For the last decade scholars have been questioning the idea that the Holocaust was not talked about in any way until well into the 1970s. After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence is the first collection of authoritative, original scholarship to expose a serious misreading of the past on which, controversially, the claims for a Holocaust industry rest. Taking an international approach this bold new book exposes the myth and opens the way for a sweeping reassessment of Jewish life in the postwar era, a life lived in the pervasive, shared awareness that Jews had narrowly survived a catastrophe that had engulfed humanity as a whole but claimed two-thirds of their number.

The chapters include:

A breakthrough volume in the debate about the Myth of Silence, this is a must for all students of Holocaust and genocide.

The majority of Poland's prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Wolfson History Prize and a finalist for the 2021 Cundill History Prize Told for the first time from their perspective, the story of children who survived the chaos and trauma of the Holocaust-named a best history book of 2020 by the Daily Telegraph "Impressive, beautifully written, judicious and thoughtful. . . . Will be a major milestone in the history of the Holocaust and its legacy."-Mark Roseman, author of The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressing question for the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, whose prewar memories were vague or nonexistent. In this beautifully written account, Rebecca Clifford follows the lives of one hundred Jewish children out of the ruins of conflict through their adulthood and into old age. Drawing on archives and interviews, Clifford charts the experiences of these child survivors and those who cared for them-as well as those who studied them, such as Anna Freud. Survivors explores the aftermath of the Holocaust in the long term, and reveals how these children-often branded "the lucky ones"-had to struggle to be able to call themselves "survivors" at all. Challenging our assumptions about trauma, Clifford's powerful and surprising narrative helps us understand what it was like living after, and living with, childhoods marked by rupture and loss.

This book is a collection of some of the most influential recent writing on vital aspects of Nazi Germany. It provides readers with an insight into new perspectives on traditional understandings of the Third Reich as well as covering all the central aspects of the period, from the rise of the Nazis and the internal organization of the regime, to Germany's role in the Second World War.

The readings incorporate discussion of social and economic change, the personality of Hitler, the role of women in Nazi Germany, the involvement of German armed forces in the atrocities of the Second World War, the relationship between the German people and the Gestapo and, most controversially, continuing debates about German public opinion and the Holocaust. A key feature is the inclusion of three seminal articles by German historians translated into English here for the first time. The volume begins with a substantial editorial introduction to current issues and each essay is prefaced with a headnote, setting it in its historiographical context.

Recently, there has been a major shift in the focus of historical research on World War II towards the study of the involvements of scholars and academic institutions in the crimes of the Third Reich. The roots of this involvement go back to the 1920s. At that time right-wing scholars participated in the movement to revise the Versailles Treaty and to create a new German national identity. The contribution of geopolitics to this development is notorious. But there were also the disciplines of history, geography, ethnography, art history, archeology, sociology, and demography that devised a new nationalist ideology and propaganda. Its scholars established an extensive network of personal and institutional contacts. This volume deals with these scholars and their agendas. They provided the Nazi regime with ideas of territorial expansion, colonial exploitation and racist exclusion culminating in the Holocaust. Apart from developing ideas and concepts, scholars also actively worked in the SS and Wehrmacht when Hitler began to implement its criminal policies in World War II. This collection of original essays, written by the foremost European scholars in this field, describes key figures and key programs supporting the expansion and exploitation of the Third Reich. In particular, they analyze the historical, geographic, ethnographical and ethno-political ideas behind the ethnic cleansing and looting of cultural treasures.

Architectural design can play a role in helping make the past present in meaningful ways when applied to preexisting buildings and places that carry notable and troubling pasts. In this comparative analysis, Rumiko Handa establishes the critical role architectural designs play in presenting difficult pasts by examining documentation centers on National Socialism in Germany. Presenting Difficult Pasts Through Architecture analyzes four centers - Cologne, Nuremberg, Berlin, and Munich - from the point of view of their shared intent to make the past present at National Socialists' perpetrator sites. Applying original frameworks, Handa considers what more architectural design could do toward meaningful representations and interpretations of difficult pasts. This book is a must-read for students, practitioners, and academics interested in how architectural design can participate in presenting the difficult pasts of historical places in meaningful ways.

Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This volume addresses manifestations of Holocaust-engendered global discourse by critically examining their function and inherent dilemmas, and the ways in which Holocaust-related matters still instigate public debate and academic deliberation. It contends that the contradiction between the totalizing logic of globalization and the assumed uniqueness of the Holocaust generates continued intellectual and practical discontent.

Atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust were photographed more intensely that any before. In the time since the images were taken they have been subjected to a perplexing variety of treatments: variously ignored, suppressed, distorted and above all exploited for propaganda purposes. With the use of many photographs, including some never before seen, this book traces the history of this process and asks whether the images can be true representations of the events they were depicting. Yet their provenance, Janina Struk argues, has been less important that the uses to which a wide range of political interests has put them, from the desperate attempts of the war-time underground to provide hard evidence of the death camps to the memorial museums of Europe, the US and Israel today.

The genocide of Jewish and non-Jewish civilians perpetrated by the German regime during World War Two continues to confront scholars with elusive questions even after nearly seventy years and hundreds of studies. This multi-contributory work is a landmark publication that sees experts renowned in their field addressing these questions in light of current research. A comprehensive introduction to the history of the Holocaust, this volume has 42 chapters which add important depth to the academic study of the Holocaust, both geographically and topically. The chapters address such diverse issues as: continuities in German and European history with respect to genocide prior to 1939 the eugenic roots of Nazi anti-Semitism the response of Europe's Jewish Communities to persecution and destruction the Final Solution as the German occupation instituted it across Europe rescue and rescuer motivations the problem of prosecuting war crimes gender and Holocaust experience the persecution of non-Jewish victims the Holocaust in postwar cultural venues. This important collection will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of the Holocaust.

This book tells the life story of an extremely engaging and charming Polish Jew, Shmuel Braw (1906-1992), who lived through the traumatic historical events that shaped Jewish experiences in the twentieth century. The story is told largely in Shmuel's own Yiddish- inflected Australian English to two avid listeners: Calvin Goldscheider, a social scientist, and Jeffrey M. Green, a writer and translator. Both the Holocaust and Shmuel's harrowing experience as a prisoner in a Soviet labor camp in Siberia figure prominently in this book, but Shmuel also describes his community of Tarnow, a town in southeastern Poland, in rich detail. After World War II, Shmuel settled in Melbourne, Australia before eventually immigrating to Israel. Shmuel was lively, colorful, entertaining, deeply concerned about other people, and a devoted and kind family man. The book is true to Shmuel's spirit and shares the life of a man whom everyone fondly remembers as a typical extraordinary Jew.

In this uplifting memoir in the vein of The Last Lecture and Man’s Search for Meaning, a Holocaust survivor pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story, sharing his wisdom, and living his best possible life.

Born in Leipzig, Germany, into a Jewish family, Eddie Jaku was a teenager when his world was turned upside-down. On November 9, 1938, during the terrifying violence of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, Eddie was beaten by SS thugs, arrested, and sent to a concentration camp with thousands of other Jews across Germany. Every day of the next seven years of his life, Eddie faced unimaginable horrors in Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and finally on a forced death march during the Third Reich’s final days. The Nazis took everything from Eddie—his family, his friends, and his country. But they did not break his spirit.

Against unbelievable odds, Eddie found the will to survive. Overwhelming grateful, he made a promise: he would smile every day in thanks for the precious gift he was given and to honor the six million Jews murdered by Hitler. Today, at 100 years of age, despite all he suffered, Eddie calls himself the “happiest man on earth.” In his remarkable memoir, this born storyteller shares his wisdom and reflects on how he has led his best possible life, talking warmly and openly about the power of gratitude, tolerance, and kindness. Life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful. With The Happiest Man on Earth, Eddie shows us how.

Filled with his insights on friendship, family, health, ethics, love, and hatred, and the simple beliefs that have shaped him, The Happiest Man on Earth offers timeless lessons for readers of all ages, especially for young people today.

This celebratory volume consists of nineteen previously published essays by Professor David A. Scrase. These English-language essays are divided into three sections: (1) studies on the twentieth-century German author Wilhelm Lehmann; (2) literary studies on Johannes Bobrowski, Ludwig Greve, Stephan Hermlin, and others; and (3) studies on the literature, art, and film of the Holocaust. The book addresses German literature of the twentieth century in particular, with an emphasis on modern poetry and fiction by East and West German authors. Another theme concerns itself with biographical matters of various authors. While there is an emphasis on the poetry and fiction of Wilhelm Lehmann, the third section on the Holocaust also addresses the important factor of teaching about the Holocaust at schools and on the undergraduate level of colleges and universities. In its entirety the book includes an impressive overview of the rich German literary world of the twentieth century while also stressing the necessary study of the Holocaust through literary and artistic expressions. The detailed analysis of numerous poems will be of much use to students, and some of the articles on the Holocaust will be useful to instructors as they prepare courses on the literature, art, and film dealing with various aspects of the Holocaust.

The recent rise of global antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and American white nationalism has created a dangerous challenge to Holocaust public memory on an unprecedented scale. This book is a timely exploration of the ways in which next-generation Holocaust survivors combine old and new media to bring newer generations of audiences into active engagement with Holocaust histories. Readers have been socialized to expect memorialization artifacts about the Holocaust to come in the form of diaries, memoirs, photos, or documentaries in which gender is often absent or marginalized. This book shows a complex process of remembering the past that can positively shift our orientations toward others. Using gender, performance, and rhetoric as a frame, Lisa Costello questions public memory as gender neutral while showing how new forms of memorialization like digital archives, YouTube posts, hybrid memoirs, and small films build emotional connections that bring us closer to the past.

This unique volume critically discusses the works of fifty of the most influential scholars involved in the study of the Holocaust and genocide. Studying each scholar's background and influences, the authors examine the ways in which their major works have been received by critics and supporters, and analyse each thinker's contributions to the field. Key figures discussed range from historians and philosophers, to theologians, anthropologists, art historians and sociologists, including: Hannah Arendt Christopher Browning Primo Levi Raphael Lemkin Jacques Semelin Saul Friedlander Samantha Power Hans Mommsen Emil Fackenheim Helen Fein Adam Jones Ben Kiernan. A thoughtful collection of groundbreaking thinkers, this book is an ideal resource for academics, students, and all those interested in both the emerging and rapidly evolving field of Genocide Studies and the established field of Holocaust Studies.

Surviving the Holocaust is a compelling sociological account of two brothers who survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. One brother, the author's father, endured several concentration camps, including the infamous camp at Auschwitz, as well as a horrific winter death march; while the other brother, the author's uncle, survived outside the camps by passing as a Catholic among anti-Semitic Poles, including a group of anti-Nazi Polish Partisans, eventually becoming an officer in the Soviet army.

As an exemplary "theorized life history," Surviving the Holocaust applies concepts from life course theory to interpret the trajectories of the brothers' lives, enhancing this approach with insights from agency-structure and collective memory theory. Challenging the conventional wisdom that survival was simply a matter of luck, it highlights the prewar experiences, agentive decision-making and risk-taking, and collective networks that helped the brothers elude the death grip of the Nazi regime. Surviving the Holocaust also shows how one family's memory of the Holocaust is commingled with the memories of larger collectivities, including nations-states and their institutions, and how the memories of individual survivors are infused with collective symbolic meaning.

Surviving the Holocaust is a compelling sociological account of two brothers who survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. One brother, the author s father, endured several concentration camps, including the infamous camp at Auschwitz, as well as a horrific winter death march; while the other brother, the author s uncle, survived outside the camps by passing as a Catholic among anti-Semitic Poles, including a group of anti-Nazi Polish Partisans, eventually becoming an officer in the Soviet army.

As an exemplary "theorized life history," Surviving the Holocaust applies concepts from life course theory to interpret the trajectories of the brothers lives, enhancing this approach with insights from agency-structure and collective memory theory. Challenging the conventional wisdom that survival was simply a matter of luck, it highlights the prewar experiences, agentive decision-making and risk-taking, and collective networks that helped the brothers elude the death grip of the Nazi regime. Surviving the Holocaust also shows how one family s memory of the Holocaust is commingled with the memories of larger collectivities, including nations-states and their institutions, and how the memories of individual survivors are infused with collective symbolic meaning.

How do the spaces of the past stay with us through representations-whether literary or photographic? How has the Holocaust registered in our increasingly globally connected consciousness? What does it mean that this European event is often used as an interpretive or representational touchstone for genocides and traumas globally? In this interdisciplinary study, Kaplan asks and attempts to answer these questions by looking at historically and geographically diverse spaces, photographs, and texts concerned with the physical and/or mental landscape of the Holocaust and its transformations from the postwar period to the early twenty-first century. Examining the intersections of landscape, postmemory, and trauma, Kaplan's text offers a significant contribution to our understanding of the spatial, visual, and literary reach of the Holocaust.

This book analyzes the role and function of an Italian deportation camp during and immediately after World War Two within the context of Italian, European, and Holocaust history. Drawing upon archival documents, trial proceedings, memoirs, and testimonies, Herr investigates the uses of Fossoli as an Italian prisoner-of-war camp for Allied soldiers captured in North Africa (1942-43), a Nazi deportation camp for Jews and political prisoners (1943-44), a postwar Italian prison for Fascists, German soldiers, and displaced persons (1945-47), and a Catholic orphanage (1947-52). This case study shines a spotlight on victims, perpetrators, Resistance fighters, and local collaborators to depict how the Holocaust unfolded in a small town and how postwar conditions supported a story of national innocence. This book trains a powerful lens on the multi-layered history of Italy during the Holocaust and illuminates key elements of local involvement largely ignored by Italian wartime and postwar narratives, particularly compensated compliance (compliance for financial gain), the normalization of mass murder, and the industrialization of the Judeocide in Italy.

This unique volume critically discusses the works of fifty of the most influential scholars involved in the study of the Holocaust and genocide. Studying each scholar 's background and influences, the authors examine the ways in which their major works have been received by critics and supporters, and analyse each thinker 's contributions to the field. Key figures discussed range from historians and philosophers, to theologians, anthropologists, art historians and sociologists, including:

• Hannah Arendt
• Christopher Browning
• Primo Levi
• Raphael Lemkin
• Jacques S melin
• Saul Friedl nder
• Samantha Power
• Hans Mommsen
• Emil Fackenheim
• Helen Fein
• Adam Jones
• Ben Kiernan.

A thoughtful collection of groundbreaking thinkers, this book is an ideal resource for academics, students, and all those interested in both the emerging and rapidly evolving field of Genocide Studies and the established field of Holocaust Studies.

This volume provides for the first time a collection of writing that investigates the stories and struggles of survivors in the context of the Jewish resort culture of the Catskills, through new and existing works of fiction and memoir by writers who spent their youths there. It explores how vacationers, resort owners, and workers dealt with a horrific contradiction - the pleasure of their summer haven against the mass extermination of Jews throughout Europe. It also examines the character of Holocaust survivors in the Catskills: in what ways did they people find connection, resolution to conflict, and avenues to come together despite the experiences that set them apart? The book will be useful to those studying Jewish, American, or New York history, the Holocaust and Catskills legacy, United States immigration, American literature, and American culture. The focus on themes of nostalgia, humor, loss, and sexuality will draw general readers as well.

How did the academy react to the rise, dominance, and ultimate fall of Germany's Third Reich? Did German professors of the humanities have to tell themselves lies about their regime's activities or its victims to sleep at night? Did they endorse the regime? Or did they look the other way, whether out of deliberate denial or out of fear for their own personal safety? The Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich is a collection of groundbreaking essays that shed light on this previously overlooked piece of history. The Betrayal of the Humanities accepts the regrettable news that academics and intellectuals in Nazi Germany betrayed the humanities, and explores what went wrong, what occurred at the universities, and what happened to the major disciplines of the humanities under National Socialism. The Betrayal of the Humanities details not only how individual scholars, particular departments, and even entire universities collaborated with the Nazi regime but also examines the legacy of this era on higher education in Germany. In particular, it looks at the peculiar position of many German scholars in the post-war world having to defend their own work, or the work of their mentors, while simultaneously not appearing to accept Nazism.

The man the New York Times has called "the preeminent scholar of the Holocaust" tells the stories of those who caused, experienced, and witnessed the great human catastrophe.

Architectural design can play a role in helping make the past present in meaningful ways when applied to preexisting buildings and places that carry notable and troubling pasts. In this comparative analysis, Rumiko Handa establishes the critical role architectural designs play in presenting difficult pasts by examining documentation centers on National Socialism in Germany. Presenting Difficult Pasts Through Architecture analyzes four centers - Cologne, Nuremberg, Berlin, and Munich - from the point of view of their shared intent to make the past present at National Socialists' perpetrator sites. Applying original frameworks, Handa considers what more architectural design could do toward meaningful representations and interpretations of difficult pasts. This book is a must-read for students, practitioners, and academics interested in how architectural design can participate in presenting the difficult pasts of historical places in meaningful ways.

Over the past decades, the memory of the Holocaust has not only become a common cultural consciousness but also a cultural property shared by people all over the world. This collection brings together academics, critics and creative practitioners from the fields of Holocaust Studies, Literature, History, Media Studies, Creative Writing and German Studies to discuss contemporary trends in Holocaust commemoration and representation in literature, film, TV, the entertainment industry and social media. The essays in this trans-disciplinary collection debate how contemporary culture engages with the legacy of the Holocaust now that, 75 years on from the end of the Second World War, the number of actual survivors is dwindling. It engages with ongoing cultural debates in Holocaust Studies that have seen a development from, largely, testimonial presentations of the Holocaust to more fictional narratives both in literature and film. In addition to a number of chapters focusing in particular on literary trends in Holocaust representation, the collection also assesses other forms of cultural production surrounding the Holocaust, ranging from recent official memorialisation in Germany to Holocaust presentation in film, computer games and social media. The collection also highlights the contributions by creative practitioners such as writers and performers who use drama and the traditional art of storytelling in order to keep memories alive and pass them on to new generations. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

Combining accessible prose with scholarly rigor, The Participants presents fascinating profiles of the all-too-human men who implemented some of the most inhuman acts in history. On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior German government officials attended a short meeting in Berlin to discuss the deportation and murder of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. Despite lasting less than two hours, the Wannsee Conference is today understood as a signal episode in the history of the Holocaust, exemplifying the labor division and bureaucratization that made the "Final Solution" possible. Yet while the conference itself has been exhaustively researched, many of its attendees remain relatively obscure. From the introduction: Ten of the fifteen participants had been to university. Eight of them had even been awarded doctorates, although it should be pointed out that it was considerably easier to gain a doctorate in law or philosophy in the 1920s than it is today. Eight of them had studied law, which, then as now, was not uncommon in the top positions of public administration. Many first turned to radical politics as members of Freikorps or student fraternities. Three of the participants (Freisler, Klopfer and Lange) had studied in Jena. In the 1920s, the University of Jena was a fertile breeding ground for nationalist thinking. With dedicated Nazi, race researcher and later SS-Hauptsturmbannfuhrer Karl Astel as rector, it developed into a model Nazi university. Race researcher Hans Gunther also taught there. Others, such as Reinhard Heydrich, joined the SS because they had failed to launch careers elsewhere, and only became radical once they were members of the self-acclaimed Nazi elite order.