Growing up in Germany, Freddy Mayer witnessed the Nazis' rise to power. When he was sixteen, his family made the decision to flee to the United States - they were among the last German Jews to escape, in 1938. In America, Freddy tried enlisting the day after Pearl Harbor, only to be rejected as an "enemy alien" because he was German. He was soon recruited to the OSS, the country's first spy outfit before the CIA. Freddy, joined by Dutch Jewish refugee Hans Wynberg and Nazi defector Franz Weber, parachuted into Austria as the leader of Operation Greenup, meant to deter Hitler's last stand. He posed as a Nazi officer and a French POW for months, dispatching reports to the OSS via Hans, holed up with a radio in a nearby attic. The reports contained a gold mine of information, provided key intelligence about the Battle of the Bulge, and allowed the Allies to bomb twenty Nazi trains. On the verge of the Allied victory, Freddy was captured by the Gestapo and tortured and waterboarded for days. Remarkably, he persuaded the region's Nazi commander to surrender, completing one of the most successful OSS missions of the war. Based on years of research and interviews with Mayer himself, whom the author was able to meet only months before his death at the age of ninety-four, Return to the Reich is an eye-opening, unforgettable narrative of World War II heroism.

Each scholar working in the field of Holocaust literature and representation has a story to tell. Not only the scholarly story of the work they do, but their personal story, their journey to becoming a specialist in Holocaust studies. What academic, political, cultural, and personal experiences led them to choose Holocaust representation as their subject of research and teaching? What challenges did they face on their journey? What approaches, genres, media, or other forms of Holocaust representation did they choose and why? How and where did they find a scholarly "home" in which to share their work productively? Have political, social, and cultural conditions today affected how they think about their work on Holocaust representation? How do they imagine their work moving forward, including new challenges, responses, and audiences? These are but a few of the questions that the authors in this volume address, showing how a scholar's field of research and resulting writings are not arbitrary, and are often informed by their personal history and professional experiences.

The Handbook of Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction aims to increase the visibility and show the versatility of works from East-Central European countries. It is the first encyclopedic work to bridge the gap between the literary production of countries that are considered to be main sites of the Holocaust and their recognition in international academic and public discourse. It contains over 100 entries offering not only facts about the content and motifs but also pointing out the characteristic fictional features of each work and its meaning for academic discourse and wider reception in the country of origin and abroad. The publication will appeal to the academic and broader public interested in the representation of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and World War II in literature and the arts. Besides prose, it also considers poetry and theatrical plays from 1943 through 2018. An introduction to the historical events and cultural developments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Czech, and Slovak Republic, and their impact on the artistic output helps to contextualise the motif changes and fictional strategies that authors have been applying for decades. The publication is the result of long-term scholarly cooperation of specialists from four countries and several dozen academic centres.

How does scale affect our understanding of the Holocaust? In the vastness of its implementation and the sheer amount of death and suffering it produced, the genocide of Europe's Jews presents special challenges for historians, who have responded with work ranging in scope from the world-historical to the intimate. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a willingness to study the Holocaust at scales as focused as a single neighborhood, family, or perpetrator. This volume brings together an international cast of scholars to reflect on the ongoing microhistorical turn in Holocaust studies, assessing its historiographical pitfalls as well as the distinctive opportunities it affords researchers.

Reading a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to Israeli, Palestinian and postcolonial writers, The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature is a comprehensive exploration of changing cultural perceptions of Jewishness in contemporary writing. Examining how representations of Jewishness in contemporary fiction have wrestled with such topics as the Holocaust, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish diaspora experiences, Isabelle Hesse demonstrates the 'colonial' turn taken by these representations since the founding of the Jewish state. Following the dynamics of this turn, the book demonstrates new ways of questioning received ideas about victimhood and power in contemporary discussions of postcolonialism and world literature.

The testimonies of individuals who survived the Holocaust as children pose distinct emotional and intellectual challenges for researchers: as now-adult interviewees recall profound childhood experiences of suffering and persecution, they also invoke their own historical awareness and memories of their postwar lives, requiring readers to follow simultaneous, disparate narratives. This interdisciplinary volume brings together historians, psychologists, and other scholars to explore child survivors' accounts. With a central focus on the Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive's over 1,500 testimonies, it not only enlarges our understanding of the Holocaust empirically but illuminates the methodological, theoretical, and institutional dimensions of this unique form of historical record.

She found the diary and brought the world a message of love and hope.

It seems as if we are never far from Miep's thoughts....Yours, Anne

For the millions moved by "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, " here at last is Miep's own astonishing story. For more than two years, Miep Gies and her husband helped hide the Franks from the Nazis. Like thousands of unsung heroes of the Holocaust, they risked their lives each day to bring food, news, and emotional support to the victims.

From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refugee to the moment she places a small, red-orange, checkered diary -- Anne's legacy -- in Otto Frank's hands, Miep Gies remembers her days with simple honesty and shattering clarity. Each page rings with courage and heartbreaking beauty.

Whether it's a novel, memoir, diary, poem, or drama, a common thread runs through the literature of the Nazi Holocaust--a motif of personal testimony to the dearness of humanity. With that perspective the expert authors of Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature undertake profiling 128 of the most influential first generation authors who either survived, perished, or were closely connected to the Holocaust. Arranged alphabetically by author, all of the entries answer the same basic questions about the author and his or her work: What is the nature of the author's literary response to the Holocaust? What is his or her place in Holocaust literature? What does the author's work contribute to an understanding of the Holocaust? What is distinctive about the author's work? What are some key moments in the author's life? What issues does the author's work pose for the reader? To address these questions, the entries are generally organized into three primary divisions: (1) an opening section on why the author's work has a significant or distinctive place in Holocaust literature, (2) a second section containing information on the author's biography, and (3) a critical examination of the highlights of the author's work. In most cases, the third section is the longest, since the focus of the encyclopedia is the literature, not the author.

The Encyclopedia is intended for all students and teachers of the Holocaust, regardless of their levels of learning. Avenues for further research are incorporated at the conclusion of each entry and in a comprehensive bibliography of primary works of Holocaust literature and a second bibliography of critical studies of Holocaust literature.

An intriguing analysis of how place constructs memory and how memory constructs place, "Remembering the Holocaust" shows how visiting sites such as Auschwitz shapes the transfer of Holocaust memory from one generation to the next. Through the discussion of a range of memoirs and novels, including "Landscapes of Memory" by Ruth Kluger, "Too Many Men" by Lily Brett, " The War After" by Anne Karpf and "Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer, "Remembering the Holocaust "reveals the pivotal yet complicated role of place in each generation's writing about the Holocaust.This book provides an insightful and nuanced investigation of the effect of the Holocaust upon families, from survivors of the genocide to members of the second and even third generations of families involved. By deploying an innovative combination of generational and literary study of Holocaust survivor families focussed on place, "Remembering the Holocaust" makes an important contribution to the field of Holocaust Studies that will be of interest to scholars and anyone interested in Holocaust remembrance.

Despite an outpouring in recent years of history and cultural criticism related to the Holocaust, Italian women's literary representations and testimonies have not received their proper due. This project fills this gap by analyzing Italian women's writing from a variety of genres, all set against a complex historical backdrop.

Memory Work studies how Jewish children of Holocaust survivors from the English-speaking diaspora explore the past in literary texts. By identifying areas where memory manifests - Objects, Names, Bodies, Food, Passover, 9/11 it shows how the Second Generation engage with the pre-Holocaust family and their parents' survival.

Covering the period between the Munich Agreement and the Communist Coup in February 1948, this volume provides the first full account of the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in London. In examining attitudes towards the Jews during World War 2 and its aftermath Jan Lani ek explores the notion that Czechoslovak treatment of the Jews was shaped by resurgent Czech and Slovak nationalism/s caused by the war and by the experience of the occupation by the German army. He challenges the official history of Czechoslovak policy towards the Jews between 1918 and 1948, which still presents Czechoslovakia as an exceptional case study of an East-Central European state that rejected antisemitism and treated the Jews decently. This groundbreaking work offers a novel, provocative analysis of the political activities and plans of the Czechoslovak exiles during and after the war years, and of the implementation of the plans in liberated Czechoslovakia after 1945.

This book is the author's attempt and duty to, in the words of Elie Wiesel, ""Bear witness for the dead and for the living". Through extensive research in archives, family documents, and literature, Laufer unearthed his father's lost biography as a slave in the Hungarian forced labor battalions and in German concentration camps, his return to Hungary, and his daring escape from Stalinist Hungary to Israel. Laufer's father's experiences mark one of the saddest points in Jewish history. The story is contrasted with his own in Israel during the Six Days War, a pinnacle in Jewish history and during the Israeli wars that followed.

This memoir is about a Jewish baby born in the Krakow ghetto in November 1942, three years after Hitler conquered Poland, and, remarkably, escaping death-one of a mere one half of one percent of Jewish children in Poland who survived during the Nazi era. Her life was saved because her parents hid her with a Catholic family. Just as remarkably, her mother, still alive after suffering terribly through four of Hitler's camps, traveled for weeks back to Poland and found her again. The book also depicts the author's postwar challenges in Germany and America.

This bold intervention into the debate over the memory and post-memory of the Holocaust both scrutinises recent academic theories of post-Holocaust trauma and provides a new reading of literary and architectural memory texts related to the Holocaust.

Mordechai Gebirtig was one of the most influential and popular writers of Yiddish songs and poems. Born in 1877, he became a prolific poet and song writer, using everything he saw, heard and knew about people. His legacy, therefore, is not only one of melodies and lyrics, but also a treatise on Jewish life in Poland under the benign neglect of the Austrians, the ever growing hostility of the Poles, and finally, the terror of the Germans, who destroyed the people, their culture, and, to a great measure, their memory. Schneider's book for the first time brings his work to an English-speaking audience, offering a collection of all of his major works, complete with the scores, transliterated Yiddish text, and English translation. Her book offers a rare insight into the world of Eastern European Jews, their culture, and their music.

Gebirtig's most famous song Es Brent--It's Burning--was written in response to a 1936 pogrom. It became a stirring hymn for the survivors of the Holocaust, who felt that the words suited their own situation very well. Gebirtig himself was shot in the Cracow Ghetto in June 1942. Neither he nor any of his close family survived the war. However, as this volume shows, his songs and poems remain an enduring voice for a Jewish community nearly lost to the Nazis. They constitute a precious legacy for anyone interested in the world of Eastern Europe Jews, their culture, and their music.

The graphic history of the Nazi attempt to destroy the Jews of Europe during the Second World War is illustrated in this series of 333 detailed maps.

The maps, and the text and photographs that accompany them, powerfully depict the fate of the Jews between 1933 and 1945, while also setting the chronological story in the wider context of the war itself. The maps include:

• historical background ? from the effects of anti-Jewish violence between 1880 and 1933 to the geography of the existing Jewish communities before the advent of the Nazis
• the beginning of the violence ? from the destruction of the synagogues in November 1938 to Jewish migrations and deportations, the ghettos, and the establishment of the concentration camps and death camps throughout German-dominated Europe
• the spread of Nazi rule ? the fate of the Jews throughout Europe including Germany, Austria, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Russia, Denmark, Norway, France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, and the Baltic States
• Jewish revolts and resistance ? acts of armed resistance, fighting in the forests, individual acts of courage
• Jews in hiding ? escape routes, Christians who helped Jews
• the death marches ? the advance of the Allies and the liberation of the camps, the survivors, and the final death toll.

This revised edition includes a new section which gives an insight into the layout and organization of some of the most significant places of the Holocaust, including Auschwitz, Treblinka and the Warsaw ghetto, maps that will be especially useful to those visiting the sites.

The graphic history of the Nazi attempt to destroy the Jews of Europe during the Second World War is illustrated in this series of 333 detailed maps.

The maps, and the text and photographs that accompany them, powerfully depict the fate of the Jews between 1933 and 1945, while also setting the chronological story in the wider context of the war itself. The maps include:

• historical background from the effects of anti-Jewish violence between 1880 and 1933 to the geography of the existing Jewish communities before the advent of the Nazis
• the beginning of the violence from the destruction of the synagogues in November 1938 to Jewish migrations and deportations, the ghettos, and the establishment of the concentration camps and death camps throughout German-dominated Europe
• the spread of Nazi rule the fate of the Jews throughout Europe including Germany, Austria, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Russia, Denmark, Norway, France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, and the Baltic States
• Jewish revolts and resistance acts of armed resistance, fighting in the forests, individual acts of courage
• Jews in hiding escape routes, Christians who helped Jews
• the death marches the advance of the Allies and the liberation of the camps, the survivors, and the final death toll.

This revised edition includes a new section which gives an insight into the layout and organization of some of the most significant places of the Holocaust, including Auschwitz, Treblinka and the Warsaw ghetto, maps that will be especially useful to those visiting the sites.