"We will be judged in our own time and in the future by measuring the aid that we, inhabitants of a free and fortunate country, gave to our brethren in this time of greatest disaster." This declaration, made shortly after the pogroms of November 1938 by the Jewish communities in Sweden, was truer than anyone could have forecast at the time. Pontus Rudberg focuses on this sensitive issue - Jewish responses to the Nazi persecutions and mass murder of Jews. What actions did Swedish Jews take to aid the Jews in Europe during the years 1933-45 and what determined their policies and actions? Specific attention is given to the aid efforts of the Jewish Community of Stockholm, including the range of activities in which the community engaged and the challenges and opportunities presented by official refugee policy in Sweden.

In the early morning hours of May 18, 1944 the Russian army, under orders from Stalin, deported the entire Crimean Tatar population from their historical homeland. Given only fifteen minutes to gather their belongings, they were herded into cattle cars bound for Soviet Central Asia. Although the official Soviet record was cleansed of this affair and the name of their ethnic group was erased from all records and official documents, Crimean Tatars did not assimilate with other groups or disappear. This is an ethnographic study of the negotiation of social memory and the role this had in the growth of a national repatriation movement among the Crimean Tatars. It examines the recollections of the Crimean Tatars, the techniques by which they are produced and transmitted and the formation of a remarkably uniform social memory in light of their dispersion throughout Central Asia. Through the lens of social memory, the book covers not only the deportation and life in the diaspora but the process by which the children and grandchildren of the deportees returned and anchored themselves in the Crimean Peninsula, a place they had never visited.

Irmin Vinson's Some Thoughts on Hitler and Other Essays is a book about propaganda. Vinson explains how the organized Jewish community uses the memory of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust as weapons to stigmatize the patriotism and ethnic pride not just of Germans, but of all whites, including those who fought against Hitler. In these clear, rational, and highly readable essays, Irmin Vinson demolishes this propaganda and exposes the insidious agenda behind it.

Sarah, nine years old, endures yet another air-raid in the street shelter in Blitz-torn England. At the same time nine-year old Claude is practising an escape should their house in occupied France be raided by the Gestapo. Sarah and Claude, Jews, and their families experience the devastating effects of Nazi Germany. The children are deeply traumatised, Sarah by the fate of her mother during an air-raid and Claude by the 'disappearance' of his family. The effects of their tragic experiences are played out very differently. The early lives of the children, though in different cultures and different circumstances, manifest very similar parallel experiences. It is only when the two central characters meet as adults that the effects of the trauma show themselves clearly and very dramatically. The novel traces four generations of the two families through to the final powerful and moving outcome.

Paris was home to one of the key European initiatives to document and commemorate the Holocaust, the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine . By analysing the earliest Holocaust narratives and their reception in France, this study provides a new understanding of the institutional development of Holocaust remembrance in France after the War.

Auschwitz. Treblinka. The very names of these Nazi camps evoke unspeakable cruelty. Sobibor is less well known, and this book discloses the horrors perpetrated there.Established in German-occupied Poland, the camp at Sobibor began its dreadful killing operation in May 1942. By October 1943, approximately 167,000 people had been murdered there. Sobibor is not well documented and, were it not for an extraordinary revolt on 14 October 1943, we would know little about it. On that day, prisoners staged a remarkable uprising in which 300 men and women escaped. The author identifies only forty-seven who survived the war.Sent in June 1943 to Sobibor, where his wife and family were murdered, Jules Schelvis has written the first book-length, fully documented account of the camp. He details the creation of the killing centre, its personnel, the use of railways, selections, forced labour, gas chambers, escape attempts and the historic uprising.In documenting this part of Holocaust history, this compelling and well-researched account advances our knowledge and understanding of the Nazi attempt to annihilate the European Jews.Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

his practical and inspirational guide to healing from the bestselling author of The Choice shows us how to release your self-limiting beliefs and embrace your potential.

The prison is in your mind. The key is in your pocket. In the end, it's not what happens to us that matters most - it's what we choose to do with it.

We all face suffering - sadness, loss, despair, fear, anxiety, failure. But we also have a choice; to give in and give up in the face of trauma or difficulties, or to live every moment as a gift. Celebrated therapist and Holocaust survivor, Dr Edith Eger, provides a hands-on guide that gently encourages us to change the imprisoning thoughts and destructive behaviours that may be holding us back.

Accompanied by stories from Eger's own life and the lives of her patients her empowering lessons help you to see your darkest moments as your greatest teachers and find freedom through the strength that lies within.

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.

This is a unique, eye-witness account of everyday life right at the heart of the Nazi extermination machine.

Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first with disbelief, that they had almost certainly been gassed. Given the chance to earn a little extra bread, he agreed to become a 'Sonderkommando', without realising what this entailed. He soon found himself a member of the 'special unit' responsible for removing the corpses from the gas chambers and burning their bodies.

Dispassionately, he details the grim round of daily tasks, evokes the terror inspired by the man in charge of the crematoria, 'Angel of Death' Otto Moll, and recounts the attempts made by some of the prisoners to escape, including the revolt of October 1944.

It is usual to imagine that none of those who went into the gas chambers at Auschwitz ever emerged to tell their tale - but, as a member of a 'Sonderkommando', Shlomo Venezia was given this horrific privilege. He knew that, having witnessed the unspeakable, he in turn would probably be eliminated by the SS in case he ever told his tale. He survived: this is his story.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Combined for the first time here are Maus I: A Survivor's Tale and Maus II - the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, living and surviving in Hitler's Europe. By addressing the horror of the Holocaust through cartoons, the author captures the everyday reality of fear and is able to explore the guilt, relief and extraordinary sensation of survival - and how the children of survivors are in their own way affected by the trials of their parents. A contemporary classic of immeasurable significance. 

This book by dynamic scholars James Whisker and John Coe examines the short life of the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, one of the most overlooked individuals in the pantheon of leaders in the Third Reich. Born to German mercantile parents in the Baltic region of the Russian Empire, he was a student in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. Deeply influenced by the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a propaganda pamphlet distributed by the tsar's secret police, he carried it to Germany, where he introduced it to Adolf Hitler. Rosenberg leaned heavily on heterodox Christian writings that challenged mainstream Christian thought. He revived interest in a variety of philosophies and individuals long forgotten, such as the cosmic dualistic Cathars and the mystic Master Eckart von Hochheim. Rosenberg came to view history from a perspective often called "Scientific Racism," which held that the history of humankind had been marked by a struggle between the Aryan race and their supposed inferiors. Race was the newest subject for the application of cosmic dualism, which is the spiritual belief that two fundamental concepts exist. Rosenberg identified the Nazis' task as creating a bulwark against Semitic influences from Europe generally and Germany in particular, and to do so by any means necessary. Rosenberg figured in a long anti-Jewish tradition in Germany, a tortured legacy that began with Martin Luther and continued through many of the prominent German figures of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Rosenberg considered his magnum opus, The Myth of the 20th Century, to be the logical successor work to Foundations of the 19th Century by the composer Richard Wagner's son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Paths to Genocide examines the development of antisemitism from the beginnings of Christianity, through the Middle Ages, Reformation, Enlightenment and nineteenth century liberalism, nationalism and racism to the Holocaust. Focusing on major periods, places and problems in the history of European civilization, the book highlights historical contexts as it shows how religion, science, and socioeconomic forces all played a role in the evolution of antisemitism to its genocidal climax.

On 7 November 1938, an impoverished seventeen-year-old Polish Jew living in Paris, obsessed with Nazi persecution of his family in Germany, brooding on revenge - and his own insignificance - bought a handgun, carried it on the Metro to the German Embassy in Paris and, never before having fired a weapon, shot down the first German diplomat he saw. When the official died two days later, Hitler and Goebbels used the event as their pretext for the state-sponsored wave of anti-Semitic violence and terror known as Kristallnacht, the pogrom that was the initiating event of the Holocaust. Overnight this obscure young man, Herschel Grynszpan, found himself world-famous, his face on front pages everywhere, and a pawn in the machinations of power. Instead of being executed, he found himself a privileged prisoner of the Gestapo while Hitler and Goebbels prepared a show-trial. The trial, planned to the last detail, was intended to prove that the Jews had started the Second World War. Alone in his cell, Herschel soon grasped how the Nazis planned to use him, and set out to wage a battle of wits against Hitler and Goebbels, knowing perfectly well that if he succeeded in stopping the trial, he would certainly be murdered. Until very recently, what really happened has remained hazy. Hitler's Scapegoat, based on the most recent research - including access to a heretofore untapped archive compiled by a Nuremberg rapporteur - tells Herschel's extraordinary story in full for the first time.

Jurek Becker is one of the most important post-war German authors. His first novel, Jacob the Liar, already has the status of a classic of post-1945 European literature about the Holocaust and has been widely translated. This timely book traces the main events in Becker's unusual personal history: his childhood experiences in the Lodz Ghetto and in the concentration camps of Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen, his life in the GDR, and his move to the West. The author reflects both on Becker's quest for his Jewish identity as well as on his achievements in terms of narrative technique, formal innovation and style. Examining Becker's treatment of the Holocaust in his novels and stories, the author highlights their central themes of hope as resistance to barbarity, the idea of memory, the inability of a survivor of the camps to overcome psychological scars, but also the provocative portrayal of Jews as oppressors who take revenge on their former persecutors. Becker's portrayal of life in former East Germany, the role of gender relations, the problems facing a writer under a socialist regime, and East-West German relations are also investigated.
As the first comprehensive assessment of Becker's life and work, this book will be essential reading for those interested in German and Holocaust literature, critical theory and German studies.

The SS Cavalry Brigade was a unit of the Waffen-SS that differed from other German military formations as it developed a 'dual role': SS cavalrymen both helped to initiate the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and experienced combat at the front.

The essays in this book reflect on the significance of the Holocaust sixty years afterwards. In this time it has become embedded in collective memory This book explores the idea that even thought the tenets of Nazism--racism, dictatorship, expansionism --have become unacceptable in the western world, little has actually changed. Since 1945 crimes against humanity and human rights have occurred throughout the world. The Holocaust thus pre-figures a "death-drive" in contemporary culture: the idea that the ability to deliver death is the supreme expression of self-affirmation.

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

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

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

The Halbjuden of Hitler's Germany were half Christian and half Jewish but, like the rest of the Mischlinge (or "partial-Jews"), were far too Jewish in the eyes of the Nazis. Thus, while they were allowed for a time to coexist with the rest of German society, they were granted only the most marginal or menial jobs, restricted from marrying Aryans or even leading normal social lives, and sent eventually to forced-labor and concentration camps. More than 70,000 Germans were subjected to these restrictions and indignities, created and fostered by Hitler's morally bankrupt race laws, yet to this day few personal accounts of their experiences exist.

James Tent movingly recounts how these men and women from all over Germany and from all walks of life struggled to survive in an increasingly hostile society, even as their Jewish relatives were disappearing into the East. It draws on extensive interviews with twenty survivors, many of whom were teenagers when Hitler came to power, to show how "half Jews" coped with conditions on a day-to-day basis, and how the legacy of the hatred they suffered has forever lingered in their minds.

Tent provides gripping stories of life beneath the boot-heel of Nazi rule: a woman deemed unsuited for a career in nursing because the shape of her earlobes and breasts indicated she was not "racially suited," a man arrested for "race defilement" because he lived with an Aryan woman, and many others. Writing with a deep and abiding respect for his subjects, Tent shows how Nazi discrimination and persecution affected the lives of the Mischlinge beginning in 1933, and he tells how such treatment intensified through the later years of the war.

These testimonies offer rare insight into how Nazi persecution functioned at a very personal level. Tent's witnesses share experiences in school and problems in the workplace, where the best survival strategy was to find an unobtrusive niche in a nondescript job. They tell of obstacles to personal and romantic relationships. And they soberly remind us that by 1944 they too were rounded up for forced labor, certain to be the next victims of Nazi genocide.

"In the Shadow of the Holocaust" demonstrates the lengths to which the Nazis were willing to go in order to eradicate Judaism-a fanaticism that increased over time and even in the face of impending military defeat. These people mostly survived the Holocaust, yet they paid for their re-assimilation into German society by remaining silent in the face of haunting memories. This book breaks that silence and is a testament to human endurance under the most trying circumstances.

Over the past forty years, the term Holocaust has come to represent the deliberate campaign of extermination of Jews by the Nazis of Germany's Third Reich preceding and during World War II. Masses of edited documents and analytical material have been generated by Holocaust scholars, and some bibliographical and encyclopedic guides to the field are available. However, a student or researcher may be confounded by the abundance of publications and may lack the necessary background and endurance to sift the wheat from the chaff. The present volume has a two-fold purpose: to offer substantial analysis in intrinsic areas of study and to assess the relevant literature in each case.

Major scholars and brilliant, less established historians from Israel, Canada, and the United States have contributed more than thirty essays complete with extensive reference lists in three broad divisions. The section on conceptual approaches to the Holocaust is composed of such topics as the rise of national socialism, biographies and interpretations of Hitler, concentration camps, post-Holocaust Jewish philosophies, and the righteous gentiles. Area studies deal with aspects of the Holocaust in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, the Balkans, France, Holland, Italy, and Spain, and with effects and reactions in Switzerland and Britain. Arab-German collaboration and American responses are also addressed. A third section takes up Holocaust subjects in education, belles lettres, and the arts, including diaries and memoirs, fiction, poetry, books for children, art, music, and films. Although the scholars all provide evaluative surveys of their subjects and related literature, each enjoyed considerable latitude in coverage and each presents his or her own views and selections, not all of which are shared by other contributors or the volume editor. The editor also provides an introduction and a final survey of major institutions and resources for Holocaust study. A significant reference tool, this volume will be consulted by researchers at all levels in university, public, secondary, and parochial school libraries and at religious institutions.