The Belated Witness stakes out an original place within the field of recent work on the theory and practice of literary writing after the Holocaust. Drawing in productive and unsettling ways from converging work in history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, the book asks how the events of the Holocaust force us to alter traditional conceptions about human experience, as well as the way we can now talk and write about such experiences. Rather than providing a mere account of an outside or inside reality, literature after the Holocaust sets itself a more radical task: it testifies to unspeakable experiences in a specific mode of address, a call or summons to another in whose sole power resides the possibility of a future response to such testimonies of world-historical trauma.

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age explores the nexus of new media and memory practices, raising questions about how advances in digital technologies continue to influence the nature of Holocaust memorialization. Through an in-depth study of the largest and most widely available collection of videotaped interviews with survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust, the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, Jeffrey Shandler weighs the possibilities and challenges brought about by digital forms of public memory. The Visual History Archive's holdings are extensive-over 100,000 hours of video, including interviews with over 50,000 individuals-and came about at a time of heightened anxiety about the imminent passing of the generation of Holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses. Now, the Shoah Foundation's investment in new digital media is instrumental to its commitment to remembering the Holocaust both as a subject of historical importance in its own right and as a paradigmatic moral exhortation against intolerance. Shandler not only considers the Archive as a whole, but also looks closely at individual survivors' stories, focusing on narrative, language, and spectacle to understand how Holocaust remembrance is mediated.

With the end of World War I, a new Republic of Poland emerged on the maps of Europe, made up of some of the territory from the first Polish Republic, including Wolyn and Wilno, and significant parts of Belarus, Upper Silesia, Eastern Galicia, and East Prussia. The resulting conglomeration of ethnic groups left many substantial minorities wanting independence. The approach of World War II provided the minorities' leaders a new opportunity in their nationalist movements, and many sided with one or the other of Poland's two enemies - the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany - in hopes of achieving their goals at the expense of Poland and its people. Based on primary and secondary sources in numerous languages (including Polish, German, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Russian and English), this work examines the roles of the ethnic minorities in the collapse of the Republic and in the atrocities that occurred under the occupying troops. The Polish government's response to mounting ethnic tensions in the prewar era and its conduct of the war effort are also examined.

Growing up in the beautiful mountains of Berchtesgaden -- just steps from Adolf Hitler's alpine retreat -- Irmgard Hunt had a seemingly happy, simple childhood. In her powerful, illuminating, and sometimes frightening memoir, Hunt recounts a youth lived under an evil but persuasive leader. As she grew older, the harsh reality of war -- and a few brave adults who opposed the Nazi regime -- aroused in her skepticism of National Socialist ideology and the Nazi propaganda she was taught to believe in.

In May 1945, an eleven-year-old Hunt watched American troops occupy Hitler's mountain retreat, signaling the end of the Nazi dictatorship and World War II. As the Nazi crimes began to be accounted for, many Germans tried to deny the truth of what had occurred; Hunt, in contrast, was determined to know and face the facts of her country's criminal past.

On Hitler's Mountain is more than a memoir -- it is a portrait of a nation that lost its moral compass. It is a provocative story of a family and a community in a period and location in history that, though it is fast becoming remote to us, has important resonance for our own time.

Questions shape the Holocaust's legacy. 'What happened to ethics during the Holocaust? What should ethics be, and what can it do after the Holocaust?' loom large among them. Absent the overriding or moral sensibilities, if not the collapse or collaboration of ethical traditions, the Holocaust could not have happened. Its devastation may have deepened conviction that there is a crucial difference between right and wrong; its destruction may have renewed awareness about the importance of ethical standards and conduct. But Birkenau, the main killing center at Auschwitz, also continues to cast a disturbing shadow over basic beliefs concerning right and wrong, human rights, and the hope that human beings will learn from the past. This book explores those realities and the issues they contain. It does so not to discourage but to encourage, not to deepen darkness and despair but to face those realities honestly and in a way that can make post-Holocaust ethics more credible and realistic. The book's thesis is that nothing human, natural or divine guarantees respect for the ethical values and commitments that are most needed in contemporary human existence, but nothing is more important than our commitment to defend them, for they remain as fundamental as they are fragile, as precious as they are endangered.

In 1930s and 1940s Vienna, child psychiatrist Hans Asperger sought to define autism as a diagnostic category, treating those children he deemed capable of participating fully in society. Depicted as compassionate and devoted, Asperger was in fact deeply influenced by Nazi psychiatry. Although he offered care to children he deemed promising, he prescribed harsh institutionalisation and even transfer to one of the Reich's killing centres, for children with greater disabilities. With sensitivity and passion, Edith Sheffer reveals the heart-breaking voices and experiences of many of these children, whilst illuminating a Nazi regime obsessed with sorting the population into categories, cataloguing people by race, heredity, politics, religion, sexuality, criminality and biological defects-labels that became the basis of either rehabilitation or persecution and extermination.

This book describes and analyzes theater productions performed in Israel, America, Poland, France, Italy and Germany that deal with the Holocaust. The collected essays trace the development of the realistic/documentary stagings of the 1950s-1970s through to today's very controversial avant-garde shows. This is the first book that deals with Holocaust plays "in performance," and provides many previously unpublished drawings and documents, as well as an important descriptive bibliography.

Like many European Jews, Sam Iwry began his life in Poland, but at the age of ten fled with his family to Russia before World War I. At age 29, Iwry was forced to flee again - this time from the Soviets - and ended up in Shanghai, China, joining 20,000 Jewish refugees who were there. The story of the Diaspora caused by the Holocaust is well-known, but the Far Eastern dimension has come to light only very recently. Iwry is a magnificent storyteller who not only brings the harrowing details of flight and survival into vivid detail, but he is also an historian who deliberately places his own experiences into much wider context. This oral history sheds light on Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the inter-war period, the search for a safe haven from Nazis and Soviets, daily life in the Shanghai ghetto, and emigration to America. Iwry's story is both representative of the Jewish experience and also completely unique.

This collection of essays by leading scholars in their fields provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of Holocaust historiography available. Covering both long-established historical disputes as well as research questions and methodologies that have developed in the last decade's massive growth in Holocaust Studies, this collection will be of enormous benefit to students and scholars alike.

The Spring of 1943 was a desperate season for the Jews of Brussels. Having discovered the departure date of the next transport train to Auschwitz, resistance fighter Youra Livchitz and two school friends organized a raid and pulled off one of the most daring rescues of the enitre war.These three lone men freed seventeen men and women before the German guards opened fire. Miraculously, by the time the convoy had reached the German border another 225 prisoners had managed to escape unharmed and found shelter with the locals. In a testament to the solidarity of the Belgians, no one is betrayed. No one that is except the three young rescuers who were turned in by a double agent, imprisoned and killed.
Marion Schreiber's gripping book about the only Nazi death train in World War II to be ambushed draws on private documents, photographs, archive material and police reports, as well as original research, including interviews with the surviving escapees. Like Schindler's List or The Pianist, The Twentieth Train creates a vivid, moving portrait of heroism under impossible circumstances.

One of the few survivors of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, Holocaust scholar Gutman draws on diaries, personal letters, and underground press reports in this compelling, authoritative account of a landmark event in Jewish history. Here, too, is a portrait of the vibrant culture that shaped the young fighters, whose inspired defiance would have far-reaching implications for the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

How could the Holocaust have happened? How can people do such things to other people? Questions such as these have animated discussion of the Holocaust from our earliest awareness of what had happened. These questions have engaged the lay public as well as academics from many different fields. Psychologists have taken an active role in trying to understand and explain the motivation, thinking, and behavior of all those involved in and affected by the Holocaust. The present volume is, in part, an attempt to provide a kind of historical roadmap to the diverse psychological explanations and interpretations that have been developed by psychologists over the last several decades. While many psychological discussions of the Holocaust dismiss or diminish the significance of work that antedates the Milgram obedience experiments in the early 1960s, this book engages some of these earlier formulations in detail. It strives to be, in this sense, a more complete history of psychological thought on the Holocaust. As many psychologists now accept the idea that a comprehensive psychology of the Holocaust must include more than social influence, the book addresses the question, "What, then?" The answer can be found by looking both backward and forward in time. Gordon Allport's 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice remains one of the best psychological attempts to grapple with the Holocaust written, though that was not its primary purpose. In this volume, the reader will find both echoes of Allport and new ideas for ways psychologists can engage this profoundly important subject.

Between 1939 and 1945 the Nazi regime systematically murdered hundreds of thousands of children and adults with disabilities as part of its "euthanasia" programs. These programs were designed to eliminate all persons with disabilities who, according to Nazi ideology, threatened the health and purity of the German race. "Forgotten Crimes" explores the development and workings of this nightmarish process, a relatively neglected aspect of the Holocaust. Suzanne Evans's account draws on the rich historical record as well as scores of exclusive interviews with disabled Holocaust survivors. It begins with a description of the Nazis' Children's Killing Program, in which tens of thousands of children with mental and physical disabilities were murdered by their physicians, usually by starvation or lethal injection. The book goes on to recount the T4 euthanasia program, in which adults with disabilities were disposed of in six official centers, and the development of the Sterilization Law that allowed the forced sterilization of at least a half-million young adults with disabilities. Ms. Evans provides portraits of the perpetrators and accomplices of the killing programs, and investigates the curious role of Switzerland's rarely discussed exclusionary immigration and racially eugenic policies. Finally, "Forgotten Crimes" notes the inescapable implications of these Nazi medical practices for our present-day controversies over eugenics, euthanasia, genetic engineering, medical experimentation, and rationed health care.

On October 14, 1943, Aleksandr "Sasha" Pechersky led a mass escape of inmates from Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Despite leading the only successful prisoner revolt at a World War II death camp, Pechersky never received the public recognition he deserved in his home country of Russia. This story of a forgotten hero reveals the tremendous difference in memorial cultures between societies in the West and societies in the former Communist world. Pechersky, along with other Russian and Jewish inmates who had been prisoners of the Nazis, was considered suspect by the Russian government simply because he had been imprisoned. In this volume, Selma Leydesdorff describes the official silence in the Eastern Bloc about Pechersky's role in the Sobibor escape and how an effort was made to recognize his actions. The narrative is based on eyewitness accounts from people in Pechersky's life and a discussion of the mechanism of memory, mixing written sources with varied recollections and assessing the collisions of collective memory held by the East and the West. Specifically, this book critiques the ideological refusal of many societies to acknowledge the suffering of Jews at Sobibor. Offering fascinating insights into a crucial period of history, emphasizing that Jews were not passive in the face of German violence, and exploring the history of the Jews who fell victim to Stalinism after surviving Nazism, this is valuable reading for students and scholars of the Holocaust and the position of Jews under Communism.

What are the effects of growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust? Drawing on interviews and survey materials, Aaron Hass provides a vibrant account of the experiences of survivors' children. Now in their thirties and forties, these men and women describe their relationships with their parents and offer their perceptions of the impact of the Holocaust on their families. They give voice to memories and feelings about which some of them have never spoken before. A child of survivors himself and a distinguished clinical psychologist, Hass writes about the lingering presence of the Holocaust in his own life.

The Aftermath offers a perspective of how one who has lived with terror for years is able to avoid paralysis and move forward. It is a book about how people live with gnawing doubts and uncertainty concerning their past actions and inaction. It is a tale of the anguish they feel because of their first hand knowledge of the evil in their fellow human being which so unjustly struck and deprived them of what was rightly theirs. For a while the Holocaust survivor seems, in most ways, to be like you and I, they are also aware of their subterranean world which may afflict them without warning. The Aftermath offers the most comprehensive examination of the psychological impact of the Holocaust on survivors ever undertaken and covers the widest range of topics including: survivor guilt, the absence of mourning, the psychological characteristics of survivor families, a survivor's view of God, survivor's feelings about Germans as well as their own countrymen of origin, and the survivor's ongoing sense of vulnerability.

'The most important event in my life occurred before I was born,' one child of concentration camp survivors has observed. The Holocaust did not end with the liberation of survivors after the collapse of the Third Reich, for the legacy of their suffering extends to a generation that never faced an SS storm- trooper. With a rich blend of oral history, memoir, and psychological interpretation, Aaron Hass deepens our understanding of the price of that legacy for the second generation. What are the effects of growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust? Drawing on interviews and survey materials, Aaron Hass provides a vibrant account of the experiences of survivors' children. Now in their thirties and forties, these men and women describe their relationships with their parents and offer their perceptions of the impact of the Holocaust on their families. They give voice to memories and feelings about which some of them have never spoken before. Himself a child of survivors and a distinguished clinical psychologist, Hass writes about the lingering presence of the Holocaust in his own life as well.

In this definitive new biography, Carol Ann Lee provides the answer to one of the most heartbreaking questions of modern times: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis? Probing this startling act of treachery, Lee brings to light never before documented information about Otto Frank and the individual who would claim responsibility -- revealing a terrifying relationship that lasted until the day Frank died. Based upon impeccable research into rare archives and filled with excerpts from the secret journal that Frank kept from the day of his liberation until his return to the Secret Annex in 1945, this landmark biography at last brings into focus the life of a little-understood man -- whose story illuminates some of the most harrowing and memorable events of the last century.

W. H. Auden and Hannah Arendt belonged to a generation that experienced the catastrophic events of the mid-twentieth century, and they both sought to respond to the enormity of the novel phenomena they witnessed. "Regions of Sorrow" explores the remarkable affinity between their works. As incisive exponents and uncompromising proponents of the insuperable condition of plurality, Auden and Arendt give voice to an unexpected and inconspicuous messianism--a messianism in which contingency, frailty, and faultiness are neither rejected nor scorned but celebrated as the indispensable elements of what Auden calls "anxious hope."
Beginning with an examination of Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" and Auden's "Age of Anxiety," which both conclude with meditations on Nazi terror, the author turns to an unprecedented presentation of Arendt's "Human Condition" in terms of Jewish-German messianism, and concludes with Auden's "In Praise of Limestone," which lays out the frail and faulty space in which messianism breaks free from apocalyptic forecasts.

Few lives shed more light on the complex relationship between Jews and Christians during and after the Holocaust--or provide a more moving portrait of courage--than Oswald Rufeisen's. A Jew passing as a Christian in occupied Poland, Rufeisen worked as translator for the German police--the very people who rounded up and murdered the Jews--and repeatedly risked his life to save hundreds from the Nazis. In this gripping biography, Nechama Tec, a widely acclaimed writer on the Holocaust, recounts Rufeisen's remarkable story.
A youth of seventeen when World War II began, Rufeisen joined the exodus of Poles who fled the approaching German army. Tec vividly describes how Rufeisen used his ability to speak fluent German to pass as half German and half Polish in Mir, where he came to serve as translator and personal secretary to the German in charge of the gendarmerie. As he carried out his duties--reading death sentences to prisoners, swearing in new police officers before a portrait of Hitler--he earned the trust and affection of the German commander, yet lived in constant fear of discovery. He used his position to pass secret information to Jews and Christians about impending "aktions" and to sabatoge Nazi plans. Most notably, he thwarted the annihilation of the Mir ghetto by arming hundreds of doomed Jews and organizing their escape, and saved an entire Belorussian village from destruction. Denounced, Rufeisen escaped and found shelter in a convent, where he converted to Catholicism. Though a pacifist, he spent the rest of the war fighting in a Russian partisan unit.
After the war, Father Daniel (as he is now known) became a priest and a Carmelite monk. Identifying himself as aChristian Jew and an ardent Zionist, he moved to Israel, where he challenged the Law of Return in a case that reached the High Court and attracted international attention. Today he continues to devote himself to bridging the gap between Christians and Jews.
In the Lion's Den offers a stirring portrait of a Jewish rescuer during the Holocaust and its aftermath, illuminating the intricate connections between good and evil, cruelty and compassion, and Judaism and Christianity.

The incorporation of German territories east of the Oder and Western Neisse rivers into Poland in 1945 was linked with the difficult process of an almost total exchange of population and involved the taking over of a region in which the Second World War had effected an enormous level of destruction. The contemporary term 'Polish Wild West' not only alluded to the reigning atmosphere of chaos and 'survival of the fittest' in the Polish-German borderland but was also associated with a new kind of freedom and the opportunity to start everything anew. The arrival in this region of Polish settlers from different parts of Poland led to Poles, Germans and Soviet soldiers temporarily coming into contact with one another. Living together in this war-damaged space was far from easy. On the basis of ego-documents, the author recreates the beginnings of the shaping of this new society, one affected by a repressive political system, internal conflicts and human tragedy. In distancing oneself from the until-recently dominant narratives concerning expellees in Germany or pioneers of the 'Recovered Territories' in Poland, Beata Halicka tells the story of the disintegration of a previous cultural landscape and the establishment of one which was new, in a colourful and vivid manner and encompassing different points of view.

Volumes one and two of the Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of a mouse's experiences in Nazi-occupied Europe and in German concentration camps are housed in a sturdy box. Reprint.

Odilo Globocnik, a collaborator of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, was responsible for the deaths of at least 1.5 million people in three Polish camps: Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. Along with Rudolf Hoess, Globocnik may be named as one of the first industrial-style killers in history. Betraying his homeland by conspiring with Hitler to destroy Austria's independence, he then launched the Generalplan-Ost and played a pivotal role in Aktion Reinhardt, directing the entire program from November 1939 to September 1943, and writing letters to Hitler detailing goods looted from his victims. Globocnik's Lublin Distrikt's gulag was not merely a vehicle for a well-organized pogrom; it also involved creating a highly organized network of ghettos. By the winter of 1943 nearly all of the Lublin Distrikt's Jews had been exterminated, leaving only skilled laborers used in Globocnik's industrial conglomerates. His ethnic cleansing teams, assisted by Ukrainian policing units, also cleared the Polish peasant farmers from the Zamosc Lands. Very little has been published on Globocnik, with particular neglect of his early life, political career, and, most importantly, the four years he spent in Lublin. This authoritative biography details every aspect of his life from his ancestry to his suicide after being captured. Information has been researched from more than forty international archives, Globocnik's SS file, extensive interviews with his lover Irmgard Rickheim and others, a wealth of letters both personal and formal, internal memos and official reports of the SS, diaries, and reminisces from survivors. Includes rare photographs, many from the collection of Irmgard Rickheim.

Advance Praise for the Inextinguishable Symphony ""A Fascinating Insight into a Virtually Unknown Chapter of Nazi Rule in Germany, Made all the More Engaging through a Son's Discovery of His Own Remarkable Parents."" -Ted Koppel, ABC News ""An Immensely Moving and Powerful Description of those Evil Times. I couldn't Put the Book Down."" -James Galway ""Martin Goldsmith has Written a Moving and Personal Account of a Search for Identity. His is a Story that will Touch All Readers with Its Integrity. This is not about Exorcising Ghosts, but Rather Awakening Passions that no One Ever Knew Existed. This is a Journey Everyone should Take."" -Leonard Slatkin, Music Director National Symphony Orchestra ""For Years I've been Familiar with Martin Goldsmith's Musical Expertise. This Book Explains the Source of His Knowledge and His Passion for the Subject. In Tracking the Extraordinary Story of His Parents and the Jewish Kulturbund, Martin Unfolds a Little-Known Piece of Holocaust History, and Finds Depths in His Own Heart that Warm the Hearts of Readers."" -Susan Stamberg, Special Correspondent National Public Radio "" A] Strong and Painful Book, Well-Written, Well-Researched, Moving, and Very Instructive."" -Ned Rorem, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer