Historians have long noted that Jews often appear at the storm center of European history. Nowhere is this more true than when dealing with the tumultuous years between the Nazi seizure of power in Germany on January 30, 1933 and the proclamation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. Yet, the events of Jewish history must also be viewed within the broader contexts of European, American, and global history. Spanning sixteen years of destruction and rebirth, A World in Turmoil is the first book of its kind, an integrated chronology which attempts to provide the researcher with clear and concise data describing the events as they unfolded. From the murder pits of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, to the battlefields in all the major theatres of operation, to the home fronts of all the major and minor combatants, A World in Turmoil covers a broad spectrum of events. Although major events throughout the world are noted, the volume concentrates on events in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. While the volume deals primarily with politics, significant social and intellectual trends are woven into the chronology. Augmented by an introductory essay and postscript to help place events in their historical context, by a bibliography, and by name, place, and subject indexes, the volume provides scholars and researchers alike a basic reference tool on sixteen of the most important years in modern history.

Commentary on memorials to the Holocaust has been plagued with a sense of "monument fatigue", a feeling that landscape settings and national spaces provide little opportunity for meaningful engagement between present visitors and past victims. This book examines the Holocaust via three sites of murder by the Nazis: the former concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany; the mass grave at Babi Yar, Ukraine; and the razed village of Lidice, Czech Republic. Bringing together recent scholarship from cultural memory and cultural geography, the author focuses on the way these violent histories are remembered, allowing these sites to emerge as dynamic transcultural landscapes of encounter in which difficult pasts can be represented and comprehended in the present. This leads to an examination of the role of the environment, or, more particularly, the ways in which the natural environment, co-opted in the process of killing, becomes a medium for remembrance.

Mimi Rubin had fond memories of growing up in Novy Bohumin, Czechoslovakia, a place that ten thousand people called home. It was a tranquil town until September 1, 1939, when the German army invaded the city. From that day forward, eighteen-yearold Mimi would face some of the harshest moments of her life.

This memoir follows Mimi's story-from her idyllic life in Novy Bohumin before the invasion, to being transported to a Jewish ghetto, to living in three different German concentration camps, and finally, to liberation. It tells of the heartbreaking loss of her parents, grandmother, and countless other friends and relatives. It tells of the tempered joys of being reunited with her sister and of finding love, marrying, and raising a family.

A compelling firsthand account, "Mimi of Novy Bohumin, Czechoslovakia: A Young Woman's Survival of the Holocaust" weaves the personal, yet horrifying, details of Mimi's experience with historical facts about this era in history. This story helps keep alive the memory of the millions of innocent men, women, and children who died in the German concentration camps during the 1930s and 1940s.

Between 1941 and 1945, in one of the more curious episodes of racial politics during the Second World War, a small number of Jews were granted the rights of Aryan citizens in the Independent State of Croatia by the pro-Nazi Utasha regime. This study seeks to explain how these exemptions from Ustasha racial laws came to be, and in particular how they were justified by the race theory of the time. Author Nevenko Bartulin explores these questions within the broader histories of anti-Semitism, nationalism, and race in Croatia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tracing Croatian Jews' troubled journey from "Croats of the Mosaic faith" before World War II to their eventual rejection as racial aliens by the Utasha movement.

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.

First English translation of the memoirs of Austrian Romani Holocaust survivor, writer, visual artist, musician, and activist Ceija Stojka (1933-2013), along with poems, an interview, historical photos, and reproductions of her artworks. "Is this the whole world?" This question begins the first of three memoirs by Austrian Romani writer, visual artist, musician, and activist Ceija Stojka (1933-2013), told from her perspective as a child interned in three Nazi concentration camps from age nine to twelve. Written by a child survivor much later in life, the memoirs offer insights into the nexus of narrative and extreme trauma, expressing the full spectrum of human emotions: fear and sorrow at losing loved ones; joy and relief when reconnecting with family and friends; desire to preserve some memories while attempting to erase others; horror at acts of genocide, and hope arising from dreams of survival. In addition to annotated translations of the three memoirs, the book includes two of Stojka's poems and an interview by Karin Berger, editor of the original editions of Stojka's memoirs, as well as color reproductions of several of her artworks and historical photographs. An introduction contextualizes her works within Romani history and culture, and a glossary informs the reader about the "concentrationary universe." Because the memoirs show how Stojka navigated male-dominated postwar Austrian culture, generally discriminatory to Roma, and the patriarchal aspects of Romani culture itself, the book is a contribution not only to Holocaust Studies but also to Austrian Studies, Romani Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.

Invisible Ink is the story of Guy Stern's remarkable life. This is not a Holocaust memoir; however, Stern makes it clear that the horrors of the Holocaust and his remarkable escape from Nazi Germany created the central driving force for the rest of his life. Stern gives much credit to his father's profound cautionary words, "You have to be like invisible ink. You will leave traces of your existence when, in better times, we can emerge again and show ourselves as the individuals we are." Stern carried these words and their psychological impact for much of his life, shaping himself around them, until his emergence as someone who would be visible to thousands over the years. This book is divided into thirteen chapters, each marking a pivotal moment in Stern's life. His story begins with Stern's parents-"the two met, or else this chronicle would not have seen the light of day (nor me, for that matter)." Then, in 1933, the Nazis come to power, ushering in a fiery and destructive timeline that Stern recollects by exact dates and calls "the end of [his] childhood and adolescence." Through a series of fortunate occurrences, Stern immigrated to the United States at the tender age of fifteen. While attending St. Louis University, Stern was drafted into the U.S. Army and soon found himself selected, along with other German-speaking immigrants, for a special military intelligence unit that would come to be known as the Ritchie Boys (named so because their training took place at Ft. Ritchie, MD). Their primary job was to interrogate Nazi prisoners, often on the front lines. Although his family did not survive the war (the details of which the reader is spared), Stern did. He has gone on to have a long and illustrious career as a scholar, author, husband and father, mentor, decorated veteran, and friend. Invisible Ink is a story that will have a lasting impact. If one can name a singular characteristic that gives Stern strength time after time, it is his resolute determination to persevere. To that end Stern's memoir provides hope, strength, and graciousness in times of uncertainty.

This book explores one of the most notorious aspects of the German system of oppression in wartime Poland: the only purpose-built camp for children under the age of 16 years in German-occupied Europe. The camp at Przemyslowa street, or the Polen-Jugendverwahrlager der Sicherheitspolizei in Litzmannstadt as the Germans called it, was a concentration camp for children. The camp at Przemyslowa existed for just over two years, from December 1942 until January 1945. During that time, an unknown number of children, mainly Polish nationals, were imprisoned there and subjected to extreme physical and emotional abuse. For almost all, the consequences of atrocities which they endured in the camp remained with them for the rest of their lives. This book focuses on the establishment of the camp, the experience of the child prisoners, and the post-war investigations and trials. It is based on contemporary German documents, post-war Polish trials and German investigations, as well as dozens of testimonies from camp survivors, guards, civilian camp staff and the camp leadership

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

For centuries Jewish shtetls were an active part of Belarusian life; today, they are gone. The Belarusian Shtetl is a landmark volume which offers, for the first time in English, an illuminating look at the shtetls' histories, the lives lived and lost in them, and the memories, records, and physical traces of these communities that remain today. Since 2012, under the auspices of the Sefer Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, teams of scholars and students from many different disciplines have returned to the sites of former Jewish shtetls in Belarus to reconstruct their past. These researchers have interviewed a wide range of both Jews and non-Jews to find and document traces of Shtetl history, to gain insights into community memories, and to discover surviving markers of identity and ethnic affiliation. In the process, they have also unearthed evidence from old cemeteries and prewar houses and the stories behind memorials erected for Holocaust victims. Drawing on the wealth of information these researchers have gathered, The Belarusian Shtetl creates compelling and richly textured portraits of the histories and everyday lives of each shtetl. Important for scholars and accessible to the public, these portraits set out to return the Jewish shtetls to their rightful places of prominence in the histories and legacies of Belarus.

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.

'A fine and deeply affecting work of history and memoir' Philippe Sands Decades ago, the historian Bernard Wasserstein set out to uncover the hidden past of the town forty miles west of Lviv where his family originated: Krakowiec (Krah-KOV-yets). In this book he recounts its dramatic and traumatic history. 'I want to observe and understand how some of the great forces that determined the shape of our times affected ordinary people.' The result is an exceptional, often moving book. Wasserstein traces the arc of history across centuries of religious and political conflict, as armies of Cossacks, Turks, Swedes and Muscovites rampaged through the region. In the Age of Enlightenment, the Polish magnate Ignacy Cetner built his palace at Krakowiec and, with his vivacious daughter, Princess Anna, created an arcadia of refinement and serenity. Under the Habsburg emperors after 1772, Krakowiec developed into a typical shtetl, with a jostling population of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. In 1914, disaster struck. 'Seven years of terror and carnage' left a legacy of ferocious national antagonisms. During the Second World War the Jews were murdered in circumstances harrowingly described by Wasserstein. After the war the Poles were expelled and the town dwindled into a border outpost. Today, the storm of history once again rains down on Krakowiec as hordes of refugees flee for their lives from Ukraine to Poland. At the beginning and end of the book we encounter Wasserstein's own family, especially his grandfather Berl. In their lives and the many others Wasserstein has rediscovered, the people of Krakowiec become a prism through which we can feel the shocking immediacy of history. Original in conception and brilliantly achieved, A Small Town in Ukraine is a masterpiece of recovery and insight.