories of those who remained below the radar of public representations, outside the media spotlight, while also situating their experiences in the changing wider contexts and settings in which they sought to make sense of unprecedented suffering. Fulbrook uses the word "reckoning" in the widest possible sense, to evoke the consequences of violence on those directly involved, but also on those affected indirectly, and how its effects have expanded almost infinitely across place and time.

Escape into Danger tells the remarkable story of a young girl s perilous adventures and coming of age during World War II. Born in Kiev to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, Sophia Williams chose to be identified as Jewish when she was eligible for a Soviet passport, mandatory at the age of sixteen, little realizing the life-changing consequences of her decision. Only seventeen when Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Sophia left Kiev, unwittingly escaping the Babi Yar massacre. On her journey into Russia, she fled from flooding, dodged fires and bombs, and fell in love. At Stalingrad, Sophia turned back in a futile attempt to return home to her mother. Stranded in a Nazi-occupied town, accepted as a Russian, she found work with a sympathetic German officer and felt secure until a local girl recognized her as a Jew. Within days, Sophia s boss spirited her to safety with his family in Poland. Soon, though, Sophia was on the run again, this time to Nazi Germany, where, befriended by Germans and Hungarians, she somehow escaped detection through the rest of the war. She met and married a like-minded German soldier and started a family and business. The business thrived in post-war Germany, but the marriage deteriorated. She divorced her adulterous husband, but the vindictive, even homicidal Guido continued to dog her steps. Throughout, Sophia maintained her grit, charm, and optimism, the qualities that saved her as she time and again made her escape into danger. "

Before the Nazis took power, Jewish businesspeople in Berlin thrived alongside their non-Jewish neighbors. But Nazi racism changed that, gradually destroying Jewish businesses before murdering the Jews themselves. Reconstructing the fate of more than 8,000 companies, this book offers the first comprehensive analysis of Jewish economic activity and its obliteration. Rather than just examining the steps taken by the persecutors, it also tells the stories of Jewish strategies in countering the effects of persecution. In doing so, this book exposes a fascinating paradox where Berlin, serving as the administrative heart of the Third Reich, was also the site of a dense network for Jewish self-help and assertion.

Combining accessible prose with scholarly rigor, The Participants presents fascinating profiles of the all-too-human men who implemented some of the most inhuman acts in history. On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior German government officials attended a short meeting in Berlin to discuss the deportation and murder of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. Despite lasting less than two hours, the Wannsee Conference is today understood as a signal episode in the history of the Holocaust, exemplifying the labor division and bureaucratization that made the "Final Solution" possible. Yet while the conference itself has been exhaustively researched, many of its attendees remain relatively obscure. From the introduction: Ten of the fifteen participants had been to university. Eight of them had even been awarded doctorates, although it should be pointed out that it was considerably easier to gain a doctorate in law or philosophy in the 1920s than it is today. Eight of them had studied law, which, then as now, was not uncommon in the top positions of public administration. Many first turned to radical politics as members of Freikorps or student fraternities. Three of the participants (Freisler, Klopfer and Lange) had studied in Jena. In the 1920s, the University of Jena was a fertile breeding ground for nationalist thinking. With dedicated Nazi, race researcher and later SS-Hauptsturmbannfuhrer Karl Astel as rector, it developed into a model Nazi university. Race researcher Hans Gunther also taught there. Others, such as Reinhard Heydrich, joined the SS because they had failed to launch careers elsewhere, and only became radical once they were members of the self-acclaimed Nazi elite order.

In European and Holocaust historiography, it is generally believed that neither the Zionist movement nor the Yishuv were mindful of the plight of European Jews in the face of the Nazi threat during the 1930s. Drawing on a wide variety of memoirs, letters, and institutional reports by people from all walks of life, this volume sheds new light on a troubled period in Jewish history. Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit trace Jewish responses to developments in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as reactions to British policy on the question of a Jewish homeland, to show that Zionists in the Yishuv worked tirelessly on the international stage on behalf of their coreligionists in Europe. Nevertheless, their efforts were all too often shattered by the realities of their powerlessness and lack of resources. Piercing to the heart of conversations about how or whether to save Jews in an increasingly hostile Europe, this volume provides a nuanced assessment of what could and could not be achieved in the years just prior to World War II and Holocaust.

This collection is the first of its kind, bringing together Holocaust educational researchers as well as school and museum educators from across the globe, to discuss the potentials of Holocaust education in relation to primary school children. Its contributors are from countries that have a unique relationship with the Holocaust, such as Germany, Israel, neutral Switzerland, and Allied countries outside the UK. Their research provides new insight into the diverse ways in which primary aged students engage with Holocaust education. Chapters explore the impact of teaching the Holocaust to this age group, school and museum teaching pedagogies, and primary students' perspectives of the Holocaust. This book will appeal to school and museum educators of primary aged students whose work requires them to teach the Holocaust, Citizenship (or Civics) or Human Rights Education. Since the turn of the twenty-first century there has been a transformation in school and museum-based Holocaust education. This book clearly demonstrates that primary education has been included in this transformation.

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.

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.

Over the decades, the Holocaust has remained a critical issue both historically and politically. This is due to the modernisation of anti-Semitism in the West, where accusations of ritual murder have long been passe and claims that the Holocaust was a hoax are de riguer, and to the government sanctions of anti-Semitism in the East in countries such as Iran. The purely scholarly problem of determining the number of victims, like other aspects of demography related to the Holocaust, have suddenly become closely embroiled in geopolitics and the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, which is now a context that has been forced upon it. This book is imbued with these connections and interrelationships. Avraham, Wolfgang Benz, Sergio Della Pergola, Mark Kupovetsky, Dieter Pohl, Aron Shneer, and the editors contribute their voices to the topic.

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 differs from other genocides in recent history for one main reason: there is no other example in which a minority was annihilated systematically and as completely as possible on the orders of a head of state and through the apparatus of government. To reconstruct Hitler's central role in the Final Solution represents a particular challenge. Hitler treated the murder of the Jews as a matter of the utmost secrecy and was careful wherever possible not to leave behind any written orders. Wherever his instructions on this matter are recorded he has used codified language. He kept away from the implementation of the orders and feigned ignorance, even to his closest friends and colleagues. Under these conditions, the surviving source material can only be described as fragmentary. The Unwritten Order aims to offer documentary proof of Hitler's central role in the murder of the European Jews. In order to achieve this aim, various documents and fragments of documents have been pieced together and the codified language of the dictator deciphered.

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.

Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only Lengyel's work in the prisoners' underground resistance and the need to tell this story kept her fighting for survival. She survived by her wit and incredible strength. Despite her horrifying closeness to the subject, FIVE CHIMNEYS does not retreat into self-pity or sensationalism. When first published (two years after World War 2 ended), Albert Einstein was so moved by her story that he wrote a personal letter to Lengyel, thanking her for her ""very frank, very well written book"". Today, with 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia, and neo-Nazism on the rise in western Europe, we cannot afford to forget the grisly lessons of the Holocaust. FIVE CHIMNEYS is a stark reminder that the unspeakable can happen wherever and whenever ethnic hatreds, religious bigotries, and racial discriminations are permitted to exist.

The mystery has haunted generations since the Second World War: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And why? Now, thanks to radical new technology and the obsession of a retired FBI agent, this book offers an answer. Rosemary Sullivan unfolds the story in a gripping, moving narrative.

Over thirty million people have read The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal teenaged Anne Frank kept while living in an attic with her family and four other people in Amsterdam during World War II, until the Nazis arrested them and sent them to a concentration camp. But despite the many works – journalism, books, plays and novels – devoted to Anne’s story, none has ever conclusively explained how these eight people managed to live in hiding undetected for over two years – and who or what finally brought the Nazis to their door.

With painstaking care, retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and a team of indefatigable investigators pored over tens of thousands of pages of documents – some never before seen – and interviewed scores of descendants of people familiar with the Franks. Utilising methods developed by the FBI, the Cold Case Team painstakingly pieced together the months leading to the infamous arrest – and came to a shocking conclusion.

The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation is the riveting story of their mission. Rosemary Sullivan introduces us to the investigators, explains the behaviour of both the captives and their captors and profiles a group of suspects. All the while, she vividly brings to life wartime Amsterdam: a place where no matter how wealthy, educated, or careful you were, you never knew whom you could trust.

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.

Jewish radicals manned the barricades on the avenues of Petrograd and the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto; they were in the vanguard of those resisting Franco and the Nazis. They originated in Yiddishland, a vast expanse of Eastern Europe that, before the Holocaust, ran from the Baltic Sea to the western edge of Russia and incorporated hundreds of Jewish communities with a combined population of some 11 million people. Within this territory, revolutionaries arose from the Jewish misery of Eastern and Central Europe; they were raised in the fear of God and taught to respect religious tradition, but were caught up in the great current of revolutionary utopian thinking. Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals, they embodied the multifarious activity and radicalism of a Jewish working class that glimpsed the Messiah in the folds of the red flag. Today, the world from which they came has disappeared, dismantled and destroyed by the Nazi genocide. After this irremediable break, there remain only survivors, and the work of memory for red Yiddishland. This book traces the struggles of these militants, their singular trajectories, their oscillation between great hope and doubt, their lost illusions-a red and Jewish gaze on the history of the twentieth century.