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Books > History > European history > From 1900
This is the story of Chęciny, my hometown in southern Poland, and
of the people who lived there between the two world wars of the
20th Century.
The Nazi invasion of Poland in October 1939 started World War
II. Millions of Polish Jews died in the ensuing Holocaust,
including 4,000 citizens of Chęciny, and 50 members of my family. I
was lucky: my mother, brother, three sisters and I had joined my
father in America in 1930. I finished high school in Chicago, went
to college and graduated from the University of Illinois Medical
School. I became a doctor and a psychiatrist, setting up a long and
rewarding private practice in Los Angeles that spanned more than 50
years.
Like the wall paintings in Pompeii, which offer a glimpse into
the daily life of that city before the volcano, I hope that these
stories offer a glimpse into the daily life of my hometown before
the Holocaust.
But most of all, this is the story of my family, and a tribute
to my beloved Aunt Chana and her daughter, my cousin Rachel, whose
courage and self-sacrifice saved Miriam - Chęciny's youngest
survivor of the Holocaust - from the Nazi murderers.
This is my memoir - a true story about victims of World War II and
their life in concentration camp, their fears and their dreams,
their relations with others, and their struggle on a journey to
make a home in exile. It is also a story of adventure, danger and
death. Above all, however, it is my story, a story of very
important part of my life - my youth. Those events took place a
long time ago. The people are real and so are their names. I have
told it with complete honesty as I saw it, observe it, and
experienced it. In order to make reading of this book more
interesting I wrote it in a form of a novel. Some of the words
within quotation marks are not necessarily of the speaker, for they
have been said a long time ago, and my recollection of them is not
always accurate. In other words, I'm giving in this book only the
general ideas of the speakers and not their exact words, except
when speaker is yours truly. Never the less, this book is a true
account of my life in exile and is should be regarded as such.
This is the first biography in English of a World War II heroine of
the Greek resistance, who joined the British secret intelligence
services (SIS) shortly after the German occupation of Athens and
was betrayed, arrested and executed one month before the Germans'
departure. She was a prosperous housewife with seven children, who
had no experience in politics or military affairs, and yet she
managed to build a formidable escape, espionage and sabotage
organization that interacted with the highest levels of SIS agents
in Occupied Greece. Book Presentation with Prof. Stylianos Perrakis
(Concordia University), Prof. Stathis Kalyvas (University of
Oxford), and Prof. Gonda van Steen (King's College London)
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Braided Memories
(Hardcover)
Marjorie Agosin; Photographs by Samuel Shats; Translated by Alison Ridley
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R1,426
Discovery Miles 14 260
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The Holocaust is one of the most intensively studied phenomena in
modern history. The volume of writing that fuels the numerous
debates about it is overwhelming in quantity and diversity. Even
those who have dedicated their professional lives to understanding
the Holocaust cannot assimilate it all.
There is, then, an urgent need to synthesize and evaluate the
complex historiography on the Holocaust, exploring the major themes
and debates relating to it and drawing widely on the findings of a
great deal of research. Concentrating on the work of the last two
decades, Histories of the Holocaust examines the "Final Solution"
as a European project, the decision-making process, perpetrator
research, plunder and collaboration, regional studies, ghettos,
camps, race science, antisemitic ideology, and recent debates
concerning modernity, organization theory, colonialism, genocide
studies, and cultural history. Research on victims is discussed,
but Stone focuses more closely on perpetrators, reflecting trends
within the historiography, as well as his own view that in order to
understand Nazi genocide the emphasis must be on the culture of the
perpetrators.
The book is not a "history of the history of the Holocaust,"
offering simply a description of developments in historiography.
Stone critically analyses the literature, discerning major themes
and trends and assessing the achievements and shortcomings of the
various approaches. He demonstrates that there never can or should
be a single history of the Holocaust and facilitates an
understanding of the genocide of the Jews from a multiplicity of
angles. An understanding of how the Holocaust could have happened
can only be achieved by recourse to histories of the Holocaust:
detailed day-by-day accounts of high-level decision-making;
long-term narratives of the Holocaust's relationship to European
histories of colonialism and warfare; micro-historical studies of
Jewish life before, during, and after Nazi occupation; and cultural
analyses of Nazi fantasies and fears.
This book offers a unique perspective on contemporary Polish
cinema's engagement with histories of Polish violence against their
Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Moving beyond conventional
studies of historical representation on screen, the book considers
how cinema reframes the unwanted knowledge of violence in its
aftermaths. The book draws on Derridean hauntology, Didi-Huberman's
confrontations with art images, Levinasian ethics and anamorphosis
to examine cinematic reconfigurations of histories and memories
that are vulnerable to evasion and formlessness. Innovative
analyses of Birthplace (Lozinski, 1992), It Looks Pretty From a
Distance (Sasnal, 2011), Aftermath (Pasikowski, 2012), and Ida
(Pawlikowski, 2013) explore how their rural filmic landscapes are
predicated on the radical exclusion of Jewish neighbours, prompting
archaeological processes of exhumation. Arguing that the
distressing materiality of decomposition disturbs cinematic
composition, the book examines how Poland's aftermath cinema
attempts to recompose itself through form and narrative as it faces
Polish complicity in Jewish death.
Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis
of the Holocaust-perpetrators, victims, and bystanders-it is the
last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described
by Hilberg as those who were "once a part of this history,"
bystanders present unique challenges for those seeking to
understand the decisions, attitudes, and self-understanding of
historical actors who were neither obviously the instigators nor
the targets of Nazi crimes. Combining historiographical,
conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case
studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex
social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.
An award-winning teacher takes a journey into alien territory:
Austria, Hitler's birthplace, and the territory of her own hatred.
A teaching memoir that offers a pedagogy of hope.
Josef Rosin's "Preserving Our Litvak Heritage" is a monumental work
documenting the history of 31 Jewish communities in Lithuanaia from
their inception to their total destruction in 1941 at the hands of
the Nazis and their Lithuania helpers. Rosin gathered his material
from traditional sources, archives, public records, and remembrance
books. He has enriched and enhanced the entry for each community
with personal memoirs and contributions from widely dispersed
survivors who opened family albums and shared treasured photographs
of family and friends. He made use of sources originally written in
Hebrew, Yiddish, Lithuanian, German and Russian. In over 700 pages,
Rosin documents each community from its beginning until World War
I, through the years of Independent Lithuania (1918-1940), and
finally during the indescribable Nazi annihilation of nearly all of
Lithuanian Jewry. Most impressive is the record of cultural
richness, the important town personalities, the welfare
institutions, the glorious Hebrew educational system of the Tarbuth
elementary schools and the Yavneh high schools, the world famous
Telz and Ponevezh Yeshivoth (in the towns of Telsiai and
Panevezys), the Yiddish press and other significant events of the
period. Rosin has provided a documentary and a testament to once
vibrant communities almost totally destroyed but which come alive
again in the pages of this book. 736 page, Hard Cover. List of
towns included in the book: Alite Birzh Yurburg Koshedar Kopcheve
Memel Naishtot Kibart Lazdey Ligum Mariampol Meretch Ponevezh
Pikvishok Pren Shaki Salant Serey Shat Stoklishok Sudarg Tavrig
Taragin Telzh Utyan Aran Vishey Vilkovishk Verzhbelov Zheiml
Naishtot Tavrig 786 page, Hard Cover
"The Oryx Holocaust Sourcebook" provides a comprehensive
selection of high quality resources in the field of Holocaust
studies. The "Sourcebook's" 17 chapters cover general reference
works; narrative histories; monographs in the social sciences;
fiction, drama, and poetry; books for children and young adults;
periodicals; primary sources; electronic resources in various
formats; audiovisual materials; photographs; music; film and video;
educational and teaching materials; and information on
organizations, museums, and memorials. In addition, each chapter
begins with a concise overview essay. The book also includes a
preface, and index, and an appendix listing general distributors
and vendors of Holocaust materials.
Drawn from a wide array of scholarly disciplines ranging across
the humanities and social sciences, the items included in each
chapter were selected using the following criteria: (1) current
availability for use or purchase; (2) availability in English,
unless a non-English item was too significant to exclude; (3)
scholarly legitimacy, meaning it is recognized as a work of
authentic scholarship that contributes to advancement of knowledge
in the field; (4) relationship to topical categories for study of
the Holocaust as noted in the Curriculum Guidelines of the
Association of Holocaust Organizations, as listed in major
bibliographic works, and as used as topics in the contents of
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the leading journal in the field;
and, (5) in the case of online resources (Internet sites),
adherence to standards of scholarly documentation established by
learned societies or recognized by reputable scholarly
institutions, as well as the display of accurate and credible
content about the Holocaust drawn from reputable scholarship.
Covering Western and Eastern Europe, this book looks at the
Holocaust on the local level. It compares and contrasts the
behaviour and attitude of neighbours in the face of the Holocaust.
Topics covered include deportation programmes, relations between
Jews and Gentiles, violence against Jews, perceptions of Jewish
persecution, and reports of the Holocaust in the Jewish and
non-Jewish press.
For five horrifying years in Vilna, the Vilna ghetto, and
concentration camps in Estonia, Herman Kruk recorded his own
experiences as well as the life and death of the Jewish community
of the city symbolically called "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." This
unique chronicle includes many recovered pages of Kruk's diaries
and provides a powerful eyewitness account of the annihilation of
the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. This volume includes the
Yiddish edition of Kruk's diaries, published in 1961 and translated
here for the first time, as well as many widely scattered pages of
the chronicles, collected here for the first time and meticulously
deciphered, translated, and annotated. Kruk describes vividly the
collapse of Poland in September, 1939, life as a refugee in Vilna,
the manhunt that destroyed most of Vilna Jewry in the summer of
1941, the creation of a ghetto and the persecution and self-rule of
the remnants of the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," the internment of the
last survivors in concentration camps in Estonia, and their brutal
deaths. Kruk scribbled his final diary entry on September 17, 1944,
managing to bury the small, loose pages of his manuscript just
hours before he and other camp inmates were shot to death and their
bodies burnt on a pyre. Kruk's writings illuminate the tragedy of
the Vilna Jews and their courageous efforts to maintain an
ideological, social, and cultural life even as their world was
being destroyed. To read Kruk's day-by-day account of the unfolding
of the Holocaust is to discern the possibilities for human courage
and perseverance even in the face of profound fear. Co-published
with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
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