Largely forgotten over the years, the seminal work of French poet, novelist and camp survivor Jean Cayrol has experienced a revival in the French-speaking world since his death in 2005. His concept of a concentrationary art-the need for an urgent and constant aesthetic resistance to the continuing effects of the concentrationary universe-proved to be a major influence for Hannah Arendt and other writers and theorists across a number of disciplines. Concentrationary Art presents the first translation into English of Jean Cayrol's key essays on the subject, as well as the first book-length study of how we might situate and elaborate his concept of a Lazarean aesthetic in cultural theory, literature, cinema, music and contemporary art.

In this volume, the first English-language account of the underground Jewish resistance in Romania, I. C. Butnaru examines the efforts that resulted in some 300,000 Romanian Jews surviving the Holocaust. After detailing the rise of the fascist Iron Guards and the consequences of German domination, Butnaru describes the organization of the Jewish resistance movement, its various contacts within the government, and its activities. While emphasizing the role played by Zionist youth organizations which smuggled Jews from Europe and arranged illegal emigration, Butnaru also describes the role of Jewish parachutists from Palestine, the links between the resistance and the key international Jewish organizations, and even the links with the Gestapo. Waiting for Jerusalem is the most comprehensive study of the efforts to save the Jewish population of Romania, and, as such, will be of considerable use to scholars and students of the Holocaust and Eastern European Studies.

In this updated edition, author Joseph Keysor addresses the growing trend among secularists to label Hitler as a Christian and therefore attribute the atrocities of the second world war to the Christian religion. Keysor does not settle for simply contrasting the Nazis' behavior with the Biblical record. He also examines the true sources of Nazi ideology which are anything but Christian: Wagner, Chamberlain, Haeckel, and Nietzsche, to name a few. Keysor does not shy away from discussing Christian anti-semitism (alleged and real) throughout history and discusses Martin Luther, medieval anti-semitism, and the behavior of the Roman Catholic church and other Christian denominations during the Holocaust in Germany. Joseph Keysor's well reasoned, well researched, and comprehensive defense of the Christian faith against modern accusations is a useful tool for scholars, pastors, and educators who are interested in the truth. "Hitler and Christianity" is a necessity in one's apologetics library, and secularists, skeptics, and atheists will be obliged to respond.

Holocaust Education in Lithuania is based on a six-year, multi-sited ethnographic research project that was conducted to analyze the effects of the controversial policies of Holocaust education which were introduced as conditions of membership for access into post-Soviet western alliances. In order to understand how individuals take up transnational policies and programs intended to support democratization, Beresniova delves into rarely discussed issues. She looks at the means through which inherent cultural and political assumptions have had an impact on the ways in which memory and history are used in educational programs. She also scrutinizes the motivating factors for involvement in Holocaust education, such as the importance of community building, civic activism beyond the topic of the Holocaust, and the perceived power of the international community in dictating domestic education policy guidelines. Beresniova contends that educators must acknowledge the political and cultural elements in Holocaust education programs and policies, or risk undermining their own efforts. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, education, history, political science, and European studies.

If you had a chance to speak to the Pope, what would you say? This is the question that 13 noted Holocaust scholars--Christians of various denominations and Jews (including some Holocaust survivors)--address in this volume. The Holocaust was a Christian as well as a Jewish tragedy; nonetheless, the Roman Catholic hierarchy has offered very little official discourse on the Church's role in it. These essays provide solid constructive criticism and make a major contribution to both Holocaust and Christian studies.

The first book-length study of the survival of Polish Jews in Stalin's Soviet Union. About 1.5 million East European Jews-mostly from Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia-survived the Second World War behind the lines in the unoccupied parts of the Soviet Union. Some of these survivors, following the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, were evacuated as part of an organized effort by the Soviet state, while others became refugees who organized their own escape from the Germans, only to be deported to Siberia and other remote regions under Stalin's regime. This complicated history of survival from the Holocaust has fallen between the cracks of the established historiographical traditions as neither historians of the Soviet Union nor Holocaust scholars felt responsible for the conservation of this history. With Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, the editors have compiled essays that are at the forefront of developing this entirely new field of transnational study, which seeks to integrate scholarship from the areas of the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the history of Poland and the Soviet Union, and the study of refugees and displaced persons.

This is a multi-perspectival, broadly thematic exploration of ghettoization and deportation in Hungary as spatio-temporal processes, integrating the so-called 'spatial turn' in the humanities into Holocaust Studies. 'The universe began shrinking,' wrote Elie Wiesel of his Holocaust experiences in Hungary, 'first we were supposed to leave our towns and concentrate in the larger cities. Then the towns shrank to the ghetto, and the ghetto to a house, the house to a room, the room to a cattle car...' Wiesel's words point to the Holocaust being implemented and experienced as a profoundly spatial event, with Jews concentrated in urban centres in more and more confined space. But alongside this spatial story of increasing physical concentration (segregation and control), is a spatio-temporal story of the Holocaust experienced as movement (to and from ghettos and camps) and stasis (in ghettos and cattle cars) which Wiesel hints at. Both ideas underlie this book on ghettoization and deportation in Hungary as spatio-temporal processes. Using a multi-perspectival, broadly thematic approach, Dr Tim Cole's "Traces of the Holocaust" sees him innovatively explore ways of integrating the so-called 'spatial turn' in the humanities into Holocaust Studies.

The agonizing correspondence between Jewish family members ensnared in the Nazi grip and their American relatives Just a week after the Kristallnacht terror in 1938, young Luzie Hatch, a German Jew, fled Berlin to resettle in New York. Her rescuer was an American-born cousin and industrialist, Arnold Hatch. Arnold spoke no German, so Luzie quickly became translator, intermediary, and advocate for family left behind. Soon an unending stream of desperate requests from German relatives made their way to Arnold's desk. Luzie Hatch had faithfully preserved her letters both to and from far-flung relatives during the World War II era as well as copies of letters written on their behalf. This extraordinary collection, now housed at the American Jewish Committee Archives, serves as the framework for Exit Berlin. Charlotte R. Bonelli offers a vantage point rich with historical context, from biographical information about the correspondents to background on U.S. immigration laws, conditions at the Vichy internment camps, refuge in Shanghai, and many other topics, thus transforming the letters into a riveting narrative. Arnold's letters reveal an unfamiliar side of Holocaust history. His are the responses of an "average" American Jew, struggling to keep his own business afloat while also assisting dozens of relatives trapped abroad-most of whom he had never met and whose deathly situation he could not fully comprehend. This book contributes importantly to historical understanding while also uncovering the dramatic story of one besieged family confronting unimaginable evil.

'My mind refuses to play its part in the scholarly exercise. I walk around in a daze, remembering occasionally to take a picture. I've heard that many people cry here, but I am too numb to feel. The wind whips through my wool coat. I am very cold, and I imagine what the wind would have felt like for someone here fifty years ago without coat, boots, or gloves. Hours later as I write, I tell myself a story about the day, hoping it is true, and hoping it will make sense of what I did and did not feel.' _From the Foreword Most of us learn of Auschwitz and the Holocaust through the writings of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel. Remarkable as their stories are, they leave many voices of Auschwitz unheard. Mary Lagerwey seeks to complicate our memory of Auschwitz by reading less canonical survivors: Jean Amery, Charlotte Delbo, Fania Fenelon, Szymon Laks, Primo Levi, and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. She reads for how gender, social class, and ethnicity color their tellings. She asks whether we can_whether we should_make sense of Auschwitz. And throughout, Lagerwey reveals her own role in her research; tells of her own fears and anxieties presenting what she, a non-Jew born after the fall of Nazism, can only know second-hand. For any student of the Holocaust, for anyone trying to make sense of the final solution, Reading Auschwitz represents a powerful struggle with what it means to read and tell stories after Auschwitz.

A literary memoir of exile and survival in Soviet prison camps during the Holocaust. Most Polish Jews who survived the Second World War did not go to concentration camps, but were banished by Stalin to the remote prison settlements and Gulags of the Soviet Union. Less than ten percent of Polish Jews came out of the war alive-the largest population of East European Jews who endured-for whom Soviet exile was the main chance for survival. Ellen G. Friedman's The Seven, A Family HolocaustStory is an account of this displacement. Friedman always knew that she was born to Polish-Jewish parents on the run from Hitler, but her family did not describe themselves as Holocaust survivors since that label seemed only to apply only to those who came out of the concentration camps with numbers tattooed on their arms. The title of the book comes from the closeness that set seven individuals apart from the hundreds of thousands of other refugees in the Gulags of the USSR. The Seven-a name given to them by their fellow refugees-were Polish Jews from Warsaw, most of them related. The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story brings together the very different perspectives of the survivors and others who came to be linked to them, providing a glimpse into the repercussions of the Holocaust in one extended family who survived because they were loyal to one another, lucky, and endlessly enterprising. Interwoven into the survivors' accounts of their experiences before, during, and after the war are their own and the author's reflections on the themes of exile, memory, love, and resentment. Based on primary interviews and told in a blending of past and present experiences, Friedman gives a new voice to Holocaust memory-one that is sure to resonate with today's exiles and refugees. Those with an interest in World War II memoir and genocide studies will welcome this unique perspective.

Among the surprising events in Eastern Europe in 1989, none astonished the world more than the nonviolent overthrow of the East German Communist regime. This book examines the collapse of East Germany as it unfolded in one city, Leipzig. Analyzing the leading role of the GDR's second largest city, Bartee combines chronological and descriptive narration of events with an in-depth critique of leading actors and groups. Prominent among these are the Protestant churches and the array of opposition groups concerned for peace, freedom, human rights, justice, and the environment.

Bartee focuses in particular on the famous peace prayer services in St. Nicholas Church and the protest activities of the groups as they expanded into the mass demonstrations of late 1989. Using surveys and interviews with participants, as well as Leipzig archives, this study examines the motivations and methods of the demonstrators. Bartee concludes that, while the prayer services provided hope, inspiration, and information, the strong desire for a free, open society served as the group's chief motivation.

The Holocaust did not introduce the phenomenon of the bystander, but it did illustrate the terrible consequences of indifference and passivity towards the persecution of others. Although the term was initially applied only to the good Germans--the apathetic citizens who made genocide possible through unquestioning obedience to evil leaders--recent Holocaust scholarship has shown that it applies to most of the world, including parts of the population in Nazi-occupied countries, some sectors within the international Christian and Jewish communities, and the Allied governments themselves. This work analyzes why this happened, drawing on the insights of historians, Holocaust survivors, and Christian and Jewish ethicists. The author argues that bystander behavior cannot be attributed to a single cause, such as anti-Semitism, but can only be understood within a complex framework of factors that shape human behavior individually, socially, and politically.

The Boy Who Lost His Birthday is the uplifting story of one man's journey from boyhood in rural Hungary to triumph over oppression during the Holocaust and finally to a role as a spiritual leader in America. Rabbi Laszlo Berkowits' compelling memoir recounts his happy childhood memories in Derecske, Hungary where he was a member of a thriving Jewish community and aspired to become a cantor. Stricken with wartime poverty, Berkowits and his father left their home and family behind to seek work in Budapest. It was there that they were rounded up with other Budapest Jews and shipped by sealed train to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. Berkowits vividly narrates his treacherous experience as a sixteen year-old boy surviving in the notorious Nazi concentration camp until its liberation by American troops. After recovery in Sweden, Berkowits immigrated to America were he completed his education, joined the United States Army, and became a chaplain's assistant. After leaving the Army, he undertook graduate study at Hebrew Union College, married, and became the founding rabbi of the largest Jewish congregation in Virginia, Temple Rodef Shalom. Berkowits' story shows that he emerged victorious over deprivation, cruelty, and tragedy to become an exemplar of American success.

The Boy Who Lost His Birthday is the uplifting story of one man's journey from boyhood in rural Hungary to triumph over oppression during the Holocaust and finally to a role as a spiritual leader in America. Rabbi Laszlo Berkowits' compelling memoir recounts his happy childhood memories in Derecske, Hungary where he was a member of a thriving Jewish community and aspired to become a cantor. Stricken with wartime poverty, Berkowits and his father left their home and family behind to seek work in Budapest. It was there that they were rounded up with other Budapest Jews and shipped by sealed train to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. Berkowits vividly narrates his treacherous experience as a sixteen year-old boy surviving in the notorious Nazi concentration camp until its liberation by American troops. After recovery in Sweden, Berkowits immigrated to America were he completed his education, joined the United States Army, and became a chaplain's assistant. After leaving the Army, he undertook graduate study at Hebrew Union College, married, and became the founding rabbi of the largest Jewish congregation in Virginia, Temple Rodef Shalom. Berkowits' story shows that he emerged victorious over deprivation, cruelty, and tragedy to become an exemplar of American success.

In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando-the "special squads," composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process-buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these "Scrolls of Auschwitz," which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp's liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

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.