Historians have mainly seen the ghettos established by the Nazis in German-occupied Eastern Europe as spaces marked by brutality, tyranny, and the systematic murder of the Jewish population. Drawing on examples from the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos, Dance on the Razor's Edge explores how, in fact, highly improvised legal spheres emerged in these coerced and heterogeneous ghetto communities. Looking at sources from multiple archives and countries, Svenja Bethke investigates how the Jewish Councils, set up on German orders and composed of ghetto inhabitants, formulated new definitions of criminal offenses and established legal institutions on their own initiative, as a desperate attempt to ensure the survival of the ghetto communities. Bethke explores how people under these circumstances tried to make sense of everyday lives that had been turned upside down, bringing with them pre-war notions of justice and morality, and she considers the extent to which this rupture led to new judgments on human behaviour. In doing so, Bethke aims to understand how people attempted to use their very limited scope for action in order to survive. Set against the background of a Holocaust historiography that often still seeks for clear categories of "good" and "bad" behaviours, Dance on the Razor's Edge calls for a new understanding of the ghettos as complex communities in an unprecedented emergency situation.

The Belated Witness stakes out an original place within the field of recent work on the theory and practice of literary writing after the Holocaust. Drawing in productive and unsettling ways from converging work in history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, the book asks how the events of the Holocaust force us to alter traditional conceptions about human experience, as well as the way we can now talk and write about such experiences. Rather than providing a mere account of an outside or inside reality, literature after the Holocaust sets itself a more radical task: it testifies to unspeakable experiences in a specific mode of address, a call or summons to another in whose sole power resides the possibility of a future response to such testimonies of world-historical trauma.

On October 14, 1943, Aleksandr "Sasha" Pechersky led a mass escape of inmates from Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Despite leading the only successful prisoner revolt at a World War II death camp, Pechersky never received the public recognition he deserved in his home country of Russia. This story of a forgotten hero reveals the tremendous difference in memorial cultures between societies in the West and societies in the former Communist world. Pechersky, along with other Russian and Jewish inmates who had been prisoners of the Nazis, was considered suspect by the Russian government simply because he had been imprisoned. In this volume, Selma Leydesdorff describes the official silence in the Eastern Bloc about Pechersky's role in the Sobibor escape and how an effort was made to recognize his actions. The narrative is based on eyewitness accounts from people in Pechersky's life and a discussion of the mechanism of memory, mixing written sources with varied recollections and assessing the collisions of collective memory held by the East and the West. Specifically, this book critiques the ideological refusal of many societies to acknowledge the suffering of Jews at Sobibor. Offering fascinating insights into a crucial period of history, emphasizing that Jews were not passive in the face of German violence, and exploring the history of the Jews who fell victim to Stalinism after surviving Nazism, this is valuable reading for students and scholars of the Holocaust and the position of Jews under Communism.

First ever volume on Holocaust in Thessaloniki in English, utilizing new sources and interpretation schemes Thessaloniki was for centuries one of the most prominent Jewish communities in the world, which lost more than 90% of its population during the Holocaust Book will be a great contribution to the local efforts underway to reconcile Thessaloniki with its Jewish past and honor the victims of the Holocaust An ambitious Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the backing of several governments and institutions, is schedule to open in the city by 2021.

'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 incorporation of German territories east of the Oder and Western Neisse rivers into Poland in 1945 was linked with the difficult process of an almost total exchange of population and involved the taking over of a region in which the Second World War had effected an enormous level of destruction. The contemporary term 'Polish Wild West' not only alluded to the reigning atmosphere of chaos and 'survival of the fittest' in the Polish-German borderland but was also associated with a new kind of freedom and the opportunity to start everything anew. The arrival in this region of Polish settlers from different parts of Poland led to Poles, Germans and Soviet soldiers temporarily coming into contact with one another. Living together in this war-damaged space was far from easy. On the basis of ego-documents, the author recreates the beginnings of the shaping of this new society, one affected by a repressive political system, internal conflicts and human tragedy. In distancing oneself from the until-recently dominant narratives concerning expellees in Germany or pioneers of the 'Recovered Territories' in Poland, Beata Halicka tells the story of the disintegration of a previous cultural landscape and the establishment of one which was new, in a colourful and vivid manner and encompassing different points of view.

Questions shape the Holocaust's legacy. 'What happened to ethics during the Holocaust? What should ethics be, and what can it do after the Holocaust?' loom large among them. Absent the overriding or moral sensibilities, if not the collapse or collaboration of ethical traditions, the Holocaust could not have happened. Its devastation may have deepened conviction that there is a crucial difference between right and wrong; its destruction may have renewed awareness about the importance of ethical standards and conduct. But Birkenau, the main killing center at Auschwitz, also continues to cast a disturbing shadow over basic beliefs concerning right and wrong, human rights, and the hope that human beings will learn from the past. This book explores those realities and the issues they contain. It does so not to discourage but to encourage, not to deepen darkness and despair but to face those realities honestly and in a way that can make post-Holocaust ethics more credible and realistic. The book's thesis is that nothing human, natural or divine guarantees respect for the ethical values and commitments that are most needed in contemporary human existence, but nothing is more important than our commitment to defend them, for they remain as fundamental as they are fragile, as precious as they are endangered.

Mira Hamermesh is an award-winning film maker, painter and writer. This moving memoir gives a vivid account of her remarkable life. As a young Jewish teenager Hamermesh escaped the horrors of German-occupied Poland and was spared the experience of the ghetto and the concentration camp that claimed most of her family. Mira shows how her status as a refugee has continued to influence her throughout her life. The journey led her across Europe and eventually to Palestine in 1941; her account of that region, before the establishment of Israel, provides a fascinating insight into the historical setting for today's conflict. Having settled in London where she studied art and married, she eventually won a place at the celebrated Polish Film School in Lodz. At the height of the Cold War Mira Hamermesh commuted across the Iron Curtain - her experience of a divided Europe offers many insights into the political factors that affected people's everyday lives. Mira's theme of political conflict, so often explored in her films, is brought to life here in an intimate account that will live long in the memory.

The Spring of 1943 was a desperate season for the Jews of Brussels. Having discovered the departure date of the next transport train to Auschwitz, resistance fighter Youra Livchitz and two school friends organized a raid and pulled off one of the most daring rescues of the enitre war.These three lone men freed seventeen men and women before the German guards opened fire. Miraculously, by the time the convoy had reached the German border another 225 prisoners had managed to escape unharmed and found shelter with the locals. In a testament to the solidarity of the Belgians, no one is betrayed. No one that is except the three young rescuers who were turned in by a double agent, imprisoned and killed.
Marion Schreiber's gripping book about the only Nazi death train in World War II to be ambushed draws on private documents, photographs, archive material and police reports, as well as original research, including interviews with the surviving escapees. Like Schindler's List or The Pianist, The Twentieth Train creates a vivid, moving portrait of heroism under impossible circumstances.

Like many European Jews, Sam Iwry began his life in Poland, but at the age of ten fled with his family to Russia before World War I. At age 29, Iwry was forced to flee again - this time from the Soviets - and ended up in Shanghai, China, joining 20,000 Jewish refugees who were there. The story of the Diaspora caused by the Holocaust is well-known, but the Far Eastern dimension has come to light only very recently. Iwry is a magnificent storyteller who not only brings the harrowing details of flight and survival into vivid detail, but he is also an historian who deliberately places his own experiences into much wider context. This oral history sheds light on Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the inter-war period, the search for a safe haven from Nazis and Soviets, daily life in the Shanghai ghetto, and emigration to America. Iwry's story is both representative of the Jewish experience and also completely unique.

This collection of essays by leading scholars in their fields provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of Holocaust historiography available. Covering both long-established historical disputes as well as research questions and methodologies that have developed in the last decade's massive growth in Holocaust Studies, this collection will be of enormous benefit to students and scholars alike.

A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel

Born in Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. "Night "is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's seminal work.

Immediately after World War II, there was little discussion of the Holocaust, but today the word has grown into a potent political and moral symbol, recognized by all. In Holocaust: An American Understanding, renowned historian Deborah E. Lipstadt explores this striking evolution in Holocaust consciousness, revealing how a broad array of Americans - from students in middle schools to presidents of the United States - tried to make sense of this inexplicable disaster, and how they came to use the Holocaust as a lens to interpret their own history. Lipstadt weaves a powerful narrative that touches on events as varied as the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Stonewall, and the women's movement, as well as controversies over Bitburg, the Rwandan genocide, and the bombing of Kosovo. Drawing upon extensive research on politics, popular culture, student protests, religious debates and various strains of Zionist ideologies, Lipstadt traces how the Holocaust became integral to the fabric of American life. Even popular culture, including such films as Dr. Strangelove and such books as John Hershey's The Wall, was influenced by and in turn influenced thinking about the Holocaust. Equally important, the book shows how Americans used the Holocaust to make sense of what was happening in the United States. Many Americans saw the civil rights movement in light of Nazi oppression, for example, while others feared that American soldiers in Vietnam were destroying a people identified by the government as the enemy. Lipstadt demonstrates that the Holocaust became not just a tragedy to be understood but also a tool for interpreting America and its place in the world. Ultimately Holocaust: An American Understanding tells us as much about America in the years since the end of World War II as it does about the Holocaust itself.

British state-supported Holocaust remembrance has dramatically grown in prominence since the 1990s. This monograph provides the first substantial discussion of the interface between public Holocaust memory in contemporary Britain and the nation's changing religious-secular landscape. In the first half of the book attention is given to the relationships between remembrance activities and Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and post-Christian communities. Such relationships are far from monolithic, being entangled in diverse histories, identities, power-structures, and notions of 'British values'. In the book's second half, the focus turns to ways in which public initiatives concerned with Holocaust commemoration and education are intertwined with evocations and perceptions of the sacred. Three state-supported endeavours are addressed in detail: Holocaust Memorial Day, plans for a major new memorial site in London, and school visits to Auschwitz. Considering these phenomena through concepts of ritual, sacred space, and pilgrimage, it is proposed that response to the Holocaust has become a key feature of Britain's 21st century religious-secular landscape. Critical consideration of these topics, it is argued, is necessary for both a better understanding of religious-secular change in modern Britain and a sustainable culture of remembrance and national self-examination. This is the first study to examine Holocaust remembrance and British religiosity/secularity in relation to one another. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Jewish studies and Holocaust Studies, as well as the Sociology of Religion, Material Religion and Secularism.

Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik provides the first extensive exploration of the reception of Ka-Tzetnik's work and the role that his books have played in the larger discussion of the Holocaust and its memorialization around the world. Including contributions from an international and interdisciplinary group of experienced scholars, the book examines the literary merits, historical context and public resonance of Ka-Tzetnik's stories. It also places his novels in the context of post-WWII debates about how the memories and testimonies of the victims of the Holocaust can be represented and made publicly accessible through literature. There is also detailed coverage of key topics, like Holocaust memory and sexual violence in the concentration camps, and thorough historical analysis of key works like House of Dolls included throughout. This is an important study for all scholars and students with an interest in the Holocaust and Holocaust literature.

W. H. Auden and Hannah Arendt belonged to a generation that experienced the catastrophic events of the mid-twentieth century, and they both sought to respond to the enormity of the novel phenomena they witnessed. "Regions of Sorrow" explores the remarkable affinity between their works. As incisive exponents and uncompromising proponents of the insuperable condition of plurality, Auden and Arendt give voice to an unexpected and inconspicuous messianism--a messianism in which contingency, frailty, and faultiness are neither rejected nor scorned but celebrated as the indispensable elements of what Auden calls "anxious hope."
Beginning with an examination of Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" and Auden's "Age of Anxiety," which both conclude with meditations on Nazi terror, the author turns to an unprecedented presentation of Arendt's "Human Condition" in terms of Jewish-German messianism, and concludes with Auden's "In Praise of Limestone," which lays out the frail and faulty space in which messianism breaks free from apocalyptic forecasts.

W. H. Auden and Hannah Arendt belonged to a generation that experienced the catastrophic events of the mid-twentieth century, and they both sought to respond to the enormity of the novel phenomena they witnessed. "Regions of Sorrow" explores the remarkable affinity between their works. As incisive exponents and uncompromising proponents of the insuperable condition of plurality, Auden and Arendt give voice to an unexpected and inconspicuous messianism--a messianism in which contingency, frailty, and faultiness are neither rejected nor scorned but celebrated as the indispensable elements of what Auden calls "anxious hope."
Beginning with an examination of Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" and Auden's "Age of Anxiety," which both conclude with meditations on Nazi terror, the author turns to an unprecedented presentation of Arendt's "Human Condition" in terms of Jewish-German messianism, and concludes with Auden's "In Praise of Limestone," which lays out the frail and faulty space in which messianism breaks free from apocalyptic forecasts.

Born into poverty in Russian Poland in 1911, Zosa Szajkowski (Shy-KOV-ski) was a self-made man who managed to make a life for himself as an intellectual, first as a journalist in 1930s Paris, and then, after a harrowing escape to New York in 1941, as a scholar. Although he never taught at a university or even earned a PhD, Szajkowski became one of the world's foremost experts on the history of the Jews in modern France, publishing in Yiddish, English, and Hebrew. His work opened up new ways of thinking about Jewish emancipation, economic and social modernization, and the rise of modern anti-Semitism. But beneath Szajkowski's scholarly success lay a shameful secret. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the scholar stole tens of thousands of archival documents related to French Jewish history from public archives and private synagogue collections in France and moved them, illicitly, to New York. There, he used them as the basis for his pathbreaking articles. Eventually, he sold them, piecemeal, to American and Israeli research libraries, where they still remain today. Why did this respectable historian become an archive thief? And why did librarians in the United States and Israel buy these materials from him, turning a blind eye to the signs of ownership they bore? These are the questions that motivate this gripping tale. Throughout, it is clear that all involved-perpetrator, victims, and buyers-saw what Szajkowski was doing through the prism of the Holocaust. The buyers shared a desire to save these precious remnants of the European Jewish past, left behind on a continent where six million Jews had just been killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. The scholars who read Szajkowski's studies, based largely on the documents he had stolen, saw the treasures as offering an unparalleled window into the history that led to that catastrophe. And the Jewish caretakers of many of the institutions Szajkowski robbed in France saw the losses as a sign of their difficulties reconstructing their community after the Holocaust, when the balance of power in the Jewish world was shifting away from Europe to new centers in America and Israel. Based on painstaking research, Lisa Leff reconstructs Szajkowski's story in all its ambiguity by taking us backstage at the archives, revealing the powerful ideological, economic and scientific forces that made Holocaust-era Jewish scholars care more deeply than ever before about preserving the remnants of their past.

Few lives shed more light on the complex relationship between Jews and Christians during and after the Holocaust--or provide a more moving portrait of courage--than Oswald Rufeisen's. A Jew passing as a Christian in occupied Poland, Rufeisen worked as translator for the German police--the very people who rounded up and murdered the Jews--and repeatedly risked his life to save hundreds from the Nazis. In this gripping biography, Nechama Tec, a widely acclaimed writer on the Holocaust, recounts Rufeisen's remarkable story.
A youth of seventeen when World War II began, Rufeisen joined the exodus of Poles who fled the approaching German army. Tec vividly describes how Rufeisen used his ability to speak fluent German to pass as half German and half Polish in Mir, where he came to serve as translator and personal secretary to the German in charge of the gendarmerie. As he carried out his duties--reading death sentences to prisoners, swearing in new police officers before a portrait of Hitler--he earned the trust and affection of the German commander, yet lived in constant fear of discovery. He used his position to pass secret information to Jews and Christians about impending "aktions" and to sabatoge Nazi plans. Most notably, he thwarted the annihilation of the Mir ghetto by arming hundreds of doomed Jews and organizing their escape, and saved an entire Belorussian village from destruction. Denounced, Rufeisen escaped and found shelter in a convent, where he converted to Catholicism. Though a pacifist, he spent the rest of the war fighting in a Russian partisan unit.
After the war, Father Daniel (as he is now known) became a priest and a Carmelite monk. Identifying himself as aChristian Jew and an ardent Zionist, he moved to Israel, where he challenged the Law of Return in a case that reached the High Court and attracted international attention. Today he continues to devote himself to bridging the gap between Christians and Jews.
In the Lion's Den offers a stirring portrait of a Jewish rescuer during the Holocaust and its aftermath, illuminating the intricate connections between good and evil, cruelty and compassion, and Judaism and Christianity.

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.

A half-century ago, the international community made a solemn promise to “never again” allow genocide to go unchallenged. In the early days of the post-Cold War era, international leaders failed to stop horrific genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, chiefly because Western leaders lack the “political will” to use decisive force. Despite increased attention to war crimes issues, American military policy still gives lowest priority to responding to gross abuses of human rights. In Genocide and the Global Village, Kenneth Campbell explains why the international community fails to prevent, suppress, and punish contemporary genocide. Campbell provides a multi-level analysis of genocide’s impact upon world order, and the inter-play of politics and morality in the international community’s determination of the appropriate role for military force in halting genocide and securing an emerging global civil society. He recommends practical steps the international community can take to greatly improve its response the next time genocide occurs--a next time that will occur.