Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is an inspiring and tragic account of an ordinary life lived in extraordinary circumstances that has enthralled readers for generations. This Penguin Classics edition is edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler, translated by Susan Massotty, and includes an introduction by Elie Wiesel, author of Night. 'June, 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.' In Amsterdam, in the summer of 1942, the Nazis forced teenager Anne Frank and her family into hiding. For over two years, they, another family and a German dentist lived in a 'secret annexe', fearing discovery. All that time, Anne kept a diary. Since its publication in 1947, Anne Frank's diary has been read by tens of millions of people. This Definitive Edition restores substantial material omitted from the original edition, giving us a deeper insight into Anne Frank's world. Her curiosity about her emerging sexuality, the conflicts with her mother, her passion for Peter, a boy whose family hid with hers, and her acute portraits of her fellow prisoners reveal Anne as more human, more vulnerable and more vital than ever. 'One of the greatest books of the twentieth century' Guardian 'A modern classic' Julia Neuberger, The Times

Containing an almost entirely new selection of texts, this second edition of The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath presents a critical and important study of the Holocaust. Many of the pieces challenge conventional analyses and preconceived notions about the Holocaust, whether regarding genocidal precedents and the centrality of antisemitism, the relationship between ideological motivation and economic calculations, or the timing of the decision on the Final Solution. Starting with the background of the Holocaust and focusing on colonial violence, antisemitism and scientific racism as being at the root of the Final Solution, the book then examines the context of the decision to unleash the genocide of the Jews. Several powerful texts then provide readers with a close look at the psychology of a perpetrator, the fate of the victims - with a particular emphasis on the role of gender and the murder of children - and the impossible choices made by Jewish leaders, educators, and men recruited into the Nazi extermination apparatus. Finally, there is an analysis of survivors' testimonies and the creation of an early historical record, and an inquiry into post-war tribunals and the development of international justice and legislation with a view to the larger phenomenon of modern genocide before and after the Holocaust. Complete with an introduction that summarises the state of the field, this book contains major reinterpretations by leading Holocaust authors along with key texts on testimony, memory, and justice after the catastrophe. With brief discussions placing each essay in historical and scholarly context, this carefully selected compilation is an ideal introduction to the topic and essential reading for all students of the Holocaust.

This interdisciplinary study intergrates historiographical, literary and cultural methodologies in its focus on a little known corpus of testimonial accounts published by French women deported to Nazi camps. Comprising epistemological and literary analyses of the accounts and an examination of the construction of deportee identities, it will interest those working in the fields of modern French literature, genre, women's studies and the Holocaust.

Ordinary Men has been admired all over the world and is now published in the UK for the first time. It takes as its basis the detailed records of one squad from the Nazis' extermination groups and explores in detail its composition, its actions, and the methods by which it was trained to perform acts of genocide on an industrial scale. He introduces us to cheerful, friendly, ordinary men who killed without hesitation or apparent remorse for years on end, in docile obedience to an authority they happily accepted as legitimate. It is a valuable corrective to the idea of German uniqueness and offers a much more chilling picture of human beings as avidly suggestible and desperate for an organising purpose in their lives, however disgusting.

This book follows Chagall's life through his art and his understanding of the role of the artist as a political being. It takes the reader through the different milieus of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - including the World Wars and the Holocaust - to present a unique understanding of Chagall's artistic vision of peace in an age of extremes. At a time when all identities are being subsumed into a "national" identity, this book makes the case for a larger understanding of art as a way of transcending materiality. The volume explores how Platonic notions of truth, goodness, and beauty are linked and mutually illuminating in Chagall's work. A "spiritual-humanist" interpretation of his life and work renders Chagall's opus more transparent and accessible to the general reader. It will be essential reading for students of art and art history, political philosophy, political science, and peace studies.

The Holocaust and Representations of Jews examines how prominent national exhibitions in Europe represent the Jewish minority and its cultural and religious self-understandings, historically and today, in particular in the context of the Holocaust. Insights from the New Museology are brought to the field of Jewish Studies through an exploration of the visual representation of Jewish history and Jewish identifications in the display of photographs. Drawing on case studies which focus on the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London and the permanent exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin, these themes become the prism through which aspects of historiography and the display of the 'otherness' of minorities are addressed. Casting new light on the issues surrounding the visual representation of Jews, the work of museum practitioners in relation to historical presentations and to the use of photographs in exhibitions, this book is an important contribution not only to the fields of Jewish Studies, Religion and History, but also to the study of the representation of minority-majority relations and the understanding of exhibition visits as an educational tool.

Atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust were photographed more intensely that any before. In the time since the images were taken they have been subjected to a perplexing variety of treatments: variously ignored, suppressed, distorted and above all exploited for propaganda purposes. With the use of many photographs, including some never before seen, this book traces the history of this process and asks whether the images can be true representations of the events they were depicting. Yet their provenance, Janina Struk argues, has been less important that the uses to which a wide range of political interests has put them, from the desperate attempts of the war-time underground to provide hard evidence of the death camps to the memorial museums of Europe, the US and Israel today.

Over the past decades, the memory of the Holocaust has not only become a common cultural consciousness but also a cultural property shared by people all over the world. This collection brings together academics, critics and creative practitioners from the fields of Holocaust Studies, Literature, History, Media Studies, Creative Writing and German Studies to discuss contemporary trends in Holocaust commemoration and representation in literature, film, TV, the entertainment industry and social media. The essays in this trans-disciplinary collection debate how contemporary culture engages with the legacy of the Holocaust now that, 75 years on from the end of the Second World War, the number of actual survivors is dwindling. It engages with ongoing cultural debates in Holocaust Studies that have seen a development from, largely, testimonial presentations of the Holocaust to more fictional narratives both in literature and film. In addition to a number of chapters focusing in particular on literary trends in Holocaust representation, the collection also assesses other forms of cultural production surrounding the Holocaust, ranging from recent official memorialisation in Germany to Holocaust presentation in film, computer games and social media. The collection also highlights the contributions by creative practitioners such as writers and performers who use drama and the traditional art of storytelling in order to keep memories alive and pass them on to new generations. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

Notes from the Other Side of Night is a diary-memoir written upon Juliana Geran Pilon's return to her native Romania in 1975, which she had left along with her family when she was just fourteen. Poetically weaving together modern insight and realities with childhood perceptions, Pilon tells the haunting stories of her parents, grandparents, neighbors, and friends.

Although the scenery of her native home had remained essentially unchanged since her childhood, Pilon recalls streets that are no more, homes and churches that have been demolished. Yet, the hills and forests, the flowers and mountains, the heat of old Bucharest, remained the same. The scenes and characters described in this book are simply unforgettable.

Despite the many tragedies it describes--anti-semitism, political imprisonment, and judicial execution were ruthless realities under communism--Notes from the Other Side of Night is not a depressing book. Pilon writes with a detached melancholy about events and characters that illustrate Hannah Arendt's terrifying "banality of evil." But she remembers, as well, those few who managed to remain human beings until the end. Ultimately, hope triumphs in this memoir. This edition includes a new foreword, which discusses the initial writing and publication of this and previous editions.

Under the legal and administrative system of Nazi Germany, people categorized as Fremdvolkische (literally, "foreign people") were subject to special laws that restricted their rights, limited their protection under the law, and exposed them to extraordinary legal sanctions and brutal, extralegal police actions. These special laws, one of the central constitutional principles of the Third Reich, applied to anyone perceived as different or racially inferior, whether German citizens or not.
""Non-Germans" under the Third Reich" traces the establishment and evolution of these laws from the beginnings of the Third Reich through the administration of annexed and occupied eastern territories during the war. Drawing extensively on German archival sources as well as on previously unexplored material from Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe, the book shows with chilling detail how the National Socialist government maintained a superficial legal continuity with the Weimar Republic while expanding the legal definition of Fremdvolkische, to untimately give itself legal sanction for the actions undertaken in the Holocaust. Replete with revealing quotations from secret decrees, instructions, orders, and reports, this major work of scholarship offers a sobering assessment of the theory and practice of law in Nazi Germany.
Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The program of extermination Nazis called the Final Solution took the lives of approximately six million Jews, amounting to roughly 60 percent of European Jewry and a third of the world's Jewish population. Studying the Holocaust from a sociological perspective, Ronald J. Berger explains why the Final Solution happened to a particular people for particular reasons; why the Jews were, for the Nazis, the central enemy. Taking a unique approach in its examination of the devastating event, The Holocaust, Religion, and the Politics of Collective Memory fuses history and sociology in its study of the Holocaust.

Berger's book illuminates the Holocaust as a social construction. As historical scholarship on the Holocaust has proliferated, perhaps no other tragedy or event has been as thoroughly documented. Yet sociologists have paid less attention to the Holocaust than historians and have been slower to fully integrate the genocide into their corpus of disciplinary knowledge and realize that this monumental tragedy affords opportunities to examine issues that are central to main themes of sociological inquiry.

Berger's aim is to counter sociologists who argue that the genocide should be maintained as an area of study unto itself, as a topic that should be segregated from conventional sociology courses and general concerns of sociological inquiry. The author argues that the issues raised by the Holocaust are central to social science as well as historical studies.

The ways in which memories of the Holocaust have been communicated, represented and used have changed dramatically over the years. From such memories being neglected and silenced in most of Europe until the 1970s, each country has subsequently gone through a process of cultural, political and pedagogical awareness-rising. This culminated in the 'Stockholm conference on Holocaust commemoration' in 2000, which resulted in the constitution of a task force dedicated to transmitting and teaching knowledge and awareness about the Holocaust on a global scale. The silence surrounding private memories of the Holocaust has also been challenged in many families. What are the catalysts that trigger a change from silence to discussion of the Holocaust? What happens when we talk its invisibility away? How are memories of the Holocaust reflected in different social environments? Who asks questions about memories of the Holocaust, and which answers do they find, at which point in time and from which past and present positions related to their societies and to the phenomenon in question? This book highlights the contexts in which such questions are asked. By introducing the concept of 'active memory', this book contributes to recent developments in memory studies, where memory is increasingly viewed not in isolation but as a dynamic and relational part of human lives.

A SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'The best biography I have read in years' Philippe Sands 'Spectacular' Observer 'A remarkable portrait' Guardian W. G. Sebald was one of the most extraordinary and influential writers of the twentieth century. Through books including The Emigrants, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, he pursued an original literary vision that combined fiction, history, autobiography and photography and addressed some of the most profound themes of contemporary literature: the burden of the Holocaust, memory, loss and exile. The first biography to explore his life and work, Speak, Silence pursues the true Sebald through the memories of those who knew him and through the work he left behind. This quest takes Carole Angier from Sebald's birth as a second-generation German at the end of the Second World War, through his rejection of the poisoned inheritance of the Third Reich, to his emigration to England, exploring the choice of isolation and exile that drove his work. It digs deep into a creative mind on the edge, finding profound empathy and paradoxical ruthlessness, saving humour, and an elusive mix of fact and fiction in his life as well as work. The result is a unique, ferociously original portrait.

In this "engrossing peek into a little-known chapter of World War II, and one family's harrowing tale of finding the lost pieces of its own history" (Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of Liar Temptress Solider Spy), a woman sets out to track down the descendants of the Jewish family her grandmother helped hide seventy years earlier. Yvette Manessis Corporon grew up listening to her grandmother's stories about how the people of the small Greek island Erikousa hid a Jewish family--a tailor named Savvas and his daughters--from the Nazis during World War II. Nearly 2,000 Jews from that area died in the concentration camps, but even though everyone on Erikousa knew Savvas and his family were hiding on the island, no one ever gave them up, and the family survived the war. Years later, Yvette couldn't get the story of the Jewish tailor out of her head. She decided to track down the man's descendants--and eventually found them in Israel. Their tearful reunion was proof to her that evil doesn't always win. But just days after she made the connection, her cousin's child was gunned down in a parking lot in Kansas, a victim of a Neo-Nazi out to inflict as much harm as he could. Despite her best hopes, she was forced to confront the fact that seventy years after the Nazis were defeated, remainders of their hateful legacy still linger today. As Yvette and her family wrestled with the tragedy in their own lives, the lessons she learned from the survivors of the Holocaust helped her confront and make sense of the present. In beautiful interweaving storylines, the past and present come together in a nuanced, heartfelt "story of compassion and collective resistance" with "undeniable emotional power" (Kirkus Reviews).

One woman's discovery-and the incredible, unexpected journey it takes her on-of how her grandparent's small village of Campagna, Italy, helped save Jews during the Holocaust.

Take a journey with Elizabeth Bettina as she discovers-much to her surprise-that her grandparent's small village, nestled in the heart of southern Italy, housed an internment camp for Jews during the Holocaust, and that it was far from the only one. Follow her discovery of survivors and their stories of gratitude to Italy and its people. Explore the little known details of how members of the Catholic church assisted and helped shelter Jews in Italy during World War II.

An exploration of the development of Holocaust research in Israel, this book ranges from the consolidation of Holocaust research as an academic subject in the late 1940s to the establishment of Yad Vashem and beyond. Research on the story of historiography is often a work on books, on the "final products" that fill academic bookshelves yet, in Israeli Holocaust Research, Boaz Cohen illustrates that the evolution of holocaust research in Israel has a more human element to it. Drawing on knowledge gained through seven years of work in ten major archives in Israel, the author reveals a previously unseen picture of the development of Israeli Holocaust research "from below," and of the social and cultural forces influencing its character. In doing so, a new facet to the picture emerges, of the story beyond the archive and the people who see Holocaust research as their mission and responsibility. This book will be a fascinating addition to the study of Holocaust research and will be of particular interest to students of history, historiography and Jewish studies

This book seeks to answer three vital questions about the worldwide response to Hitler's "Final Solution" When did information about the genocide first become known to Jews and non-Jews? Through what channels was this information transmitted? What was the reaction of those who received word of the slaughter?

Walter Laqueur's quest focuses on the period between June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and December 1942, by which time the United Nations had confirmed the news about the mass killings in a common declaration. By the end of 1942, Chelmno, Belzec, Auschwitz, Maidanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka were fully operational and two and a half million Jews had already been killed.

According to Laqueur, word started to spread soon after extermination began. But there is no easy, straightforward answer to the wider question of why there was a failure to read and correctly interpret the signs in 1941; why so many individuals and governments actually chose to deny the reality of genocide when faced with incontrovertible evidence. A probing and disturbing work, The Terrible Secret explores one of the most perplexing aspects of the Holocaust, a political and psychological riddle of general significance to the understanding of the history of our times.

Acclaimed historian and New York Times bestselling author Craig Shirley delivers a compelling account of 1945, particularly the watershed events in the month of April, that details how America emerged from World War II as a leading superpower. In the long-awaited follow-up to the widely praised December 1941,Craig Shirley's April 1945 paints a vivid portrait of America--her people, faith, economy, government, and culture. The year of 1945 bought a series of watershed events that transformed the country into an arsenal of democracy, one that no longer armed the world by necessity but henceforth protected the world by need. At the start of 1945, America and the rest of the world were grieving millions of lives lost in the global conflict. As President Roosevelt was sworn into his fourth term, optimism over an end to the bloody war had grown--then, in April, several events collided that changed the face of the world forever: the sudden death of President Roosevelt followed by Harry S. Truman's rise to office; Adolph Hitler's suicide; and the horrific discoveries of Dachau and Auschwitz. Americans doubled down on their completion of the atomic bomb and their plans to drop them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the destruction ultimately leading the Japanese Empire to surrender on V-J day and ending World War II for good. Combining engaging anecdotes with deft research and details that are both diminutive and grand, April 1945 gives readers a front-row seat to the American stage at the birth of a brand-new world.

I had an uneventful childhood. My family loved me." The author's direct, personal voice gives this Holocaust memoir its power. Although the writing is direct, almost monosyllabic at times, the book is not intended for young readers. It conveys a brutality that is sudden and close, just as it was for the boy when he heard that his beloved older brother and his father had been shot to death and thrown into a common grave. This is the story of a young boy who came of age before World War II in a small Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian town. Nearly his entire family met their end by gas or by bullet. He survived only by the barest of luck. Among the most moving pages in the book are those the author devotes to the Ukrainian and Polish men and women who found the courage, in the face of savage anti-Semitism raging about them, to come to the aid of the Jewish victims, thus risking death both at the hands of their neighbors and the German masters alike.

The genocide of Jewish and non-Jewish civilians perpetrated by the German regime during World War Two continues to confront scholars with elusive questions even after nearly seventy years and hundreds of studies. This multi-contributory work is a landmark publication that sees experts renowned in their field addressing these questions in light of current research. A comprehensive introduction to the history of the Holocaust, this volume has 42 chapters which add important depth to the academic study of the Holocaust, both geographically and topically. The chapters address such diverse issues as: continuities in German and European history with respect to genocide prior to 1939 the eugenic roots of Nazi anti-Semitism the response of Europe's Jewish Communities to persecution and destruction the Final Solution as the German occupation instituted it across Europe rescue and rescuer motivations the problem of prosecuting war crimes gender and Holocaust experience the persecution of non-Jewish victims the Holocaust in postwar cultural venues. This important collection will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of the Holocaust.

Offering an up-to-date historical perspective which should enable readers to fathom how the brutal massacres of 800,000 Rwandese came to pass in 1994, this volume includes a new chapter that brings the analysis up to the end of 1996. Gerard Prunier probes into how the genocidal events in Rwanda were part of a deadly logic - a plan that served central political and economic interests - rather than a result of primordial tribal hatreds, a notion often invoked by the media to dramatize genocide.

The July 1936 coup detat against the Spanish Second Republic brought together a diversity of anti-Republican political and social groups under the leadership of rebel Africanista military officers. In the ensuing Civil War this coalition gradually came under the rule of Generalissimo Franco. This volume explores the hypothesis that the violence and combat experiences of the war were the fundamental ideological crucible for the Francoist regime. The rebels were a group of reactionary and anti-liberal forces with little ideological or political coherence, but they emerged from the conflict not only victorious but ideologically united under the dictators power. Key to understanding this transition are the different political cultures of the rebel army, how the combatants war experiences contributed to the transformation of diverse rebel groups, and the role of foreign armed intervention. The contributors examine not only the endogenous Spanish political and military cultures of the Francoist coalition, but also the transnational influence of foreign groups. The roots of Francoist political culture are found in the Falangist and Carlist militias, and Civil Guard units, that lent their support to the military rebellion. The war experiences of conscripts, colonial troops, and junior officers forged the Francoist ideology. It was reinforced by fascist influences and assistance from Germany and Italy, and the lesser-known contributions of Swiss and White Russian volunteers. At the beginning of the conflict the rebel side was not homogeneous. But it weaved together a complex, transnational web of political and military interests in the midst of a bloody and destructive war, transforming itself in the process to a political and dictatorial platform that was to rule Spain for many years.

Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe explores the phenomenon of Holocaust transfer, analysing the widespread practice of using the Holocaust and its imagery for the representation and recording of other historical events in various media sites. It investigates the use of Holocaust imagery in political and legal discourses, in critical thinking and philosophy, as well as in popular culture, to provide a fresh theorisation of the manner in which the Holocaust comes loose from its historical context and is applied to events and campaigns in the contemporary public sphere. Richly illustrated with concrete examples, including prominent, international animal rights activism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the genocide in Rwanda, this book traces the visual rhetoric of Holocaust imagery and its application to events other than the genocide of Jewish people With its discussion of the wide range of issues arising with this form of 'Holocaust-transfer', the generalization of the Holocaust as a metaphor in representations of catastrophe, as well as in other cultural locations, Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe will appeal to those working in the fields of holocaust studies, cultural and visual culture studies, sociology, and media studies.