2018 Book Prize from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies 2018 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature in Nonfiction from the Koffler Centre of the Arts in Toronto When Julija Sukys was a child, her paternal grandfather, Anthony, rarely smiled, and her grandmother, Ona, spoke only in her native Lithuanian. But they still taught Sukys her family's story: that of a proud people forced from their homeland when the soldiers came. In mid-June 1941 three Red Army soldiers arrested Ona and sent her east to Siberia, where she spent seventeen years working on a collective farm. It was all a mistake, the family maintained. Some seventy years after these events, Sukys sat down to write about her grandparents and their survival of a twenty-five-year forced separation and subsequent reunion. Piecing the story together from letters, oral histories, audio recordings, and KGB documents, her research soon revealed a Holocaust-era secret-a family connection to the killing of seven hundred Jews in a small Lithuanian border town. According to KGB documents, the man in charge when those massacres took place was Anthony, Ona's husband. In Siberian Exile Sukys weaves together the two narratives: the story of Ona, noble exile and innocent victim, and that of Anthony, accused war criminal. She examines the stories that communities tell themselves and considers what happens when the stories we've been told all our lives suddenly and irrevocably change, and how forgiveness operates across generations and the barriers of life and death.

This volume is the first ever study to address Jewish forced labor in Poland's General Government during the Holocaust. The study presents German economic policy on the occupied territories, discussing Germany's misappropriation and misuse of available resources-particularly human resources and their inhuman treatment-and how this policy ultimately led to the downfall of the Nazi regime. This fascinating study sheds a light on the mutual dependence of economics and warfare during one of the most difficult periods in human history.

The Number One International Bestseller. The heartbreaking, inspiring true story of a girl sent to Auschwitz who survived the evil Dr Josef Mengele's pseudo-medical experiments. With a foreword by His Holiness Pope Francis. Lidia Maksymowicz was just three years old when she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother, grandparents and foster brother. They were from Belarus, their 'crime' that they supported the partisan resistance to Nazi occupation. Once there, Lidia was picked by Mengele for his experiments and sent to the children's block. It was here that she survived eighteen months of hell. Injected with infectious diseases, desperately malnourished, she came close to death. Her mother - who risked her life to secretly visit Lidia - was her only tie to humanity. By the time Birkenau was liberated her family had disappeared. Even her mother was presumed dead. Lidia was adopted by a woman from the nearby town of Oswiecim. Too traumatised to feel emotion, she was not an easy child to care for but she came to love her adoptive mother and her new home. Then, in 1962, she discovered that her birth parents were still alive. They lived in the USSR - and they wanted her back. Lidia was faced with an agonising choice . . . The Little Girl Who Could Not Cry is powerful, moving and ultimately hopeful, as Lidia comes to terms with the past and finds the strength to share her story - even making headlines when she meets Pope Francis, who kisses her tattoo. Above all she refuses to hate those who hurt her so badly, saying, 'Hate only brings more hate. Love, on the other hand, has the power to redeem.'

Jerzy Einhorn was fourteen years old when the war started. His father Pinkus was "the" tailor of Czestochowa -- a fact, which together with Pinkus's mental resourcefulness would help save the family. This touching memoir, which sold several hundred thousand copies when it was first published in Swedish, documents Jerzy Einhorn's life in Czestochowa before the war, during the war -- in the Czestochowa ghetto and the concentration camp Hasag-Pelcery -- and after the war, when Jerzy came as a refugee to Sweden and started studying medicine. Jerzy Einhorn became a prominent figure in Swedish life, as a Professor of Oncology, a Member of Parliament and a debater. He passed away in 2000. The Maple Tree Behind The Barbed Wire has also been published in Polish and Russian.

Leslie H. Hardman, a Jewish chaplain, entered Belsen camp two days after its liberation by the British Army. This book tells the story of what he found there, and what he did. The horror which first confronts him is overwhelming, and something other than himself makes him stay and face it. In the beginning he feels he is making no inroads into the task he has set himself, that he is a pigmy grappling with a mountain. But with courage and patience he brings faith, comfort and help to the stricken survivors. In his mission he meets some remarkable men and women: Marta the woman doctor, Yankel the strong man, Eva whose love is oddly deflected, Joseph who rises to astonishing heights, and many others. He himself is enmeshed in the life of liberated Belsen, experiencing hope, despair, intolerance, inspiration. This book is an authentic record, written with compassionate understanding. The account of the rebirth of the almost dehumanised survivors is an inspiring, rather than a harrowing narrative. In the simplicity and sincerity of its writing, it tells a moving and vivid story of a crime which has shocked the world, but which should be read and remembered.

New essays on poetical and theoretical responses to the Holocaust's rupture of German and European civilization. Crisis presents chances for change and creativity: Adorno's famous dictum that writing poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric has haunted discourse on poetics, but has also given rise to poetic and theoretical acts of resistance. The essays in this volume discuss postwar poetics in terms of new poetological directions and territory rather than merely destruction of traditions. Embedded in the discourse triggered by Adorno, the volume's foci include the work of Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn, and Ingeborg Bachmann. Other German writers discussed are Ilse Aichinger, Rose Auslander, Charlotte Beradt, Thomas Kling, Heiner Muller, and Nelly Sachs; concrete poetry is also treated. The final section offers comparative views of the poetics of European literary figures such as Jean Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, and Danilo Kis and a consideration of the aesthetics of Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah. Contributors: Chris Bezzel, Manuel Braganca, Gisela Dischner, Rudiger Goerner, Stefan Hajduk, Gert Hofmann, Aniela Knoblich, Rachel MagShamhrain, Marton Marko, Elaine Martin, Barry Murnane, Marko Pajevic, Tatjana Petzer, Renata Plaice,Annette Runte, Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa, Michael Shields, Peter Tame. Gert Hofmann is a Lecturer in German, Comparative Literature, Drama, and Film and Rachel MagShamhrain is a Lecturer in German, Film, and Comparative Literature, both at University College Cork; Marko Pajevic is a Lecturer in German at Queen's University Belfast; Michael Shields is a Lecturer in German at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

This book is the first to bring together analyses of the full range of post-war testimony given by survivors of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando were slave labourers in the gas chambers and crematoria, forced to process and dispose of the bodies of those who were murdered. They have been central to a number of key topics in post-war debates about the Shoah: collaboration, moral compromise and survival, resistance, representation, and the possibility of bearing witness. Their testimony however has mostly met with a reluctance to engage in depth with it. Moving from testimonies produced within the event, the Scrolls of Auschwitz and the Sonderkommando photographs, to testimonies given at trials and for video archives, and to the paintings of David Olere and the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, this book demonstrates the importance of their witnessing in the post-war memory of the Holocaust, and provides vital new insights into the questions of representation, memory, gender, and the Shoah.

In this book, Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. This ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.

In the Third Reich, political dissidents were not the only ones liable to be punished for their crimes. Their parents, siblings and relatives also risked reprisals. This concept - known as Sippenhaft - was based in ideas of blood and purity. This definitive study surveys the threats, fears and infliction of this part of the Nazi system of terror.

This book explores the work and legacy of Professor David Cesarani OBE, a leading British scholar and expert on Jewish history who helped to shape Holocaust research, remembrance and education in the UK. It is a unique combination of chapters produced by researchers, curators and commemoration activists who either worked with and/or were taught by the late Cesarani. The chapters in this collection consider the legacies of Cesarani's contribution to the discipline of history and the practice of public history. The contributors offer reflections on Cesarani's approach and provide new insights into the study of Anglo-Jewish history, immigrants and minorities and the history and public legacies of the Holocaust.

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.

Germans remember the Nazi past so that it may never happen again. But how has the abstract vow to remember translated into concrete action to prevent new genocides abroad? As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Balkans to prevent a genocide, or would departing from postwar Germany's pacifist tradition open the door to renewed militarism? In short, when Germans said "never again," did they mean "never again Auschwitz" or "never again war"? Looking beyond solemn statements and well-meant monuments, Andrew I. Port examines how the Nazi past shaped German responses to the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda-and further, how these foreign atrocities recast Germans' understanding of their own horrific history. In the late 1970s, the reign of the Khmer Rouge received relatively little attention from a firmly antiwar public that was just "discovering" the Holocaust. By the 1990s, the genocide of the Jews was squarely at the center of German identity, a tectonic shift that inspired greater involvement in Bosnia and, to a lesser extent, Rwanda. Germany's increased willingness to use force in defense of others reflected the enthusiastic embrace of human rights by public officials and ordinary citizens. At the same time, conservatives welcomed the opportunity for a more active international role involving military might-to the chagrin of pacifists and progressives at home. Making the lessons, limits, and liabilities of politics driven by memories of a troubled history harrowingly clear, Never Again is a story with deep resonance for any country confronting a dark past.

After the Holocaust's near complete destruction of European Yiddish cultural centers, the Yiddish language was largely viewed as a remnant of the past, tragically eradicated in its prime. In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust, Jan Schwarz reveals that, on the contrary, Yiddish culture in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust was in dynamic flux. Yiddish writers and cultural organizations maintained a staggering level of activity in fostering publications and performances, collecting archival and historical materials, and launching young literary talents. Schwarz traces the transition from the Old World to the New through the works of seven major Yiddish writers-including well-known figures (Isaac Bashevis Singer, Avrom Sutzkever, Yankev Glatshteyn, and Chaim Grade) and some who are less well known (Leib Rochman, Aaron Zeitlin, and Chava Rosenfarb). The first section, Ground Zero, presents writings forged by the crucible of ghettos and concentration camps in Vilna, Lodz, and Minsk-Mazowiecki. Subsequent sections, Transnational Ashkenaz and Yiddish Letters in New York, examine Yiddish culture behind the Iron Curtain, in Israel and the Americas. Two appendixes list Yiddish publications in the book series Dos poylishe yidntum (published in Buenos Aires, 1946-66) and offer transliterations of Yiddish quotes. Survivors and Exiles charts a transnational post-Holocaust network in which the conflicting trends of fragmentation and globalization provided a context for Yiddish literature and artworks of great originality. Schwarz includes a wealth of examples and illustrations from the works under discussion, as well as photographs of creators, making this volume not only a critical commentary on Yiddish culture but also an anthology of sorts. Readers interested in Yiddish studies, Holocaust studies, and modern Jewish studies will find Survivors and Exiles a compelling contribution to these fields.

In the terrifying summer of 1942 in Belgium, when the Nazis began the brutal roundup of Jewish families, parents searched desperately for safe haven for their children. As Suzanne Vromen reveals in Hidden Children of the Holocaust, these children found sanctuary with other families and schools--but especially in Roman Catholic convents and orphanages.
Vromen has interviewed not only those who were hidden as children, but also the Christian women who rescued them, and the nuns who gave the children shelter, all of whose voices are heard in this powerfully moving book. Indeed, here are numerous first-hand memoirs of life in a wartime convent--the secrecy, the humor, the admiration, the anger, the deprivation, the cruelty, and the kindness--all with the backdrop of the terror of the Nazi occupation. We read the stories of the women of the Resistance who risked their lives in placing Jewish children in the care of the Church, and of the Mothers Superior and nuns who sheltered these children and hid their identity from the authorities. Perhaps most riveting are the stories told by the children themselves--abruptly separated from distraught parents and given new names, the children were brought to the convents with a sense of urgency, sometimes under the cover of darkness. They were plunged into a new life, different from anything they had ever known, and expected to adapt seamlessly. Vromen shows that some adapted so well that they converted to Catholicism, at times to fit in amid the daily prayers and rituals, but often because the Church appealed to them. Vromen also examines their lives after the war, how they faced the devastating loss of parents to the Holocaust, struggled to regaintheir identities and sought to memorialize those who saved them.
This remarkable book offers an inspiring chronicle of the brave individuals who risked everything to protect innocent young strangers, as well as a riveting account of the "hidden children" who lived to tell their stories.

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.

Based on work conducted by scholars as part of a Summer Research Workshop organized by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2007, this book takes a fresh look at how American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews responded to the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany and German-occupied territory in the 1930s. The essays focus specifically on American religious responses to the November 9-10, 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Today understood as the first act of the Holocaust because of its systematized brutality against Germany's Jews, Kristallnacht, generated a dramatic response among mainline Protestants, Catholic clerical and lay leaders, Orthodox Jews, Protestant fundamentalists, and Jewish War Veterans. Together, the essays represent the first examination of multi-religious group responses to the beginnings of one of the pivotal moral events of the twentieth century, the Holocaust. They possess implications for the history of anti-Semitism globally and in the U.S., the history of interfaith cooperation and religious belief in America, the influence of American ideals on religious thought, and the impact of historical events on Jewish and Christian theology.

Hostile Takeovers revises current understanding of how German-Jewish companies were cheaply purchased. This book argues that banks earned fees by recalling loans from large Jewish firms and providing funds to non-Nazi businessmen. Because of the right-wing orientation of the courts, the original proprietors weren't defended by the law. As a bottom-up process, this 1933-1935 activity occurred due to anti-Semitism, whereas scholarship focus on the top-down elimination of smaller Jewish firms in 1938.

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.

This book provides readers with an increased understanding of and sensitivity to the many powerful ways in which personal names are used by both perpetrators and victims during wartime. Whether to declare allegiance or seek refuge, names are routinely used to survive under life-threatening conditions. To illustrate this point, this book concentrates on one of the most terrifying and yet fascinating periods of modern history: the Holocaust. More specifically, this book will examine the different ways in which personal names were used by Nationalist Socialists and targeted victims of their genocidal ideology. Although there are many excellent scientific and popular works which have dealt with the Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, to my knowledge, there are none which have examined the importance of naming during this period. This oversight is significant when one considers the incredible importance of personal names during this time. For example, many people are aware of the fact that Jewish residents were forced to wear a yellow star (the Star of David) on their outermost apparel to distinguish them from the Aryan population. It is also generally known, albeit much less so, that as of 1938, all Jewish citizens living within Nazi German or one of its occupied territories were also required to have either the word "Jewish" or the letter "J" stamped in their passports. However, comparatively few people realize is that before those regulations were implemented, Nazi leaders had decreed that all Jewish women and men must add the names 'Sara' and 'Israel' respectively to their given names. Once the deportations began, the perfidious logic behind this naming (onomastic) legislation became clear: it made it that much easier to pinpoint Jewish residents on official governmental listings (e.g. housing registries, voting rosters, pay rolls, labor union registers, bank accounts, school, university, military, and hospital records, etc.). Once the Jewish residents were identified, new lists of names were drawn up for people designated for relocation to a deportation center; relocation to labour camp; or transportation to an extermination center. By using first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors, the direct descendants of Nazi war criminals, and chilling cases extracted from international and national archival records, this book presents a harrowing depiction of the way personal names were used during the Third Reich to systematically murder millions to achieve Hitler's dream of a society devoid of cultural diversity. Importantly, the practice of using personal names and naming to identify victims is not an historical anomaly of World War II but is a widespread sociolinguistic practice which has been followed in modern acts of genocide as well. From Rwanda to Bosnia, Berlin to Washington, when normal governmental controls are abridged and ethical boundaries designed to protect the human rights and liberties are violated, very quickly something as simple as a person's name can be used to determine who lives and who dies.

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.

Keepers of Memory answers the question of how descendants of Holocaust survivors remember the Holocaust, the event that preceded their birth but has shaped their lives. Through personal stories and in-depth interviews, Rich examines the complicated relationship between history, truth, and memory. Keepers of Memory explores topics that include how stories of survival become stories of either empowerment or trauma for the descending generations, career choice as a form of commemoration, religion, and family life. Ultimately, this work paints a compelling picture of the promises and pitfalls of memory and points to implications for memory and commemoration in the coming generations.