After 1948, the 370,000 Jews of Romania who survived the Holocaust became one of the main sources of immigration for the new state of Israel as almost all left their homeland to settle in Palestine and Israel. Romania's decision to allow its Jews to leave was baldly practical: Israel paid for them, and Romania wanted influence in the Middle East. For its part, Israel was rescuing a community threatened by economic and cultural extinction and at the same time strengthening itself with a massive infusion of new immigrants. Radu Ioanid traces the secret history of the longest and most expensive ransom arrangement in recent times, a hidden exchange that lasted until the fall of the Communist regime. Including a wealth of recently declassified documents from the archives of the Romanian secret police, this updated edition follows Israel's long and expensive ransom arrangement with Communist Romania. Ioanid uncovers the elaborate mechanisms that made it successful for decades, the shadowy figures responsible, and the secret channels of communication and payment. As suspenseful as a Cold-War thriller, his book tells the full, startling story of an unprecedented slave trade.

The province of Grosseto in southern Tuscany shows two extremes in the treatment of Italian and foreign Jews during the Holocaust. To the east of the province, the Jews of Pitigliano, a four hundred-year-old community, were hidden for almost a year by sympathetic farmers in barns and caves. None of those in hiding were arrested and all survived the Fascist hunt for Jews. In the west, near the provincial capital of Grosseto, almost a hundred Italian and foreign Jews were imprisoned in 1943-1944 in the bishop's seminary, which he had rented to the Fascists for that purpose. About half of them, though they had thought that the bishop would protect them, were deported with his knowledge by Fascists and Nazis to Auschwitz. Thus, the Holocaust reached into this provincial corner as it did into all parts of Italy still under Italian Fascist control. This book is based on new interviews and research in local and national archives.

The book about the Westerweel Group tells the fascinating story about the cooperation of some ten non-conformist Dutch socialists and a group of Palestine Pioneers who mostly had arrived in the Netherlands from Germany and Austria the late thirties. With the help of Joop Westerweel, the headmaster of a Rotterdam Montessori School, they found hiding places in the Netherlands. Later on, an escape route to France via Belgium was worked out. Posing as Atlantic Wall workers, the pioneers found their way to the south of France. With the help of the Armee Juive, a French Jewish resistance organization, some 70 pioneers reached Spain at the beginning of 1944. From here they went to Palestine. Finding and maintaining the escape route cost the members of the Westerweel Group dear. With some exceptions, all members of the group were arrested by the Germans. Joop Westerweel was executed in August 1944. Other members, both in the Netherlands and France, were send to German concentration camps, where some perished.

During and in the aftermath of the dark period of the Holocaust, writers across Europe and America sought to express their feelings and experiences through their writings. This book provides a comprehensive account of these writings through essays from expert scholars, covering a wide geographic, linguistic, thematic and generic range of materials. Such an overview is particularly appropriate at a time when the corpus of Holocaust literature has grown to immense proportions and when guidance is needed in determining a canon of essential readings, a context to interpret them, and a paradigm for the evolution of writing on the Holocaust. The expert contributors to this volume, who negotiate the literature in the original languages, provide insight into the influence of national traditions and the importance of language, especially but not exclusively Yiddish and Hebrew, to the literary response arising from the Holocaust.

'An extraordinary family tale of survival' Sunday Times Jonathan Dean's great-grandfather, David Schapira, fled the Russian threat in Ukraine for Vienna in 1914. Blinded in the First World War, he survived to find love and start a family, only to be sent to a concentration camp during the next war. David's son, Heinz, was also a refugee. In 1939, aged 16, he embarked on a nail-biting journey to London, to escape his fate as an Austrian Jew. Drawing on David's memoir and Heinz's wartime diaries, Dean visits the places that changed the course of his family tree - Vienna, Cologne, Ukraine - where he finds history repeating itself and meets a new wave of people leaving loved ones for an uncertain future. I Must Belong Somewhere is an unforgettable family tale of exile and survival, and a powerful meditation on what it means to be a refugee today.

It is an all too common belief that Jews did nothing to resist their own fate in the Holocaust. However, the parallel realities of disintegrating physical and psychological conditions in the ghetto, and the efforts of ghetto undergrounds to counter both collaborationist judenrat policies and the despair of a beaten down population, could not but lead to a breakdown in spiritual life. James M. Glass examines spiritual resistance to the Holocaust and the place of this within political and violent resistance. He explores Jewish reactions to the murderous campaign against them and their creation of new spiritual and moral rules to live by. He argues that the Orthodox Jewish response to annihilation, often seen as unduly passive, was predicated in the insanity of the times and can be seen as spiritually noble.

During World War II, the United States government and many Western democracies limited or closed themselves off entirely to Jewish refugees. By contrast, a Pacific island nation decided to keep its doors open. Between 1938 and 1941, the Philippine Commonwealth provided safe asylum to more than 1,300 German Jews. In highlighting the efforts by Philippine president Manual Quezon and High Commissioner Paul V. McNutt, Bonnie M. Harris offers fuller implications for our understanding of the Roosevelt administration's response to the Holocaust. This untold history is brought to life by focusing on the incredible journey of synagogue cantor Joseph Cysner. Drawing from oral histories, memoirs, and personal papers, Harris documents Cysner's harrowing escape from the Nazis and his heroic rescue by the American-led Jewish community of the Philippines in 1939. Moving and rich in historical detail, Philippine Sanctuary reveals new insights for an overlooked period in our recent history, and emphasizes the continued importance of humanitarian efforts to aid those being persecuted.

Far from the image of an apolitical, "clean" Wehrmacht that persists in popular memory, German soldiers regularly cooperated with organizations like the SS in the abuse and murder of countless individuals during the Second World War. This in-depth study demonstrates that a key factor in the criminalization of the Wehrmacht was the intense political indoctrination imposed on its members. At the instigation of senior leadership, many ordinary German soldiers and officers became ideological warriors who viewed their enemies in racial and political terms-a project that was but one piece of the broader effort to socialize young men during the Nazi era.

In the immediate decades after World War II, the French National Railways (SNCF) was celebrated for its acts of wartime heroism. However, recent debates and litigation have revealed the ways the SNCF worked as an accomplice to the Third Reich and was actively complicit in the deportation of 75,000 Jews and other civilians to death camps. Sarah Federman delves into the interconnected roles-perpetrator, victim, and hero-the company took on during the harrowing years of the Holocaust. Grounded in history and case law, Last Train to Auschwitz traces the SNCF's journey toward accountability in France and the United States, culminating in a multimillion-dollar settlement paid by the French government on behalf of the railways.The poignant and informative testimonies of survivors illuminate the long-term effects of the railroad's impact on individuals, leading the company to make overdue amends. In a time when corporations are increasingly granted the same rights as people, Federman's detailed account demonstrates the obligations businesses have to atone for aiding and abetting governments in committing atrocities. This volume highlights the necessity of corporate integrity and will be essential reading for those called to engage in the difficult work of responding to past harms.

Gisella Perl's memoir is the extraordinarily candid account of women's extreme efforts to survive Auschwitz. With writing as powerful as that of Charlotte Delbo and Ruth Kluger, her story individualizes and therefore humanizes a victim of mass dehumanization. Perl accomplished this by representing her life before imprisonment, in Auschwitz and other camps, and in the struggle to remake her life. It is also the first memoir by a woman Holocaust survivor and establishes the model for understanding the gendered Nazi policies and practices targeting Jewish women as racially poisonous. Perl's memoir is also significant for its inclusion of the Nazis' Roma victims as well as in-depth representations of Nazi women guards and other personnel. Unlike many important Holocaust memoirs, Perl's writing is both graphic in its horrific detail and eloquent in its emotional responses. One of the memoir's major historical contributions is Perl's account of being forced to work alongside Dr. Josef Mengele in his infamous so-called clinic and using her position to save the lives of other women prisoners. These efforts including infanticide and abortion, topics that would remain silenced for decades and, unfortunately, continue to be marginalized from all too many Holocaust accounts. After decades out of print, this new edition will ensure the crucial place of Perl's testimony on Holocaust memory and education.

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.

Following the Axis invasion of Greece, the Nazis began persecuting the country's Jews much as they had across the rest of occupied Europe, beginning with small indignities and culminating in mass imprisonment and deportations. Among the many Jews confined to the Thessaloniki ghetto during this period were Sarina Saltiel, Mathilde Barouh, and Neama Cazes-three women bound for Auschwitz who spent the weeks before their deportation writing to their sons. Do Not Forget Me brings together these remarkable pieces of correspondence, shocking accounts of life in the ghetto with an emotional intensity rare even by the standards of Holocaust testimony.

Filled with new elements that challenge common scholarly theses, this book acquaints the reader with the "Jewish problem" of sociology and provides what this academic discipline urgently needs: a one-volume history of the Sociology of the Holocaust. The story of why and how sociologists as well as the schools of sociological thought came to confront the Holocaust has never been entirely told. The volume offers original insights on the nature of American sociology with implications for the post-Holocaust sociology development.

Winner of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize and the Wolfson History Prize In March of 1933, a disused factory surrounded by barbed wire held 223 prisoners in the town of Dachau. By the end of 1945, the SS concentration camp system had become an overwhelming landscape of terror. Twenty-two large camps and over one thousand satellite camps throughout Germany and Europe were at the heart of the Nazi campaign of repression and intimidation. The importance of the camps in terms of Nazi history and our modern world cannot be questioned. Dr Nikolaus Wachsmann is the first historian to write a complete history of the camps. Combining the political and the personal, Wachsmann will examine the organisation of such an immense genocidal machine, whilst drawing a vivid picture of life inside the camps for the individual prisoner. The book gives voice to those typically forgotten in Nazi history: the 'social deviants', criminals and unwanted ethnicities that all faced the terror of the camps. Wachsmann explores the practice of institutionalised murder and inmate collaboration with the SS selectively ignored by many historians. Pulling together a wealth of in-depth research, official documents, contemporary studies and the evidence of survivors themselves, KL is a complete but accessible narrative.

Biography of a Jewish doctor who survived and triumphed over the horrors of the Holocaust. Eli's Story: A Twentieth-Century Jewish Life is first and foremost a biography. Its subject is Eli G. Rochelson, MD (1907-1984), author Meri-Jane Rochelson's father. At its core is Eli's story in his own words, taken from an interview he did with his son, Burt Rochelson, in the mid-1970s. The book tells the story of a man whose life and memory spanned two world wars, several migrations, an educational odyssey, the massive upheaval of the Holocaust, and finally, a frustrating yet ultimately successful effort to restore his professional credentials and identity, as well as reestablish family life. Eli's Story contains a mostly chronological narration that embeds the story in the context of further research. It begins with Eli's earliest memories of childhood in Kovno and ends with his death, his legacy, and the author's own unanswered questions that are as much a part of Eli's story as his own words. The narrative is illuminated and expanded through Eli's personal archive of papers, letters, and photographs, as well as research in institutional archives, libraries, and personal interviews. Rochelson covers Eli's family's relocation to southern Russia; his education, military service, and first marriage after he returned to Kovno; his and his family's experiences in the Dachau, Stutthof, and Auschwitz concentration camps-including the deaths of his wife and child; his postwar experience in the Landsberg Displaced Persons (DP) camp, and his immigration to the United States, where he determinedly restored his medical credentials and started a new family. Rochelson recognizes that both the effort of reconstructing events and the reality of having personal accounts that confi rm and also differ from each other in detail, make the process of gap-fi lling itself a kind of fi ction??an attempt to shape the incompleteness that is inherent to the story. An earlier reviewer said of the book, ""Eli's Story combines the care of a scholar with the care of a daughter."" Both scholars and general readers interested in Holocaust narratives will be moved by this monograph.

Memory in Hungarian Fascism: A Cultural History argues that fascist memory had a key role in the historical formation and later return of fascism. Tracing the trajectory of a perennial figure of fascist memory, the cult of Eszter Solymosi, from interwar Hungary through the Cold War West to contemporary Hungary, the book covers a century of fascism and offers a unique combination of fascism studies and memory studies. How did fascists challenge liberal memory after the First World War? How did the memory culture they created come to frame and feed the Second World War and the genocide? In what ways did fascist memory transform as they navigated the challenges of exile in a profoundly changed political landscape and tried to counter the postwar order? And what role did their legacy, carefully crafted for a post-Communist future, play as later neo-fascists rejected democratic transformation? Eventually, as fascist memory travelled across time and space, the book argues, it contributed to the political challenges that we face today. Based on a variety of unpublished sources, the book offers new insights for students of memory, Holocaust, fascism, and antisemitism studies, Jewish studies, Central and Eastern European history, and Hungarian studies.

Leon Leyson (born Leib Lezjon) was only ten years old when the Nazis invaded Poland and his family was forced to relocate to the Krakow ghetto. With incredible luck, perseverance and grit, Leyson was able to survive the sadism of the Nazis, including that of the demonic Amon Goeth, commandant of Plaszow, the concentration camp outside Krakow. Ultimately, it was the generosity and cunning of one man, a man named Oskar Schindler, who saved Leon Leyson's life, and the lives of his mother, his father, and two of his four siblings, by adding their names to his list of workers in his factory - a list that became world renowned: Schindler's List. This, the only memoir published by a former Schindler's List child, perfectly captures the innocence of a small boy who goes through the unthinkable. Most notable is the lack of rancour, the lack of venom, and the abundance of dignity in Mr Leyson's telling. The Boy on the Wooden Boxis a legacy of hope, a memoir unlike anything you've ever read.

This book presents the results of comprehensive research into the world's Jewish press during the Second World War and explores its stance in the face of annihilation of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime in Europe. The research is based on the major Jewish newspapers that were published in four countries Palestine, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union and in three languages Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. The Jewish press frequently described the situation of the Jewish people in occupied countries. It urged the Jewish leaders and institutions to act in rescue of their brethren. It protested vigorously against the refusal of the democratic leadership to recognize that the Jewish plight was unique because of the Nazi intention to annihilate Jews as a people. Yosef Gorny argues that the Jewish press was the persistent open national voice fighting on behalf of the Jewish people suffering and perishing under Nazi occupation."

East Germany's ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany's name during the Third Reich. Instead, it cast communists as both victims of and victors over National Socialist oppression while marginalizing discussions of Jewish suffering. Yet for the 1977 Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture submitted Jakob der Lugner - a film focused exclusively on Jewish victimhood that would become the only East German film to ever be officially nominated. By combining close analyses of key films with extensive archival research, this book explores how GDR filmmakers depicted Jews and the Holocaust in a country where memories of Nazi persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political.

In the 1930s, Carl Goerdeler, the mayor of Leipzig and, as prices commissioner, a cabinet-level official, engaged in active opposition against the persecution of the Jews in Germany and in Eastern Europe. He did this openly until 1938 and then secretly in contact with the British Foreign Office. Having failed to change Hitler's policy against the Jews, Goerdeler joined forces with military and civil conspirators against the regime. He was hanged for 'treason' on 2 February 1945. This book describes the actions of Carl Goerdeler, the German resistance leader who consistently engaged in efforts to protect the Jews against persecution. Using new evidence and thus far under-researched documents, including a memorandum written by Goerdeler at the end of 1941 with a proposal for the status of the Jews in the world, the book fundamentally changes our understanding of Goerdeler's plan and presents a new view of the German resistance to Hitler.

Much post-Holocaust Jewish thought published in North America has assumed that the Holocaust shattered traditional religious categories that had been used by Jews to account for historical catastrophes. But most traditional Jewish thinkers during the war saw no such overwhelming of tradition in the death and suffering delivered to Jews by Nazis. Through a comparative reading of postwar North American and wartime Orthodox Jewish texts about the Holocaust, Barbara Krawcowicz shows that these sources differ in the paradigms-modern and historicist for North American thinkers, traditional and covenantal for Orthodox thinkers-in which they employ historical events.

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'.

When the Holocaust broke out in Europe, Hansi and Joel Brand were joined by Israel (Rezso) Kasztner to launch an organized effort to save thousands of human lives. Their efforts, which involved playing a dangerous bluffing game against the Nazi regime, helped to end the Auschwitz extermination. Their success put them at odds with the political machine of the young state of Israel. Politicians wanted the public to believe that there was nothing they could do, a sentiment which many still believe to this day. This cover-up led to Israel's first politically-motivated homicide.

When the Holocaust broke out in Europe, Hansi and Joel Brand were joined by Israel (Rezso) Kasztner to launch an organized effort to save thousands of human lives. Their efforts, which involved playing a dangerous bluffing game against the Nazi regime, helped to end the Auschwitz extermination. Their success put them at odds with the political machine of the young state of Israel. Politicians wanted the public to believe that there was nothing they could do, a sentiment which many still believe to this day. This cover-up led to Israel's first politically-motivated homicide.