Before the Nazis took power, Jewish businesspeople in Berlin thrived alongside their non-Jewish neighbors. But Nazi racism changed that, gradually destroying Jewish businesses before murdering the Jews themselves. Reconstructing the fate of more than 8,000 companies, this book offers the first comprehensive analysis of Jewish economic activity and its obliteration. Rather than just examining the steps taken by the persecutors, it also tells the stories of Jewish strategies in countering the effects of persecution. In doing so, this book exposes a fascinating paradox where Berlin, serving as the administrative heart of the Third Reich, was also the site of a dense network for Jewish self-help and assertion.

This volume is a brief history of the Jewish community of Volodymyr-Volynsky, going back to its first historical mentions. It explores Jewish settlement in the city, the kahal, and the role of the community in the Va'ad Arba Aratsot, and profiles several important historical figures, including Shelomoh of Karlin and Khane-Rokhl Werbermacher (the Maiden of Ludmir). It also considers the city's synagogues and Jewish cemetery, and explores the twentieth-century history of the community, especially during the Holocaust. Drawing on survivor eyewitness testimonies, the author pays tribute to the town's Righteous among the Nations and describes efforts to preserve the memory of its Jewish community, including the creation of the Piatydni memorial, and lists prominent Jews born in Volodymyr-Volynsky and natives of the city living abroad. This book will be of interest to historians of the Jewish communities and the Holocaust in Ukraine, as well as to the general reader

For the Jewish world and the Yishuv in particular, the 1930s was a time of escalating crises?the rise of the Nazis and their antisemitic policies, the declining fortunes of Eastern European Jewry, increasing Arab enmity, and the hardening of British Mandatory policies in Palestine. Reexamining some of the most controversial episodes in modern Jewis

A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Viktor Frankl was uniquely able to observe the way that both he and others in Auschwitz coped (or didn't) with the experience. He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest - and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. The sort of person the concentration camp prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not of camp influences alone. Only those who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influence - while those who made a victory of those experiences turned them into an inner triumph. Frankl came to believe man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. This outstanding work offers us all a way to transcend suffering and find significance in the art of living.

Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This volume addresses manifestations of Holocaust-engendered global discourse by critically examining their function and inherent dilemmas, and the ways in which Holocaust-related matters still instigate public debate and academic deliberation. It contends that the contradiction between the totalizing logic of globalization and the assumed uniqueness of the Holocaust generates continued intellectual and practical discontent.

Over the last seventy years, memories and narratives of the Holocaust have played a significant role in constructing Jewish communities. The author explores one field where these narratives are disseminated: Holocaust pedagogy in Jewish schools in Melbourne and New York. Bringing together a diverse range of critical approaches, including memory studies, gender studies, diaspora theory, and settler colonial studies, Anxious Histories complicates the stories being told about the Holocaust in these Jewish schools and their broader communities. It demonstrates that an anxious thread runs throughout these historical narratives, as the pedagogy negotiates feelings of simultaneous belonging and not-belonging in the West and in Zionism. In locating that anxiety, the possibilities and the limitations of narrating histories of the Holocaust are opened up once again for analysis, critique, discussion, and development.

This book is the first detailed look in English at the German Legion Condor's motorized Flak Abteilung F/88 in the Spanish Civil War. Along with organiztional and operational histories, are detailed looks at flak guns, range finders, trucks and towing vehicles, and personalities.

This book focuses on the fate of Polish Jews and Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust and its aftermath, in the ill-recognized era of Eastern-European pogroms after the WW2. It is based on the author's own ethnographic research in those areas of Poland where the Holocaust machinery operated. The results comprise the anthropological interviews with the members of the generation of Holocaust witnesses and the results of her own extensive archive research in the Polish Institute for National Remembrance (IPN). "[This book] is at times shocking; however, it grips the reader's attention from the first to the last page. It is a remarkable work, set to become a classic among the publications in this field." Jerzy Jedlicki, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences

From April 1942 to March 1944, Helene Berr, a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, kept a journal that is both an intensely moving, intimate, harrowing, appalling document and a text of astonishing literary maturity. With her colleagues, she plays the violin and she seeks refuge from the everyday in what she calls the "selfish magic" of English literature and poetry. But this is Paris under the occupation and her family is Jewish. Eventually, there comes the time when all Jews are required to wear a yellow star. She tries to remain calm and rational, keeping to what routine she can: studying, reading, enjoying the beauty of Paris. Yet always there is fear for the future, and eventually, in March 1944, Helene and her family are arrested, taken to Drancy Transit Camp and soon sent to Auschwitz. She went - as is later discovered - on the death march to Bergen-Belsen and there she died in 1945, only five days before the liberation of the camp. The last words in the journal she had left behind in Paris were "Horror! Horror! Horror!", a hideous and poignant echo of her English studies. Helene Berr's story is almost too painful to read, foreshadowing horror as it does amidst an enviable appetite for life, for beauty, for literature, for all that lasts.

Between 1935 and 1940, the Nazis incorporated large portions of Europe into the German Reich. The contributors to this volume analyze the evolving anti-Jewish policies in the annexed territories and their impact on the Jewish population, as well as the attitudes and actions of non-Jews, Germans, and indigenous populations. They demonstrate that diverse anti-Jewish policies developed in the different territories, which in turn affected practices in other regions and even influenced Berlin's decisions. Having these systematic studies together in one volume enables a comparison - based on the most recent research - between anti-Jewish policies in the areas annexed by the Nazi state. The results of this prizewinning book call into question the common assumption that one central plan for persecution extended across Nazi-occupied Europe, shifting the focus onto differing regional German initiatives and illuminating the cooperation of indigenous institutions.

Describes the life of the author's family in Vilnius before and during WWII and under the Nazi occupation, depicting their miraculous survival thanks to the German officer Karl Plagge. Plagge played a vital role in the survival of more than one hundred Jews, and for this is known as "the Schindler from Darmstadt." After liberation by the Red Army, the author's family moved first to Poland and then to France, forging their lives as refugees with gratitude and courage.

This significant new study is concerned with the role of interpreting in Nazi concentration camps, where prisoners were of 30 to 40 different nationalities. With German as the only official language in the lager, communication was vital to the prisoners' survival. While in the last few decades there has been extensive research on the language used by the camp inmates, investigation into the mediating role of interpreters between SS guards and prisoners on the one hand, and among inmates on the other, has been almost nonexistent. On the basis of Primo Levi's considerations on communication in the Nazi concentrationary system, this book investigates the ambivalent role of interpreting in the camps. One of the central questions is what the role of interpreting was in the wider context of shaping life in concentration camps. And in what way did the knowledge of languages, and accordingly, certain communication skills, contribute to the survival of concentration camp inmates and of the interpreting person? The main sources under investigation are both archive materials and survivors' memoirs and testimonials in various languages. On a different level, Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps also asks in what way the study of communication in concentration camps enhances our understanding of the ambiguous role of interpreting in more general terms. And in what way does the study of interpreting in concentration camps shape an interpreting concept which can help us to better understand the violent nature of interpreting in contexts other than the Holocaust?

What, exactly, does one mean when idealizing tolerance as a solution to cultural conflict? This book examines a wide range of young adult texts, both fiction and memoir, representing the experiences of young adults during WWII and the Holocaust. Author Rachel Dean-Ruzicka argues for a progressive reading of this literature. Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature contests the modern discourse of tolerance, encouraging educators and readers to more deeply engage with difference and identity when studying Holocaust texts. Young adult Holocaust literature is an important nexus for examining issues of identity and difference because it directly confronts systems of power, privilege, and personhood. The text delves into the wealth of material available and examines over forty books written for young readers on the Holocaust and, in the last chapter, neo-Nazism. The book also looks at representations of non-Jewish victims, such as the Romani, the disabled, and homosexuals. In addition to critical analysis of the texts, each chapter reads the discourses of tolerance and cosmopolitanism against present-day cultural contexts: ongoing debates regarding multicultural education, gay and lesbian rights, and neo-Nazi activities. The book addresses essential questions of tolerance and toleration that have not been otherwise considered in Holocaust studies or cultural studies of children's literature.

Emil Fackenheim's life work was to call upon the world at large - and on philosophers, Christians, Jews, and Germans in particular - to confront the Holocaust as an unprecedented assault on the Jewish people, Judaism, and all humanity. In this memoir, to which he was making final revisions at the time of his death, Fackenheim looks back on his life, at the profound and painful circumstances that shaped him as a philosopher and a committed Jewish thinker. Interned for three months in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp after Kristallnacht, Fackenheim was released and escaped to Scotland and then to Canada, where he lived in a refugee internment camp before eventually becoming a congregational rabbi and then, for thirty-five years, a professor of philosophy. He recalls here what it meant to be a German Jew in North America, the desperate need to respond to the crisis in Europe and to cope with its overwhelming implications for Jewish identity and community. His second great turning point came in 1967, as he saw Jews threatened with another Holocaust, this time in Israel. This crisis led him on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and ultimately back to Germany, where he continued to grapple with the question, How can the Jewish faith - and the Christian faith - exist after the Holocaust?

For many years, histories of the Holocaust focused on its perpetrators, and only recently have more scholars begun to consider in detail the experiences of victims and survivors, as well as the documents they left behind. This volume contains new research from internationally established scholars. It provides an introduction to and overview of Jewish narratives of the Holocaust. The essays include new considerations of sources ranging from diaries and oral testimony to the hidden Oyneg Shabbes archive of the Warsaw Ghetto; arguments regarding Jewish narratives and how they fit into the larger fields of Holocaust and Genocide studies; and new assessments of Jewish responses to mass murder ranging from ghetto leadership to resistance and memory.

First published 2013. This ground-breaking book examines the lives of two extraordinary, religious women. Both Edith Stein and Regina Jonas were German Jewish women who demonstrated 'deviant' religious desires as they pursued their spiritual paths to serve their communities during the Holocaust. Both were religious visionaries viewed as iconoclasts in their own times. Stein, the first woman to receive a doctorate in philosophy from Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, claimed her Jewish identity while she was still a cloistered Carmelite nun. Jonas, the first woman rabbi in Jewish history, served as a rabbi in Berlin and Theresienstadt concentration camp. A study of a contemplative and a rabbi, the book ranges across many spiritual and theological questions, not least it offers a remarkable exploration of the theology of spiritual resistance. For Stein, this meant redemption and the transmutation of suffering on the cross; for Jonas, acts of compassion bring the face of God into our presence.

During the Spanish Civil War (1936 1939) the British public raised an estimated one to two million pounds for Republican Spain, mostly through small individual donations at a time when large parts of Britain were experiencing severe economic depression. Across the country people were moved by the plight of Spain, a land in which most had never set foot. The response was quintessentially British; through picnics, whist drives, concerts, dances and rambling expeditions, the war in Spain became embedded in British social and cultural life. Innovative fundraising campaigns ran alongside lectures, film screenings and exhibitions, engaging people with the Spanish conflict. But it was a fragile alliance of progressive opinion, for those involved often had very different interpretations of the political significance of the war and of the Republics fight for a broadly defined concept of democracy. Democracy, Deeds and Dilemmas provides a fresh perspective on what is a well-trodden area of scholarship. It places British humanitarian responses to Spain within the context of Britains flourishing civic and popular political culture, following the advent of mass democracy in 1928 as supported by the Equal Franchise Act. Emily Mason explores engagement with Spain through three foci: the peace movement, the co-operative movement and British Christians groups that were at the heart of the humanitarian response, but which remain underexplored in current historiography. The book explores how the Republican cause resonated with notions of British identity and with the crises that different groups perceived to be threatening their world order. It explores the dilemma that non-intervention posed for many Britons, and argues that humanitarian support for the Spanish Republic offers an example of active citizenship and popular internationalism in Britain between the wars.

Providing diverse insights into Jewish-Gentile relations in East Central Europe from the outbreak of the Second World War until the reestablishment of civic societies after the fall of Communism in the late 1980s, this volume brings together scholars from various disciplines - including history, sociology, political science, cultural studies, film studies and anthropology - to investigate the complexity of these relations, and their transformation, from perspectives beyond the traditional approach that deals purely with politics. This collection thus looks for interactions between the public and private, and what is more, it does so from a still rather rare comparative perspective, both chronological and geographic. It is this interdisciplinary and comparative perspective that enables us to scrutinize the interaction between the individual majority societies and the Jewish minorities in a longer time frame, and hence we are able to revisit complex and manifold encounters between Jews and Gentiles, including but not limited to propaganda, robbery, violence but also help and rescue. In doing so, this collection challenges the representation of these encounters in post-war literature, films, and the historical consciousness. This book was originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies.

This book deals with the Second World War in Southeastern Europe from the perspective of conditions on the ground during the conflict. The focus is on the reshaping of ethnic and religious groups in wartime, on the "top-down" and "bottom-up" dynamics of mass violence, and on the local dimensions of the Holocaust. The approach breaks with the national narratives and "top-down" political and military histories that continue to be the predominant paradigms for the Second World War in this part of Europe.

A rediscovered masterpiece by the 16 million copy bestselling author of Man’s Search For Meaning

Just months after his liberation from Auschwitz renowned psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl delivered a series of talks revealing the foundations of his life-affirming philosophy. The psychologist, who would soon become world famous, explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience and his conviction that every crisis contains opportunity.

Published here for the very first time in English, Frankl's words resonate as strongly today as they did in 1946. Despite the unspeakable horrors in the camp, Frankl learnt from his fellow inmates that it is always possible to say ‘yes to life’ – a profound and timeless lesson for us all.

With an introduction by Daniel Goleman.