Flares of Memory is a collection of ninety-two stories written by over forty Jewish survivors and several US Army liberators about their experiences during the Holocaust. The stories collected in this volume were developed in a writing workshop led by Brostoff and Chamovitz for survivors of the Holocaust in the hope of preserving their memories for posterity. The contributors to this collection relate their recollections of being children, teenagers, and young adults during the Holocaust. Their individual experiences testify to the horror of the period as well as the moments of courage and luck that allowed them to survive while offering a tribute to the lives and cultures that were destroyed. The volume organizes the stories thematically into chapters, and includes a detailed timeline of the Holocaust, a map of concentration camps, and photographs of the contributors.

Examines literature and art to reveal the German genocidal gaze in Africa and the Holocaust. The first genocide of the twentieth century, though not well known, was committed by Germans between 1904-1907 in the country we know today as Namibia, where they exterminated thousands of Herero and Nama people and subjected the surviving indigenous men, women, and children to forced labor. The perception of Africans as subhuman-lacking any kind of civilization, history, or meaningful religion-and theresulting justification for the violence against them is what author Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the "genocidal gaze," an attitude that was later perpetuated by the Nazis. In The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, Baer uses the trope of the gaze to trace linkages between the genocide of the Herero and Nama and that of the victims of the Holocaust. Baer also considers the African gaze of resistance returned by the indigenous people and their leaders upon the German imperialists. Baer explores the threads of shared ideology in the Herero and Nama genocide and the Holocaust-concepts such as racial hierarchies, lebensraum (living space), rassenschande (racial shame), and endloesung (final solution) that were deployed by German authorities in 1904 and again in the 1930s and 1940s to justify genocide. She also notes the use of shared methodology-concentration camps, death camps, intentional starvation, rape, indiscriminate killing of women and children-in both instances. While previous scholars have made these links between the Herero and Nama genocide and that of the Holocaust, Baer's book is the first to examine literary texts that demonstrate this connection. Texts under consideration include the archive of Nama revolutionary Hendrik Witbooi; a colonial novel by German Gustav Frenssen (1906), in which the genocidal gaze conveyed an acceptance of racial annihilation; and three post-Holocaust texts that critique the genocidal gaze. Baer posits that writing and reading about the gaze is an act of mediation, a power dynamic that calls those who commit genocide to account for their crimes and discloses their malignant convictions. Her transnational analysis provides the groundwork for future studies of links between imperialism and genocide, links among genocides, and the devastating impact of the genocidal gaze.

We commonly associate the term "Holocaust" with Nuremberg and Kristallnacht, the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos, Auschwitz and Treblinka. Appearing as they do in countless books and films, these symbols of hatred penetrate our consciousness, memory, and history. But, unfortunately, our memory is selective, and, in the case of Romania, our knowledge is scant. In 1939 the Jewish population of Romania exceeded 750,000: the third largest concentration of Jews in Europe. By 1944, some 400,000 had disappeared. Another 150,000 Ukrainian Jews died at the hands of Romanian soldiers. In the quest for a "final solution" Romania proved to be Hitler's most enthusiastic ally. In The Silent Holocaust, Butnaru, himself a survivor of the Romanian labor camps, provides a full account and demonstrates that anti-Semitism was a central force in Romania's history. He begins by examining the precarious status of Romanian Jewry in the years prior to World War I. He then reviews the period to the establishment in September, 1940, of the National Legionary State, a period when anti-Semitism became the unifying force in politics. The remainder of the book covers the Holocaust years, and reveals that Romania's premeditated mass murder of Jews was well underway before the Reich's gas chambers became operational. The Silent Holocaust has been called a "work of epic and historical worth" and it is invaluable for students of World War II, the Holocaust, and Jewish and Eastern European studies.

Does religion encourage altruism on behalf of those who do not belong? Are the very religious more likely to be altruistic toward outsiders than those who are less religious? In this book Pearl M. Oliner examines data on Christian rescuers and nonrescuers of Jews during the Holocaust to shed light on these important questions.

Drawing on interviews with more than five hundred Christians--Protestant and Catholic, very religious, irreligious, and moderately religious rescuers and nonrescuers living in Nazi-occupied Europe, Oliner offers a sociological perspective on the values and attitudes that distinguished each group. She presents several case studies of rescuers and nonrescuers within each group and then interprets the individual's behavior as it relates to his or her group. She finds that the value patterns of the religious groups differ significantly from one another, and she is able to highlight those factors that appear to have contributed most toward rescue within each group.

It takes courage beyond belief to sneak out in the night to dig in the garbage for scraps to keep from starving when you know you would be killed if you were caught, or to crawl through ice and snow to freedom because the muscles in your legs atrophied from sitting in a hay mow for almost two years. To defect to the west, leaving all your family behind, not knowing when or if you'll ever see them again, or to endure the work, starvation diet, and beatings of concentration camp life also were courageous acts. However, these and other challenges were everyday living for millions such as those in this book. While those around them fell victim to WWII atrocities and did not survive, these people fought hard and won the right to live.

Interdisciplinary overview of American Jewish life post-Holocaust. The 1950s and early 1960s have not traditionally been viewed as a particularly creative era in American Jewish life. On the contrary, these years have been painted as a period of inactivity and Americanization. As if exhausted by the traumas of World War II, the American Jewish community took a rest until suddenly reawakened by the 1967 Six-Day War and its implications for world Jewry. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that previous assumptions about the early silence of American Jewry with regard to the Holocaust were exaggerated. And while historians have expanded their borders and definitions to encompass the postwar decades, scholars from other disciplines have been paying increasing attention to the unique literary, photographic, artistic, dramatic, political, and other cultural creations of this period and the ways in which they hearken back to not only the Holocaust itself but also to images of prewar Eastern Europe. Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades brings together scholars of literature, art, history, ethnography, and related fields to examine how the American Jewish community in the post-Holocaust era was shaped by its encounter with literary relics, living refugees, and other cultural productions which grew out of an encounter with Eastern European Jewish life from the pre-Holocaust era.

This innovative study shows how the imaginary constructions of self and Other are shaping identification with Jewishness in the twenty-first century. The texts and artworks discussed in this book test a diverse range of ways of identifying as Jews and with the Jewish people, while engaging with postmodern and postcolonial discourses of hybridity and multiculturalism. This book selects six key areas in which the boundaries of Jewish identities have been interrogated and renegotiated: nation, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and the Holocaust. In each of these areas Sicher explores how major and emerging contemporary writers and artists re-envision the meaning of their identities. Such re-envisioning may be literally visual or metaphorical in the search for expression of artistic self between the conventional paradigms of the past and new ways of thinking.

Because the Holocaust, at its core, was an extreme expression of a devastating racism, the author contends it has special significance for African Americans. Locke, a university professor, clergyman, and African American, reflects on the common experiences of African American and Jewish people as minorities and on the great tragedy that each community has experienced in its history--slavery and the Holocaust. Without attempting to equate the experiences of African Americans to the experiences of European Jews during the Holocaust, the author does show how aspects of the Holocaust, its impact on the Jewish community worldwide, and the long-lasting consequences relate to slavery, the civil rights movement, and the current status of African Americans.

Written from a Christian perspective, this book argues that the implications of the Holocaust touch all people, and that it is a major mistake to view the Holocaust as an exclusively Jewish event. Instead, the author asks whether it is possible for both African Americans and Jewish Americans to learn from the experience of the other regarding the common threat that minority people confront in Western societies. Locke focuses on the themes of parochialism and patriotism and reexamines the role of the Christian churches during the Holocaust in an effort to challenge some of the prevailing views in Holocaust studies.

As violence and turmoil continue to define the former Yugoslavia, basic questions remain unanswered: What are the forces behind the Serbian expansionist drive that has brought death and destruction to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo? How did the Serbs rationalize, and rally support for, this genocidal activity?

Heavenly Serbia traces Serbia's nationalist and expansionist impulses to the legendary battle of Kosovo in 1389. Anzulovic shows how the myth of "Heavenly Serbia" developed to help the Serbs endure foreign domination, explaining their military defeat and the loss of their medieval state by emphasizing their own moral superiority over military victory. Heavenly Serbia shows how this myth resulted in an aggressive nationalist ideology which has triumphed in the late twentieth century and marginalized those Serbs who strive for the establishment of a civil society.

"Modern Serbian nationalism...and its contradictory connections...have been sources of considerable scholarly interest...Branimir Anzulovic's compendium is a good example of the genre, made all the more useful by Anzulovic's excellent command of the literature."
--Ivo Banac, "History of Religions"

Author interview with CNN: http: //www.cnn.com/chat/transcripts/branimir_chat.html

This book follows the story of suspected Nazi war criminals in the United States and analyzes their supposed crimes during World War II, their entry into the United States as war refugees in the 1940s and 1950s, and their prosecution in the 1970s and beyond by the U.S. government, specifically by the Office of Special Investigation (OSI). In particular, this book explains why and how such individuals entered the United States, why it took so long to locate and apprehend them, how the OSI was founded, and how the OSI has tried to bring them to justice. This study constitutes a thorough account of 150 suspects and examines how the search for them connects to larger developments in postwar U.S. history. In this latter regard, one major theme includes the role Holocaust memory played in the aforementioned developments. This account adds significantly to the historiographical debate about when and how the Holocaust found its way into American Jewish and also general American consciousness. In general, these suspected Nazi war criminals could come to the United States largely undetected during the early Cold War. In this atmosphere, they morphed from Nazi collaborators to ardent anti-Communists and, outside of some big fish, not even within the Jewish community was their role in the Holocaust much discussed. Only with the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s did interest in other Holocaust perpetrators increase, culminating in the founding of the OSI in the late 1970s. The manuscript makes use, among other documents, of declassified sources from the CIA and FBI, little used trial accounts, and hard to locate OSI records.

Following decades of silence about the involvement of doctors, medical researchers and other health professionals in the Holocaust and other National Socialist (Nazi) crimes, scholars in recent years have produced a growing body of research that reveals the pervasive extent of that complicity. This interdisciplinary collection of studies presents documentation of the critical role medicine played in realizing the policies of Hitler's regime. It traces the history of Nazi medicine from its roots in the racial theories of the 1920s, through its manifestations during the Nazi period, on to legacies and continuities from the postwar years to the present.

"Rhodes and the Holocaust" is the story of "La Juderia," the Jewish community that once lived and flourished on Rhodes Island, the largest of the twelve Dodecanese islands in the Mediterranean Sea near the coast of Turkey. While the focus of the accounts of the Holocaust has for the most part been on the Jewish populations of Eastern and Middle Europe, little seems to be known of the events that affected those communities in Greece and the surrounding Aegean Islands during that time.

The population of this group was almost annihilated, reduced from a thriving community of over 80,000, to less than a 1,000 survivors, who were left to tell their stories. Among the victims of Rhodes Island were the grandmother and aunt of the author, who were killed by falling bombs, and his grandfather, who was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp. This history tells of the deceit and inhuman treatment the entire Jewish community of Rhodes experienced during their deportation and eventual "liberation" by the Russian Army.

The heart-wrenching story of the Rhodes Jewish community is told through the experiences of a thirteen-year-old boy, taken by the Nazis to Auschwitz along with his father and his eleven-year-old sister.; Most of all, Rhodes and the Holocaust makes known the story of that community's existence and struggle for survival.

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.

This narrative history tells the story of the German occupation of Normandy (1940-44), and the Allied liberation. Following the fall of France in 1940, Normandy formed part of the Reich's western border and its history for the next four years. On the coast, vast defenses were built up, and large numbers of German troops were stationed throughout the region, all in the midst of the local population. Much of the story is told in the words of French, German, and Allied participants, including last letters of executed hostages and resisters, accounts of everyday life and eyewitness reports of aerial, naval, and ground combat operations during the Liberation. When the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944, all were witness to the greatest amphibious landing in history. This, then, is the story of the 51-month-nightmare that was Normandy's war, told while it is still possible to record the personal stories of survivors, which very soon will not be the case.

Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, Austria, Italy and Israel: "Vergangenheitsbewaltigung" as a Historical Quest offers an account on post-war coming-to-terms with the Holocaust tragedy in some European countries, such as Germany, Austria, and Italy. The subject has attracted more attention in recent years, since the long transition to liberal democracy seems to have put an end to the main theme of the memory of the Second World War. The main point of the volume is the making of a new generational memory after the "end of history". What is to be done after the making of a globalised world? What about the memorialisation of the last century?