Based on work conducted by scholars as part of a Summer Research Workshop organized by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2007, this book takes a fresh look at how American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews responded to the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany and German-occupied territory in the 1930s. The essays focus specifically on American religious responses to the November 9-10, 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Today understood as the first act of the Holocaust because of its systematized brutality against Germany's Jews, Kristallnacht, generated a dramatic response among mainline Protestants, Catholic clerical and lay leaders, Orthodox Jews, Protestant fundamentalists, and Jewish War Veterans. Together, the essays represent the first examination of multi-religious group responses to the beginnings of one of the pivotal moral events of the twentieth century, the Holocaust. They possess implications for the history of anti-Semitism globally and in the U.S., the history of interfaith cooperation and religious belief in America, the influence of American ideals on religious thought, and the impact of historical events on Jewish and Christian theology.

Keepers of Memory answers the question of how descendants of Holocaust survivors remember the Holocaust, the event that preceded their birth but has shaped their lives. Through personal stories and in-depth interviews, Rich examines the complicated relationship between history, truth, and memory. Keepers of Memory explores topics that include how stories of survival become stories of either empowerment or trauma for the descending generations, career choice as a form of commemoration, religion, and family life. Ultimately, this work paints a compelling picture of the promises and pitfalls of memory and points to implications for memory and commemoration in the coming generations.

Israeli perspective on postmemory. Interdisciplinary focus. Also includes discussion of postcolonialism.

This book analyzes sensationalized Nazi and Holocaust representations in Anglo-American cultural and political discourses. Recognizing that this history is increasingly removed from contemporary life, it explains how irreverent representations can help rejuvenate the story for successive generations of new learners. Surveying seventy-five-years of transatlantic activities, the work erects counterposing categorizes of "constructive and destructive memorializing," providing scholars with a new framework for elucidating both this history and its historicization.

A guide to major books in English on the Holocaust.

East Germany's ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany's name during the Third Reich. Instead, it cast communists as both victims of and victors over National Socialist oppression while marginalizing discussions of Jewish suffering. Yet for the 1977 Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture submitted Jakob der Lugner - a film focused exclusively on Jewish victimhood that would become the only East German film to ever be officially nominated. By combining close analyses of key films with extensive archival research, this book explores how GDR filmmakers depicted Jews and the Holocaust in a country where memories of Nazi persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political.

Gisella Perl's memoir is the extraordinarily candid account of women's extreme efforts to survive Auschwitz. With writing as powerful as that of Charlotte Delbo and Ruth Kluger, her story individualizes and therefore humanizes a victim of mass dehumanization. Perl accomplished this by representing her life before imprisonment, in Auschwitz and other camps, and in the struggle to remake her life. It is also the first memoir by a woman Holocaust survivor and establishes the model for understanding the gendered Nazi policies and practices targeting Jewish women as racially poisonous. Perl's memoir is also significant for its inclusion of the Nazis' Roma victims as well as in-depth representations of Nazi women guards and other personnel. Unlike many important Holocaust memoirs, Perl's writing is both graphic in its horrific detail and eloquent in its emotional responses. One of the memoir's major historical contributions is Perl's account of being forced to work alongside Dr. Josef Mengele in his infamous so-called clinic and using her position to save the lives of other women prisoners. These efforts including infanticide and abortion, topics that would remain silenced for decades and, unfortunately, continue to be marginalized from all too many Holocaust accounts. After decades out of print, this new edition will ensure the crucial place of Perl's testimony on Holocaust memory and education.

A remarkable account of the terrible climax of the Second World War in Asia, published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.

In the closing months of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Japanese, mostly civilians, died in a final outburst of violence from the air. American planes were beginning to run low on plausible targets when it was decided to use two atomic weapons in a final, terrible flourish to try to end the war.

Richard Overy’s remarkable new book rethinks how we should regard this last stage of the war and the role of the bombing. This book explores the way in which the willingness to kill civilians and destroy cities became normalized in the course of a horrific war as moral concerns were blunted and scientists, airmen, and politicians followed a strategy of mass destruction they would never have endorsed before the war began. But it also engages with the new scholarship that shows how complex the effort to end the war was in Japan, where ‘surrender’ was entirely foreign to Japanese culture.

This book provides case-studies of how teachers and practitioners have attempted to develop more effective 'experiential learning' strategies in order to better equip students for their voluntary engagements in communities, working for sustainable peace and a tolerant society free of discrimination. All chapters revolve around this central theme, testing and trying various paradigms and experimenting with different practices, in a wide range of geographical and historical arenas. They demonstrate the innovative potentials of connecting know-how from different disciplines and combining experiences from various practitioners in this field of shaping historical memory, including non-formal and formal sectors of education, non-governmental workers, professionals from memorial sites and museums, local and global activists, artists, and engaged individuals. In so doing, they address the topic of collective historical traumas in ways that go beyond conventional classroom methods. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book provides a combination of theoretical reflections and concrete pedagogical suggestions that will appeal to educators working across history, sociology, political science, peace education and civil awareness education, as well as memory activists and remembrance practitioners.

This book is an important work in Holocaust literature and was originally published in Poland in 1967. Covering the years 1939-1945, it is the author's account of her experience growing up in the Warsaw ghetto and her eventual deportation to, imprisonment in, and survival of the Majdanek, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Neustadt-Glewe camps. Since the old, the weak, and children were summarily executed by the Nazis in these camps, Mrs Birenbaum's survival and coming of age is all the more remarkable. Her story is told with simplicity and clarity and the new edition contains revisions made by the author to the original English translation, and is expanded with a new epilogue and postscripts that bring the story up to date and complete the circle of Mrs Birenbaum's experiences.

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is an inspiring and tragic account of an ordinary life lived in extraordinary circumstances that has enthralled readers for generations. This Penguin Classics edition is edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler, translated by Susan Massotty, and includes an introduction by Elie Wiesel, author of Night. 'June, 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.' In Amsterdam, in the summer of 1942, the Nazis forced teenager Anne Frank and her family into hiding. For over two years, they, another family and a German dentist lived in a 'secret annexe', fearing discovery. All that time, Anne kept a diary. Since its publication in 1947, Anne Frank's diary has been read by tens of millions of people. This Definitive Edition restores substantial material omitted from the original edition, giving us a deeper insight into Anne Frank's world. Her curiosity about her emerging sexuality, the conflicts with her mother, her passion for Peter, a boy whose family hid with hers, and her acute portraits of her fellow prisoners reveal Anne as more human, more vulnerable and more vital than ever. 'One of the greatest books of the twentieth century' Guardian 'A modern classic' Julia Neuberger, The Times

When German troops come to the small village of Belzyce, Poland, in 1939, nine-year-old Jakub Szabmacher's world is forever changed. At first the humiliations inflicted by the Germans seem small, but the conditions worsen until eventually Jakub's family and much of his village are murdered, and he is sent to various concentration camps in Poland and Germany, where he struggles to survive the terrible conditions of camp life. Finally liberated in 1945 from the concentration camp in Flossenburg, Germany, Jakub is befriended by American troops and with their help brought to the United States, where he takes the name Jack Terry. Coauthor Alicia Nitecki, whose grandfather was also imprisoned at Flossenburg, uses Terry's personal memories to tell young Jakub's story, as well as unpublished memoirs, private letters, and interviews with former inmates of the Flossenburg concentration camp and the townspeople of Belzyce and Flossenburg. Part history, part autobiography. "Jakub's World offers an anguished young boy's perspective on the Holocaust.

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.

Biography of a Jewish doctor who survived and triumphed over the horrors of the Holocaust. Eli's Story: A Twentieth-Century Jewish Life is first and foremost a biography. Its subject is Eli G. Rochelson, MD (1907-1984), author Meri-Jane Rochelson's father. At its core is Eli's story in his own words, taken from an interview he did with his son, Burt Rochelson, in the mid-1970s. The book tells the story of a man whose life and memory spanned two world wars, several migrations, an educational odyssey, the massive upheaval of the Holocaust, and finally, a frustrating yet ultimately successful effort to restore his professional credentials and identity, as well as reestablish family life. Eli's Story contains a mostly chronological narration that embeds the story in the context of further research. It begins with Eli's earliest memories of childhood in Kovno and ends with his death, his legacy, and the author's own unanswered questions that are as much a part of Eli's story as his own words. The narrative is illuminated and expanded through Eli's personal archive of papers, letters, and photographs, as well as research in institutional archives, libraries, and personal interviews. Rochelson covers Eli's family's relocation to southern Russia; his education, military service, and first marriage after he returned to Kovno; his and his family's experiences in the Dachau, Stutthof, and Auschwitz concentration camps-including the deaths of his wife and child; his postwar experience in the Landsberg Displaced Persons (DP) camp, and his immigration to the United States, where he determinedly restored his medical credentials and started a new family. Rochelson recognizes that both the effort of reconstructing events and the reality of having personal accounts that confi rm and also differ from each other in detail, make the process of gap-fi lling itself a kind of fi ction??an attempt to shape the incompleteness that is inherent to the story. An earlier reviewer said of the book, ""Eli's Story combines the care of a scholar with the care of a daughter."" Both scholars and general readers interested in Holocaust narratives will be moved by this monograph.

It is an all too common belief that Jews did nothing to resist their own fate in the Holocaust. However, the parallel realities of disintegrating physical and psychological conditions in the ghetto, and the efforts of ghetto undergrounds to counter both collaborationist judenrat policies and the despair of a beaten down population, could not but lead to a breakdown in spiritual life. James M. Glass examines spiritual resistance to the Holocaust and the place of this within political and violent resistance. He explores Jewish reactions to the murderous campaign against them and their creation of new spiritual and moral rules to live by. He argues that the Orthodox Jewish response to annihilation, often seen as unduly passive, was predicated in the insanity of the times and can be seen as spiritually noble.

This book is the first volume to offer comprehensive insights into visitor reactions to a wide range of museum exhibitions, memorials, and memory sites. draws exclusively upon empirical research and offers critical insights about visitor experience at museums and memory sites in the United States, Poland, Austria, Germany, France, the UK, Norway, Hungary, Australia, and Israel. explores visitor experience in all its complexity and argues that visitors are more than just 'learners'. approaches visitor experience as a multidimensional phenomenon and positions visitor experience within a diverse national, ethnic, cultural, social, and generational context. considers the impact of museums' curatorial and design choices, visitor motivations and expectations, and the crucial role emotions play in shaping understanding of historical events and subjects. offers significant insights into audience motivation, expectation, and behaviour. It is essential reading for academics, postgraduate students and practitioners with an interest in museums and heritage, visitor studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and tourism.

The book about the Westerweel Group tells the fascinating story about the cooperation of some ten non-conformist Dutch socialists and a group of Palestine Pioneers who mostly had arrived in the Netherlands from Germany and Austria the late thirties. With the help of Joop Westerweel, the headmaster of a Rotterdam Montessori School, they found hiding places in the Netherlands. Later on, an escape route to France via Belgium was worked out. Posing as Atlantic Wall workers, the pioneers found their way to the south of France. With the help of the Armee Juive, a French Jewish resistance organization, some 70 pioneers reached Spain at the beginning of 1944. From here they went to Palestine. Finding and maintaining the escape route cost the members of the Westerweel Group dear. With some exceptions, all members of the group were arrested by the Germans. Joop Westerweel was executed in August 1944. Other members, both in the Netherlands and France, were send to German concentration camps, where some perished.

Drawing on hitherto neglected archival materials, Zohar Segev sheds new light on the policy of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) during the Holocaust. Contrary to popular belief, he can show that there was an impressive system of previously unknown rescue efforts. Even more so, there is evidence for an alternative pattern for modern Jewish existence in the thinking and policy of the World Jewish Congress. WJC leaders supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine but did not see it as an end in itself. They strove to establish a Jewish state and to rehabilitate Diaspora Jewish life, two goals they saw as mutually complementary. The efforts of the WJC are put into the context of the serious difficulties facing the American Jewish community and its representative institutions during and after the war, as they tried to act as an ethnic minority within American society.

Written at an accessible level for undergraduate students, this is the first introduction to the complex relationship between religion and genocide for use on related courses. Steven Leonard Jacobs is a leading scholar in the field and covers a complex and controversial topic in an engaging and accessible style, using real world case studies throughout. Religion and Genocide is an outstanding contribution to the fields of Judaic studies and Holocaust and Genocide studies.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable-whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.

Between ten thousand and twelve thousand Jews tried to escape Nazi genocide by going into hiding. With the help of Jewish and non-Jewish relatives, friends, or people completely unknown to them, these "U-boats," as they came to be known, dared to lead a life underground. Flight and Concealment brings to light their hidden stories. Deftly weaving together personal accounts with a broader comparative look at the experiences of Jews throughout Germany, historian Susanna Schrafstetter tells the story of the Jews in Munich and Upper Bavaria who fled deportation by going underground. Archival sources and interviews with survivors and with the Germans who aided or exploited them reveal a complex, often intimate story of hope, greed, and sometimes betrayal. Flight and Concealment shows the options and strategies for survival of those in hiding and their helpers, and discusses the ways in which some Germans enriched themselves at the expense of the refugees.

Gendered Testimonies of the Holocaust: Writing Life begins with the premise that writing proves virtually synonymous with survival, bearing the traces of life and of death carried within those who survived the atrocities of the Nazis. In reading specific testimonies by survivor-writers Paul Celan, Charlotte Delbo, Olga Lengyel, Gisella Perl, and Dan Pagis, this text seeks to answer the question: How was it possible for these survivors to write about human destruction, if death is such an intimate part of the survivors' survival? This book shows how the works of these survivors arise creatively from a vigorous spark, the desire to preserve memory. Testimony for each of these writers is a form of relation to oneself but also to others. It situates each survivor's anguish in writing as a need to write so as to affirm life. Writing as such always bears witness to the life of the one who should be dead by now and thus to the miracle of having survived. This book's claim is that the act of writing testimony manifests itself as the most intensive form of life possible. More specifically, its exploration of writing's affirmation of life and assertion of identity focuses on the gendered dimension of expression and language. This book does not engage in the binary structure of gender and the hierarchically constructed roles in terms of privileging the male over the female. The criteria that guide its discussion on Gendered Testimonies emerge out of Levinas's concept of maternity.