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Books > History > European history > From 1900 > Second World War
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.
This extraordinary wartime diary provides a rare glimpse into the
daily life of French and foreign-born Jewish refugees under the
Vichy regime during World War II. Long hidden, the diary was
written by Lucien Dreyfus, a native of Alsacewho was a teacher at
the most prestigious high school in Strasbourg, an editor of the
leading Jewish newspaper of Alsace and Lorraine, the devoted father
of an only daughter, and the doting grandfather of an only
granddaughter. In 1939, after the French declaration of war on
Hitler's Germany, Lucien and his wife, Marthe, were forced by the
French state to leave Strasbourg along with thousands of other
Jewish and non-Jewish residents of the city. The couple found
refuge in Nice, on the Mediterranean coast in the south of France.
Anti-Jewish laws prevented Lucien from resuming his teaching career
and his work as a newspaper editor. But he continued to write,
recording his trenchant reflections on the situation of France and
French Jews under the Vichy regime. American visas allowed his
daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter to escape France in the
spring of 1942 and establish new lives in the United States, but
Lucien and Marthe were not so lucky. Rounded up during an SS raid
in September 1943, they were deported and murdered in
Auschwitz-Birkenau two months later. As the only diary by an
observant Jew raised bi-culturally in French and German, Dreyfus's
writing offers a unique philosophical and moral reflection on the
Holocaust as it was unfolding in France.
A SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'The best
biography I have read in years' Philippe Sands 'Spectacular'
Observer 'A remarkable portrait' Guardian W. G. Sebald was one of
the most extraordinary and influential writers of the twentieth
century. Through books including The Emigrants, Austerlitz and The
Rings of Saturn, he pursued an original literary vision that
combined fiction, history, autobiography and photography and
addressed some of the most profound themes of contemporary
literature: the burden of the Holocaust, memory, loss and exile.
The first biography to explore his life and work, Speak, Silence
pursues the true Sebald through the memories of those who knew him
and through the work he left behind. This quest takes Carole Angier
from Sebald's birth as a second-generation German at the end of the
Second World War, through his rejection of the poisoned inheritance
of the Third Reich, to his emigration to England, exploring the
choice of isolation and exile that drove his work. It digs deep
into a creative mind on the edge, finding profound empathy and
paradoxical ruthlessness, saving humour, and an elusive mix of fact
and fiction in his life as well as work. The result is a unique,
ferociously original portrait.
Cultural Writing. Asian-American Studies. Shortly after the
Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Japanese
Americans were uprooted from their homes and communitites and
banished to remote internment camps. This collection of haunting
reminiscences, letters, stories, poems, and graphic art gives voice
to the range of powerful emotions with which these victims of
wartime hysteria struggled. ONLY WHAT WE COULD CARRY gathers
together the voices of internement -- private, personal stories
that could have been lost, but will now be heard and felt. It's a
if we have a seat at a family dinner, listening to stories passed
down from one generation to another, feeling the pian and the
spirit of hope -- David Mas Masumoto. Edited by Lawson Fusao Inada,
with a preface by Patricia Wakida and an afterword by William
Hohri.
The remarkable story of Mohammed Helmy, the Egyptian doctor who
risked his life to save Jewish Berliners from the Nazis. One of the
people he saved was a Jewish girl called Anna. This book tells
their story. The Israeli holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem has to
date honoured more than 25,000 of the courageous non-Jewish men and
women who saved Jewish people during the Second World War. But it
is a striking fact that under the 'Righteous Among the Nations'
listed at Yad Vashem there is only one Arab person: Mohammed Helmy.
Helmy was an Egyptian doctor living in Berlin. He spent the entire
war there, all the time walking the fine line between accommodation
to the Nazi regime and subversion of it. He was also a master of
deception, outfoxing the Nazis and risking his own life to save his
Jewish colleagues and other Jewish Berliners from Nazi persecution.
One of the people he saved was a Jewish girl called Anna. This book
tells their story. Also revealed here is a wider understanding of
the Arab community in Berlin at the time, many of whom had warm
relations with the Jewish community, and some of whom - like
Mohammed Helmy - risked their lives to help their Jewish friends
when the Nazis rose to power. Mohammed Helmy was the most
remarkable individual amongst this brave group, but he was by no
means the only one.
When the real is so fantastic, what literary effects will succeed
in making it credible and help readers to comprehend its human
meaning? As recent world developments fully show us, several
lessons of the Nazi Holocaust still remain to be learned. To
respond meaningfully and ethically to the Holocaust, writers need
to incorporate moral and emotional complexity, and one way they
have done this is through using the techniques of the fantastic.
The authors in this anthology of essays examine the usefulness of
fantastic story-telling for exploring relevant philosophical and
moral issues about the Holocaust. The present volume is
interdisciplinary in scope, including print literature and film,
animation, graphic novels, and various other media. The editors
have sought essays that, while ranging in theoretical perspectives,
engage in dialogue with one another, together producing a
comprehensive whole. Examined are writers like JaneYolen and Art
Spiegelman and such works as the sci-fi television series V (1983),
Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil (1982), Guillermo del Toro's
imaginative Pan's Labyrinth (2006), and Martin Scorsese's dark
thriller Shutter Island (2010).
Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History is a brief but comprehensive
survey of the Third Reich based on current research findings that
provides a balanced approach to the study of Hitler's role in the
history of the Third Reich. The book considers the economic,
social, and political forces that made possible the rise and
development of Nazism; the institutional, cultural, and social life
of the Third Reich; World War II; and the Holocaust. World War II
and the Holocaust are presented as logical outcomes of the ideology
of Hitler and the Nazi movement. This new edition contains more
information on the Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany), as well as Nazi
complicity in the Reichstag Fire and increased discussion of
consent and dissent during the Nazi attempt to create the ideal
Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). It takes a greater focus on
the experiences of ordinary bystanders, perpetrators, and victims
throughout the text, includes more discussion of race and space,
and the final chapter has been completely revised. Fully updated,
the book ensures that students gain a complete and thorough picture
of the period and issues. Supported by maps, images, and thoroughly
updated bibliographies that offer further reading suggestions for
students to take their study further, the book offers the perfect
overview of Hitler and the Third Reich.
A striking exmination of the harsh relities of being human, Robert
Frey's Our Future in Light of Twentieth-Century Evil perceptively
examines such significant foundations of American culture as
religion, science, education and political experession i light fo
the European Holocaust. His work offers poignant and collective
re-direction for each of these areas of life, in light of the moral
and social evil that have stained our century. Non-sectarian and
multidisciplinary in its approach, this work offers bridge buidingg
solutions of conceptual and practical understanding across
epistemic and ideational divides. Historically and scientifically
gorunded, Our Future in Light of Twentieth-Century Evil poses and
explores difficult, probing questions about our nature, our
divisions, our beliefs and our basis for hope. Frey suggests that,
"for our collectives future to have meaning beyond privatized
economic or religious refuge, talk must cohere into clear-minded
visions and pathways illuminated by compassion, informed tolerance,
sacrifice, humility and obligation directed toward the Earth, our
fellow human beings, and generations unborn." He continues, "Hope,
history and human culture emanate from each one of us. The results
in our world are our own. Therein is our genuine power." Our Future
in Light of Twentieth-Century Evil synthesizes disparate concepts
in a manner accessible to all thoughtful people. A definite "must
have" for every library.
Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past is a
comprehensive consideration of the role of empathy in historical
knowledge, informed by the literature on empathy in fields
including history, psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience,
philosophy, and sociology. The book seeks to raise the
consciousness of historians about empathy, by introducing them to
the history of the concept and to its status in fields outside of
history. It also seeks to raise the self-consciousness of
historians about their use of empathy to know and understand past
people. Defining empathy as thinking and feeling, as imagining,
one's way inside the experience of others in order to know and
understand them, Thomas A. Kohut distinguishes between the external
and the empathic observational position, the position of the
historical subject. He argues that historians need to be aware of
their observational position, of when they are empathizing and when
they are not. Indeed, Kohut advocates for the deliberate,
self-reflective use of empathy as a legitimate and important mode
of historical inquiry. Insightful, cogent, and interdisciplinary,
the book will be essential for historians, students of history, and
psychoanalysts, as well as those in other fields who seek to seek
to know and understand human beings.
This book shares the conclusions of a remarkable conference marking
the centennial of Thessaloniki's incorporation into the Greek state
in 1912. Like its Roman and Byzantine predecessors, Ottoman
Salonica was the metropolis of a huge, multi-ethnic Balkan
hinterland, a center of modernization/westernization, and the de
facto capital of Sephardic Judaism. The powerful attraction it
exerted on competing local nationalisms, including the Young Turks,
gave it a paradigmatic role in the transition from imperial to
national rule in southeastern Europe. Twenty-three articles cover
the multicultural physiognomy of a 'Levantine' city. They describe
the mechanisms for cultivating national consciousness (including
education, journalism, the arts, archaeology, and urban planning),
the relationship between national identity, religious identity, and
an evolving socialist labor movement, anti-Semitism, and the
practical issues of governing and assimilating diverse non-Greek
populations after Greece's military victory in 1912. Analysis of
this transformation extends chronologically through the arrival of
Greek refugees from Turkey and the Black Sea in 1923, the
Holocaust, the Greek civil war, and the new waves of migration
after 1990. These processes are analyzed on multiple levels,
including civil administration, land use planning, and the
treatment of Thessaloniki's historic monuments. This work
underscores the importance of cities and their local histories in
shaping the key national narratives that drove development in
southeastern Europe. Those lessons are highly relevant today, as
Europe reacts to renewed migratory pressures and the rise of new
nationalist movements, and draws lessons, valid or otherwise, from
the nation-building experiments of the previous century.
This book considers how women's experiences have been treated in
films dealing with Nazi persecution. Focusing on fiction films made
in Europe between 1945 and the present, this study explores
dominant discourses on and cinematic representation of women as
perpetrators, victims and resisters. Ingrid Lewis contends that
European Holocaust Cinema underwent a rich and complex trajectory
of change with regard to the representation of women. This change
both reflects and responds to key socio-cultural developments in
the intervening decades as well as to new directions in cinema,
historical research and politics of remembrance. The book will
appeal to international scholars, students and educators within the
fields of Holocaust Studies, Film Studies, European Cinema and
Women's Studies.
"The definitive study of the topic." --Prof. Antony Polonsky,
Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University, and
Chief Historian, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The
incredible story of underground resistance among the prisoners at
the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. When the Germans opened
Auschwitz in June 1940, it was a concentration camp for political
prisoners, who were told on arrival that they would live no longer
than three months--expanding two years later to also become a death
camp for Jews. Underground resistance appeared at Auschwitz very
quickly, spearheaded in 1940 by one of the bravest men ever to
live, Polish army officer Captain Witold Pilecki. Jozef Garlinski
traces the evolution and operations of the principal resistance
organizations among the prisoners (including communist as well as
non-communist groups). He delves into the relationships among these
groups, as well as their relationships with the various political
and multinational factions in the prisoner population, including
both male and female, and with the underground outside the camp. He
describes their efforts against the brutal SS men and informers. In
parallel, he documents the growth and evolution of Auschwitz
itself, and the horrors of the industrialized death factory for
Jews created by the Germans. First published in English in 1975,
but out of print for decades, this seminal book is now being
released in a new 2nd edition with more than 200 photos and maps,
and a new introduction by Prof. Antony Polonsky, Emeritus Professor
of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University, and Chief Historian,
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. . Garlinski, a member
of the Polish underground during WWII, was himself a prisoner at
Auschwitz.With more than 200 photos and maps, five Appendices,
extensive Bibliography and detailed Indexes.
Survival in Auschwitz: If This Is a Man is a book written by the
Italian author, Primo Levi. It describes his experiences in the
concentration camp at Auschwitz during the Second World War.
Levi, then a 25-year-old chemist, spent 10 months in Auschwitz
before the camp was liberated by the Red Army. Of the 650 Italian
Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the
camps alive. The average life expectancy of a new entrant was three
months.
This truly amazing story offers a revealing glimpse into the
realities of the Holocaust and its effects on our world.
My Seven Lives is the English translation of the best-selling
memoir of Slovak journalist Agnesa Kalinova (1924-2014): Holocaust
survivor, film critic, translator, and political prisoner. An oral
history written with her colleague Jana Juranova My Seven Lives
provides a window into Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the
cultural evolution of Central and Eastern Europe. The
conversational approach gives the book a relatable immediacy that
vividly conveys the tone and temperament of Agnesa, bringing out
her lively personality and extraordinary ability to stay positive
in the face of adversity. Each chapter reflects a distinct period
of Agnesa's long and tumultuous life. Her idyllic childhood gives
way to the rise of Nazism and restrictions of the anti-Jewish
legislation, which led to deportations and her escape to Hungary,
where she found refuge in a Budapest convent. Surviving the
Holocaust, she returned to Slovakia and married writer J?in
Ladislav Kalina. They embraced communism, and Agnesa began her
career as a journalist and film critic and became involved in the
Prague Spring, ending with the Soviet-led invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968. Agnesa and her husband lost their jobs and
were imprisoned, which led to their decision to immigrate to West
Germany. She found a new career as a political commentator for
Radio Free Europe, and after decades of political oppression,
Agnesa lived to see the euphoric days of the Velvet Revolution and
its freeing aftermath. My Seven Lives shows the impact of an often
brutal twentieth century on the life of one remarkable individual.
It's a story of survival, perseverance, and ultimately triumph.
The Holocaust is an attempt to explain the inexplicable - the
systematic murder of millions of Europe's Jews by the Nazis and
their collaborators during the Second World War. It includes
facsimile documents that have been carefully selected to remind
readers that the horrifying statistics represent not numbers but
people. This illustrated volume describes Jewish life before the
spread of Nazism in Europe and Nazi ideologies. The author
discusses the mass murder, the death camps such as Auschwitz, the
perpetrators, the witnesses, the escapees, the refugee havens and
the 10,000 Kindertransport youngsters who were given safe haven in
Britain. The Holocaust records stories of resistance and acts of
heroism, and tells us of the survivors and those who risked their
lives to save the Jews. Finally, it describes the liberation of the
camps, the resettlement of the Jews and how the events are
remembered now. Published in partnership with the Memorial de la
Shoah, which contains the biggest collection of documents on the
subject in Europe and is dedicated to preserving the memory of the
Holocaust and educating future generations.
In the heart of the twentieth century, the game of soccer was
becoming firmly established as the sport of the masses across
Europe, even as war was engulfing the continent. Intimately woven
into the war was the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its
collaborators, genocide on a scale never seen before. For those
victims ensnared by the Nazi regime, soccer became a means of
survival and a source of inspiration even when surrounded by
profound suffering and death. In Soccer under the Swastika: Stories
of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust, Kevin E. Simpson
reveals the surprisingly powerful role soccer played during World
War II. From the earliest days of the Nazi dictatorship, as
concentration camps were built to hold so-called enemies, captives
competed behind the walls and fences of the Nazi terror state.
Simpson uncovers this little-known piece of history, rescuing from
obscurity many poignant survivor testimonies, old accounts of
wartime players, and the diaries of survivors and perpetrators. In
victim accounts and rare photographs-many published for the first
time in this book-hidden stories of soccer in almost every Nazi
concentration camp appear. To these prisoners, soccer was a glimmer
of joy amid unrelenting hunger and torture, a show of resistance
against the most heinous regime the world had ever seen. With the
increasing loss of firsthand memories of these events, Soccer under
the Swastika reminds us of the importance in telling these
compelling stories. And as modern day soccer struggles to combat
racism in the terraces around the world, the endurance of the human
spirit embodied through these personal accounts offers insight and
inspiration for those committed to breaking down prejudices in the
sport today. Thoughtfully written and meticulously researched, this
book will fascinate and enlighten readers of all generations.
The complete story of the Wannsee Conference, the meeting that
paved the way for the Holocaust. On 20 January 1942, fifteen men
arrived for a meeting in a luxurious villa on the shores of the
Wannsee in the far-western outskirts of Berlin. They came at the
invitation of Reinhard Heydrich and were almost all high-ranking
Nazi Party, government, and SS officials. The exquisite position by
the lake, the imposing driveway up to the villa, culminating in a
generously sized roundabout in front of the house, the expansive,
carefully landscaped park, the generous suite of rooms that opened
on to the park and the lake, the three-level terrace that stretched
the entire garden side of the house, and the winter garden with its
marble fountain, all give today's visitor to the villa a good idea
of its owner's aspiration to build a sophisticated, almost palatial
structure as a testament to his cultivation and worldly success.
But the beauty of the situation stood in stark contrast to the
purpose of the meeting to which the fifteen had come in January
1942: the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question'. According to the
surviving records of the meeting, items on the agenda included the
precise definition of exactly which group of people was to be
affected, followed by a discussion of how upwards of eleven million
people were to be deported and subjected to the toughest form of
forced labour, and following on from this a discussion of how the
survivors of this forced labour as well as those not capable of it
were ultimately to be killed. The next item on the agenda was
breakfast.
Through narrative analysis of the memoirs of six holocaust
survivors from a single extended family, Trauma and Resilience in
Holocaust Memoir: Strategies of Self-Preservation and
Inter-Generational Encounter with Narrative examines strategies of
self-preservation of young people exposed to violence and
persecution at different ages and life stages. Through the lens of
studying resilience in child development, this book describes the
striking diversity of holocaust-era experiences and traces the arc
of a remarkable global diaspora. Birnbaum argues that stories from
the past can enhance understanding of the internal lives of today's
young refugees and survivors of violent conflict. Exploring the
socio-politics of narrative and memory, this book considers the
ways that children of holocaust survivors may honor the past while
also allowing a new generation to engage family history in a
conversation with contemporary concerns.
This book analyzes how West German intellectuals debated the Nazi
past and democratic future of their country. Rather than proceeding
event by event, it highlights the underlying issues at stake: the
question of a stigmatized nation and the polarized reactions to it
that structured German discussion and memory of the Nazi past.
Paying close attention to the generation of German intellectuals
born during the Weimar Republic - the forty-fivers - this book
traces the drama of sixty years of bitter public struggle about the
meaning of the past: did the Holocaust forever stain German
identity so that Germans could never again enjoy their national
emotions like other nationalities? Or were Germans unfairly singled
out for the crimes of their ancestors? By explaining how the
perceived pollution of family and national life affected German
intellectuals, the book shows that public debates cannot be
isolated from the political emotions of the intelligentsia.
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