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Books > History > European history > From 1900 > Second World War
Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when
he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car
ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father's
attempted suicide, Karen Baum Gordon, Rudy's daughter, began a
sincere effort to understand the sequence of events that led her
father to that dreadful day in 2002. What she found were hidden
scars of generational struggles reaching back to the camps and
ghettos of the Third Reich. In The Last Letter: A Father's
Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust,
Gordon explores not only her father's life story, but also the
stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparents-two
Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s
and early years of World War II. This investigation of her family's
history is grounded in eighty-eight letters written mostly by Julie
Baum, Rudy's mother and Karen's grandmother, to Rudy between
November 1936 and October 1941. In five parts, Gordon examines
pieces of these well-worn, handwritten letters and other archival
documents in order to discover what her family experienced during
the Nazi period and the psychological impact that reverberated from
it in the generations that followed. Part of the Legacies of War
series, The Last Letter is a captivating family memoir that spans
events from the 1930s and Hitler's rise to power, through World War
II and the Holocaust, to the present-day United States. In
recreating the fatal journeys of her grandparents and tracing her
father's efforts to save them an ocean away in America, Gordon
discovers the forgotten fragments of her family's history and a
vivid sense of her own Jewish identity. By inviting readers along
on this journey, Gordon manages to honor victim and survivor alike
and shows subsequent generations-now many years after the tragic
events of World War II-what it means to remember.
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.
For years, the history of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany was
hidden and distorted by Cold War politics. Providing a much-needed
corrective, Red Orchestra presents the dramatic story of a circle
of German citizens who opposed Hitler from the start, choosing to
stay in Germany to resist Nazism and help its victims. The book
shines a light on this critical movement which was made up of
academics, theatre people, and factory workers; Protestants,
Catholics and Jews; around 150 Germans all told and from all walks
of life. Drawing on archives, memoirs, and interviews with
survivors, award-winning scholar and journalist Anne Nelson
presents a compelling portrait of the men and women involved, and
the terrifying day-to-day decisions in their lives, from the Nazi
takeover in 1933 to their Gestapo arrest in 1942. Nelson traces the
story of the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) resistance movement
within the context of German history, showing the stages of the
Nazi movement and regime from the 1920s to the end of the Second
World War. She also constructs the narrative around the life of
Greta Kuckhoff and other female figures whose role in the anti-Nazi
resistance fight is too-often unrecognised or under appreciated.
This revised edition includes: * A new introduction which explores
elements of the Red Orchestra’s experience that resonate with our
times, including: the impact of new media technologies; the dangers
of political polarization; and the way the judiciary can be shaped
to further the ends of autocracy. The introduction will also
address the long-standing misconception that the German Resistance
only took action when it was clear that Germany was losing the war.
* Historiographic updates throughout the book which take account of
recent literature and additional archival sources
This compelling and candid memoir by Mindy Weisel, an
internationally acclaimed artist and author, traces her search to
find beauty in her life, which began as a child born in the
Bergen-Belsen Displaced Person's Camp to parents who had survived
the Auschwitz concentration camp. This is not her parents' story,
rather, it is a courageous and honest portrait of her struggle to
understand the black hole she was born into. Her successful journey
in becoming an artist with her own voice, and an unshakable will to
live with beauty, is most inspiring. By weaving an eloquent
tapestry of her art, narrative, poetry and journals, Ms. Weisel
offers moving insights into her life and work, especially her
deep-seated conviction that beauty and love can overcome tragedy.
AFTER: The Obligation of Beauty immerses the reader in Mindy's
astonishing body of paintings and glass works that explore the
subtleties of color as a means in expressing emotion. The "second
generation," as her generation of survivors' children are referred
to, were faced not only with the tragedy their parents had endured
but also with their own feelings of guilt and despair. The process
of creating art not only became an antidote to the pain and
suffering she witnessed and felt, but it also became an
"obligation" for finding joy and love in the face of pain. Each
chapter of AFTER is accompanied by paintings relating to different
periods of Mindy Weisel's life - a life filled with accomplishment,
meaning, love and fulfillment, personally and professionally.
Emil Fackenheim was the last in a long line of Jewish philosophers
to emerge from Germany, the modern center of Western philosophy,
following Moses Mendelssohn, Leo Baeck, and Martin Buber. In this
revealing book, David Patterson explores Fackenheim's rigorous
pursuit of a philosophical response to the tragedy of the
Holocaust. Fackenheim's writing sheds light on the tensions between
Jewish thinking and German philosophy, illustrating how elements of
the latter were used by the Nazis to justify Jewish annihilation.
In addition, he emphasizes the important implications of defining
Jewish philosophy as its own entity, separate from the tenets of
the Jewish cultural tradition.
Many stories of courage have been told about the sacrifices made by
individuals and families during World War 2 -- this is one to stir
the emotions of all who read it.
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The Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto
(Hardcover)
Maria Ciesielska; Edited by Tali Nates, Jeanette Friedman, Luc Albinski; Foreword by Michael Berenbaum; Translated by …
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R2,993
Discovery Miles 29 930
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Based on years of archival research, 'The Doctors of the Warsaw
Ghetto' is the most detailed study ever undertaken into the fate of
more than 800 Jewish doctors who devoted themselves, in many cases
until the day they died, to the care of the sick and the dying in
the Ghetto. The functioning of the Ghetto hospitals, clinics and
laboratories is explained in fascinating detail. Readers will learn
about the ground-breaking research undertaken in the Ghetto as well
as about the underground medical university that prepared hundreds
of students for a career in medicine; a career that, in most cases,
was to be cut brutally short within weeks of them completing their
first year of studies.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is considered one of the most
influential philosophers of the twentieth century in spite of his
well-known transgressions-his complicity with National Socialism
and his inability to show remorse or compassion for its victims. In
The Duplicity of Philosophy's Shadow, Elliot R. Wolfson intervenes
in a debate that has seen much attention in scholarly and popular
media from a unique perspective, as a scholar of Jewish mysticism
and philosophy who has been profoundly influenced by Heidegger's
work. Wolfson sets out to probe Heidegger's writings to expose what
remains unthought. In spite of Heidegger's explicit anti-Semitic
statements, Wolfson reveals some crucial aspects of his
thinking-including criticism of the biological racism and militant
apocalypticism of Nazism-that betray an affinity with dimensions of
Jewish thought: the triangulation of the concepts of homeland,
language, and peoplehood; Jewish messianism and the notion of
historical time as the return of the same that is always different;
inclusion, exclusion, and the status of the other; the problem of
evil in kabbalistic symbolism. Using Heidegger's own methods,
Wolfson reflects on the inextricable link of truth and untruth and
investigates the matter of silence and the limits of speech. He
challenges the tendency to bifurcate the relationship of the
political and the philosophical in Heidegger's thought, but parts
company with those who write off Heidegger as a Nazi ideologue.
Ultimately, The Duplicity of Philosophy's Shadow argues, the
greatness and relevance of Heidegger's work is that he presents us
with the opportunity to think the unthinkable as part of our
communal destiny as historical beings.
Lilo was a child during the Holocaust. Now that the older
generation of Holocaust survivors, such as her parents, have mostly
passed on, she and others like her are the "last survivors of the
Holocaust" -- the final witnesses to the horrors that Hitler
perpetrated on the Jewish people. After Lilo attended a workshop
given by Hana Greenfield, noted author, lecturer, and Holocaust
child survivor, where she spoke about the importance of child
survivors sharing their experiences of the Holocaust, Lilo began
compiling her history and experiences. She started speaking to
schools and groups, and received more and more requests to share
her story, presented here in a special volume illustrated by Lilo
herself. Through narrative, poems and illustrations, this book
shares the voice of a childhood lived in the shadow of the ultimate
darkness.
Contrary to the common notion that news regarding the genocide was
unavailable or unreliable, news from Europe was often communicated
to North American Poles through the Polish-language press. This
work engages with the origins of this debate and demonstrates that
the Polish-language press covered seminal issues during the
inter-war years, the war, and the Holocaust extensively on their
front and main story pages, and were extremely responsive,
professional, and vocal in their journalism. From Polish-Jewish
relations, to the cause of the Second World War and subsequently
the development of genocide-related policy, North American Poles,
had a different perspective from mainstream society on the "causes
and effects" of what was happening. New research for this book
examines attitudes toward Jews prior to and during the Holocaust,
and how information on such attitudes was disseminated. It utilizes
original research from selected Polish newspapers, predominantly
the Republika-Gornik, as well as survivor testimony from 1926-1945.
May God Avenge Their Blood: a Holocaust Memoir Triptych presents
three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks (1912-1974). In
"Those Who Didn't Survive," Bryks portrays inter-war life in his
shtetl Skarzysko-Kamienna, Poland with great flair and rich
anthropological detail, rendering a haunting collective portrait of
an annihilated community. "The Fugitives" vividly charts the
confusion and terror of the early days of World War II in the
industrial city of Lodz and elsewhere. In the final memoir, "From
Agony to Life," Bryks tells of his imprisonment in Auschwitz and
other camps. Taken together, the triptych takes the reader on a
wide-ranging journey from Hasidic life before the Holocaust to the
chaos of the early days of war and then to the horrors of Nazi
captivity. This translation by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub brings the
extraordinary memoirs of an important Yiddish writer to
English-language readers for the first time.
On a quiet winter night in 1944, as part of their support of the
Third Reich's pogrom of European Jews, French authorities arrested
Ida Grinspan, a young Jewish girl hiding in a neighbor's home in
Nazi-occupied France. Of the many lessons she would learn after her
arrest and the subsequent year and a half in Auschwitz, the most
notorious concentration camp of the Holocaust, the first was that
""barbarity enters on tiptoes . . . [even] in a hamlet where
everything seemed to promise the peaceful slumber of places
forgotten by history."" Translated by Charles B. Potter, You've Got
to Tell Them is the result of a friendship that formed in 1988,
when Grinspan returned to visit Auschwitz for the first time since
1945 and where she met Bertrand Poirot-Delpeche, a distinguished
writer for the Paris newspaper Le Monde. Sometimes speaking alone,
sometimes speaking in close alternation, Grinspan and
Poirot-Delpeche simultaneously narrate the story of her survival
and the decades that followed, including how she began lecturing in
schools and guiding groups that visited the death camps. Replete
with pedagogical resources including a discussion of how and why
the Holocaust should be taught, a timeline, and suggestions for
further reading, Potter's expert translation of You've Got to Tell
Them showcases a clear and moving narrative of a young French girl
overcoming one of the darkest periods in her life and in European
history.
Given their geographical separation from Europe, ethno-religious
and cultural diversity, and subordinate status within the Nazi
racial hierarchy, Middle Eastern societies were both hospitable as
well as hostile to National Socialist ideology during the 1930s and
1940s. By focusing on Arab and Turkish reactions to German
anti-Semitism and the persecution and mass-murder of European Jews
during this period, this expansive collection surveys the
institutional and popular reception of Nazism in the Middle East
and North Africa. It provides nuanced and scholarly yet accessible
case studies of the ways in which nationalism, Islam,
anti-Semitism, and colonialism intertwined, all while sensitive to
the region's political, cultural, and religious complexities.
The remarkable story of how a consul and his allies helped save
thousands of Jews from the Holocaust in one of the greatest rescue
operations of the twentieth century. In May 1940, desperate Jewish
refugees in Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania, faced annihilation in
the Holocaust - until an ordinary Dutch man became their saviour.
Over a period of ten feverish days, Jan Zwartendijk, the newly
appointed Dutch consul, wrote thousands of visas that would
ostensibly allow Jews to travel to the Dutch colony of Curacao on
the other side of the world. With the help of Chiune Sugihara, the
consul for Japan, while taking great personal and professional
risks, Zwartendijk enabled up to 10,000 men, women, and children to
escape the country on the Trans-Siberian Express, through Soviet
Russia to Japan and then on to China, saving them from the Nazis
and the concentration camps. Most of the Jews whom Zwartendijk
helped escape survived the war, and they and their descendants
settled in America, Canada, Australia, and other countries.
Zwartendijk and Sugihara were true heroes, and yet they were both
shunned by their own countries after the war, and their courageous,
unstinting actions have remained relatively unknown. In The Just,
renowned Dutch author Jan Brokken wrests this heroic story from
oblivion and traces the journeys of a number of the rescued Jews.
This epic narrative shows how, even in life-threatening
circumstances, some people make the just choice at the right time.
It is a lesson in character and courage.
'An extraordinary book . . . vivid and heart-breaking' The Jewish
Chronicle Through the discovery of a precious friendship album
which belonged to 12-year-old Alie, a Jewish schoolgirl in
Amsterdam, Claudia Carli has traced and preserved the lives of an
entire class of girls, most of whom did not survive the War. Alie
and her friends are brought touchingly and vividly to life, along
with their writings, in this extraordinary book. Their everyday
hopes, pleasures and longings are offset by the constant fear of a
knock on the door, a missing friend from class, a family member
taken away. Alie and her mother were to die in Sobibor in 1943.
Alie's sister Gretha survived Auschwitz and kept her promise to her
sister to preserve the friendship album so long as she hoped to
live. This book will sit alongside Anne Frank's diary and The
Cutout Girl as a unique window into occupied Amsterdam and the
girls who will now never be forgotten.
On a November evening in 1989, Laura Levitt was raped in her own
bed. Her landlord heard the assault taking place and called 911,
but the police arrived too late to apprehend Laura's attacker. When
they left, investigators took items with them-a pair of sweatpants,
the bedclothes-and a rape exam was performed at the hospital.
However, this evidence was never processed. Decades later, Laura
returns to these objects, viewing them not as clues that will lead
to the identification of her assailant but rather as a means of
engaging traumatic legacies writ large. The Objects That Remain is
equal parts personal memoir and fascinating examination of the ways
in which the material remains of violent crimes inform our
experience of, and thinking about, trauma and loss. Considering
artifacts in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and
evidence in police storage facilities across the country, Laura's
story moves between intimate trauma, the story of an unsolved rape,
and genocide. Throughout, she asks what it might mean to do justice
to these violent pasts outside the juridical system or through
historical empiricism, which are the dominant ways in which we
think about evidence from violent crimes and other highly traumatic
events. Over the course of her investigation, the author reveals
how these objects that remain and the stories that surround them
enable forms of intimacy. In this way, she models for us a
different kind of reckoning, where justice is an animating process
of telling and holding.
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The Will To Tell
(Hardcover)
Yitzhak Weizman; Cover design or artwork by Jan Fine; Edited by Leon Zamosc
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R1,049
R838
Discovery Miles 8 380
Save R211 (20%)
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