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Books > Humanities > History > European history > From 1900 > Second World War
This is my memoir - a true story about victims of World War II and
their life in concentration camp, their fears and their dreams,
their relations with others, and their struggle on a journey to
make a home in exile. It is also a story of adventure, danger and
death. Above all, however, it is my story, a story of very
important part of my life - my youth. Those events took place a
long time ago. The people are real and so are their names. I have
told it with complete honesty as I saw it, observe it, and
experienced it. In order to make reading of this book more
interesting I wrote it in a form of a novel. Some of the words
within quotation marks are not necessarily of the speaker, for they
have been said a long time ago, and my recollection of them is not
always accurate. In other words, I'm giving in this book only the
general ideas of the speakers and not their exact words, except
when speaker is yours truly. Never the less, this book is a true
account of my life in exile and is should be regarded as such.
The Holocaust is one of the most intensively studied phenomena in
modern history. The volume of writing that fuels the numerous
debates about it is overwhelming in quantity and diversity. Even
those who have dedicated their professional lives to understanding
the Holocaust cannot assimilate it all.
There is, then, an urgent need to synthesize and evaluate the
complex historiography on the Holocaust, exploring the major themes
and debates relating to it and drawing widely on the findings of a
great deal of research. Concentrating on the work of the last two
decades, Histories of the Holocaust examines the "Final Solution"
as a European project, the decision-making process, perpetrator
research, plunder and collaboration, regional studies, ghettos,
camps, race science, antisemitic ideology, and recent debates
concerning modernity, organization theory, colonialism, genocide
studies, and cultural history. Research on victims is discussed,
but Stone focuses more closely on perpetrators, reflecting trends
within the historiography, as well as his own view that in order to
understand Nazi genocide the emphasis must be on the culture of the
perpetrators.
The book is not a "history of the history of the Holocaust,"
offering simply a description of developments in historiography.
Stone critically analyses the literature, discerning major themes
and trends and assessing the achievements and shortcomings of the
various approaches. He demonstrates that there never can or should
be a single history of the Holocaust and facilitates an
understanding of the genocide of the Jews from a multiplicity of
angles. An understanding of how the Holocaust could have happened
can only be achieved by recourse to histories of the Holocaust:
detailed day-by-day accounts of high-level decision-making;
long-term narratives of the Holocaust's relationship to European
histories of colonialism and warfare; micro-historical studies of
Jewish life before, during, and after Nazi occupation; and cultural
analyses of Nazi fantasies and fears.
Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the
commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in
Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed.
The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly
constituted nation states in these regions have already received
much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The
present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us
understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the
Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts
point to new commemorative cultures shaping up 'after memory'.
Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the
Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older
practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now
defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are
conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context,
one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative
rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory
narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures
of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area's contested
heritage.
Sentinel of Truth provides a gripping account of the assassination
of two Turkish diplomats in California in 1973 by an aggrieved
septuagenarian survivor of the Armenian Genocide, and explains how
a study of the global campaign against Turkey's denial of the
genocide cannot but include the killings carried out by Gourgen
Yanikian. By describing in detail the effects these and subsequent
acts of militancy had on the consciousness of diasporan Armenians,
author Tigran Kalaydjian sheds new light on the activities of the
tightly-knit group of people that is spearheading the drive for a
comprehensive redress of the human rights disaster of 1915 and
elucidates the many facets of the Diaspora's decades-long struggle
for justice. "Highly recommended for anyone interested in the
Armenian people, 20th century history, United States jurisprudence,
the triumph of the state over the individual and the paucity of
morality in modern-day politics; also, for the general reader, as
an informative and heart-rending factual account of a little known
chapter in European history." - Michael J. Hunt, author of Matabele
Gold and Two Days in Tehran TIGRAN KALAYDJIAN, a graduate of the
London School of Economics and Political Science, is a businessman,
writer, activist and grandson of Armenian Genocide survivors. He is
also a Board member of the Kalaydjian Foundation, a philanthropic
organisation based in Cyprus. He resides in Larnaca, Cyprus, with
his wife and two children. Publisher's website: http:
//sbpra.com/TigranKalaydjian
In ruling against the controversial historian David Irving, whose
libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt was
tried in April 2000, the High Court in London labeled Irving a
falsifier of history. No objective historian, declared the judge,
would manipulate the documentary record in the way that Irving did.
Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge historian and the chief adviser for
the defense, uses this famous trial as a lens for exploring a range
of difficult questions about the nature of the historian's
enterprise.
Josef Rosin's "Preserving Our Litvak Heritage" is a monumental work
documenting the history of 31 Jewish communities in Lithuanaia from
their inception to their total destruction in 1941 at the hands of
the Nazis and their Lithuania helpers. Rosin gathered his material
from traditional sources, archives, public records, and remembrance
books. He has enriched and enhanced the entry for each community
with personal memoirs and contributions from widely dispersed
survivors who opened family albums and shared treasured photographs
of family and friends. He made use of sources originally written in
Hebrew, Yiddish, Lithuanian, German and Russian. In over 700 pages,
Rosin documents each community from its beginning until World War
I, through the years of Independent Lithuania (1918-1940), and
finally during the indescribable Nazi annihilation of nearly all of
Lithuanian Jewry. Most impressive is the record of cultural
richness, the important town personalities, the welfare
institutions, the glorious Hebrew educational system of the Tarbuth
elementary schools and the Yavneh high schools, the world famous
Telz and Ponevezh Yeshivoth (in the towns of Telsiai and
Panevezys), the Yiddish press and other significant events of the
period. Rosin has provided a documentary and a testament to once
vibrant communities almost totally destroyed but which come alive
again in the pages of this book. 736 page, Hard Cover. List of
towns included in the book: Alite Birzh Yurburg Koshedar Kopcheve
Memel Naishtot Kibart Lazdey Ligum Mariampol Meretch Ponevezh
Pikvishok Pren Shaki Salant Serey Shat Stoklishok Sudarg Tavrig
Taragin Telzh Utyan Aran Vishey Vilkovishk Verzhbelov Zheiml
Naishtot Tavrig 786 page, Hard Cover
For five horrifying years in Vilna, the Vilna ghetto, and
concentration camps in Estonia, Herman Kruk recorded his own
experiences as well as the life and death of the Jewish community
of the city symbolically called "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." This
unique chronicle includes many recovered pages of Kruk's diaries
and provides a powerful eyewitness account of the annihilation of
the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. This volume includes the
Yiddish edition of Kruk's diaries, published in 1961 and translated
here for the first time, as well as many widely scattered pages of
the chronicles, collected here for the first time and meticulously
deciphered, translated, and annotated. Kruk describes vividly the
collapse of Poland in September, 1939, life as a refugee in Vilna,
the manhunt that destroyed most of Vilna Jewry in the summer of
1941, the creation of a ghetto and the persecution and self-rule of
the remnants of the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," the internment of the
last survivors in concentration camps in Estonia, and their brutal
deaths. Kruk scribbled his final diary entry on September 17, 1944,
managing to bury the small, loose pages of his manuscript just
hours before he and other camp inmates were shot to death and their
bodies burnt on a pyre. Kruk's writings illuminate the tragedy of
the Vilna Jews and their courageous efforts to maintain an
ideological, social, and cultural life even as their world was
being destroyed. To read Kruk's day-by-day account of the unfolding
of the Holocaust is to discern the possibilities for human courage
and perseverance even in the face of profound fear. Co-published
with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
"The Oryx Holocaust Sourcebook" provides a comprehensive
selection of high quality resources in the field of Holocaust
studies. The "Sourcebook's" 17 chapters cover general reference
works; narrative histories; monographs in the social sciences;
fiction, drama, and poetry; books for children and young adults;
periodicals; primary sources; electronic resources in various
formats; audiovisual materials; photographs; music; film and video;
educational and teaching materials; and information on
organizations, museums, and memorials. In addition, each chapter
begins with a concise overview essay. The book also includes a
preface, and index, and an appendix listing general distributors
and vendors of Holocaust materials.
Drawn from a wide array of scholarly disciplines ranging across
the humanities and social sciences, the items included in each
chapter were selected using the following criteria: (1) current
availability for use or purchase; (2) availability in English,
unless a non-English item was too significant to exclude; (3)
scholarly legitimacy, meaning it is recognized as a work of
authentic scholarship that contributes to advancement of knowledge
in the field; (4) relationship to topical categories for study of
the Holocaust as noted in the Curriculum Guidelines of the
Association of Holocaust Organizations, as listed in major
bibliographic works, and as used as topics in the contents of
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the leading journal in the field;
and, (5) in the case of online resources (Internet sites),
adherence to standards of scholarly documentation established by
learned societies or recognized by reputable scholarly
institutions, as well as the display of accurate and credible
content about the Holocaust drawn from reputable scholarship.
The end of the Second World War in Europe gave way to a gigantic
refugee crisis. Thoroughly prepared by Allied military planners,
the swift repatriation of millions of former forced laborers,
concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war nearly brought this
dramatic episode top a close. Yet in September 1945, the number of
displaced persons placed under the guardianship of Allied armies
and relief agencies in occupied Germany amounted to 1.5 million. A
costly burden for the occupying powers, the Jewish, Polish,
Ukrainian, Yugoslav and Baltic DPs unwilling to return to their
countries of origin presented a complex international problem.
Massed in refugee camps stretched from Northern Germany to Sicily,
the DPs had become long-term asylum seekers.
Based on the records of the International Refugee Organization,
this book describes how the European DP crisis impinged on the
shape of the postwar order. The DP question directly affected the
outbreak of the Cold War; the transformation of the "West" into a
new geopolitical entity; the conduct of political purges and
retribution; the ideology and methods of modern humanitarian
interventions; the appearance of international agencies and
non-governmental organizations; the emergence of an international
human rights system; the organization of migration movements and
the redistribution of "surplus populations"; the advent of Jewish
nationhood; and postwar categorizations of political and
humanitarian refugees.
Covering Western and Eastern Europe, this book looks at the
Holocaust on the local level. It compares and contrasts the
behaviour and attitude of neighbours in the face of the Holocaust.
Topics covered include deportation programmes, relations between
Jews and Gentiles, violence against Jews, perceptions of Jewish
persecution, and reports of the Holocaust in the Jewish and
non-Jewish press.
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