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Books > History > European history > From 1900 > Second World War
Scholarship often presumes that texts written about the Shoah,
either by those directly involved in it or those writing its
history, must always bear witness to the affective aftermath of the
event, the lingering emotional effects of suffering. Drawing on the
History of Emotions and on trauma theory, this monograph offers a
critical study of the ambivalent attributions and expressions of
emotion and "emotionlessness" in the literature and historiography
of the Shoah. It addresses three phenomena: the metaphorical
discourses by which emotionality and the purported lack thereof are
attributed to victims and to perpetrators; the rhetoric of
affective self-control and of affective distancing in fiction,
testimony and historiography; and the poetics of empathy and the
status of emotionality in discourses on the Shoah. Through a close
analysis of a broad corpus centred around the work of W. G. Sebald,
Dieter Schlesak, Ruth Kluger and Raul Hilberg, the book critically
contextualises emotionality and its attributions in the post-war
era, when a scepticism of pathos coincided with demands for factual
rigidity. Ultimately, it invites the reader to reflect on their own
affective stances towards history and its commemoration in the
twenty-first century.
In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President. Over the next
twelve years, he instilled confidence in a nation once mired in
fear. The Jews of America revered Roosevelt, and from an early age,
Robert Beir regarded him as a hero. In mid-life, however, Beir
undertook a historian's quest regarding Roosevelt's record during
the Holocaust. How much did Roosevelt know about the Holocaust and
what could he have done?
He's been called "America's greatest living tailor" and "the most
interesting man in the world." Now, for the first time, Holocaust
survivor Martin Greenfield tells his incredible life story. Taken
from his Czechoslovakian home at age fifteen and transported to the
Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz with his family, Greenfield
came face to face with "Angel of Death" Dr. Joseph Mengele and was
divided forever from his parents, sisters, and baby brother. In
haunting, powerful prose, Greenfield remembers his desperation and
fear as a teenager alone in the death camp and how an SS soldier's
shirt dramatically altered the course of his life. He learned how
to sew; and when he began wearing the shirt under his prisoner
uniform, he learned that clothes possess great power and could even
help save his life. Measure of a Man is the story of a man who
suffered unimaginable horror and emerged with a dream of success.
From sweeping floors at a New York clothing factory to founding
America's premier custom suit company, Greenfield built a fashion
empire. Now 86 years old and working with his sons, Greenfield has
dressed the famous and powerful of D.C. and Hollywood, including
Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama,
celebrities Paul Newman, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jimmy Fallon, and
the stars of Martin Scorsese's films. Written with soul-baring
honesty and, at times, a wry sense of humor, Measure of a Man is a
memoir unlike any other one that will inspire hope and renew faith
in the resilience of man.
In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race," was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi's classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, Survival in Auschwitz remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit. Included in this new edition is an illuminating conversation between Philip Roth and Primo Levi never before published in book form.
The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewryis a collection of
eyewitness testimonies, letters, diaries, affidavits, and other
documents on the activities of the Nazis against Jews in the camps,
ghettoes, and towns of Eastern Europe. Arguably, the only apt
comparism is to The Gulag Archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
This definitive edition of The Black Book, including for the first
time materials omitted from previous editions, is a major addition
to the literature on the Holocaust. It will be of particular
interest to students, teachers, and scholars of the Holocaust and
those interested in the history of Europe.
By the end of 1942, 1.4 million Jews had been killed by the
Einsatzgruppen that followed the German army eastward; by the end
of the war, nearly two million had been murdered in Russia and
Eastern Europe. Of the six million Jews who perished in the
Holocaust, about one-third fell in the territories of the USSR. The
single most important text documenting that slaughter is The Black
Book, compiled by two renowned Russian authors Ilya Ehrenburg and
Vasily Grossman. Until now, The Black Book was only available in
English in truncated editions. Because of its profound
significance, this new and definitive English translation of The
Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry is a major literary and
intellectual event.
From the time of the outbreak of the war, Ehrenburg and Grossman
collected the eyewitness testimonies that went into The Black Book.
As early as 1943 they were planning its publication; the first
edition appeared in 1944. During the years immediately after the
war, Grossman assisted Ehrenburg in compiling additional materials
for a second edition, which appeared in 1946 (in English as well as
Russian).
Since the fall of the Soviet regime, Irina Ehrenburg, the
daughter of Ilya Ehrenburg, has recovered the lost portions of the
manuscript sent to Yad Vashem. The texts recovered by Ms. Ehrenburg
include numerous documents that had been censored from the original
manuscript, as well as items that had been hidden by the Grossman
family. In addition, she verified and, where appropriate, corrected
the accuracy of documents that had already appeared in earlier
editions of The Black Book.
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Abigail
(Paperback)
Magda Szabo; Translated by Len Rix
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R321
R293
Discovery Miles 2 930
Save R28 (9%)
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A teenage girl's difficult journey towards adulthood in a time of
war. "A school story for grownups that is also about our inability
or refusal to protect children from history" SARAH MOSS "Of all
Szabo's novels, Abigail deserves the widest readership. It's an
adventure story, brilliantly written" TIBOR FISCHER Of all her
novels, Magda Szabo's Abigail is indeed the most widely read in her
native Hungary. Now, fifty years after it was written, it appears
for the first time in English, joining Katalin Street and The Door
in a loose trilogy about the impact of war on those who have to
live with the consequences. It is late 1943 and Hitler, exasperated
by the slowness of his Hungarian ally to act on the "Jewish
question" and alarmed by the weakness on his southern flank, is
preparing to occupy the country. Foreseeing this, and concerned for
his daughter's safety, a Budapest father decides to send her to a
boarding school away from the capital. A lively, sophisticated,
somewhat spoiled teenager, she is not impressed by the reasons she
is given, and when the school turns out to be a fiercely
Puritanical one in a provincial city a long way from home, she
rebels outright. Her superior attitude offends her new classmates
and things quickly turn sour. It is the start of a long and bitter
learning curve that will open her eyes to her arrogant blindness to
other people's true motives and feelings. Exposed for the first
time to the realities of life for those less privileged than
herself, and increasingly confronted by evidence of the more
sinister purposes of the war, she learns lessons about the nature
of loyalty, courage, sacrifice and love. Translated from the
Hungarian by Len Rix
'That nickname . . .' '"Little bird." It wasn't mine. I found out
later he gave it to every little girl that came in to be injected.
"Little Bird" didn't mean anything. It was a trick. There were
thousands of "little birds", just like me, all thinking they were
the only one.' As a reporter, Jacques Peretti has spent his life
investigating important stories. But there was one story, heard in
scattered fragments throughout his childhood, that he never thought
to investigate. The story of how his mother survived Auschwitz. In
the few last months of the Second World War, thirteen-year-old
Alina Peretti, along with her mother and sister, was one of
thirteen thousand non-Jewish Poles sent to Auschwitz. Her
experiences there cast a shadow over the rest of her life. Now
ninety, Alina has been diagnosed with dementia. Together, mother
and son begin a race against time to record her memories and
preserve her family's story. Along the way, Jacques learns
long-hidden secrets about his mother's family. He gains an
understanding of his mother through retracing her past, learning
more about the woman who would never let him call her 'Mum'.
The history of spatial identities in the Third Reich is best
approached not as the history of a singular ideology of place, but
rather, as a history of interrelated spaces. National Socialists,
it is clear, attached great importance to place: it was at the
heart of their utopian political project, which was about re-making
territories as well as people's relationships with them. But in
this project, Heimat, region and Empire did not constitute separate
realms for political interventions. Rather, in the Third Reich, as
in the preceding periods of German history, Heimat, region and
Empire were constantly imagined, constructed and re-moulded through
their relationship with one another. This collection brings
together an exciting mixture of international scholars who are
currently pursuing cutting-edge research on spatial identities
under National Socialism. They uncover more differentiated spatial
imaginaries at the heart of Nazi ideology than were previously
acknowledged, and will fuel a growing scepticism about generic
national narratives.
The extraordinary experiences of ordinary people-their suffering
and their unimaginable bravery-are the subject of Judy Glickman
Lauder's remarkable photographs. Beyond the Shadows responds to the
world's looking the other way as the Nazis took power and their
hate-fueled nationalism steadily turned to mass murder. In the
context of the horror of the Holocaust, it also tells the uplifting
story of how the citizens and leadership of Denmark, under
occupation and at tremendous risk to themselves, defied the Third
Reich to transport the country's Jews to safety in Sweden. Over the
past thirty years, Glickman Lauder has captured the intensity of
death camps in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, in dark and
expressive photographs, telling of a world turned upside down, and,
in contrast, the redemptive and uplifting story of the "Danish
exception." Including texts by Holocaust scholars Michael Berenbaum
and Judith S. Goldstein, and a previously unpublished original text
by survivor Elie Wiesel, Beyond the Shadows demonstrates
passionately what hate can lead to, and what can be done to stand
in its path. "This is photography and storytelling for our times,
about what hate leads to, and how we can stand up to it. Beyond the
Shadows is powerful and revealing, and sharply relevant to all of
us who believe in the human family." - Sir Elton John
The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature is a comprehensive
reference resource including a wealth of critical material on a
diverse range of topics within the literary study of Holocaust
writing. At its centre is a series of specially commissioned essays
by leading scholars within the field: these address genre-specific
issues such as the question of biographical and historical truth in
Holocaust testimony, as well as broader topics including the
politics of Holocaust representation and the validity of
comparative approaches to the Holocaust in literature and
criticism. These original essays are complemented by a host of
other features designed to benefit scholars and students within
this subject area, including a substantial section detailing new
and emergent trends within the literary study of the Holocaust, a
concise glossary of major critical terminology, and an annotated
bibliography of relevant research material. The volume will be of
interest and value to scholars and students of Holocaust
literature, memorial culture, Jewish Studies, genocide studies, and
twentieth and twenty-first century literature more
broadly.Contributors: Victoria Aarons, Jenni Adams, Michael
Bernard-Donals, Matthew Boswell, Stef Craps, Richard Crownshaw,
Brett Ashley Kaplan and Fernando Herrero-Matoses, Adrienne Kertzer,
Erin McGlothlin, David Miller, and Sue Vice.
Based on never previously explored personal accounts and archival
documentation, this book examines life and death in the
Theresienstadt ghetto, seen through the eyes of the Jewish victims
from Denmark. "How was it in Theresienstadt?" Thus asked Johan Grun
rhetorically when he, in July 1945, published a short text about
his experiences. The successful flight of the majority of Danish
Jewry in October 1943 is a well-known episode of the Holocaust, but
the experience of the 470 men, women, and children that were
deported to the ghetto has seldom been the object of scholarly
interest. Providing an overview of the Judenaktion in Denmark and
the subsequent deportations, the book sheds light on the fate of
those who were arrested. Through a micro-historical analysis of
everyday life, it describes various aspects of social and daily
life in proximity to death. In doing so, the volume illuminates the
diversity of individual situations and conveys the deportees'
perceptions and striving for survival and 'normality'. Offering a
multi-perspective and international approach that places the case
of Denmark into the broader Jewish experience during the Holocaust,
this book is invaluable for researchers of Jewish studies,
Holocaust and genocide studies, and the history of modern Denmark.
This is the first attempt to explain how Jewish doctors survived
extreme adversity in Auschwitz where death could occur at any
moment. The ordinary Jewish slave labourer survived an average of
fifteen weeks. Ross Halpin discovers that Jewish doctors survived
an average of twenty months, many under the same horrendous
conditions as ordinary prisoners. Despite their status as
privileged prisoners Jewish doctors starved, froze, were beaten to
death and executed. Many Holocaust survivors attest that luck, God
and miracles were their saviors. The author suggests that surviving
Auschwitz was far more complex. Interweaving the stories of Jewish
doctors before and during the Holocaust Halpin develops a model
that explains the anatomy of survival. According to his model the
genesis of survival of extreme adversity is the will to live which
must be accompanied by the necessities of life, specific personal
traits and defence mechanisms. For survival all four must co-exist.
Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of German Jews, in fear for their
lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and
live submerged in the shadows of the Nazi capital. Drawing on a
wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this
book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin
during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that "hidden"
Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the
outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable
individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to
ensure their own survival.
Dachau and the SS studies the concentration camp guards at Dachau,
the first SS concentration camp and a national 'school' of violence
for its concentration camp personnel. Set up in the first months of
Adolf Hitler's rule, Dachau was a bastion of the Nazi 'revolution'
and a key springboard for the ascent of Heinrich Himmler and the SS
to control of the Third Reich's terror and policing apparatus.
Throughout the pre-war era of Nazi Germany, Dachau functioned as an
academy of violence where concentration camp personnel were
schooled in steely resolution and the techniques of terror. An
international symbol of Nazi depredation, Dachau was the cradle of
a new and terrible spirit of destruction. Combining extensive new
research into the pre-war history of Dachau with theoretical
insights from studies of perpetrator violence, this book offers the
first systematic study of the 'Dachau School'. It explores the
backgrounds and socialization of thousands of often very young SS
men in the camp and critiques the assumption that violence was an
outcome of personal or ideological pathologies. Christopher Dillon
analyses recruitment to the Dachau SS and evaluates the
contribution of ideology, training, social psychology and masculine
ideals to the conduct and subsequent careers of concentration camp
guards. Graduates of the Dachau School would go on to play a
central role in the wartime criminality of the Third Reich,
particularly at Auschwitz. Dachau and the SS makes an original
contribution to scholarship on the pre-history of the Holocaust and
the institutional organisation of violence.
Under the Swastika in Nazi Germany begins in flames in 1933 with
Adolf Hitler taking power and ends in the ashes of total defeat in
1945. Kristin Semmens tells that story from five different
perspectives over five chronologically distinct phases in the Third
Reich's lifespan. The book offers a much-needed integrated history
of insiders and outsiders - Nazis, accomplices, supporters, racial
and social outsiders and resisters - that captures the complexity
of Germans' lives under Hitler. Incorporating recent research and
the voices of those who often remain silent in histories of this
period, Under the Swastika in Nazi Germany delivers an up to date,
engaging and accessible introduction. Its narrative is further
supported by well-chosen images, some familiar and others rarely
seen. By revealing the potent combination of coercion and consent
at work during the dictatorship, the book allows a deeper
understanding of Nazi Germany and provides a vital platform for
further inquiry into these twelve years of German history.
This book explores, for the first time, the impact of the Holocaust
on the gender identities of Jewish men. Drawing on historical and
sociological arguments, it specifically looks at the experiences of
men in France, Holland, Belgium, and Poland. Jewish Masculinity in
the Holocaust starts by examining the gendered environment and
ideas of Jewish masculinity during the interwar period and in the
run-up to the Holocaust. The volume then goes on to explore the
effect of Nazi persecution on various elements of male gender
identity, analysing a wide range of sources including diaries and
journals written at the time, underground ghetto newspapers and
numerous memoirs written in the intervening years by survivors.
Taken together, these sources show that Jewish masculinities were
severely damaged in the initial phases of persecution, particularly
because men were unable to perform the gendered roles they expected
of themselves. More controversially, however, Maddy Carey also
shows that the escalation of the persecution and later enclosure -
whether through ghettoisation or hiding - offered men the
opportunity to reassert their masculine identities. Finally, the
book discusses the impact of the Holocaust on the practice of
fatherhood and considers its effect on the transmission of
masculinity. This important study breaks new ground in its coverage
of gender and masculinities and is an important text for anyone
studying the history of the Holocaust.
"A meticulous and shattering investigation of eight horrific
pictures..."-L'Arche In December 1941, on a shore near the Latvian
city of Liepaja, Nazi death squads (the Einsatzgruppen) and local
collaborators murdered in three days more than 2,700 Jews. The
majority were women and children, most men having already been shot
during the summer. The perpetrators took pictures of the December
killings. These pictures are among the rare photographs from the
first period of the extermination, during which over 800 000 Jews
from the Baltic to the Black Sea were shot to death. By showing the
importance of photography in understanding persecution, Nadine
Fresco offers a powerful meditation on these images while
confronting the essential questions of testimony and guilt. From
the forward by Dorota Glowackay: Straddling the boundary between
historical inquiry and personal reflection, this extraordinary text
unfolds as a series of encounters with eponymic Holocaust
photographs. Although only a small number of photographs are
reproduced here, Fresco provides evocative descriptions of many
well-known images: synagogues and Torah scrolls burning on the
night of Kristallnacht; deportations to the ghettos and the camps;
and, finally, mass executions in the killing fi elds of Eastern
Europe. The unique set of photographs included in On the Death of
Jews shows groups of women and children from Liepaja (Liepaja),
shortly before they were killed in December 1941 in the dunes of
Shkede (Skede) on the Baltic Sea. In the last photograph of the
series, we see the victims' bodies tumbling into the pit.
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