During 1938 and 1939, Paul Neurath was a Jewish political prisoner in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. He owed his survival to a temporary Nazi policy allowing release of prisoners who were willing to go into exile and to the help of friends on the outside who helped him obtain a visa. He fled to Sweden before coming to the United States in 1941. In 1943, he completed The The Society of Terror, based on his experiences in Dachau and Buchenwald. He embarked on a long career teaching sociology and statistics at universities in the United States and later in Vienna until his death in September 2001.After liberation, the horrific images of the extermination camps abounded from Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places. Neurath's chillingly factual discussion of his experience as an inmate and his astute observations of the conditions and the social structures in Dachau and Buchenwald captivate the reader, not only because of their authenticity, but also because of the work's proximity to the events and the absence of influence of later interpretations. His account is unique also because of the exceptional links Neurath establishes between personal experience and theoretical reflection, the persistent oscillation between the distanced and sober view of the scientist and that of the prisoner.

During 1938 and 1939, Paul Neurath was a Jewish political prisoner in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. He owed his survival to a temporary Nazi policy allowing release of prisoners who were willing to go into exile and to the help of friends on the outside who helped him obtain a visa. He fled to Sweden before coming to the United States in 1941. In 1943, he completed The The Society of Terror, based on his experiences in Dachau and Buchenwald. He embarked on a long career teaching sociology and statistics at universities in the United States and later in Vienna until his death in September 2001.After liberation, the horrific images of the extermination camps abounded from Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places. Neurath's chillingly factual discussion of his experience as an inmate and his astute observations of the conditions and the social structures in Dachau and Buchenwald captivate the reader, not only because of their authenticity, but also because of the work's proximity to the events and the absence of influence of later interpretations. His account is unique also because of the exceptional links Neurath establishes between personal experience and theoretical reflection, the persistent oscillation between the distanced and sober view of the scientist and that of the prisoner.

'Laurence Rees brilliantly combines powerful eye-witness testimony, vivid narrative and compelling analysis in this superb account' Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: Hubris and Hitler: Nemesis 'In this fascinating study of two monsters, Rees is extraordinarily perceptive and original' Antony Beevor _____________________ Two tyrants. Each responsible for the death of millions. This compelling book on Hitler and Stalin - the culmination of thirty years' work - examines the two leaders during the Second World War, when Germany and the Soviet Union fought the biggest and bloodiest war in history. Hitler's charismatic leadership may contrast with Stalin's regimented rule by fear; and his intransigence later in the war may contrast with Stalin's change in behaviour in response to events. But as bestselling historian Laurence Rees shows, at a macro level, both were prepared to create undreamt-of suffering - in Hitler's case, most infamously the Holocaust - in order to build the utopias they wanted. Using previously unpublished, startling eyewitness testimony from soldiers, civilians and those who knew both men personally, Laurence Rees - probably the only person alive who has met Germans who worked for Hitler and Russians who worked for Stalin - challenges long-held popular misconceptions about two of the most important figures in history. This is a master work from one of our finest historians. _____________________ 'Coming from one of the world's experts on the Second World War, this is an important and original - and devastating - account of Hitler and Stalin as dictators. A must read' Professor Robert Service, author of Stalin: A Biography 'Impressive . . . well paced and well informed with an eye for telling anecdotes and colourful character sketches . . . Rees' decision to add personal stories to his narrative adds an important layer to our understanding of both the dictators themselves and their victims' Robert Gerwarth, The Daily Telegraph

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.

Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies explores how American Jewish post-Holocaust writers, scholars, and editors adapted pre-Holocaust works, such as Yiddish fiction and documentary photography, for popular consumption by American Jews in the post-Holocaust decades. These texts, Jelen argues, served to help clarify the role of East European Jewish identity in the construction of a post-Holocaust American one. In her analysis of a variety of "hybrid" texts-those that exist on the border between ethnography and art-Jelen traces the gradual shift from verbal to visual Jewish literacy among Jewish Americans after the Holocaust. S. Ansky's ethnographic expedition (1912-1914) and Martin Buber's adaptation and compilation of Hasidic tales (1906-1935) are presented as a means of contextualizing the role of an ethnographic consciousness in modern Jewish experience and the way in which literary adaptations and mediations create opportunities for the creation of folk ethnographic hybrid texts. Salvage Poetics looks at classical texts of the American Jewish experience in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Maurice Samuel's The World of Sholem Aleichem (1944), Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Earth Is the Lord's (1950), Elizabeth Herzog and Mark Zborowski's Life Is with People (1952), Lucy Dawidowicz's The Golden Tradition (1967), and Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World (1983), alongside other texts that consider the symbiotic relationship between pre-Holocaust aesthetic artifacts and their postwar reframings and reconsiderations. Salvage Poetics is particularly attentive to how literary scholars deploy the notion of "ethnography" in their readings of literature in languages and/or cultures that are considered "dead" or "dying" and how their definition of an "ethnographic" literary text speaks to and enhance the scientific discipline of ethnography. This book makes a fresh contribution to the fields of American Jewish cultural and literary studies and art history.

Paul R. Bartrop examines the formation and execution of Australian government policy towards European Jews during the Holocaust period, revealing that Australia did not have an established refugee policy (as opposed to an immigration policy) until late 1938. He shows that, following the Evian Conference of July 1938, Interior Minister John McEwen pledged a new policy of accepting 15,000 refugees (not specifically Jewish), but the bureaucracy cynically sought to restrict Jewish entry despite McEwen's lofty ambitions. Moreover, the book considers the (largely negative) popular attitudes toward Jewish immigrants in Australia, looking at how these views were manifested in the press and in letters to the Department of the Interior. The Holocaust and Australia grapples with how, when the Second World War broke out, questions of security were exploited as the means to further exclude Jewish refugees, a policy incongruous alongside government pronouncements condemning Nazi atrocities. The book also reflects on the double standard applied towards refugees who were Jewish and those who were not, as shown through the refusal of the government to accept 90% of Jewish applications before the war. During the war years this double standard continued, as Australia said it was not accepting foreign immigrants while taking in those it deemed to be acceptable for the war effort. Incorporating the voices of the Holocaust refugees themselves and placing the country's response in the wider contexts of both national and international history in the decades that have followed, Paul R. Bartrop provides a peerless Australian perspective on one of the most catastrophic episodes in world history.

Although the period leading up to the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews has been well recorded, few sources convey the incremental effect of specific decrees aimed to dehumanize the Jews who were caught in Hitler's net, and how their everyday lives were transformed. These letters, written by Malvina Fischer to her daughter Mimi Weisz, have been translated and edited by her granddaughter Edith Kurzweil. They convey with vivid immediacy the fears and premonitions, the ghettoization and escape attempts that were the common experience of Viennese and German Jews in the years preceding the implementation of the "Final Solution." In the first section of the volume, Kurzweil establishes the personal and political contexts of the letters (written between April 6, 1940 and December 1941, when Malvina Fischer and her family were deported) and links them to the then emerging "Jewish laws." The second section contains the letters themselves and documents the throttling grip in which the authorities held every Viennese Jew who had not managed to escape. The third section consists of translations of official summaries of the relevant laws, ordinances, and edicts--many of them marked "secret"--which inexorably determined that Kurzweil's family become part of the "final solution." From these letters and documents we become aware, also, of the profusion of legal entities dealing with Jews, the rivalries among them, and the free-floating dimensions of victims' fear and dread. Because the letters are full of allusions rather than straightforward information, and characterized by self-censorship, Edith Kurzweil has annotated them and inserted the relevant numbers of the specific laws as these were being applied.

Nazis, fascists and voelkisch conservatives in different European countries not only cooperated internationally in the fields of culture, science, economy, and persecution of Jews, but also developed ideas for a racist and ethno-nationalist Europe under Hitler. The present volume attempts to combine an analysis of Nazi Germany's transnational relations with an evaluation of the discourse that accompanied these relations.

Winner of the Booker Prize and international bestseller, made into the award-winning film Schindler's List. In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mercy.

This book provides a sophisticated investigation into the experience of being exterminated, as felt by victims of the Holocaust, and compares and contrasts this analysis with the experiences of people who have been colonized or enslaved. Using numerous victim accounts and a wide range of primary sources, the book moves away from the 'continuity thesis', with its insistence on colonial intent as the reason for victimization in relation to other historical examples of mass political violence, to look at the victim experience on its own terms. By affording each constituent case study its own distinctive aspects, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust allows for a more enriching comparison of victim experience to be made that respects each group of victims in their uniqueness. It is an important, innovative volume for all students of the Holocaust, genocide and the history of mass political violence.

A vividly detailed account of life aboard U.S. submarines in the Pacific during World War II.

Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor's perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of hope, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

The dominant theme of post-Holocaust Jewish theology has been that of the temporary hiddenness of God, interpreted either as a divine mystery or, more commonly, as God's deferral to human freedom. But traditional Judaic obligations of female presence, together with the traditional image of the Shekhinah as a figure of God's 'femaleness' accompanying Israel into exile, seem to contradict such theologies of absence. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, the first full-length feminist theology of the Holocaust, argues that the patriarchal bias of post-Holocaust theology becomes fully apparent only when women's experiences and priorities are brought into historical light. Building upon the published testimonies of four women imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau - Olga Lengyel, Lucie Adelsberger, Bertha Ferderber-Salz and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk - it considers women's distinct experiences of the holy in relation to God's perceived presence and absence in the camps.
God's face, says Melissa Raphael, was not hidden in Auschwitz, but intimately revealed in the female face turned towards the other as a refractive image of God, especially in the moral protest made visible through material and spiritual care for the assaulted other.

The dominant theme of post-Holocaust Jewish theology has been that of the temporary hiddenness of God, interpreted either as a divine mystery or, more commonly, as God's deferral to human freedom. But traditional Judaic obligations of female presence, together with the traditional image of the Shekhinah as a figure of God's 'femaleness' accompanying Israel into exile, seem to contradict such theologies of absence. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, the first full-length feminist theology of the Holocaust, argues that the patriarchal bias of post-Holocaust theology becomes fully apparent only when women's experiences and priorities are brought into historical light. Building upon the published testimonies of four women imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau - Olga Lengyel, Lucie Adelsberger, Bertha Ferderber-Salz and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk - it considers women's distinct experiences of the holy in relation to God's perceived presence and absence in the camps.
God's face, says Melissa Raphael, was not hidden in Auschwitz, but intimately revealed in the female face turned towards the other as a refractive image of God, especially in the moral protest made visible through material and spiritual care for the assaulted other.

How far can we ever hope to understand the Holocaust? What can we reasonably say about right and wrong, moral responsibility, praise and blame, in a world where ordinary reasons seem to be excluded? In the century of Nazism, ethical writing in English had much more to say about the meaning of the word `good` than about the material reality of evil. This book seeks to redress the balance at the start of a new century. Despite intense interest in the Holocaust, there has been relatively little exploration of it by philosophers in the analytic tradition. Although ethical writers often refer to Nazism as a touchstone example of evil, and use it as a case by which moral theorising can be tested, they rarely analyse what evil amounts to, or address the substantive moral questions raised by the Holocaust itself. This book draws together new work by leading moral philosophers to present a wide range of perspectives on the Holocaust. Contributors focus on particular themes of central importance, including: moral responsibility for genocide; the moral uniqueness of the Holocaust; responding to extreme evil; the role of ideology; the moral psychology of perpetrators and victims of genocide; forgiveness and the Holocaust; and the impact of the `Final Solution` on subsequent culture. Topics are treated with the precision and rigour characteristic of analytic philosophy. Scholars, teachers and students with an interest in moral theory, applied ethics, genocide and Holocaust studies will find this book of particular value, as will all those seeking greater insight into ethical issues surrounding Nazism, race-hatred and intolerance.

How far can we ever hope to understand the Holocaust? What can we reasonably say about right and wrong, moral responsibility, praise and blame, in a world where ordinary reasons seem to be excluded? In the century of Nazism, ethical writing in English had much more to say about the meaning of the word `good` than about the material reality of evil. This book seeks to redress the balance at the start of a new century. Despite intense interest in the Holocaust, there has been relatively little exploration of it by philosophers in the analytic tradition. Although ethical writers often refer to Nazism as a touchstone example of evil, and use it as a case by which moral theorising can be tested, they rarely analyse what evil amounts to, or address the substantive moral questions raised by the Holocaust itself. This book draws together new work by leading moral philosophers to present a wide range of perspectives on the Holocaust. Contributors focus on particular themes of central importance, including: moral responsibility for genocide; the moral uniqueness of the Holocaust; responding to extreme evil; the role of ideology; the moral psychology of perpetrators and victims of genocide; forgiveness and the Holocaust; and the impact of the `Final Solution` on subsequent culture. Topics are treated with the precision and rigour characteristic of analytic philosophy. Scholars, teachers and students with an interest in moral theory, applied ethics, genocide and Holocaust studies will find this book of particular value, as will all those seeking greater insight into ethical issues surrounding Nazism, race-hatred and intolerance.

'Granddaughters of the Holocaust: Never Forgetting What They Didn't Experience' delves into the intergenerational transmission of trauma to the granddaughters of Holocaust survivors. Although members of this generation did not endure the horrors of the Holocaust directly, they absorbed the experiences of both their parents and grandparents. Ten women participated in psychoanalytic interviews about their inheritance of Holocaust knowledge and memory, and their responses to this legacy. These women provided startling evidence for the embodiment of Holocaust residue in the ways they approached daily tasks of living and being. The resulting narratives revealed that frequently unspoken, unspeakable events are inevitably transmitted to, and imprinted upon, succeeding generations. Granddaughters continue to confront and heal the pain of a trauma they never experienced.

The majority of Poland's prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

In "The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler," Dr. Kessler, a Jewish attorney from Lwow, Poland, gives an eye-witness account of the Holocaust through the events recorded in his diary between the years, 1942-1944. In vivid, raw, documentary style, he describes his experiences in the Lwow Ghetto, the Janowska Concentration Camp, and in an underground bunker where he and twenty-three other Jews were hidden by a courageous Polish farmer and his family. The book includes a chapter written by Kazimierz Kalwinski, who, as a teenager, was a care-taker for the hidden Jews on his family's farm. Edmund's daughter, Renata Kessler, coordinated the book and has written the epilogue about her search for the story, which has taken her to Israel, Poland, and Lviv, Ukraine. Renowned scholar Antony Polonsky contributes an insightful historical overview of the times in which the book takes place. A tremendous resource for historians, scholars, and all serious students of the Holocaust.

'Bo, Jenny and I' is a memoir describing the life of a young woman growing up in unusual circumstances, as well as a discussion of political and sociological eff ects of troubled times upon "ordinary people." After an early childhood in pre-war Antwerp, the author, her formidable grandmother, and her young, unconventional working mother fl ed to England in 1940, upon Germany's invasion of Belgium. As refugees, the family adapted to its changed circumstances and to life in World War II England. The political upheavals of the times are refl ected in the life of this small family and its remarkable experiences.

"In The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler," Dr. Kessler, a Jewish attorney from Lwow, Poland, gives an eye-witness account of the Holocaust through the events recorded in his diary between the years, 1942-1944. In vivid, raw, documentary style, he describes his experiences in the Lwow Ghetto, the Janowska Concentration Camp, and in an underground bunker where he and twenty-three other Jews were hidden by a courageous Polish farmer and his family. The book includes a chapter written by Kazimierz Kalwinski, who, as a teenager, was a care-taker for the hidden Jews on his family's farm. Edmund's daughter, Renata Kessler, coordinated the book and has written the epilogue about her search for the story, which has taken her to Israel, Poland, and Lviv, Ukraine. Renowned scholar Antony Polonsky contributes an insightful historical overview of the times in which the book takes place. A tremendous resource for historians, scholars, and all serious students of the Holocaust.

In The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Its Outtakes, editors Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger gather contributions on how Shoah (1985) fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians regard and understand the history of the Holocaust. Critics have taken long note of Shoah's innovative style and its place in the history of documentary film and in cultural memory, but few scholars have touched on its extensive outtakes and the reams of documentation archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem, or the release of five feature-length documentaries based on the material in those outtakes. The Construction of Testimony, which contains thirteen essays by some of the most notable scholars in Holocaust film studies, reexamines Lanzmann's body of work, his film, and the impact of Shoah through this trove-over 220 hours-of previously unavailable and unexplored footage. Responding to the need for a sustained examination of Lanzmann's impact on historical and filmic approaches to testimony, this volume inaugurates a new era of scholarship, one that takes a critical position vis-a-vis the filmmaker's posturing, stylization, and editorial sleight-of-hand. The volume's contributors engage with a range of dimensions central to Lanzmann's filmography and the outtakes, including the dynamics of gender in his work, his representation of Nazi perpetrators, and complex issues of language and translation. In light of Lanzmann's invention of a radically new form of witnessing and remembrance, Shoah laid the framework for the ways in which subsequent filmmakers have represented the Holocaust cinematically; at the same time, the outtakes complicate this framework by revealing new details about the filmmaker's complex editorial choices. Scholars and students of film studies and Holocaust studies will value this close analysis.

Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were united in a 'brutal friendship'. Both had savage racial laws: both Hitler and Mussolini viciously denounced the 'Jewish menace'. Yet each nation treated the Jews quite differently. Whilst Jews who fell into the arms of the German army were consigned, almost without exception, to concentration camps, not one Jew taken by the Italians suffered the same fate.
Jonathan Steinberg uses this remarkable and poignant story to unravel the motives and forces underpinning both Nazism and Fascism in an attempt to resolve the underlying question: Why?

eBook available with sample pages: 0203356691

On 1 March, 1943, Chaim Weizmann, the elder statesman of Zionism, addressed a rally in Madison Square Garden to "Stop Hitler Now!." Three months earlier, a public declaration by the Allied governments had acknowledged that the German authorities were implementing Adolf Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. Some 2,000,000 Jews had already been killed since the beginning of World War II by the Third Reich and its collaborators, yet a deafening silence resounded throughout free world corridors of power.
Alas, Weizmann's and similar heartfelt pleas went unanswered. Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury and Arthur Cardinal Hinsley called on that same occasion for speedy deeds to meet the most appalling horror. Faced with the crime of the Holocaust - Christianity and Western humanism abdicated moral responsibility to try to save an innocent people. Without that decay of conscience, already evident in the years between Hitler's advent to power and the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland, European Jewry would not have gone abandoned into the night.
Over the past two decades, access to most of the archives has enabled historians to authenticate this grim truth. Political expediency reigned supreme in the war counsels of those governments which alone could have checked the tempo of Hitler's Final Solution of the Jewish problem.

Where was God when six million died? Over the last few decades this question has haunted both Jewish and Christian theologians. If God is all-good and all-powerful, how could he have permitted the Holocaust to take place? Holocaust Theology: A Reader provides a panoramic survey of the responses of over one hundred leading Jewish and Christian Holocaust thinkers. Beginning with the religious challenge of the Holocaust, the collection explores a wide range of thinking which seek to reconcile God's ways with the existence of evil. In addition, the book addresses perplexing questions regarding Christian responsibility and culpability during the Nazi era. Designed for general readers and students, the readings are arranged thematically and each one is divided into separate topics. For anyone who is troubled by the religious implications of the tragedy of the Holocaust, this collection of Holocaust theology provides a basis for discussion and debate: each reading is followed by several questions designed to stimulate this.