Historians and reviewers worldwide have hailed Antony Beevor's magisterial Stalingrad as the definitive account of World War II's most harrowing battle. In August 1942, Hitler's huge Sixth Army reached the city that bore Stalin's name. In the five month siege that followed, the Russians fought to hold Stalingrad at any cost, then caught their Nazi enemy in an astonishing reversal. As never before, Stalingrad conveys the experience of soldiers on both sides as they fought in inhuman conditions, and of civilians trapped on an urban battlefield. Antony Beevor has interviewed survivors and discovered completely new material in a wide range of German and Soviet archives, including reports of prisoner interrogations, desertions, and executions. The battle of Stalingrad was the psychological turning point of World War II; as Beevor makes clear, it also changed the face of modern warfare. As a story of cruelty, courage, and human suffering, Stalingrad is unprecedented and unforgettable.

In the early months of 1994, it became clear that the government of Rwanda had not acted in good faith in signing peace accords with its adversary, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Acts of government-sponsored violence grew more frequent. The author of this book, who at that point was conducting fieldwork in Rwanda, on several occasions found either himself or the Rwandans accompanying him threatened with, or sustaining, bodily harm. Finally, active hostilities between the antagonists escalated on April 7, 1994, just hours after the Rwandan President's plane was shot down. During the author's evacuation from Rwanda in the months following, he interviewed many survivors.
This book, the outcome of the author's experiences during the conflict, is an attempt to understand the atrocities committed during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which nearly one million people, mostly of Tutsi ethnicity, were slaughtered in less than four months. Beyond this, the author shows that political and historical analyses, while necessary in understanding the violence, fail to explain the forms that the violence took and the degree of passion that motivated it. Instead, Rwandan ritual and practices related to the body are revelatory in this regard, as the body is the ultimate tablet upon which the dictates of the nation-state are inscribed. One rather bizarre example of this is that Hutu extremists often married or had sexual relations with Tutsi women who, according to the Hamitic hypothesis, were said to be sexually alluring. Their mixed-race offspring were not exempt from the genocide. Finally, and perhaps most importantly in light of the recent resurgence of violence, the author advances hypotheses about how the violence in Rwanda and Burundi might be transcended.

"Excellent and absorbing.... Indispensable to any attempt to understand the Khmer Rouge." -William Shawcross New York Review of Books "A dramatic account of Pol Pot's rise to power in 1975 and his direction of Cambodia's autogenocide.... David Chandler has given us an absorbing and authoritative portrait of Brother Number One and a fascinating insight into Cambodia's cruel history." -Frederick Z. Brown New York Times Book Review "This first biography of Pol Pot is valuable not just for what it tells us about Cambodia's past, but for helping us understand the present and perhaps predict the future.... Superbly written, pioneering work. Chandler makes up for the paucity of details about Pol Pot's life by painting a rich tableau of his times and setting out the historical context of his policies.... The only plausible portrait of the man whose gentle persona and brutal actions remain an enduring paradox." -Nayan Chanda Far Eastern Economic Review "This book is particularly welcome. Although a work of scholarship, [it] has the fast pace of a thriller.... [Chandler's] analysis rings true, and he has no ideological axe to grind; he is willing to go where the evidence takes him." -Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly "Chandler's gracefully written biography of the enigmatic revolutionary of this century, Saloth Sar (alias Pol Pot), deserves wide readership.... Chandler successfully walks a fine line, condemning Pol Pot and all his works, but trying to understand what motivates him.... Recommended without reservation." -Choice "No biographer could hope for a more elusive or enigmatic subject than Pol Pot. From interviews and extensive research, Chandler pieces together a riveting account of the life of this inaccessible man who was alternately mild mannered, cultivated, and genocidal.... Highly recommended." -Library Journal In Cambodia's recent, tragic past, no figure looms larger or more ominously than that of Pol Pot. In this revised edition of the first book-length study of the man, the historian David P. Chandler throws light on the shadowy figure of Pol Pot, illuminating the ideas and behavior of this enigmatic man and his entourage against the background of post-World War II events, providing a key to understanding this horrific, pivotal period of Cambodian history.

While Anne Frank was in hiding during the German Occupation of the Netherlands, she wrote what has become the world's most famous diary. But how could an unknown Jewish girl from Amsterdam be transformed into an international icon? Renowned Dutch scholar David Barnouw investigates the facts and controversies that surround the global phenomenon of Anne Frank. Barnouw highlights the ways in which Frank's life and ultimate fate have been represented, interpreted, and exploited. He follows the evolution of her diary into a book (with translations into nearly 60 languages and editions that added previously unknown material), an American play, and a movie. As he asks, "Who owns Anne Frank?" Barnouw follows her emergence as a global phenomenon and what this means for her historical persona as well as for her legacy as a symbol of the Holocaust.

For the Jewish world and the Yishuv in particular, the 1930s was a time of escalating crises?the rise of the Nazis and their antisemitic policies, the declining fortunes of Eastern European Jewry, increasing Arab enmity, and the hardening of British Mandatory policies in Palestine. Reexamining some of the most controversial episodes in modern Jewish history, this invaluable study offers the first systematic institutional analysis of the Yishuv's responses to the imperative of saving German and European Jewry from the growing Nazi threat between 1933 and 1939. Drawing on a wealth of archival research and a thorough knowledge of the secondary literature, this informative, important book will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of the Holocaust.

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.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: viewing the Holocaust through the eyes of youth "Zapruder . . . has done a great service to history and the future. Her book deserves to become a standard in Holocaust studies classes. . . . These writings will certainly impress themselves on the memories of all readers."-Publishers Weekly "These extraordinary diaries will resonate in the reader's broken heart for many days and many nights."-Elie Wiesel This stirring collection of diaries written by young people, aged twelve to twenty-two years, during the Holocaust has been fully revised and updated. Some of the writers were refugees, others were in hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos, and nearly all perished before liberation. This seminal National Jewish Book Award winner preserves the impressions, emotions, and eyewitness reportage of young people whose accounts of daily events and often unexpected thoughts, ideas, and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our understanding of life during the Holocaust. The second paperback edition includes a new preface by Alexandra Zapruder examining the book's history and impact. Simultaneously, a multimedia edition incorporates a wealth of new content in a variety of media, including photographs of the writers and their families, images of the original diaries, artwork made by the writers, historical documents, glossary terms, maps, survivor testimony (some available for the first time), and video of the author teaching key passages. In addition, an in-depth, interdisciplinary curriculum in history, literature, and writing developed by the author and a team of teachers, working in cooperation with the educational organization Facing History and Ourselves, is now available to support use of the book in middle- and high-school classrooms.

Seventy years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, the contributions collected in this volume each attempt, in various ways and from various perspectives, to trace the relationship between Nazi-occupied spaces and Holocaust memory, considering the multitude of ways in which the passing of time impacts upon, or shapes, cultural constructions of space. Accordingly, this volume does not consider topographies merely in relation to geographical landscapes but, rather, as markers of allusions and connotations that must be properly eked out. Since space and time are intertwined, if not, in fact, one and the same, an investigation of the spaces - the locations of horror - in relation to the passing of time might provide some manner of comprehension of one of the most troubling moments in human history. It is with this understanding of space, as fluid sites of memory that the contributors of this volume engage: these are the kind of shifting topographies that we are seeking to trace. This book was originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

This beautifully written memoir is composed of linked stories about growing up on a kibbutz in Israel in the 1950s and 60s, when children spent most of their time, from birth on, in a Children's House. This memoir starts with a Prologue drawn from the diaries of Rachel Biale's mother and the letters her parents exchanged while her father served in the British army. With excerpts from these documents, she describes how the long trials and tribulations that encompassed her parents dangerous escape from Eastern Europe to Israel - fleeing from the Nazis from Prague in 1939, five years of dangerous sea voyages, and long internments in British refugee camps. Throughout these ordeals, her parents socialist and Zionist values sustained them and eventually brought them to their kibbutz. The middle and main section of the memoir is devoted to Rachel's growing up as a kibbutz child. While Rachel's parents soon realized that no community can live up to its utopian ideals, Rachel's youth on kibbutz was a robust and buoyant one. Rachel pens 24 beautifully written and engaging stories about her kibbutz childhood -- from earliest memories at age three as part of a children's society, to her army service at age twenty. The stories focus on the world of children, but also offer a window into the lives of the adult kibbutz members, including Holocaust survivors. The book ends with a Postscript-as Rachel revisits her kibbutz and updates the stories of her childhood companions.

"A remarkable and important story" BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour "Unputdownable . . . Urbach has also retold the tragic Holocaust story in quite unforgettable lines" A.N. Wilson "This fascinating book, by Alice's granddaughter Karina Urbach, shines a spotlight on this lesser-known aspect of Nazi looting" The Times "A gripping piece of 20th-century family history but also something much more original: a rare insight into the 'Aryanisation' of Jewish-authored books during the Nazi regime" Financial Times What happened to the books that were too valuable to burn? Alice Urbach had her own cooking school in Vienna, but in 1938 she was forced to flee to England, like so many others. Her younger son was imprisoned in Dachau, and her older son, having emigrated to the United States, became an intelligence officer in the struggle against the Nazis. Returning to the ruins of Vienna in the late 1940s, she discovers that her bestselling cookbook has been published under someone else's name. Now, eighty years later, the historian Karina Urbach - Alice's granddaughter - sets out to uncover the truth behind the stolen cookbook, and tells the story of a family torn apart by the Nazi regime, of a woman who, with her unwavering passion for cooking, survived the horror and losses of the Holocaust to begin a new life in America. Impeccably researched and incredibly moving, Alice's Book sheds light on an untold chapter in the history of Nazi crimes against Jewish authors. "As this engaging memoir makes clear, the theft of the cookbook remained for Alice's entire life the symbol of everything that had been taken from her" TLS Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

The poignant story of Holocaust survivors who returned to their hometown in Poland and tried to pick up the pieces of a shattered world. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the lives of Polish Jews were marked by violence and emigration. But some of those who had survived the Nazi genocide returned to their hometowns and tried to start their lives anew. Lukasz Krzyzanowski recounts the story of this largely forgotten group of Holocaust survivors. Focusing on Radom, an industrial city about sixty miles south of Warsaw, he tells the story of what happened throughout provincial Poland as returnees faced new struggles along with massive political, social, and legal change. Non-Jewish locals mostly viewed the survivors with contempt and hostility. Many Jews left immediately, escaping anti-Semitic violence inflicted by new communist authorities and ordinary Poles. Those who stayed created a small, isolated community. Amid the devastation of Poland, recurring violence, and bureaucratic hurdles, they tried to start over. They attempted to rebuild local Jewish life, recover their homes and workplaces, and reclaim property appropriated by non-Jewish Poles or the state. At times they turned on their own. Krzyzanowski recounts stories of Jewish gangs bent on depriving returnees of their prewar possessions and of survivors shunned for their wartime conduct. The experiences of returning Jews provide important insights into the dynamics of post-genocide recovery. Drawing on a rare collection of documents-including the postwar Radom Jewish Committee records, which were discovered by the secret police in 1974-Ghost Citizens is the moving story of Holocaust survivors and their struggle to restore their lives in a place that was no longer home.

On the nights of July 16 and 17, 1942, French police rounded up eleven-year-old Joseph Weismann, his family, and 13,000 other Jews. After being held for five days in appalling conditions in the Velodrome d'Hiver stadium, Joseph and his family were transported by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp and brutally separated: all the adults and most of the children were transported on to Auschwitz and certain death, but 1,000 children were left behind to wait for a later train. The French guards told the children left behind that they would soon be reunited with their parents, but Joseph and his new friend, Joe Kogan, chose to risk everything in a daring escape attempt. After eluding the guards and crawling under razor-sharp barbed wire, Joseph found freedom. But how would he survive the rest of the war in Nazi-occupied France and build a life for himself? His problems had just begun. Until he was 80, Joseph Weismann kept his story to himself, giving only the slightest hints of it to his wife and three children. Simone Veil, lawyer, politician, President of the European Parliament, and member of the Constitutional Council of France-herself a survivor of Auschwitz-urged him to tell his story. In the original French version of this book and in Roselyne Bosch's 2010 film La Rafle, Joseph shares his compelling and terrifying story of the Roundup of the Vel' d'Hiv and his escape. Now, for the first time in English, Joseph tells the rest of his dramatic story in After the Roundup.

El Alamein was the World War II land battle Britain had to win. By the summer of 1942 Rommel's German forces were threatening to sweep through the Western Desert and drive on to the Suez Canal, and Britain was in urgent need of military victory. Then, in October, after 12 days of attritional tank battle and artillery bombardment, Montgomery's Eighth Army, with Australians and New Zealanders playing crucial roles in a genuinely international Allied fighting force, broke through the German and Italian lines at El Alamein. It was a turning-point in the war after which, in Churchill's words, "we never had a defeat". Stephen Bungay's book is as much at home analysing the crucial logistics of keeping desert armies supplied with petrol and tank parts as it is reappraising the combat strategies of Montgomery and Rommel, and ranges widely from the domestic political pressures on Churchill to the aerial siege of Malta, key to the control of the Mediterranean. And in a chapter on "The Soldier's War", Bungay graphically evokes the phantasmagoric blur of thunderous cannonade and tormenting heat that was the lot of the individual men who actually fought and died in the desert.

Originally published in 1969, this book discusses the many factors which atomised German society from 1870 onwards and thus assisted Nazi evil, and it shows that Hitler and Nazism were mere phenomena of a mass age. The author wrote with the twin qualifications as historian and survivor of the camps. To have lived through it and then dissect it as a scholar is an astonishing achievement and it is this achievement that this book records.

The Holocaust: The Basics is a concise introduction to the study of this seismic event in mid twentieth-century human history. The book takes an original approach as both a narrative and thematic introduction to the topic, and provides a core foundation for readers embarking upon their own study. It examines a range of perspectives and subjects surrounding the Holocaust, including: the perpetrators of the Holocaust the victims resistance to the Holocaust liberation legacies and survivors' memories of the Holocaust. Suppported by a chronology, glossary, questions for discussion, and boxed case studies that focus the reader's thoughts and develop their appreciation of the subjects considered more broadly, The Holocaust: The Basics is the ideal introduction to this controversial and widely debated topic for both students and the more general reader.

This book is a fictional account of the life of German film and theatre actor Werner Krauss, eponymous star of the classic silent film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Upon gaining worldwide recognition in this film, Krauss was co-opted into the Nazi hate campaign of the 1930s and 1940s. He featured in the vicious propaganda film Jud Suss, and he was complicit in giving anti-Semitic performances onstage, most notably as Shylock in Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice. The book focuses on three distinct eras in Krauss life: the struggling, exuberant actor of the 1920s; the philandering pragmatist of the 1930s; and the elderly, neurotic outcast of the 1940s. Despite his honourable intentions, Krauss was all-too-often undermined by his inability to say no to women, alcohol and the egregious Joseph Goebbels. In this fictional re-imagining of his life, Krauss motives and decisions are explored in an attempt to discover why he collaborated with the Nazis in the way that he did, as well as demonstrating the personal and political consequences of his actions. As someone who was influenced by the Nazi regime, and, in turn, influential in perpetuating their message, Krauss story tells the wider story of the role of the arts and media in Nazi Germany. Extensively researched, including contemporary news stories, archived film material, critical essays on Krauss and translated passages from his autobiography, Das Schauspiel Meines Lebens, this fictional reconstruction of Krauss life and career is preceded by a substantive Introduction by the author, setting the novel in the context of the genre of Holocaust fiction, emulating and reminiscent of Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin and Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark.

In the wake of the Second World War, how were the Allies to respond to the enormous crime of the Holocaust? Even in an ideal world, it would have been impossible to bring all the perpetrators to trial. Nevertheless, an attempt was made to prosecute some. This book uncovers ten "forgotten trials" of the Holocaust, selected from the many Nazi trials that have taken place over the course of the last seven decades. It showcases how perpetrators of the Holocaust were dealt with in courtrooms around the world, revealing how different legal systems responded to the horrors of the Holocaust. The book provides a graphic picture of the genocidal campaign against the Jews through eyewitness testimony and incriminating documents and traces how the public memory of the Holocaust was formed over time.

The Holocaust is a pervasive presence in British culture and society. Schools have been legally required to deliver Holocaust education, the government helps to fund student visits to Auschwitz, the Imperial War Museum's permanent Holocaust Exhibition has attracted millions of visitors, and Britain has an annually commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day. What has prompted this development, how has it unfolded, and why has it happened now? How does it relate to Britain's post-war history, its contemporary concerns, and the wider "globalisation" of Holocaust memory? What are the multiple shapes that British Holocaust consciousness assumes and the consequences of their rapid emergence? Why have the so-called "lessons" of the Holocaust enjoyed such popularity in Britain? Through analysis of changing engagements with the Holocaust in political, cultural and memorial landscapes over the past generation, this book addresses these questions, demonstrating the complexities of Holocaust consciousness and reflecting on the contrasting ways that history is used in Britain today.

Ensure your students have access to the authoritative and in-depth content of this popular and trusted A Level History series. For over twenty years Access to History has been providing students with reliable, engaging and accessible content on a wide range of topics. Each title in the series provides comprehensive coverage of different history topics on current AS and A2 level history specifications, alongside exam-style practice questions and tips to help students achieve their best. The series: - Ensures students gain a good understanding of the AS and A2 level history topics through an engaging, in-depth and up-to-date narrative, presented in an accessible way. - Aids revision of the key A level history topics and themes through frequent summary diagrams - Gives support with assessment, both through the books providing exam-style questions and tips for AQA, Edexcel and OCR A level history specifications and through FREE model answers with supporting commentary at Access to History online (www.accesstohistory.co.uk) Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust This title covers the origins of anti-Semitism from the nineteenth century, and traces the events that took place in Germany from 1933 to 1945. The anti-Semitic views of Hitler are analysed as is the means by which these views shaped the racial state in the Third Reich. The impact of the Second World War and the events which led ultimately to the Final Solution are then assessed. All of these events are also considered within the wider historiographical debates which have surrounded this period of history, from questions on who should ultimately bear the blame, to issues of Holocaust denial.

In this unusual Holocaust memoir, Rhodea Shandler gives a woman's view of life under the Nazis in Holland. She begins by describing her early life in a closely knit Jewish family in northern Holland. There was anti-Semitism, she explains, but it was of a low level, and the Jews with their strong ties to community managed to live relatively normal lives. Then everything began to change with Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Through it all, she tells of life ongoing and how she became a nursing student in Amsterdam. It was while she was working in an Amsterdam hospital on 9 May 1940, that an explosion was heard, and she looked up to watch German paratroopers landing to take control of the city. Over the next few years she describes how the community attempts to cope even as Jews are being deported before their very eyes. Finally in early 1943, she and her new husband decide that they must go into hiding in the countryside. With the help of the Underground, they find a "safe" farm, but their situation changes when Shandler discovers that she is pregnant. Some of the most moving parts of the story describe her preparations for the child's birth, even as their "friendly" family turns against them, fearful of the new dangers a baby will bring. Then on a bitterly cold day in December 1943 the baby is born, and Shandler is left with the difficult task of caring for the child in the midst of continuing Gestapo raids. Shandler's memoir ends with the family's decision after the war to emigrate to Canada, and for Shandler to write of her struggle to give birth to the new.

Book & DVD. This is a unique eye-witness documentary record of life inside Auschwitz at its full operational peak, as recalled, with impressive lucidity and matter-of-factness by Wilhelm Brasse, prisoner no. 3444, who, due to his professional skills, escaped extermination by becoming a photographer whom the ever-well-organised Nazis obliged to record photographically the running of the camp, including such detail as Dr Mengele's infamous experiments. Wilhelm Brasse was born in 1917 in Zywiec of an Austrian father and a Polish mother. Before the war Brasse worked in a photographic studio in Katowice. For refusal to join the Wehrmacht, he was sent to Auschwitz, where from 1941 to 1945 he worked in the Identity Service as a photographer. He took tens of thousands of photographs of prisoners, hundreds of portraits of SS-men and documented some so-called medical experiments. After the war ended, he returned to Zywiec where he has been living ever since. In March 2010 Maria Anna Potocka conducted an interview with Wilhelm Brasse. The outcome is this book and its edited tales of the prisoner-cum-chief-photographer of Auschwitz, together with a film with extracts from the interview. There is an introduction by the historian Teresa Wontor-Cichy, the academic editor at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The book is generously illustrated with photographs from Wilhelm Brasse's own archives, as well as the photographic archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Yad Vashem. The book is published in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland. The publication has been supported by the following ministries and organizations: The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.