Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions aims to move archaeological research concerning the Holocaust forward through a discussion of the variety of the political, social, ethical and religious issues that surround investigations of this period and by considering how to address them. It considers the various reasons why archaeological investigations may take place and what issues will be brought to bear when fieldwork is suggested. It presents an interdisciplinary methodology in order to demonstrate how archaeology can (uniquely) contribute to the history of this period. Case examples are used throughout the book in order to contextualise prevalent themes and a variety of geographically and typologically diverse sites throughout Europe are discussed. This book challenges many of the widely held perceptions concerning the Holocaust, including the idea that it was solely an Eastern European phenomena centred on Auschwitz and the belief that other sites connected to it were largely destroyed or are well-known. The typologically , temporally and spatial diverse body of physical evidence pertaining to this period is presented and future possibilities for investigation of it are discussed. Finally, the volume concludes by discussing issues relating to the "re-presentation" of the Holocaust and the impact of this on commemoration, heritage management and education. This discussion is a timely one as we enter an age without survivors and questions are raised about how to educate future generations about these events in their absence.

A remarkable and compelling story about a Jewish boys coming of age during World War II, his survival, and ultimately, the transformation of his life as an American. Joseph Garays life story is an object lesson about perseverance in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles -- from the loss of his entire family in the concentration camps, to his survival in the Jewish Underground in Bratislava and elsewhere; from his joining the partisan underground and his enlistment in the Czechoslovakian division of the Romanian Red Army to fight the Nazis, to his meeting and marrying his wife. It is also a lesson about the remarkable acts of a single individual, Joseph Paserin, who protected Garay during those tumultuous war years despite grave risk to his own and his familys safety. The actions of Paserin ultimately enabled Garay to start anew in New York City -- to build a new family and to enjoy the safety and security of American freedom.

This work deals with the integration of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust into Israeli society in the early years of the new State's existence. Among the issues discussed are: the ways in which the survivors were recruited into the defence forces and the role they played in the War of Independence, the settlement of the immigrants in towns and villages abandoned by Arabs during the war and the immigrant youth.

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.

A revelation and a source of hope. Background essays give a historical overview of how the early pessimistic concentration on pathology has given way to greater emphasis on survivors' adaptive potential and strengths. Many contributors stress the importance of remembering and facing the pain that memory brings, an emphasis shared by Jewish tradition.

"Jewish Chronicle"

This is the first comprehensive anthology on the psychological treatment of Holocaust survivors and their families. It covers the full range of current theoretical and therapeutic approaches. It is a major resource for the clinician working with Holocaust survivors and their children, persecuted and traumatized populations, and patients suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. The chapters are organized around differing perspectives--classical psychoanalytic, self-psychological, group, family, pastoral, empirical research, eclectic. The editors include writings not usually part of the mainstream and focus on relevant yet often unnoticed issues.

This book gives its reader a good sense of how a discipline has struggled and evolved in its efforts to understand the impact of an historical event on its victims. The field's diversity of viewpoints and major controversies are put into sharp focus in this volume. It allows the reader--whether practicing clinician, academic researcher, or lay person--the opportunity to compare a wide range of approaches and draw conclusions. While primarily functioning as a resource, it will also serve as historical record to the Holocaust's unprecedented evil.

Waitman Wade Beorn's The Holocaust in Eastern Europe provides a comprehensive history of the Holocaust in the region that was the central location of the event itself while including material often overlooked in general Holocaust history texts. First introducing Jewish life as it was lived before the Nazis in Eastern Europe, the book chronologically surveys the development of Nazi policies in the area over the period from 1939 to 1945. This book provides an overview of both the German imagination and obsession with the East and its impact on the Nazi genocidal project there. It also covers the important period of Soviet occupation and its effects on the unfolding of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. This text also treats in detail other themes such as ghettoization, the Final Solution, rescue, collaboration, resistance, and many others. Throughout, Beorn includes detailed examples of the similarities and differences of the nature of the Holocaust in various regions, in the words of perpetrators, witnesses, collaborators, and victims/survivors. Beorn also illustrates the complex nature of the Holocaust by discussing the difficult subjects of collaboration, sexual violence, the use of slave labour, treatment of Soviet POWs, profiteering and others within a larger narrative framework. He also explores key topics like Jewish resistance, Jewish councils, memory, and explanations for perpetration, collaboration, and rescue. The book includes images and maps to orient the reader to the topic area. This important book explains the brutality and complexity of the Holocaust in the East for all students of the Holocaust and 20th-century Eastern European history.

"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.

This important reference work highlights a number of disparate themes relating to the experience of children during the Holocaust, showing their vulnerability and how some heroic people sought to save their lives amid the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime. This book is a comprehensive examination of the people, ideas, movements, and events related to the experience of children during the Holocaust. They range from children who kept diaries to adults who left memoirs to others who risked (and, sometimes, lost) their lives in trying to rescue Jewish children or spirit them away to safety in various countries. The book also provides examples of the nature of the challenges faced by children during the years before and during World War II. In many cases, it examines the very act of children's survival and how this was achieved despite enormous odds. In addition to more than 125 entries, this book features 10 illuminating primary source documents, ranging from personal accounts to Nazi statements regarding what the fate of Jewish children should be to statements from refugee leaders considering how to help Jewish children after World War II ended. These documents offer fascinating insights into the lives of students during the Holocaust and provide students and researchers with excellent source material for further research. Provides readers with insights into the vulnerabilities faced by children during the Holocaust Shows how individual rescuers and larger (though clandestine) rescue organizations sought to minimize the worst effects of Nazi anti-Jewish measures against children Explains how some Jewish children pretended to be non-Jewish as a way to survive Showcases adult victims of the Holocaust who, despite the risks to themselves, worked to save children

The association of Nazism with the symbol of ultimate evil - the devil - can be found in the works of Klaus and Thomas Mann, Else Lasker-Schuler, and Rolf Hochhuth. He appears either as Satan of the Judeo-Christian tradition, or as Goethe's Mephisto. The devil is not only a metaphor, but a central part of the historical analysis. Barasch-Rubinstein looks into this phenomenon and analyzes the premise that the image of the devil had a substantial impact on Germans' acceptance of Nazi ideas. His diabolic characteristics, the pact between himself and humans, and his prominent place in German culture are part of the intriguing historical observations these four German writers embedded in their work. Whether writing before the outbreak of WWII, during the war, or after it, when the calamities of the Holocaust were already well-known, they all examine Nazism in the light of the ultimate manifestation of evil.

Constructing the Holocaust examines the development of Holocaust historiography in the light of recent critical philosophy of history. It argues that the Holocaust provides both the occasion for, and the ultimate test of, new ways of giving meaning to the past. It also shows that examining our representations of the past is as important as archival research for understanding history.

Theresienstadt, located in Czechoslovakia, was a peculiar concentration camp. It was publicized as a retirement city, a place for privileged and prominent Jews to sit out the war. In reality, it was a collection point, a Schleuse or "sluice", for arriving and departing transports, most of them destined for Auschwitz. Prisoners suffered from disease, starvation, exhaustion, overcrowding, and the persistent threat of deportation. Between 1941 and 1945, about 33,000 people died in Theresienstadt of disease and malnutrition, while about 88,000 were transported to the death camps in the East. The desperate need for self-preservation caused by the isolation and deprivations of camp life mobilized prisoners to cope in their own special ways. Some placed their emphasis on nourishment, others developed asocial traits of behavior, while others retained their cultural interests. These creative activities helped artists as well as amateurs block out the fear and uncertainty while helping to restore the dignity otherwise denied them. From this maelstrom of inhumanity, Gerty Spies found her salvation in writing. Isolated from the outside world and surrounded by death, she retreated into her inner self to concentrate on human, cultural, and spiritual values. Her ability to transcend and triumph over mental and physical degradations, to keep her own integrity, to defeat the evil that tried to destroy her loving nature, and to maintain her faith in human beings gives Gerty Spies's narrative extraordinary power. Throughout her ordeal, Spies displays an unwavering belief in the decency, goodness, and sincerity of all people. No trace of cynicism, malice, or enmity finds a place in her life or work. Despite living for three years surrounded by horror, Gerty Spies's loving and kind disposition enabled her "to forgive - but not to forget". Returning to Germany after the war, Spies reconciled her experiences under the Nazi regime with a new, full life as an artist among newfound friends. She has devoted her life to keeping open the dialogue of understanding between people, a philosophy of life so often expressed in her personal motto, Vestehen und Lieben ... to understand and to love.

This book provides an analysis of the forms and functions of Holocaust memorialisation in human rights museums by asking about the impact of global memory politics on how we imagine the present and the future. It compares three human rights museums and their respective emplotment of the Holocaust and seeks to illuminate how, in this specific setting, memory politics simultaneously function as future politics because they delineate a normative ideal of the citizen-subject, its set of values and aspirations for the future: that of the historically aware human rights advocate. More than an ethical practice, engaging with the Holocaust is used as a means of asserting one’s standing on "the right side of history"; the memorialisation of the Holocaust has thus become a means of governmentality, a way of governing contemporary citizen-subjects. The linking of public memory of the Holocaust with the human rights project is often presented as highly beneficial for all members of what is often called the "global community". Yet this book argues that this specific constellation of memory also has the ability to function as an exercise of power, and thus runs the risk of reinforcing structural oppression. With its novel theoretical approach this book not only contributes to Memory Studies but also connects Holocaust memory to Studies of Global Governmentality and the debate on decolonising memory politics.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum reveals and traces the transformation of ancient Jewish symbols, rituals, archetypes and narratives deployed in these sites. Demonstrating how cloaking the 'secular' history of the Holocaust in sacred garb, memorial museums generate redemptive yet conflicting visions of the meaning and utility of Holocaust memory.

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.

In the last two decades our empirical knowledge of the Holocaust has been vastly expanded. Yet this empirical blossoming has not been accompanied by much theoretical reflection on the historiography. This volume argues that reflection on the historical process of (re)constructing the past is as important for understanding the Holocaust-and, by extension, any past event-as is archival research. It aims to go beyond the dominant paradigm of political history and describe the emergence of methods now being used to reconstruct the past in the context of Holocaust historiography.

Over three days in November 1941, in Sosenki Forest outside the city of Rovno, Ukraine, German death squads supported by local collaborationists murdered some 23,500 Jewish men, women, and children. Often remembered as "the second Babi Yar," the massacre was one of nearly a hundred similar German-sponsored, large-scale, anti-Jewish killing operations perpetrated in Soviet zones during the early months of World War II on the Eastern Front. Preceding the adoption of the "Final Solution" by the Third Reich, Rovno and other mass killings in the East were testing grounds for genocide. This study of the Rovno massacre is based substantially on remarkable new research that blends sources from multiple archives (and archival traditions), national memories, and first-person testimony that places victims' accounts side-by-side with those of German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian eyewitnesses. In its meticulous reconstruction of these events, The Holocaust in Rovno exemplifies the burgeoning movement to form a genuinely transnational history of the Holocaust.

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.

How does scale affect our understanding of the Holocaust? In the vastness of its implementation and the sheer amount of death and suffering it produced, the genocide of Europe's Jews presents special challenges for historians, who have responded with work ranging in scope from the world-historical to the intimate. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a willingness to study the Holocaust at scales as focused as a single neighborhood, family, or perpetrator. This volume brings together an international cast of scholars to reflect on the ongoing microhistorical turn in Holocaust studies, assessing its historiographical pitfalls as well as the distinctive opportunities it affords researchers.

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.

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.

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 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.