In 1945, the day after liberation, Soviet soldiers in control of the Katowice camp in Poland asked Primo Levi and his fellow captive Leonardo De Benedetti to compile a detailed report on the sanitary conditions in Auschwitz. The result was 'Auschwitz Report', an extraordinary testimony and one of the first accounts of the extermination camps ever written. The report, published in a scientific journal in 1946, marked the beginnings of Levi's life-long work as writer, analyst and witness. In the subsequent four decades, Levi never ceased to recount his experiences in Auschwitz in a wide variety of texts, many of which are assembled together here for the first time. From early research into the fate of his companions to the deposition written for Eichmann's trial, from the 'letter to the daughter of a fascist who wants to know the truth' to newspaper and magazine articles, Auschwitz Testimonies is a rich mosaic of memories and critical reflections of great historic and human value. Underpinned by his characteristically clear language, rigorous method, and deep psychological insight, this collection of testimonies, reports and analyses reaffirms Primo Levi's position as one of the most important chroniclers of the Holocaust. It will find a wide readership, both among the many readers of Levi's work and among all those who wish to understand one of the greatest human tragedies of all time.

A History of Modern Germany is a well-established text that presents a balanced survey of the last 150 years of German history, stretching from nineteenth-century imperial Germany, through political division and reunification, and into the present day. Beginning in the early 1870s and covering topics such as Wilhelmenian Germany, the World Wars, revolution, inflation and putsches, the Weimar Republic, the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic, the book offers a comprehensive overview of the entire period of modern German history. Fully updated throughout, this new edition details foreign policy, political and economic history and includes increased coverage of social and cultural history, and history 'from the bottom up', as well as containing a new chapter that brings it right up to the present day. The book is supported by full discussion of past and present historiographic debates, illustrations, maps, further readings and biographies of key German political, economic and cultural figures within the Im Mittelpunkt feature. Fully exploring the complicated path of Germany's troubled past and stable present, A History of Modern Germany provides the perfect grounding for all students of German history.

Of the countless stories of resistance, ingenuity, and personal risk to emerge in the years following the Holocaust, among the most remarkable, yet largely overlooked, are those of the hundreds of Jewish deportees who escaped from moving trains bound for the extermination camps. In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands alone over 750 men, women and children undertook such dramatic escape attempts, despite the extraordinary uncertainty and physical danger they often faced. Drawing upon extensive interviews and a wealth of new historical evidence, Escapees gives a fascinating collective account of this hitherto neglected form of resistance to Nazi persecution.

"Debates on the Holocaust" is the first attempt to survey the development of Holocaust historiography for a generation. It analyses the development of history writing on the destruction of the European Jews from just before the end of the Second World War to the present day, and argues forcefully that history writing is as much about the present as it is the past. The book guides the reader through the major debates in Holocaust historiography and shows how all of these controversies are as much products of their own time as they are attempts to uncover the past. "Debates on the Holocaust" will appeal to sixth form and undergraduate students and their teachers, Holocaust historians and anyone interested in either the destruction of the European Jews or in the process by which we access and understand the past.

The Mark of Cain fleshes out a history of conversations that contributed to Germany's coming to terms with a guilty past. Katharina von Kellenbach draws on letters exchanged between clergy and Nazi perpetrators, written notes of prison chaplains, memoirs, sermons, and prison publications to illuminate the moral and spiritual struggles of perpetrators after the war. These documents provide intimate insights into the self-reflection and self-perception of perpetrators. As Germany looks back on more than sixty years of passionate debate about political, personal and legal guilt, its ongoing engagement with the legacy of perpetration has transformed its culture and politics. In many post-genocidal societies, it falls to clergy and religious officials (in addition to the courts) to negotiate and create a path for individuals beyond the atrocities of the past. German clergy brought the Christian message of guilt and forgiveness into the internment camps where Nazi functionaries awaited prosecution at the hands of Allied military tribunals and various national criminal courts, or served out their sentences. The loving willingness to forgive and forget displayed towards his errant child by the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son became the paradigm central to Germany's rehabilitation and reintegration of Nazi perpetrators. The problem with Luke's parable in this context, however, is that perpetrators did not ask for forgiveness. Most agents of state crimes felt innocent. Von Kellenbach proposes the story of the mark of Cain as a counter narrative. In contrast to the Prodigal Son, who is quickly forgiven and welcomed back into the house of the father, the fratricide Cain is charged to rebuild his life on the basis of open communication about the past. The story of the Prodigal Son equates forgiveness with forgetting; Cain's story links redemption with remembrance and suggests a strategy of critical engagement with perpetrators.

In the spring of 1944, nearly 500,000 Jews were deported from the Hungarian countryside and killed in Auschwitz. In Budapest, only 150,000 Jews survived both the German occupation and dictatorship of the Hungarian National Socialists, who took power in October 1944. Zsuzsanna Ozsvath's family belonged among the survivors. This memoir begins with the the author's childhood during the Holocaust in Hungary. It captures life after the war's end in Communist-ruled Hungary and continues with her and her husband's flight to Germany and eventually the United States. Ozsvath's poignant story of survival, friendship, and love provides readers with a rare glimpse of an extraordinary journey.

The Holocaust in Croatia recounts the history of the Croatian Jewish community during the Second World War, with a focus on the city of Zagreb. Ivo and Slavko Goldstein have grounded their study in extensive research in recently opened archives, additionally aided by the memories of survivors to supplement and enrich the interpretation of documents. The authors' accessible narrative, here available in English for the first time, has been praised for its objectivity (including rare humane acts by those who helped to save Jews), and is complemented by a large bibliography offering an outstanding referential source to archival materials. As such, The Holocaust in Croatia stands as the definitive account of the Jews in Croatia, up to and including the criminal acts perpetrated by the pro-Nazi Ustasha regime, and adds significantly to our knowledge of the Holocaust.

"With this timely book in Hackett Publishing's Passages series, Michael Bryant presents a wide-ranging survey of the trials of Nazi war criminals in the wartime and immediate postwar period. Introduced by an extensive historical survey putting these proceedings into their international context, this volume makes the case, central to Hackett's collection for undergraduate courses, that these events constituted a 'key moment' that has influenced the course of history. Appended to Bryant's analysis is a substantial section of primary sources that should stimulate student discussion and raise questions that are pertinent to warfare and human rights abuses today." Michael R. Marrus, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto

This book is an original and comparative study of reactions in West and East Africa to the persecution and attempted annihilation of Jews in Europe and in former German colonies in sub-Saharan Africa during the Second World War. An intellectual and diplomatic history of World War II and the Holocaust, Africans and the Holocaust looks at the period from the perspectives of the colonized subjects of the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, as well as the sovereign peoples of Liberia and Ethiopia, who wrestled with the social and moral questions that the war and the Holocaust raised. The five main chapters of the book explore the pre-Holocaust history of relations between Jews and Africans in West and East Africa, perceptions of Nazism in both regions, opinions of World War II, interpretations of the Holocaust, and responses of the colonized and sovereign peoples of West and East Africa to efforts by Great Britain to resettle certain categories of Jewish refugees from Europe in the two regions before and during the Holocaust. This book will be of use to students and scholars of African history, Holocaust and Jewish studies, and international or global history.

The vast majority of studies of Hannah Arendt's thought are concerned with her as a political theorist. This book offers a contribution to rectifying this imbalance by providing a critical engagement with Arendtian ethics. Arendt asserts that the crimes of the Holocaust revealed a shift in ethics and the need for new responses to a new kind of evil. In this new treatment of her work, Arendt's best-known ethical concepts - the notion of the banality of evil and the link she posits between thoughtlessness and evil, both inspired by her study of Adolf Eichmann - are disassembled and appraised. The concept of the banality of evil captures something tangible about modern evil, yet requires further evaluation in order to assess its implications for understanding contemporary evil, and what it means for traditional, moral philosophical issues such as responsibility, blame and punishment. In addition, this account of Arendt's ethics reveals two strands of her thought not previously considered: her idea that the condition of 'living with oneself' can represent a barrier to evil and her account of the 'nonparticipants' who refused to be complicit in the crimes of the Nazi period and their defining moral features. This exploration draws out the most salient aspects of Hannah Arendt's ethics, provides a critical review of the more philosophically problematic elements, and places Arendt's work in this area in a broader moral philosophy context, examining the issues in moral philosophy which are raised in her work such as the relevance of intention for moral responsibility and of thinking for good moral conduct, and questions of character, integrity and moral incapacity.

In a book that will touch hearts and minds, acclaimed cultural historian Marilyn Yalom presents firsthand accounts of six witnesses to war, each offering lasting memories of how childhood trauma transforms lives. The violence of war leaves indelible marks, and memories last a lifetime for those who experienced this trauma as children. Marilyn Yalom experienced World War II from afar, safely protected in her home in Washington, DC. But over the course of her life, she came to be close friends with many less lucky, who grew up under bombardment across Europe-in France, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, England, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Holland. With Innocent Witnesses, Yalom collects the stories from these accomplished luminaries and brings us voices of a vanishing generation, the last to remember World War II. Memory is notoriously fickle: it forgets most of the past, holds on to bits and pieces, and colors the truth according to unconscious wishes. But in the circle of safety Marilyn Yalom created for her friends, childhood memories return in all their startling vividness. This powerful collage of testimonies offers us a greater understanding of what it is to be human, not just then but also today. With this book, her final and most personal work of cultural history, Yalom considers the lasting impact of such young experiences-and asks whether we will now force a new generation of children to spend their lives reconciling with such memories.

The book about the Westerweel Group tells the fascinating story about the cooperation of some ten non-conformist Dutch socialists and a group of Palestine Pioneers who mostly had arrived in the Netherlands from Germany and Austria the late thirties. With the help of Joop Westerweel, the headmaster of a Rotterdam Montessori School, they found hiding places in the Netherlands. Later on, an escape route to France via Belgium was worked out. Posing as Atlantic Wall workers, the pioneers found their way to the south of France. With the help of the Armee Juive, a French Jewish resistance organization, some 70 pioneers reached Spain at the beginning of 1944. From here they went to Palestine. Finding and maintaining the escape route cost the members of the Westerweel Group dear. With some exceptions, all members of the group were arrested by the Germans. Joop Westerweel was executed in August 1944. Other members, both in the Netherlands and France, were send to German concentration camps, where some perished.

In February of 1945, during the final months of the Third Reich, Eva Noack-Mosse was deported to the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt. A trained journalist and expert typist, she was put to work in the Central Evidence office of the camp, compiling endless lists-inmates arriving, inmates deported, possessions confiscated from inmates, and all the obsessive details required by the SS. With access to camp records, she also recorded statistics and her own observations in a secret diary. Noack-Mosse's aim in documenting the horrors of daily life within Theresienstadt was to ensure that such a catastrophe could never be repeated. She also gathered from surviving inmates information about earlier events within the walled fortress, witnessed the defeat and departure of the Nazis, saw the arrival of the International Red Cross and the Soviet Army takeover of the camp and town, assisted in administration of the camp's closure, and aided displaced persons in discovering the fates of their family and friends. After the war ended, and she returned home, Noack-Mosse cross-referenced her data with that of others to provide evidence of Nazi crimes. At least 35,000 people died at Theresienstadt and another 90,000 were sent on to death camps.

The inspiring stories of courageous non-Jews who risked their own lives to save Jews from the Holocaust Thanks to Thomas Keneally's book "Schindler's Ark," and the film based on it, "Schindler's List," people have become more aware of the fact that, in the midst of Hitler's extermination of the Jews, courage and humanity could still overcome evil. While six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime, some were saved through the actions of non-Jews whose consciences would not allow them to pass by on the other side, and many are honored by Israel's official memorial to Jewish Holocaust victims, Yad Vashem, as "Righteous among the Nations" for their actions. As a baby, Agnes Grunwald-Spier was herself saved from the horrors of Auschwitz by an unknown official, and is now a trustee of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. She has collected the stories of 30 individuals who rescued Jews, providing a new insight into why these people were prepared to risk so much for their fellow men and women. With a foreword by one of the leading experts on the subject, this is an ultimately uplifting account of how some good deeds really do shine in a weary world.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature is a comprehensive reference resource including a wealth of critical material on a diverse range of topics within the literary study of Holocaust writing. At its centre is a series of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars within the field: these address genre-specific issues such as the question of biographical and historical truth in Holocaust testimony, as well as broader topics including the politics of Holocaust representation and the validity of comparative approaches to the Holocaust in literature and criticism. These original essays are complemented by a host of other features designed to benefit scholars and students within this subject area, including a substantial section detailing new and emergent trends within the literary study of the Holocaust, a concise glossary of major critical terminology, and an annotated bibliography of relevant research material. The volume will be of interest and value to scholars and students of Holocaust literature, memorial culture, Jewish Studies, genocide studies, and twentieth and twenty-first century literature more broadly.Contributors: Victoria Aarons, Jenni Adams, Michael Bernard-Donals, Matthew Boswell, Stef Craps, Richard Crownshaw, Brett Ashley Kaplan and Fernando Herrero-Matoses, Adrienne Kertzer, Erin McGlothlin, David Miller, and Sue Vice.

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.

When and why do groups target each other for extermination? How do seemingly normal people become participants in genocide? Why do some individuals come to the rescue of members of targeted groups, while others just passively observe their victimization? And how do perpetrators and bystanders later come to terms with the choices that they made? These questions have long vexed scholars and laypeople alike, and they have not decreased in urgency as we enter the twenty-first century. In this book--the first collection of essays representing social psychological perspectives on genocide and the Holocaust-- prominent social psychologists use the principles derived from contemporary research in their field to try to shed light on the behavior of the perpetrators of genocide. The primary focus of this volume is on the Holocaust, but the conclusions reached have relevance for attempts to understand any episode of mass killing. Among the topics covered are how crises and dificult life conditions might set the stage for violent intergroup conflict; why some groups are more likely than others to be selected as scapegoats; how certain cultural values and beliefs could facilitate the initiation of genocide; the roles of conformity and obedience to authority in shaping behavior; how engaging in violent behavior makes it easier to for one to aggress again; the evidence for a "genocide-prone" personality; and how perpetrators deceive themselves about what they have done. The book does not culminate in a grand theory of intergroup violence; instead, it seeks to provide the reader with new ways of making sense of the horrors of genocide. In other words, the goal of all of the contributors is to provide us with at least some of the knowledge that we will need to anticipate and prevent future such tragic episodes.

An intimate co-creation of three graphic novelists and four Holocaust survivors, But I Live consists of three illustrated stories based on the experiences of each survivor during and after the Holocaust. David Schaffer and his family survived in Romania due to their refusal to obey Nazi collaborators. In the Netherlands, brothers Nico and Rolf Kamp were separated from their parents and hidden by the Dutch resistance in thirteen different places. Through the story of Emmie Arbel, a child survivor of the Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, we see the lifelong trauma inflicted by the Holocaust. To complement these hauntingly beautiful and unforgettable visual stories, But I Live includes historical essays, an illustrated postscript from the artists, and personal words from each of the survivors. As we urgently approach the post-witness era without living survivors of the Holocaust, these illustrated stories act as a physical embodiment of memory and help to create a new archive for future readers. By turning these testimonies into graphic novels, But I Live aims to teach new generations about racism, antisemitism, human rights, and social justice.

Three million Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, wiping out nearly 98 percent of the Jewish population who had lived and thrived there for generations. Night Without End tells the stories of their resistance, suffering, and death in unflinching, horrific detail. Based on meticulous research from across Poland, it concludes that those who were responsible for so many deaths included a not insignificant number of Polish villagers and townspeople who aided the Germans in locating and slaughtering Jews. When these findings were first published in a Polish edition in 2018, a storm of protest and lawsuits erupted from Holocaust deniers and from people who claimed the research was falsified and smeared the national character of the Polish people. Night Without End, translated and published for the first time in English in association with Yad Vashem, presents the critical facts, significant findings, and the unmistakable evidence of Polish collaboration in the genocide of Jews.

After World War II, tracing and documenting Nazi victims emerged against the background of millions of missing persons and early compensation proceedings. This was a process in which the Allies, international aid organizations, and survivors themselves took part. New archives, documentation centers and tracing bureaus were founded amid the increasing Cold War divide. They gathered documents on Nazi persecution and structured them in specialized collections to provide information on individual fates and their grave repercussions: the loss of relatives, the search for a new home, physical or mental injuries, existential problems, social support and recognition, but also continued exclusion or discrimination. By doing so, institutions involved in this work were inevitably confronted with contentious issues-such as varying political mandates, neutrality vs. solidarity with those formerly persecuted, data protection vs. public interest, and many more. Over time, tracing bureaus and archives changed methods and policies and even expanded their activities, using historical documents for both research and public remembrance. This is the first publication to explore this multifaceted history of tracing and documenting past and present.

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.