"My mind refuses to play its part in the scholarly exercise. I walk around in a daze, remembering occasionally to take a picture. I've heard that many people cry here, but I am too numb to feel. The wind whips through my wool coat. I am very cold, and I imagine what the wind would have felt like for someone here fifty years ago without coat, boots, or gloves. Hours later as I write, I tell myself a story about the day, hoping it is true, and hoping it will make sense of what I did and did not feel." -From the Foreword Most of us learn of Auschwitz and the Holocaust through the writings of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel. Remarkable as their stories are, they leave many voices of Auschwitz unheard. Mary Lagerwey seeks to complicate our memory of Auschwitz by reading less canonical survivors: Jean Amery, Charlotte Delbo, Fania Fenelon, Szymon Laks, Primo Levi, and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. She reads for how gender, social class, and ethnicity color their tellings. She asks whether we can-whether we should-make sense of Auschwitz. And throughout, Lagerwey reveals her own role in her research; tells of her own fears and anxieties presenting what she, a non-Jew born after the fall of Nazism, can only know second-hand. For any student of the Holocaust, for anyone trying to make sense of the final solution, Reading Auschwitz represents a powerful struggle with what it means to read and tell stories after Auschwitz.

Biography of a Jewish doctor who survived and triumphed over the horrors of the Holocaust. Eli's Story: A Twentieth-Century Jewish Life is first and foremost a biography. Its subject is Eli G. Rochelson, MD (1907-1984), author Meri-Jane Rochelson's father. At its core is Eli's story in his own words, taken from an interview he did with his son, Burt Rochelson, in the mid-1970s. The book tells the story of a man whose life and memory spanned two world wars, several migrations, an educational odyssey, the massive upheaval of the Holocaust, and finally, a frustrating yet ultimately successful effort to restore his professional credentials and identity, as well as reestablish family life. Eli's Story contains a mostly chronological narration that embeds the story in the context of further research. It begins with Eli's earliest memories of childhood in Kovno and ends with his death, his legacy, and the author's own unanswered questions that are as much a part of Eli's story as his own words. The narrative is illuminated and expanded through Eli's personal archive of papers, letters, and photographs, as well as research in institutional archives, libraries, and personal interviews. Rochelson covers Eli's family's relocation to southern Russia; his education, military service, and first marriage after he returned to Kovno; his and his family's experiences in the Dachau, Stutthof, and Auschwitz concentration camps-including the deaths of his wife and child; his postwar experience in the Landsberg Displaced Persons (DP) camp, and his immigration to the United States, where he determinedly restored his medical credentials and started a new family. Rochelson recognizes that both the effort of reconstructing events and the reality of having personal accounts that confi rm and also differ from each other in detail, make the process of gap-fi lling itself a kind of fi ction??an attempt to shape the incompleteness that is inherent to the story. An earlier reviewer said of the book, ""Eli's Story combines the care of a scholar with the care of a daughter."" Both scholars and general readers interested in Holocaust narratives will be moved by this monograph.

The relations between memory and history have recently become a subject of contention, and the implications of that debate are particularly troubling for aesthetic, ethical and political issues. Dominick LaCapra focuses on the interactions among history, memory and ethicopolitical concerns as they emerge in the aftermath of the Shoah. Particularly notable are his analyses of Albert Camus's novella The Fall, Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah and Art Spiegelman's comic book Maus. LaCapra also considers the Historian's Debate in the aftermath of German reunification and the role of psychoanalysis in historical understanding and critical theory.

"The Future of a Negation" is a crucial statement on the Holocaust--and on Holocaust denial--from Alain Finkielkraut, one of the most acclaimed and influential intellectuals in contemporary Europe.
The book examines the Holocaust, its origins in modern European thought and politics, and recent "revisionist" attempts to deny its full dimensions and, in some cases, its very existence as historical fact. Finkielkraut's central topic is the impulse toward "negation" of the Nazi horrors: the arguments made by many people, of varying political orientations, that "the gas chambers are a hoax or, in any case, an unverifiable rumor." In addition, Finkielkraut looks at other instances of twentieth-century mass murder and at arguments made by contemporary politicians and intellectuals that similarly deny the full extent of these other atrocities. An original, fearless book, "The Future of a Negation" is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and of genocidal politics and thought in our century.

In 1941, three brothers witnessed their parents and two other siblings being led away to their eventual murders. It was a grim scene that would, of course, be repeated endlessly throughout the war. Instead of running or giving in to despair, these brothers -- Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski -- fought back, waging a guerrilla war of wits against the Nazis.

By using their intimate knowledge of the dense forests surrounding the Belarusan towns of Novogrudek and Lida, the Bielskis evaded the Nazis and established a hidden base camp, then set about convincing other Jews to join their ranks. As more and more Jews arrived each day, a robust community began to emerge, a "Jerusalem in the woods."

After two and a half years in the woods, in July 1944, the Bielskis learned that the Germans, overrun by the Red Army, were retreating back toward Berlin. More than one thousand Bielski Jews emerged -- alive -- on that final, triumphant exit from the woods.

Never give up for that is just the place and time the tide will turn." -Harriet Beecher Stowe Where's Sylvia? is a true story. Only six, "Little Sylvia" leaves her parents and their bakery in the Bronx, NY to go to Germany with her Aunt Betty and Uncle Walter. They are supposed to bring her back before school starts in the fall. They don't. They can't. It's Autumn, of 1939. Hitler's Blitzkrieg is in motion. Europe is at war. Sylvia is going to have wait a "lifetime." A U.S. citizen, she will become an "Enemy Alien" when America enters World War II. Through "the duration," she lives with nuns, spends two years in German schools in the Rhineland and then runs east with Betty and her two children to escape Allied bombings. Before her thirteenth birthday, she learns how to survive a brutal dictatorship, her aunt's growing hysteria, her uncle being "drafted" into the Germany Army, her father's abandonment of her mother and his attraction to the Nazi regime. Ultimately, she manages to fearlessly dodge soldiers, bullets, bombs and tanks, and wait to be rescued. Her mother's life in America adds to the compelling nature of the story-is her only child alive or dead? Will she be found? Everyone is waiting and wants to know: Where's Sylvia?

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. "Jews, Germans, and Allies" draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to rebuild their lives.

In gripping and unforgettable detail, Atina Grossmann describes Berlin in the days following Germany's surrender--the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East. She chronicles the hunger, disease, and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann untangles the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She examines how Germans and Jews interacted and competed for Allied favor, benefits, and victim status, and how they sought to restore normality--in work, in their relationships, and in their everyday encounters.

"Jews, Germans, and Allies" shows how Jews were integral participants in postwar Germany and bridges the divide that still exists today between German history and Jewish studies.

From Miracle to Miracle: A Story of Survival documents the true-life drama of a young Polish woman's story of survival during the Holocaust. Each chapter is narrated through the lens of her daughter, whose life was deeply impacted by her mother's experiences. This is the gripping account of a young Polish-Jewish woman and her determination to live through the horrors of the Holocaust. This narrative is told through the perspective of the survivor's daughter, whose childhood in America was impacted by her mother's stories, revealed in fragments at unexpected moments. As an adult, Alicia Fleissig Magal, the elder child of Nika Kohn Fleissig, began piecing these disconnected scenes together into a chronological record of her mother's many suspenseful escapes from death. The writing process became a cathartic and freeing experience for the author and enabled her to separate from the powerful presence of her heroic, artistic mother, allowing her to access her own inner strength. This is a story of empowerment, hope, and healing for all generations.

The Holocaust memoir of a Dutch family who evaded arrest and deportation by the Nazis. Told through letters, diaries, and interviews, and illustrated with photographs throughout, this detailed account brings a new perspective to one of history's most horrific chapters. During the Second World War, as the Nazis tightened their grip on the Netherlands, the Jewish population was slowly restricted from public life-everything from owning a bike to having a job was forbidden. Sensing the murderous consequences of deportation, Daphne Geismar's family-her parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles-decided to separate and go into hiding. Parents and children were torn apart, living for years in isolation behind a church organ, below floorboards, or even in plain sight. While timelines and notes provide context, we hear the voices of young Mirjam, sent by her parents to live with a family of strangers; Judith whose braids were cut to make her look less Jewish; Nathan, taken in and given false papers by a Dutch soldier. Ordinary people whose collective story is one of resilience and resistance, survival and compassion. "This is an important book because many people don't know what took place in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation....[The] fascinating story also highlights the courage of the rescuers involved in that dangerous undertaking. It is a story that must be told to inspire others never to give up even when it seems all is lost."-Mordecai Paldiel, Former Director, Righteous Among Nations, Yad Vashem For readers of history and memoirs, this family's story, Invisible Years, challenges readers to follow this example of resistance to inhumanity.

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As historian and anatomist Sabine Hildebrandt reveals, however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the "future dead."

Since the Holocaust, traces of memory are virtually all that remain of more than 800 years of Jewish life in Poland. Yet some of that past can still be found if one knows how and where to look. In this remarkable album, 74 stunning color photographs bear witness to the great Jewish civilization that once flourished here. The images record the sites of Jewish life and death, and the ways in which Jewish culture is being remembered today. Captions and detailed notes explain and contextualize the photographs. An invaluable sourcebook on the Jewish heritage of Polish Galicia, this album also illustrates how photographs can help us understand the past and discover its relevance for the present.

Kurt and Sonja Messerschmidt met in Nazi Berlin, married in the Theresienstadt ghetto, and survived Auschwitz. In this book, they tell their intertwined stories in their own words. The text directly expresses their experiences, reactions, and emotions. The reader moves with them through the stages of their Holocaust journeys: persecution in Berlin, deportation to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz, slave labor, liberation, reunion, and finally emigration to the US. Kurt and Sonja saw the death of Jews every day for two years, but they never stopped creating their own lives. The spoken words of these survivors create a uniquely direct relationship with the reader, as if this couple were telling their story in their living room.

In this vivid memoir originally published in German, Anne Groschler (1888-1982) recounts her 1944 escape from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to Mandatory Palestine via "Transport 222", an exchange transport of 222 Jews for "Aryan" prisoners of war. In the most detailed contribution of the exchange ever published, Groschler paints an authentic picture of life before WWII amongst the upper echelons of German society, her ultimate persecution and escape to Holland where she was betrayed, the horrors of life in the Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen camps, and her eventual flight via "Transport 222" to Palestine. Written immediately after her liberation in 1944, this unique document captures a little-known chapter of Holocaust history.

Modernity has provided more than enough reason to give up believing in holiness, still we have learned that to give up the struggle to achieve it means that we become less human. As we leave the twentieth century, we discover new reasons to return to old faith. We rediscover an urgent need to defend the sacred, even as our understanding differs from our ancestors. We choose not to retreat from the world, but to struggle within it, to stain ourselves with sin even as we seek to establish the good. from Chapter 13, Humanity

The cataclysm of the Holocaust seems to forbid speech. Yet even in the heart of that darkness, sparks of sacredness were kept alive. From these sparks, Rabbi Edward Feld suggests, Jews and others can renew a faith and find a language that recovers the holy even after experiencing the reign of a Kingdom of Night unimaginable to previous generations.

In a voice that is engaging, often poetic, Rabbi Edward Feld helps the modern reader understand events that span almost 4,000 years of the history of Judaism and the Jewish people. With rare clarity, insight, and gentleness, he offers a thought-provoking yet accessible study of the way tragedy has shaped Jewish history and the self-understanding of Jews.

"The Spirit of Renewal" explores four key events that reshaped religious expression, two ancient and two modern: the Babylonian exile; the Bar Kochba revolution; the Holocaust; and the establishment of the State of Israel.

"The Spirit of Renewal" shows how, even under the most traumatic of circumstances, Judaism survives, renewing itself and flourishing again. This profound and wise meditation opens the way to a powerful new understanding of the nature of God and the spiritual life.

Published in sixteen languages and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Andre Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just is considered by many the single greatest novel of the Holocaust. This classic work -- long unavailable in a trade edition -- is one of those few novels that, once read, is never forgotten.

On March 11, 1185, tn the old Anglican city of York, the Jews of the city were brutally massacred by their townsmen. As legend has it, God blessed the only survivor of this Medieval pogrom, Rabbi Yom Tov Levy, as one of the Lamed-vov, the thirty-six Just Men of Jewish tradition, a blessing which extended to one Levy of each succeeding generation. This terrifying and remarkable Legacy is traced over eight centuries, from the Spanish Inquisition, to expulsions from England, France, Portugal Germany, and Russia, and to the small Polish village of Zemyock, where the Levys settle for two centuries in relative peace. It is in the twentieth century that Ernie Levy emerges, the Last of the Just, in 1920s Germany, as Hitter's sinister star is on the rise and the agonies of Auschwitz loom on the horizon.

An inventive literary account of Cixous's remarkable journey to her mother's birthplace Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation For about eighty years, the Jonas family of Osnabruck were part of a small but vibrant Jewish community in this mid-size city of Lower Saxony. After the war, Osnabruck counted not a single Jew. Most had been deported and murdered in the camps, others emigrated if they could and if they managed to overcome their own inertia. It is this inertia and failure to escape that Helene Cixous seeks to account for in Osnabruck Station to Jerusalem. Vicious anti-Semitism hounded all of Osnabruck's Jews long before the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. So why did people wait to leave when the threat was so patent, so in-their-face? Drawn from the stories told to Cixous by her mother, Eve, and grandmother, Rosalie (Rosi), this literary work reimagines fragments of Eve's and Rosi's stories, including the death of Eve's uncle, Onkel Andre. Piecing together the story of Andreas Jonas from what she was told and from what she envisages, Cixous recounts the tragedy of the one she calls the King Lear of Osnabruck, who followed his daughter to Jerusalem only to be sent away by her and to return to Osnabruck in time to be deported to a death camp. Cixous wanders the streets of the city she had heard about all her life in her mother's and grandmother's stories, digs into its archives, meets city officials, all the while wondering if she should have come. These hesitations and reflections in the present, often voiced in dialogues staged with her own son or daughter, are woven with scenes from her childhood in Algeria and the half-remembered, half-invented stories of the Jonas family, making Osnabruck Station to Jerusalem one of the author's most intensely engaging books. This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

Many recent books have documented the collaboration of the French authorities with the anti-Jewish German policies of World War II. Yet about 76 percent of France's Jews survived-more than in almost any other country in Western Europe. How do we explain this phenomenon? Certainly not by looking at official French policy, for the Vichy government began preparing racial laws even before the German occupiers had decreed such laws. To provide a full answer to the question of how so many French Jews survived, Susan Zuccotti examines the response of the French people to the Holocaust. Drawing on memoirs, government documents, and personal interviews with survivors, she tells the stories of ordinary and extraordinary French men and women. Zuccotti argues that the French reaction to the Holocaust was not as reprehensible as it has been portrayed. Susan Zuccotti teaches modern European history at Barnard College and Columbia University. She is the author of The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (Nebraska 1996), which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1987.

This two-part volume combines an accessible overview of contemporary Jewish history with a unique dictionary of Holocaust terms. In addition to assessing the Holocaust specifically, Part 1 of the book discusses the history of European Jewry, anti-Semitism, the rise and fall of Nazism and fascism, World War II, and the postwar implications of the Holocaust. The authors also consider key historiographical and methodological issues related to the Holocaust.Part Two provides a complete dictionary of terms relating to the Holocaust culled from dozens of primary and secondary sources in a range of languages. Included here is a comprehensive set of tables on Aktionen, Aliya Bet, anti-Jewish legislation, anti-semitic organizations, collaboration, concentration camps, Fascism, the Third Reich, the Nazi Party, Jewish and non-sectarian organizations, publications, Judenr te, and resistance movements. Each table is prefaced by a descriptive overview of pertinent issues.Graphs, photographs, and documents supplement the text, and an extensive bibliography as well as separate person, place, and subject indexes make this unique work invaluable as a reference tool.

The impact of technology-enhanced mass death in the twentieth century, argues Zachary Braiterman, has profoundly affected the future shape of religious thought. In his provocative book, the author shows how key Jewish theologians faced the memory of Auschwitz by rejecting traditional theodicy, abandoning any attempt to justify and vindicate the relationship between God and catastrophic suffering. The author terms this rejection "Antitheodicy," the refusal to accept that relationship. It finds voice in the writings of three particular theologians: Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, and Emil Fackenheim.

This book is the first to bring postmodern philosophical and literary approaches into conversation with post-Holocaust Jewish thought. Drawing on the work of Mieke Bal, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, and others, Braiterman assesses how Jewish intellectuals reinterpret Bible and Midrash to re-create religious thought for the age after Auschwitz.

In this process, he provides a model for reconstructing Jewish life and philosophy in the wake of the Holocaust. His work contributes to the postmodern turn in contemporary Jewish studies and today's creative theology.

Assassins of Memory is a passionate and painstaking look at one of the more curious realities of recent French cultural life: the prominence accorded to the phenomenon of revisionism. An attempt on the part of a tiny group of fanatics, often masquerading as scholars and researchers, to deny the existence of the gas chambers and horrors of Hitler's genocidal policies, revisionism is quietly gaining adherents.

This new verbatim play is based on the testimony of Hungarian Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack MBE, aged only thirteen when she was sent to the notorious Auschwitz -Birkenau in the summer of 1944. Interwoven with complementary narratives and layered with Holocaust history, this is a powerful new piece for Drama and History teachers alike. Commissioned by Europe's only specialist Holocaust theatre in education company, Kindness offers tremendous challenge to Drama students. It allows the stories of survivors, as well as the voices of some of the millions more who did not survive, to not be lost as living memory increasingly becomes becomes a history that must never be forgotten. "I sincerely felt very moved and grateful that the play so accurately represented my experiences, and the mood and political situation of the time is so accurately shown. It is most wonderful and I give you my legacy most willingly. Thank you so much." Susan Pollack MBE Duration: 60 minutes approximately Cast: 21 female / male, or 2 female and 2 male with multiroling Suitable for: Key Stage 3/4, BTEC, GCSE, A Level

This is the most comprehensive account of the Air Forces in Malta during Word War II. Malta was a vital base from which Allied aircraft could inflict serious damage on the crucial Axis supply route to Rommel in North Africa. In order to secure that route, the might of the Luftwaffe and Italian Air Forces were thrown together against the tiny island, affecting not just the defending servicemen and women, but the entire population. This book vividly describes how the fighters, bombers, torpedo, and reconnaissance aircraft of the RAF and FAA took the fight to the enemy and triumphantly succeeded with every odd stacked against them.