Praise for The Perfect Nazi: 'Absorbing, highly readable and painstakingly researched' NIALL FERGUSON 'Unforgettable, haunting reading' SIMON SCHAMA 'A fascinating and extraordinary journey into the banality of evil at the heart of Nazism' BEN MACINTYRE 'Riveting' THE TIMES 'Fascinating, scrupulously researched, compelling' SUNDAY TIMES In this radical new perspective on the Holocaust, Davidson challenges popular understanding and existing histories of the Holocaust. He does this in three main ways. Firstly, he describes the way in which German policy developed and was enacted in new and compelling detail, providing a road map to the 'long and twisting road to Auschwitz', skilfully dramatising those twists and turns, many of which are not generally included in conventional narratives. Secondly, he allows us to hear from new voices, notably female perpetrators, resisters and victims. These provide individual human perspectives on the unfolding events, without which true understanding is impossible; from planning and implementation, to knowledge - and its opposite, denial - all the way to its final reckoning, then and now. And finally, he provides a reappraisal of the moral perspective that drove the Holocaust, getting beyond the conventional notion of 'evil' as a catch-all rationale, to examine why anti-Jewish vitriol was such a powerful motivator for so many Germans, who used arguments and self-justifications that are more resonant today than they have been for decades. Never more so than in the use of the idea of suffering - how 'our' supposed suffering justifies 'theirs'. His focus is very much on the mindset that brought about the Holocaust, the desire to 'make Germany great again' and to make Germany's perceived enemies suffer. Again, this story of dreams of national greatness, and racially-targeted redemptive malevolence could not be more resonant today. Davidson foregrounds the stories of women, in part to illustrate the mindset of Nazi true believers - the German wife stationed in Poland, for example, who found a group of Jewish children who had escaped a mass execution, and shot them herself. He also describes the particular horror experienced by female inmates of the camps, who, as mothers, were the first to be killed alongside their children, and who were among the bravest of German resisters to the crimes being committed in their name - like twenty-one-year-old Sophie Scholl, whose leaflets listing and denouncing Nazi crimes resulted in her execution, in October 1943. The Holocaust forces us to understand that it wasn't the power of a single malevolent leader who made it happen; it was something altogether more alarming. A system of a thousand moving parts, the genocidal logic of which was willed into being, before being planned, mobilised - and submitted to - by millions of different people, acting via different agencies, under different jurisdictions, like iron filings held in the pull of a particular magnetic field which they were happy to replicate and reinforce. The resulting feedback loop would help shape-shift the Final Solution throughout the years of its existence, its direction of travel only ever from bad to worse. That is why the story has to be understood not just in the form of a fast-moving narrative - step after step after step, taken by myriad different people acting out their very different roles - but in the round, held up to the light and rotated through 360 degrees, drawing in not just war and politics, ideology and delusion, geography and economics, but accident, contingency, intention, sadism, innocence, self-justification, resistance, denial and ultimately, meaninglessness too.

Born in 1904, Brandt played a major role in the first mass killing programme of the Third Reich, the so called 'euthanasia' programme. As Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation, Karl Brandt became the highest medical authority in the Nazi regime; he initiated experiments on concentration camps inmates and was eventually put in charge of biological and chemical warfare. How was it that a rational, highly cultured, literate, young professional could come to be responsible for mass murder and criminal human experiments on a previously unimaginable scale? In this riveting biography, Ulf Schmidt explores in detail that Brandt belonged to a generation of a young 'expert elite', who in the 1930s and 1940s were willing, and empowered, to support and conceive an oppressive, militarist, and racist government policy, and ultimately turn its exterminatory potential into reality. Through a critical biography of Brandt, Schmidt re-evaluates the system of communication at the centre of Hitler's regime. The book extends our understanding of the culture of detachment between a regime that was geared towards total destruction, and a government that was almost totally removed from its people.

This volume is part of a comprehensive effort by Professor Rummel to understand and place in historical perspective the entire subject of genocide and mass murder-what is herein called Democide. It is the third in a series of volumes published by Transaction, in which Rummel offers a comprehensive analysis of the 120,000,000 people killed as a result of government action or direct intervention.

Curiously, while we have a considerable body of literature on the Nazi Holocaust, we do not have a total accounting-at least not until now with the issuance of Democide. In addition to the quantitative lacunae, there remains a paucity of theoretical information distinguishing the historical descriptive and the anecdotal accounts. This study of Nazi killings in cold blood is a path-finding effort in political psychology.

While Rummel does not claim to give a definitive accounting, his explanation for the numbers reached-and they are high-is compelling. In addition, we now have a correlation of information on the murder of diverse groups: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Ukranians, and even Germans themselves. It is now possible to fathom the Nazi genocidal poiicies-which were collective and which were selective.

Rummel's volume is a clear guide to a murky past. It offers the first systematic effort to ascertain the nature and the extent of the Nazi genocide from the point of view of the perpetrator's aims rather than the victims' consequences. This is not a pretty picture, but it is not a partisan one either. The materials are presented in a clinical as well as a systemic fashion.

Rummel has a deep sense of the life-saving instincts of individuals and the life-taking propensities of impersonal state machinery. It is thus, a humanistic effort, one that plumbs the effects of the Nazi war-machine on innocents in order to better understand present conditions. Professionals ranging from social scientists to demographers will find this a quintessential effort at political reconstruction.

In February 1945, Israele Zolli, chief rabbi of Rome's ancient Jewish community, shocked his co-religionists in Italy and throughout the Jewish world by converting to Catholicism and taking as his baptismal name, Eugenio, to honor Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) for what Zolli saw as his great humanitarianism toward the Jews during the Holocaust. Almost a half a century after his conversion, Zolli still evokes anger and embarrassment in Italy's Jewish community. This book is the first authoritative treatment of this astonishing story.

What induced Zolli to embrace Catholicism will probably never be known. Nonetheless, by painstaking scholarly detective work, through interviews in Italy and elsewhere, through the unearthing of private papers not previous known to exist, and through the study of previous inaccessible archival materials, the authors have succeeded in explaining why Zolli left the Jewish fold and joined the Catholic Church.

Like Zolli's rabbinical career, Pius XII's long pontificate tells us much about the Church of Rome and its relationship to the Jewish people, particularly with reference to the issue of conversion. The authors focus on the pontiff's World War II policies vis-a-vis the Jews, a subject that has been heatedly debated since Rolf Hochhuth's "The Deputy" was performed in the early 1960s. What Pacelli knew abut the extermination of the Jews and when he knew it, what he said and failed to say, are given special attention in this book. Through the examination of previous scholarship and primary materials (including Pius XI's encyclical on race and anti-Semitism, Pacelli's behavior is evaluated to determine if Zolli accurately gauged the Holy Father's efforts to save Jews. This saga of the two Eugenios will interest historians of the Second World War and the Holocaust and students of history alike.

Finally a single volume detailing the SS officers that served in the largest and most infamous of Hitler's concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau. This volume begins with a brief history of this concentration camp and then details briefly the different departments that made up the command structure of this camp. The book goes on to describe the evacuation and liberation of Auschwitz and some of the major trials are described before the author gives brief descriptions of what Auschwitz-Birkenau is like today. The second part of the book is a biographical study of the SS officers in alphabetical order. The SS officers described inside this book were the commanders of the camp, the men with power, some with power over life and death. Inside you will meet the commandants, LagerfA"hrers, doctors, dentists, Gestapo officials, adjutants, administration officers, and sentry commanders. Some went on to fight at the front and won awards for bravery, others helped to save the lives of the inmates, and of course others were there to help with the administration of the Holocaust. The biographical details of the SS officers have been set out in the following way. Under the name is the last rank held by the officer, with his most important position obtained at Auschwitz. Next is the officers SS number and Nazi Party number where known, followed by his promotions, which in some cases included both the Allgemeine-SS (General SS) and Waffen-SS (Armed SS). The biographical detail of this book alone adds vast clarity to the gaps in biographical information in other books on Auschwitz. Inside this book are the details of 162 SS officers who served at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Along with over 140 rare black and white photographs, some never published before, is a detailed appendix and index.

The Sunday Times bestseller now updated with a new foreword Among millions of Holocaust victims sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944, Priska, Rachel, and Anka each passed through its infamous gates with a secret. Strangers to each other, they were newly pregnant, and facing an uncertain fate without their husbands. Alone, scared, and with so many loved ones already lost to the Nazis, these young women were privately determined to hold on to all they had left: their lives, and those of their unborn babies. That the gas chambers ran out of Zyklon-B just after the babies were born, before they and their mothers could be exterminated, is just one of several miracles that allowed them all to survive and rebuild their lives after World War II. Born Survivors follows the mothers' incredible journey - first to Auschwitz, where they each came under the murderous scrutiny of Dr. Josef Mengele; then to a German slave labour camp where, half-starved and almost worked to death, they struggled to conceal their condition; and finally, as the Allies closed in, their hellish 17-day train journey with thousands of other prisoners to the Mauthausen death camp in Austria. Hundreds died along the way but the courage and kindness of strangers, including guards and civilians, helped save these women and their children. Sixty-five years later, the three 'miracle babies' met for the first time at Mauthausen for the anniversary of the liberation that ultimately saved them. United by their remarkable experiences of survival against all odds, they now consider each other "siblings of the heart." In Born Survivors, Wendy Holden brings all three stories together for the first time to mark their seventieth birthdays and the seventieth anniversary of the ending of the war. A heart-stopping account of how three mothers and their newborns fought to survive the Holocaust, Born Survivors is also a life-affirming celebration of our capacity to care and to love amid inconceivable cruelty.

As her mother slipped into the darkness of old age, Lisa Appignanesi began to realise how little she knew of the reality behind the tales she had heard since childhood. She had shunned her parents' stories of war-time Poland, but now she set out to find the truth. In her quest she flew to Warsaw - imagining and revisiting a past she never knew. This is the moving story of the Jews who survived outside the camps, but it is also the author's own voyage of self-discovery - a family memoir of the rites of passage of emigration, childhood, and growing up an outsider in a closed community

To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment. Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered? In this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political significance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with and overcoming divisive pasts? Taking Argentina, Spain and a number of sites in post-communist Europe as test cases, this book illustrates the transformation from a nationally oriented ethics to a trans-national one. The authors look at media, scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and memorial sites, and examine how a new generation of memory activists revisits the past to construct a new future. Baer and Sznaider follow these attempts to manoeuvre between the duties of remembrance and the benefits of forgetting. This, the authors argue, is the "ethics of Never Again."

Daniel Goldhagen's study of the Holocaust offers conclusions that run directly counter to those reached by Christopher Browning, whose book Ordinary Men is also the subject of a Macat analysis. As such, the two analyses make possible some interesting critical thinking exercises focused on evaluation of the evidence used by the two historians. For Goldhagen, a chief reason for German actions was not the mundane good comradeship stressed by Browning, but a longstanding hatred of Jews and Judaism specific to Germany that dated back well into the previous century. Debating which historian is right, which has made better use of the available evidence, which has most successfully written objectively - and which advances the most secure interpretation of contested documents - forces students to think critically about one of the most important and (on the surface at least) incomprehensible events of the past century.

Estonia is perhaps the only country in Europe that lacks a comprehensive history of its Jewish minority. Spanning over 150 years of Estonian Jewish history, On the Margins is a truly unique book. Rebuilding a life beyond so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Jewish cultural autonomy in interwar Estonia, and the trauma of Soviet occupation of 1940-41 are among the issues addressed in the book but most profoundly, the book wrestles with the subject of the Holocaust and its legacy in Estonia. Specifically, it examines the quasi-legal system of murder instituted in Nazi-occupied Estonia, confiscation of Jewish property, and Jewish forced labor camps and develops an analysis of the causes of collaboration during the Holocaust. The book also explores the dynamics of war crimes trials in the Soviet Union since the 1960s and so-called denaturalization trials in the United States in the 1980s. The haunting memory of Soviet and Nazi rule, the book concludes, prevents a larger segment of today's Estonian population from facing up to the Holocaust and the universal message that it carries.

In recent years, a lively debate has developed in Poland on the question of what responsibility the Poles share for the mass murder of the Jews, which took place largely on Polish soil. This debate was sparked off by the showing in Poland of Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah , which revealed how deeply-rooted anti-Jewish prejudice could still be found in the Polish countryside. Anti-semitism is something which Poland has preferred to forget. But before the Second World War hostility to the Jews was widespread and this climate of pervasive anti-semitism may have facilitated the Nazis' murderous plans. But Poles now, with great courage, are facing this dark side of their past. This book, translated and edited by a leading British historian of Poland, Antony Polonsky, is a major contribution to the history of the Holocaust. It gathers together the most important contribution to the current debate, revealing the agony many Poles feel about their lack of action during the war.

Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 is an abridged edition of Saul Friedlander's definitive Pulitzer Prize-winning two-volume history of the Holocaust: Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.

The book's first part, dealing with the National Socialist campaign of oppression, restores the voices of Jews who were engulfed in an increasingly horrifying reality following the Nazi accession to power. Friedlander also provides the accounts of the persecutors themselves--and, perhaps most telling of all, the testimonies of ordinary German citizens who, in general, stood silent and unmoved by the increasing waves of segregation, humiliation, impoverishment, and violence.

The second part covers the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews--an official program that depended upon the cooperation of local authorities and police departments, the passivity of the populations, and the willingness of the victims to submit in desperate hope of surviving long enough to escape the German vise.

A monumental, multifaceted study now contained in a single volume, Saul Friedlander's Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 is an essential study of a dark and complex history.

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915-1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz's rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz's life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life. From Left to Right is structured in four parts. Part 1 tells the story of Dawidowicz's childhood, adolescence, and college years when she was an immigrant daughter living in New York City. Part 2 narrates Dawidowicz's formative European years in Poland, New York City (when she was enclosed in the European-like world of the New York YIVO), and Germany. Part 3 tells how Dawidowicz became an American while Polish Jewish civilization was still inscribed in her heart and also explores when and how Dawidowicz became the voice of East European Jewry for the American Jewish public. Part 4 exposes the fissure between Dawidowicz's European-inflected diaspora nationalist modern Jewish identity and the shifting definition of American liberalism from the late 1960s forward, which also saw the emergence of neoconservatism. The book includes an interpretation of her memoir From that Place and Time, as well as an appendix of thirty-one previously unpublished letters that illustrate the broad reach of her work and person. Dawidowicz's right-wing politics, sex, and unabashed commitment to Jewish particularism in an East European Jewish key have resulted in scholarly neglect. Therefore, this book is strongly recommended for scholars and general readers interested in Jewish and women's studies.

Seven decades after the destruction of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian genocide remains largely ignored by governments and forgotten by the world public, even though the annihilation of Armenians was headlined around the world in 1915. Scholarly investigation of the Armenian genocide is just beginning, made more difficult by the tendency of many establishment figures to rationalize the past and the attempt of perpetrator governments and their successors to deny the past.

This volume is a pioneering collective attempt to assess and analyze the Armenian genocide from differing perspectives, including history, political science, ethics, religion, literature, and psychiatry. Focusing on the general implications of denial, rationalization, and responsibility, it is particularly important as a precursor to the study of the Holocaust and other genocides.

Contents: Israel Charny, "Preface"; Terrence Des Pres, "Introduction"; Richard G. Hovannisian, "The Historical Dimensions of the Armenian Question, 1878-1923"; Leo Kuper, "The Turkish Genocide of the Armenians, 1915-1917"; Robert Melson, "Provocation of Nationalism: A Critical Inquiry into the Armenian Genocide of 1915"; Richard Hrair Dekmejian, "Determinants of Genocide: Armenians and Jews as Case Studies"; Marjorie Housepian-Dobkin, "What Genocide? What Holocaust? News from Turkey, 1915-1923: A Case Study"; Richard G. Hovannisian, "The Armenian Genocide and Denial Patterns"; Vigen Guroian, "Collective Responsibility and Official Excuse Making: The Case of the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians"; Leo Hamalian, "The Armenian Genocide and the Literary Imagination"; Vahe Oshagan, "The Impact of the Genocide on Western Armenian Letters"; Levon Boyajian and Haigaz Grigorian, "Psychological Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide"; Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, "An Oral History Perspective on Responses to the Armenian Genocide."

Historic WWII reproduction map. A detailed map of Normandy at a scale of 1:200,000 showing the main sites of the summer 1944 battle. This map is an antique-feeling reproduction of the map originally published by Michelin in 1947. The main map includes place names and features special icons denoting battle dates and parachute drops, as well as an inset showing the broader movements of the military forces.

The fateful story of Adolf Hitler's transformation from awkward, feckless loner to lethal, charismatic demagogue. The story of the making of Adolf Hitler that we are all familiar with is the one Hitler himself wove in his 1924 trial, and then expanded upon in Mein Kampf. It tells of his rapid emergence as National Socialist leader in 1919, and of how he successfully rallied most of Munich and the majority of Bavaria's establishment to support the famous beer-hall putsch of 1923. It is an account which has largely been taken at face value for over ninety years. Yet, on closer examination, Hitler's account of his experiences in the years immediately following the First World War turns out to be every bit as unreliable as his account of his experiences as a soldier during the war itself. In Becoming Hitler, Thomas Weber continues from where he left off in his previous book, Hitler's First War, stripping away the layers of myth and fabrication in Hitler's own tale to tell the real story of Hitler's politicization and radicalization in post-First World War Munich. It is the gripping account of how an awkward and unemployed loner with virtually no recognizable leadership qualities and fluctuating political ideas turned into the charismatic, self-assured, virulently anti-Semitic leader with an all-or-nothing approach to politics with whom the world was soon to become tragically familiar. As Weber clearly shows, far from the picture of a fully-formed political leader which Hitler wanted to portray in Mein Kampf, his ideas and priorities were still very uncertain and largely undefined in early 1919 - and they continued to shift until 1923. It was the failed Ludendorff putsch of November 1923 - and the subsequent Ludendorff trial - which was to prove the making of Hitler. And he was not slow to spot the opportunity that it offered. As the movers and shakers of Munich's political scene tried to blame everything on him in the course of the trial, Hitler was presented with a golden opportunity to place himself at the centre of attention, turning what had been the 'Ludendorff trial' into the 'Hitler trial'. Henceforth, he would no longer be merely a local Bavarian political leader. From now on, he would present himself as a potential 'national saviour'. In the months after the trial, Hitler cemented this myth by writing Mein Kampf from his comfortable prison cell. His years of metamorphosis were now behind him. His years as Fuhrer were soon to come.

Self-Portrait, with Parents and Footnotes is a story of movement. Moving from city to city characterized the author's growing up-from Poland to Belgium and from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. The book also moves between past and present. The authors' parents, Jews from Eastern Europe, lived through the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the post-war Communist world, and much migration in between. How were these events transmitted to their child, and what questions do they give rise to today? The book moves between straightforward story-telling and reflections on memory, on politics and religion, and on literature. It seeks the genesis of intellectual interests in personal story.

Self-Portrait, with Parents and Footnotes is a story of movement. Moving from city to city characterized the author's growing up-from Poland to Belgium and from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. The book also moves between past and present. The authors' parents, Jews from Eastern Europe, lived through the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the post-war Communist world, and much migration in between. How were these events transmitted to their child, and what questions do they give rise to today? The book moves between straightforward story-telling and reflections on memory, on politics and religion, and on literature. It seeks the genesis of intellectual interests in personal story.

According to most historians, the Holocaust in Hungary represented a unique chapter in the singular history of what the Nazis termed as the "Final Solution" of the "Jewish question" in Europe. More than seventy years after the Shoah, the origins and prehistory as well as the implementation and aftermath of the genocide still provide ample ground for scholarship. In fact, Hungarian historians began to seriously deal with these questions only after the 1980s. Since then, however, a consistently active and productive debate has been waged about the history and interpretation of the Holocaust in Hungary and with the passage of time, more and more questions have been raised in connection with its memorialization. This volume includes twelve selected scholarly papers thematically organized under four headings: 1. The newest trends in the study of the Holocaust in Hungary. 2. The anti-Jewish policies of Hungary during the interwar period 3. The Holocaust era in Hungary 4. National and international aspects of Holocaust remembrance. The studies reflect on the anti-Jewish atmosphere in Hungary during the interwar period; analyze the decision-making process that led to the deportations, and the options left open to the Hungarian government. They also provide a detailed presentation of the Holocaust in Transylvania and describe the experience of Hungarian Jewish refugees in Austria after the end of the war.

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As historian and anatomist Sabine Hildebrandt reveals, however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the "future dead."

It has been more than sixty years since the end of World War II and the liberation of the survivors of the Holocaust. Since then, many rich personal and historical accounts have been written of the horrific events of those times. Mental health workers have strived to give survivors solace for their loss, and help them return to a meaningful life. Meanwhile, scholars continue to ponder the inexplicable facts of genocide. Yet Studies of the Holocaust: Lessons in Survivorship continues to be timely. Based on more than 100 interviews in nine U.S. locations, the book offers a powerful view of survivors' hope, determination, and resilience. Study questions elicited survival strategies, and revealed how, following the war, survivors overcame the horrors of the Holocaust, formed families, built careers, and gave to their communities. Survivor quotes taken from these interviews illuminate how the survivors maintained competence into old age. While memories of pain persist, accomplishments are acknowledged, and provide lessons for students of human development, mental health practitioners, and the general public. This book was previously published as a special issue of Journal of Human Behaviour and the Social Environment.

Holocaust Education: Promise, Practice, Power and Potential provides timely studies of some of the most pressing issues in teaching and learning about the Holocaust around the world. Europe is experiencing both anti-Semitic attacks, many by radicals claiming the banner of Islam, and the resurgence of right wing movements that are openly hostile to minority rights, particularly for marginalized and vulnerable groups like the Roma/Sinti, and Muslim refugees. Can Holocaust education, an encounter with the most extreme racial ideology to afflict the continent, reduce violence and prejudice against Jewish and other minority groups? The important studies in this volume address these and other pressing issues for the field, including the progress of Central and Eastern European countries that experienced both Soviet hegemony and Nazi terror in grappling with the history of the Holocaust. This book was originally published as a special issue of Intercultural Education.

As child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl's cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna's Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer, but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed. Unearthed is the story of Meryl's search for Franya and a timely history of hatred and resistance. Through archives across four continents, by way of chance encounters and miraculous discoveries, and eventually, guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl conjures the rogue spirit of her cousin-her beauty and her tragedy. Meryl's search reveals a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. As she seeks to find her lost family legacy, Meryl looks for answers to the questions that have defined her life: what is our duty to the past? How do we honor such memories while keeping them from consuming us? And what do we teach our children about tragedy?