'A breathtaking story' Daily Mail 'Extraordinary' The Telegraph on the Cook sisters Desperate circumstances can cause ordinary women to achieve extraordinary things. No one would have predicted such glamorous and daring lives for Ida and Louise Cook two decidedly ordinary women who lived quiet lives in the London suburbs. But throughout the 1930s, the remarkable sisters rescued dozens of Jews facing persecution and death. Ida's memoir of the adventures she and Louise shared remains as fresh, vital, and entertaining as the woman who wrote it. Even when Ida began to earn thousands as a successful romance novelist, the sisters directed every spare resource, as well as their considerable courage and ingenuity, towards saving as many as they could from Hitler's death camps.

'The idea which I shall present here came to me more or less out of the blue. I was on a train some five years ago, on my way to spend a day at Headingley, and I was reading a book about the death camp Sobibor... The particular, not very appropriate, conjunction involved for me in this train journey...had the effect of fixing my thoughts on one of the more dreadful features of human coexistence, when in the shape of a simple five-word phrase the idea occurred to me.' The contract of mutual indifference In this classic work, newly reissued here with a preface by Oliver Kamm, Norman Geras discusses a central aspect of the experience of the Holocaust with a view to exploring its most important contemporary implications. A bold and powerful synthesis of memorial, literary record, historical reflection and political theory, Geras's argument focuses on the figure of the bystander - the bystander to the destruction of the Jews of Europe and the bystander to more recent atrocity - to consider the moral consequences of looking on without active responses at persecution and great suffering. This book argues that we owe a duty of help to those who are suffering under terrible oppression. Geras contends that the tragedy of European Jewry - so widely pondered by historians, social scientists, psychologists, theologians and others - has not yet found its proper reflection within political philosophy. Attempting to fill the gap, he adapts an old idea from within that tradition of enquiry, the idea of the social contract, to the task of thinking about the triangular relation between perpetrators, victims and bystanders, and draws a sombre conclusion from it. Geras goes on to ask how far this conclusion may be offset by the hypothesis of a universal duty to bring aid. The contract of mutual indifference is an original and challenging work, aimed at the complacent abstraction of much contemporary theory-building. It is supplemented by three shorter essays on the implications of the Jewish catastrophe for conceptions of human nature and progress. -- .

Taking as its point of departure Omer Bartov's acclaimed Anatomy of a Genocide, this volume brings together previously unknown accounts by three individuals from Buczacz. These rare narratives give personal glimpses into daily life in unsettled times: a Polish headmaster during World War I, a Ukrainian teacher and witness to both Soviet and German rule, and a Jewish radio technician, genocide survivor, and member of the Polish resistance. Together, they offer a prismatic perspective on a world remote from our own that nonetheless helps us understand how people not unlike ourselves responded to mass violence and destruction.

Containing an almost entirely new selection of texts, this second edition of The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath presents a critical and important study of the Holocaust. Many of the pieces challenge conventional analyses and preconceived notions about the Holocaust, whether regarding genocidal precedents and the centrality of antisemitism, the relationship between ideological motivation and economic calculations, or the timing of the decision on the Final Solution. Starting with the background of the Holocaust and focusing on colonial violence, antisemitism and scientific racism as being at the root of the Final Solution, the book then examines the context of the decision to unleash the genocide of the Jews. Several powerful texts then provide readers with a close look at the psychology of a perpetrator, the fate of the victims - with a particular emphasis on the role of gender and the murder of children - and the impossible choices made by Jewish leaders, educators, and men recruited into the Nazi extermination apparatus. Finally, there is an analysis of survivors' testimonies and the creation of an early historical record, and an inquiry into post-war tribunals and the development of international justice and legislation with a view to the larger phenomenon of modern genocide before and after the Holocaust. Complete with an introduction that summarises the state of the field, this book contains major reinterpretations by leading Holocaust authors along with key texts on testimony, memory, and justice after the catastrophe. With brief discussions placing each essay in historical and scholarly context, this carefully selected compilation is an ideal introduction to the topic and essential reading for all students of the Holocaust.

Since antiquity, European Jewish diaspora communities have used formal appeals to secular and religious authorities to secure favors or protection. Such petitioning took on particular significance in modern dictatorships, often as the only tool left for voicing political opposition. During the Holocaust, tens of thousands of European Jews turned to individual and collective petitions in the face of state-sponsored violence. This volume offers the first extensive analysis of petitions authored by Jews in nations ruled by the Nazis and their allies. It demonstrates their underappreciated value as a historical source and reveals the many attempts of European Jews to resist intensifying persecution and actively struggle for survival.

Judged only as a World War Two survivor's chronicle, Millie Werber's story would be remarkable enough. Born in central Poland in the town of Radom, she found herself trapped in the ghetto at the age of fourteen, a slave laborer in an armaments factory in the summer of 1942, transported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, before being marched to a second armaments factory. She faced death many times; indeed she was certain that she would not survive. But she did.

Many years later, when she began to share her past with Eve Keller, the two women rediscovered the world of the teenage girl Millie had been during the war. Most important, Millie revealed her most precious private memory: of a man to whom she was married for a few brief months. He was--if not the love of her life--her first great unconditional passion. He died, leaving Millie with a single photograph taken on their wedding day, and two rings of gold that affirm the presence of a great passion in the bleakest imaginable time.

A crafted collection detailing western responses to the Balkan War We didn't know. For half a century, Western politicians and intellectuals have so explained away their inaction in the face of genocide in World War II. In stark contrast, Western observers today face a daily barrage of information and images, from CNN, the Internet, and newspapers about the parties and individuals responsible for the current Balkan War and crimes against humanity. The stories, often accompanied by video or pictures of rape, torture, mass graves, and ethnic cleansing, available almost instantaneously, do not allow even the most uninterested viewer to ignore the grim reality of genocide. And yet, while information abounds, so do rationalizations for non-intervention in Balkan affairs-the threshold of real genocide has yet to be reached in Bosnia; all sides are equally guilty; Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia is a threat to the West; it will only end when they all tire of killing each other-to name but a few. In This Time We Knew, Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic have put together a collection of critical, reflective, essays that offer detailed sociological, political, and historical analyses of western responses to the war. This volume punctures once and for all common excuses for Western inaction. This Time We Knew further reveals the reasons why these rationalizations have persisted and led to the West's failure to intercede, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, in the most egregious crimes against humanity to occur in Europe since World War II. Contributors to the volume include Kai Erickson, Jean Baudrillard, Mark Almond, David Riesman, Daniel Kofman, Brendan Simms, Daniele Conversi, Brad Kagan Blitz, James J. Sadkovich, and Sheri Fink.

How did the Nazis imagine their victory and the subsequent 'Thousand-Year Reich'? Between 1939 and 1943, the Nazi imperial Utopia started to take shape in the conquered areas of Eastern Europe, brutally emptied of their inhabitants, who were displaced, reduced to slavery and, in the case of the Jews and a considerable number of Slavs, murdered. This Utopia had its engineers, its agencies and its pioneers (no fewer than 27,000 Germans, most of them young). It aroused fervent support. In the Thousand-Year Reich, with its borders extended by conquest, a racially pure community would soon live a life of peace and prosperity, in total harmony. In this book, renowned historian Christian Ingrao draws on extensive archival material to shed new light on this movement and explain how it could prove so appealing, examining the coherence and the inner contradictions of the activities undertaken by the different institutions, the careers of the women and men who played a part in them, and the ambitious plans that were drawn up. Ingrao adopts a social anthropological point of view to investigate the emotions aroused by the Nazi dream, and describes not just the hatred and the anxieties it fed on but also the joys and expectations it created - two sides of a single reality. As we learn from the terrible violence unleashed across the region of Zamosc, on the border between Poland and Ukraine, the hopes of the Nazis became a nightmare for the native populations. This important work reveals an aspect of Nazism that is often overlooked and greatly extends our understanding of the general framework in which the Holocaust was realized. It will find a wide audience among students and scholars of modern German history and among a broad general readership.

Robbing the Jews reveals the mechanisms by which the Nazis and their allies confiscated Jewish property; the book demonstrates the close relationship between robbery and the Holocaust. The spoliation evolved in intensifying steps. The Anschluss and Kristallnacht in 1938 reveal a dynamic tension between pressure from below and state-directed measures. In Western Europe, the economic persecution of the Jews took the form of legal decrees and administrative measures. In Eastern Europe, authoritarian governments adopted the Nazi program that excluded Jews from the economy and seized their property, based on indigenous antisemitism and plans for ethnically homogenous nation-states. In the occupied East, property was collected at the killing sites - the most valuable objects were sent to Berlin, whereas items of lesser value supported the local administration and rewarded collaborators. At several key junctures, robbery acted as a catalyst for genocide, accelerating the progression from pogrom to mass murder.

In 1961 Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem for his part in the Nazi persecution and mass murder of Europe s Jews. For the first time a judicial process focussed on the genocide against the Jews and heard Jewish witnesses to the catastrophe. The trial and the controversies it caused had a profound effect on shaping the collective memory of what became the Holocaust .

This volume, a special issue of the Journal of Israeli History, brings together new research by scholars from Europe, Israel and the USA.

In recent years, a lively debate has developed in Poland on the question of what responsibility the Poles share for the mass murder of the Jews, which took place largely on Polish soil. This debate was sparked off by the showing in Poland of Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah , which revealed how deeply-rooted anti-Jewish prejudice could still be found in the Polish countryside. Anti-semitism is something which Poland has preferred to forget. But before the Second World War hostility to the Jews was widespread and this climate of pervasive anti-semitism may have facilitated the Nazis' murderous plans. But Poles now, with great courage, are facing this dark side of their past. This book, translated and edited by a leading British historian of Poland, Antony Polonsky, is a major contribution to the history of the Holocaust. It gathers together the most important contribution to the current debate, revealing the agony many Poles feel about their lack of action during the war.

Recent representations of the Holocaust have increasingly required us to think beyond rigid demarcations of nation and history, medium and genre. Holocaust Intersections sets out to investigate the many points of conjunction between these categories in recent images of genocide. The book examines transnational constellations in Holocaust cinema and television in Europe disclosing instances of border-crossing and boundary-troubling at levels of production, distribution and reception. It highlights intersections between film genres, through intertextuality and pastiche, and the deployment of audio-visual Holocaust memory and testimony. Finally, the volume addresses connections between the Holocaust and other histories of genocide in the visual culture of the new millennium, engaging with the questions of transhistoricity and intercultural perspective. Drawing on a wide variety of different media - from cinema and television to installation art and the internet - and on the most recent scholarship on responses to the Holocaust, the volume aims to update our understanding of how visual culture looks at the Holocaust and genocide today.

Between ten thousand and twelve thousand Jews tried to escape Nazi genocide by going into hiding. With the help of Jewish and non-Jewish relatives, friends, or people completely unknown to them, these "U-boats," as they came to be known, dared to lead a life underground. Flight and Concealment brings to light their hidden stories. Deftly weaving together personal accounts with a broader comparative look at the experiences of Jews throughout Germany, historian Susanna Schrafstetter tells the story of the Jews in Munich and Upper Bavaria who fled deportation by going underground. Archival sources and interviews with survivors and with the Germans who aided or exploited them reveal a complex, often intimate story of hope, greed, and sometimes betrayal. Flight and Concealment shows the options and strategies for survival of those in hiding and their helpers, and discusses the ways in which some Germans enriched themselves at the expense of the refugees.

A multifaceted look at historian Raul Hilberg, tracing the evolution of Holocaust research from a marginal subdiscipline into a vital intellectual project. "I would recommend this book to both Holocaust historians and general readers alike. The breadth and depth of Hilberg's research and his particular insights have not yet been surpassed by any other Holocaust scholar."-Jewish Libraries News & Reviews Though best known as the author of the landmark 1961 work The Destruction of the European Jews, the historian Raul Hilberg produced a variety of archival research, personal essays, and other works over a career that spanned half a century. The Anatomy of the Holocaust collects some of Hilberg's most essential and groundbreaking writings many of them published in obscure journals or otherwise inaccessible to nonspecialists in a single volume. Supplemented with commentary and notes from Hilberg's longtime German editor and his biographer. From the Introduction: This selection by the editors from the multitude of his published texts focuses on Hilberg's intellectual interests as a Holocaust researcher. Among other topics, they deal with the bureaucracy of the Holocaust, the number of victims, the role of the Judenrate(Jewish councils), and the function of the railway and the police in the extermination process. The scholarly impulses extending from Hilberg's work remain remarkable and virulent almost a decade after his death.2 They deserve to be readily accessible in one place to historians and the interested public in the new compilation offered here. Many of the debates influenced by Hilberg are not yet resolved. The texts presented can be quite revealing in light of these controversies.

The Triumph of Wounded Souls vividly recounts the stories of seven Holocaust survivors who overcame many obstacles to earn advanced degrees and become college and university professors. As Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe from 1939 to 1945, these remarkable individuals witnessed and endured terror and torture. After the war they pursued academic subjects that increased their understanding of the world and gave them a sense of purpose. Their inspirational accounts demonstrate that despite the worst of circumstances it is possible to heal with time. Each narrative chapter describes the social background and circumstances that helped to shape the survivor's destiny. Lerner's interrogative approach unearths surprising insights into each survivor's distinct personality, beliefs, and aspirations. Isaac Bash and George Zimmerman both survived the horrors of Auschwitz to become physicists. Ruth Anna Putnam, a philosopher, endured the war in hiding with her non-Jewish grandparents. Samuel Stern, a biologist, spent his early childhood in Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen. Zvi Griliches survived a Dachau subsidiary camp to become a prominent economist. Maurice Vanderpol became a psychiatrist after spending years during the war hiding in Amsterdam. Micheline Federman was sheltered by French farmers and later became a pathologist. While each survivor's postwar journey is complex and unique, these seven scholars reveal that the contemplative life can serve as a salve for wounded souls. They are extraordinary examples of how those who act justly and purposefully can help to bring reconciliation and meaning to an unjust world. In sharing their personal stories, they illuminate the realm of humanpossibility.

During the Nazi era, about three million Jews - half the victims of the Holocaust - were deported from the German Reich, the occupied territories, as well as Nazi-allied countries, and sent to ghettos, camps, and extermination centers. The police and the SS also deported tens of thousands of Sinti and Roma, mainly to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, where most of them were killed. Deportations were central to National Socialist persecution and extermination. In November 2020, an international conference organized by the Arolsen Archives focused on the various historical sources, their research potential, and (digital) methods of cataloging them. It also explored new (systematizing and comparative) approaches in historical research. This volume features over 20 contributions by scholars from different countries and with a variety of perspectives and questions. The main geographical focus is on deportations from the German Reich and German-occupied Southeastern Europe.

Survivor Transitional Narratives of Nazi-Era Destruction: The Second Liberation examines the historical circumstances that gave rise in the 1960s to the first cohort of Nazi-era survivors who massed a public campaign focusing on remembrance of Nazi racial crimes. The survivors' decision to engage and disquiet a public audience occurred against the backdrop of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and the West German debate over the enforcement of statutory limitations for prosecuting former Nazis. Dennis B. Klein focuses on the accounts of three survivors: Jean Amery, an Austrian ex-patriot who joined the Belgian Resistance during the war, Vladimir Jankelevitch, a member of the French Resistance, and Simon Wiesenthal, who dedicated his life after the war to investigating Nazi crimes. As Klein argues, their accounts, in addition to acting as a reminder of Nazi-era endemic criminality, express a longing for human fellowshipThis contextual and interdisciplinary interpretation illustrates the explanatory significance of contemporary events and individual responses to them in shaping the memory and legacy of Nazi-era destruction. It is essential reading for students and scholars of the Nazi era and its legacy, genocide studies, Jewish Studies, and the history of emotions.

For decades, artists and architects have struggled to relate to the Holocaust in visual form, resulting in memorials that feature a diversity of aesthetic strategies. In Memory Passages, Natasha Goldman analyzes both previously-overlooked and internationally-recognized Holocaust memorials in the United States and Germany from the postwar period to the present, drawing on many historical documents for the first time. From the perspectives of visual culture and art history, the book examines changing attitudes toward the Holocaust and the artistic choices that respond to it. The book introduces lesser-known sculptures, such as Nathan Rapoport's Monument to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs in Philadelphia, as well as internationally-acclaimed works, such as Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Other artists examined include Will Lammert, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Gerson Fehrenbach, Margit Kahl, and Andy Goldsworthy.Archival documents and interviews with commissioners, survivors, and artists reveal the conversations and decisions that have shaped Holocaust memorials. Memory Passages suggests that memorial designers challenge visitors to navigate and activate spaces to engage with history and memory by virtue of walking or meandering. This book will be valuable for anyone teaching-or seeking to better understand-the Holocaust.

Bringing together some of the last Holocaust survivor stories in living memory, After the Holocaust shares Jewish scholarship, activism, poetry, and personal narratives which tackle the changing face of human rights education in the 21st century. The collected voices draw on decades of research on Holocaust history to discuss education, broader human rights abuses, genocide, internment, and oppression. Advancing the dialogue between civic advocacy, public remembrance, and research, contributors discuss how the Holocaust is taught and remembered. By including additional perspectives on the context of Canadian antisemitism, the legacy of human rights abuses of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, and the internment of Japanese Canadians in World War II, After the Holocaust examines the ways the Holocaust changed thinking around human rights legislation and memorialization on a global scale. "The first- and second-generation survivor accounts are treasures-invaluable reflections that anchor this collection." - David MacDonald , author of The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation

Evil is sometimes thought to be incomprehensible and abnormal, falling outside of familiar historical and human processes. And yet the twentieth century was replete with instances of cruelty on a massive scale, including systematic torture, murder, and enslavement of ordinary, innocent human beings. These overwhelming atrocities included genocide, totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the Holodomor. This Element underlines the importance of careful, truthful historical investigation of the complicated realities of dark periods in human history; the importance of understanding these events in terms that give attention to the human experience of the people who were subject to them and those who perpetrated them; the question of whether the idea of 'evil' helps us to confront these periods honestly; and the possibility of improving our civilization's resilience in the face of the impulses towards cruelty to other human beings that have so often emerged.

The collecting of Holocaust artifacts can often result in an emotional and historical dilemma. Survivors and some militaria collectors regard these items as "stained" with the blood of Holocaust victims, and therefore should not be bought and sold. However, to honor the memory of those who perished and to keep a proper historical record, these items must be preserved. While a small contingent of collectors deal in Holocaust artifacts, the vast majority of Holocaust-oriented artifacts are purchased by individuals who intend to donate these items to museums. This book is a reference and resource guide to help determine the authenticity of these artifacts, and provides a detailed look at various Holocaust-related artifacts in a manner that follows the experiences of the survivors and victims. As an example; the Germans identified some individuals with outward markings, forced them to register, pressed them into forced labor, ghettoized, and eventually deported them to concentration camps or labor facilities, and due to the different times that these activities took place in conquered and occupied countries, they are distinguished here by the action rather than by a general timeline (for example, Jews in occupied Poland were forced to wear "Jewish badges" in 1939, while this did not occur in Germany until 1941). The Holocaust is a difficult period of history to examine, and although some of the photographs contained in this book are horrific in nature, this book in no way trivializes the magnitude of the Holocaust by discussing the collection and identification of Holocaust-related artifacts. The issue at hand is the callous disregard by those who profit from the Holocaust by manufacturing and selling counterfeit and fake items. Alec Tulkoff has been a collector of World War II militaria for the past twenty-five years. Over the past seven years he has taken an interest in Holocaust history and artifacts. During the past two years, while working at the SHOAH Visual History Foundation as a cataloguer, he compiled the information and materials contained in this book. As a cataloguer in the Foundation, he had the opportunity to hear hundreds of first hand Holocaust survivor testimonies. Tulkoff has worked hard in combating the vast amount of Holocaust artifact fraud that has spread in the collecting community and has posted a website dealing with this fraud and also publishes a quarterly newsletter on this topic.

This book explores the Holocaust exhibition opened within the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in 2000; setting out the long and often contentious debates surrounding the conception, design, and finally the opening of an important exhibition within a national museum in Britain. It considers a process of memory-making through an assessment of Holocaust photographs, material culture, and survivor testimonies; exploring theories of cultural memory as they apply to the national museum context. Anchored in time and place, the Holocaust exhibition within Britain's national museum of war is influenced by, and reflects, an international rise in Holocaust consciousness in the 1990s. This book considers the construction of Holocaust memory in 1990s Britain, providing a foundation for understanding current and future national memory projects. Through all aspects of the display, the Holocaust is presented as meaningful in terms of what it says about Nazism and what this, in turn, says about Britishness. From the original debates surrounding the inclusion of a Holocaust gallery at the IWM, to the acquisition of Holocaust artefacts that could act as 'concrete evidence' of Nazi barbarity and criminality, the Holocaust reaffirms an image of Britain that avoids critical self-reflection despite raising uncomfortably close questions. The various display elements are brought together to consider multiple strands of the Holocaust story as it is told by national museums in Britain.