In the last half century, ways of thinking about the Holocaust have changed somewhat dramatically. In this volume, noted scholars reflect on how their own thinking about the Holocaust has changed over the years. In their personal stories they confront the questions that the Holocaust has raised for them and explore how these questions have been evolving. Contributors include John T. Pawlikowski, Richard L. Rubenstein, Michael Berenbaum, and Eva Fleischner.

Half a century after the collapse of the Nazi regime and the Third Reich, scholars from a range of fields continue to examine the causes of Nazi Germany. An increasing number of young Americans are attempting to understand the circumstances that led to the rise of the Nazi party and the subsequent Holocaust, as well as the implication such events may have for today as the world faces a resurgence of neo-Nazism, ethnic warfare, and genocide. In the months following World War II, extensive psychiatric and psychological testing was performed on over 200 Nazis in an effort to understand the key personalities of the Third Reich and of those individuals who "just followed orders." In addressing these issues, the current volume examines the strange history of over 200 Rorschach Inkblot protocols that were administered to Nazi war criminals and answers such questions as: * Why the long delay in publishing protocols? * What caused such jealousies among the principals? * How should the protocols be interpreted? * Were the Nazis monsters or ordinary human beings? This text delivers a definitive and comprehensive study of the psychological functioning of Nazi war criminals -- both the elite and the rank-and-file. In order to apply a fresh perspective to understanding the causes that created such antisocial behavior, these analyses lead to a discussion within the context of previous work done in social and clinical psychology. Subjects discussed include the authoritarian personality, altruism, obedience to authority, diffusion of responsibility, and moral indifference. The implications for current political events are also examined as Neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, and ethnic hate are once again on the rise. While the book does contain some technical material relating to the psychological interpretations, it is intended to be a scholarly presentation written in a narrative style. No prior knowledge of psychological testing is necessary, but it should be of great benefit for those interested in the Rorschach Inkblot test, or with a special interest in psychological testing, personality assessment, and the history of psychology. It is also intended for readers with a broad interest in Nazi Germany.

Interdisciplinary overview of American Jewish life post-Holocaust. The 1950s and early 1960s have not traditionally been viewed as a particularly creative era in American Jewish life. On the contrary, these years have been painted as a period of inactivity and Americanization. As if exhausted by the traumas of World War II, the American Jewish community took a rest until suddenly reawakened by the 1967 Six-Day War and its implications for world Jewry. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that previous assumptions about the early silence of American Jewry with regard to the Holocaust were exaggerated. And while historians have expanded their borders and definitions to encompass the postwar decades, scholars from other disciplines have been paying increasing attention to the unique literary, photographic, artistic, dramatic, political, and other cultural creations of this period and the ways in which they hearken back to not only the Holocaust itself but also to images of prewar Eastern Europe. Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades brings together scholars of literature, art, history, ethnography, and related fields to examine how the American Jewish community in the post-Holocaust era was shaped by its encounter with literary relics, living refugees, and other cultural productions which grew out of an encounter with Eastern European Jewish life from the pre-Holocaust era.

Stranded in Germany after the Second World War, 300,000 Holocaust survivors began to rebuild their lives while awaiting emigration. Brought together by their shared persecution, Jewish displaced persons forged a vibrant community, redefining Jewish identity after Auschwitz. Asserting their dignity as Jews, they practised Jewish rituals, created new families, embraced Zionism, agitated against British policies in Palestine, and tried to force Germans to acknowledge responsibility for wartime crimes. In Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, Margarete Myers Feinstein uses survivor memoirs and interviews, allowing the reader to 'hear' the survivors' voices, focusing on the personal aspects of the transition to normalcy. Unlike previous political histories, this study emphasizes Jewish identity and cultural life after the war.

This book investigates cinematic representations of the murder of European Jews and civilian opposition to Nazi occupation from the war up until the twenty-first century. The study exposes a chronology of the conflict's memorialization whose geo-political alignments are demarcated by vectors of time and space-or 'chronotopes', using Mikhail Bakhtin's term. Camino shows such chronotopes to be first defined by the main allies; the USA, USSR and UK; and then subsequently expanding from the geographical and political centres of the occupation; France, the USSR and Poland. Films from Western and Eastern Europe and the USA are treated as primary and secondary sources of the conflict. These sources contribute to a sentient or emotional history that privileges affect and construct what Michel Foucault labels biopolitics. These cinematic narratives, which are often based on memoirs of resistance fighters like Joseph Kessel or Holocaust survivors such as Primo Levi and Wanda Jakubowska, evoke the past in what Marianne Hirsch has described as 'post-memory'.

Designed for secondary school and college student research, this work is a readable history and ready-reference guide to the Holocaust based on the most recent scholarship. It provides the reader with an overview of Nazi Germany's attempt to exterminate world Jewry. Fischel, a leading authority on the Holocaust, combines narrative description, analytical essays, a timeline of events, lengthy biographical profiles, and the text of key primary documents relating to the Nazi plan for the "Final Solution" to help students gain a comprehensive understanding of the causative factors and major events and personalities that shaped the Nazi genocide. A glossary of key terms, selected tables, and an annotated bibliography of recommended further reading will aid student research. Topical essays designed for the student and general reader provide an accessible historical overview and analysis of Hitler and the Jews, the racial state, genocide, the "Final Solution," and resistance to the Nazis. Fischel explains the factors that led to the Holocaust, the implementation of the decision to exterminate the Jews, the response of the free world and the Papacy, the role of "righteous gentiles" who risked their lives to save Jews, and the resistance of the Jews to their fate under the Nazis. Biographical sketches provide valuable information on the key personalities among both the Nazis and Allies, and the text of key primary documents brings the Nazis blatant plan for genocide to stark reality. In providing valuable information, analysis, and ready-reference features, this work is a one-stop resource on the Holocaust for students, teachers, library media specialists, and interested readers.

The lens of apartheid-era Jewish commemorations of the Holocaust in South Africa reveals the fascinating transformation of a diasporic community. Through the prism of Holocaust memory, this book examines South African Jewry and its ambivalent position as a minority within the privileged white minority. Grounded in research in over a dozen archives, the book provides a rich empirical account of the centrality of Holocaust memorialization to the community's ongoing struggle against global and local antisemitism. Most of the chapters focus on white perceptions of the Holocaust and reveals the tensions between the white communities in the country regarding the place of collective memories of suffering in the public arena. However, the book also moves beyond an insular focus on the South African Jewish community and in very different modality investigates prominent figures in the anti-apartheid struggle and the role of Holocaust memory in their fascinating journeys towards freedom.

The murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust is a crime that has had a lasting and massive impact on our time. Despite the immense, ever-increasing body of Holocaust literature and representation, no single interpretation can provide definitive answers. Shaped by different historical experiences, political and national interests, our approximations of the Holocaust remain elusive. Holocaust responses-past, present, and future-reflect our changing understanding of history and the shifting landscapes of memory. This book takes stock of the attempts within and across nations to come to terms with the murders. Volume editors establish the thematic and conceptual framework within which the various Holocaust responses are being analyzed. Specific chapters cover responses in Germany and in Eastern Europe; the Holocaust industry; Jewish ultra-Orthodox reflections; and the Jewish intellectuals' search for a new Jewish identity. Experts comment upon the changes in Christian-Jewish relations since the Holocaust; the issue of restitution; and post-1945 responses to genocide. Other topics include Holocaust education, Holocaust films, and the national memorial landscapes in Germany, Poland, Israel, and the United States.

Based on 70 hours of interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka (the largest of the extermination camps), this book bares the soul of a man who continually found ways to rationalize his role in Hitler's final soulution.

A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Viktor Frankl was uniquely able to observe the way that both he and others in Auschwitz coped (or didn't) with the experience. He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest - and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. The sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not of camp influences alone. Only those who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influence - while those who made a victory of those experiences turned them into an inner triumph. Frankl came to believe man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. This outstanding work offers us all a way to transcend suffering and find significance in the art of living.'Viktor Frankl-is one of the moral heroes of the 20th century. His insights into human freedom, dignity and the search for meaning are deeply humanising, and have the power to transform lives.'Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks'

A powerful account of Jewish resistence in Nazi-occupied Europe and why such resistance was so remarkable. Most popular accounts of the Holocaust typically cast Jewish victims as meek and ask, "Why didn't Jews resist?" But we know now that Jews did resist, staging armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. In Hope and Honor, Rachel L. Einwohner illustrates the dangers in attempting resistance under unimaginable conditions and shows how remarkable such resistance was. She draws on oral testimonies, published and unpublished diaries and memoirs, and other written materials produced both by survivors and those who perished to show how Jews living under Nazi occupation in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, and Lodz reached decisions about resistance. Using methods of comparative-historical sociology, Einwohner shows that decisions about resistance rested on Jews' assessments of the threats facing them, and somewhat ironically, armed resistance took place only once activists reached the critical conclusion that they had no hope for survival. Rather than ask the typical question of why Jews generally didn't resist, this powerful account of Jewish resistance seeks to explain why they resisted at all when there was no hope for success, and they faced almost certain death.

Since its completion in 1955, Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) has been considered one of the most important films to confront the catastrophe and atrocities of the Nazi era. But was it a film about the Holocaust that failed to recognize the racist genocide? Or was the film not about the Holocaust as we know it today but a political and aesthetic response to what David Rousset, the French political prisoner from Buchenwald, identified on his return in 1945 as the 'concentrationary universe' which, now actualized, might release its totalitarian plague any time and anywhere? What kind of memory does the film create to warn us of the continued presence of this concentrationary universe? This international collection re-examines Resnais's benchmark film in terms of both its political and historical context of representation of the camps and of other instances of the concentrationary in contemporary cinema. Through a range of critical readings, Concentrationary Cinema explores the cinematic aesthetics of political resistance not to the Holocaust as such but to the political novelty of absolute power represented by the concentrationary system and its assault on the human condition.

It takes courage beyond belief to sneak out in the night to dig in the garbage for scraps to keep from starving when you know you would be killed if you were caught, or to crawl through ice and snow to freedom because the muscles in your legs atrophied from sitting in a hay mow for almost two years. To defect to the west, leaving all your family behind, not knowing when or if you'll ever see them again, or to endure the work, starvation diet, and beatings of concentration camp life also were courageous acts. However, these and other challenges were everyday living for millions such as those in this book. While those around them fell victim to WWII atrocities and did not survive, these people fought hard and won the right to live.

In this fascinating book, the planning and building of Yad Vashem, Israel's central and most important institution for commemorating the Holocaust, merits an outstanding in-depth account. Following the development of Yad Vashem since 1942, when the idea to commemorate the Holocaust in Eretz-Israel was raised for the first time, the narrative continues until the inauguration of Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial in 1976. The prolonged and complicated planning process of Yad Vashem's various monuments reveals the debates, failures and achievements involved in commemorating the Holocaust. In reading this thought-provoking description, one learns how Israel's leaders aspired both to fulfill a moral debt towards the victims of the Holocaust a well as to make Yad Vashem an exclusive center of Holocaust commemoration both in the Jewish world and beyond.

We commonly associate the term "Holocaust" with Nuremberg and Kristallnacht, the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos, Auschwitz and Treblinka. Appearing as they do in countless books and films, these symbols of hatred penetrate our consciousness, memory, and history. But, unfortunately, our memory is selective, and, in the case of Romania, our knowledge is scant. In 1939 the Jewish population of Romania exceeded 750,000: the third largest concentration of Jews in Europe. By 1944, some 400,000 had disappeared. Another 150,000 Ukrainian Jews died at the hands of Romanian soldiers. In the quest for a "final solution" Romania proved to be Hitler's most enthusiastic ally. In The Silent Holocaust, Butnaru, himself a survivor of the Romanian labor camps, provides a full account and demonstrates that anti-Semitism was a central force in Romania's history. He begins by examining the precarious status of Romanian Jewry in the years prior to World War I. He then reviews the period to the establishment in September, 1940, of the National Legionary State, a period when anti-Semitism became the unifying force in politics. The remainder of the book covers the Holocaust years, and reveals that Romania's premeditated mass murder of Jews was well underway before the Reich's gas chambers became operational. The Silent Holocaust has been called a "work of epic and historical worth" and it is invaluable for students of World War II, the Holocaust, and Jewish and Eastern European studies.

In the years of Nazi occupation of Hungary, Jews referred to their Gentile rescuers as "angels"--these seemingly ordinary men and women could hardly explain their actions. "I did what I had to do almost unconsciously, " said Lutheran pastor Gabor Sztehlos. Scrawny Mr. Kanalas, a disreputable janitor, could chase away Nazi thugs without hesitation--where did such behavior come from and why? Erzesebet David was a weak and indecisive woman--where did she find the will to forge Christian birth certificates? Charles Fenyvesi and members of his family were helped by these angels. Thousands of others were helped by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish consul whose actions surprised many who knew him. Fenyvesi writes as a historian and beneficiary of these modest angels who, with their actions in a time of absolute terror, soared while others crawled.