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.

Few topics in modern history draw the attention that the Holocaust does. The Shoah has become synonymous with unspeakable atrocity and unbearable suffering. Yet it has also been used to teach tolerance, empathy, resistance, and hope. Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust provides a starting point for teachers in many disciplines to illuminate this crucial event in world history for students. Using a vast array of source materials-from literature and film to survivor testimonies and interviews-the contributors demonstrate how to guide students through these sensitive and painful subjects within their specific historical and social contexts. Each chapter provides pedagogical case studies for teaching content such as antisemitism, resistance and rescue, and the postwar lives of displaced persons. It will transform how students learn about the Holocaust and the circumstances surrounding it.

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.

The American-Jewish philosopher Berel Lang has left an indelible impression on an unusually broad range of fields that few scholars can rival. From his earliest innovations in philosophy and meta-philosophy, to his ground-breaking work on representation, historical writing, and art after Auschwitz, he has contributed original and penetrating insights to the philosophical, literary, and historical debates on ethics, art, and the representation of the Nazi Genocide. In honor of Berel Lang's five decades of scholarly and philosophical contributions, the editors of Ethics, Art and Representations of the Holocaust invited seventeen eminent scholars from around the world to discuss Lang's impact on their own research and to reflect on how the Nazi genocide continues to resonate in contemporary debates about antisemitism, commemoration and poetic representations. Resisting what Alvin Rosenfeld warned as "the end of the Holocaust", the essays in this collection signal the Holocaust as an event without closure, of enduring resonance to new generations of scholars of genocide, Jewish studies, and philosophy. Readers will find original and provocative essays on topics as diverse as Nietzsche's reputed Nazi leanings, Jewish anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, wartime rescue in Poland, philosophical responses to the Holocaust, hidden diaries in the Kovno Ghetto, and analyses of reactions to trauma in classic literary works by Bernhard Schlink, Sylvia Plath, and Derek Walcott.

'Gripping, heartbreaking and uplifting.' Christy Lefteri, author of the million-copy bestseller The Beekeeper of Aleppo THEIR STORY WILL BREAK YOUR HEART THEIR JOURNEY WILL FILL YOU WITH HOPE YOU WILL NEVER FORGET THEIR NAMES When they are little girls, Cibi, Magda and Livia make a promise to their father - that they will stay together, no matter what. Years later, at just 15, Livia is ordered to Auschwitz by the Nazis. Cibi, only 19 herself, remembers their promise and follows Livia, determined to protect her sister, or die with her. Together, they fight to survive through unimaginable cruelty and hardship. Magda, only 17, stays with her mother and grandfather, hiding out in a neighbour's attic or in the forest when the Nazi militia come to round up friends, neighbours and family. She escapes for a time, but eventually she too is captured and transported to the death camp. In Auschwitz-Birkenau the three sisters are reunited and, remembering their father, they make a new promise, this time to each other: That they will survive. Three Sisters is a beautiful story of hope in the hardest of times and of finding love after loss. Heather Morris is the global bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka's Journey, which have sold eight million copies worldwide. Three Sisters is her third novel, and the final piece in the phenomenon that is the Tattooist of Auschwitz series.

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.

Between 1941 and 1945 as many as 70,000 inmates died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwestern Germany. The exact number will never be known. A large number of these deaths were caused by malnutrition and disease, mainly typhus, shortly before and after liberation. It was at this time, in April of 1945, that Michael Hargrave answered a notice at the Westminster Hospital Medical School for 'volunteers'. On the day of his departure the 21-year-old learned that he was being sent to Bergen-Belsen, liberated only two weeks before. This firsthand account, a diary written for his mother, details Michael's month-long experience at the camp. He compassionately relates the horrendous living conditions suffered by the prisoners, describing the sickness and disease he encountered and his desperate, often fruitless, struggle to save as many lives as possible. Amidst immeasurable horrors, his descriptions of the banalities of everyday life and diagrams of the camp's layout take on a new poignancy, while anatomic line drawings detail the medical conditions and his efforts to treat them.Original newspaper cuttings and photographs of the camp, many previously unpublished, add a further layer of texture to the endeavors of an inexperienced medical student faced with extreme human suffering.