Nominated in Best Fiction at the Audie Awards 2020. Her beauty saved her life - and condemned her. In 1942 Cilka Klein is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. The Commandant at Birkenau, Schwarzhuber, notices her long beautiful hair, and forces her separation from the other women prisoners. Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly given, equals survival. After liberation, Cilka is charged as a collaborator by the Russians and sent to a desolate, brutal prison camp in Siberia known as Vorkuta, inside the Arctic Circle. Innocent, imprisoned once again, Cilka faces challenges both new and horribly familiar, each day a battle for survival. Cilka befriends a woman doctor, and learns to nurse the ill in the camp, struggling to care for them under unimaginable conditions. And when she tends to a man called Alexandr, Cilka finds that despite everything, there is room in her heart for love. Based on what is known of Cilka Klein's time in Auschwitz, and on the experience of women in Siberian prison camps, Cilka's Journey is the breathtaking sequel to The Tattooist of Auschwitz. A powerful testament to the triumph of the human will, this novel will move you to tears, but it will also leave you astonished and uplifted by one woman's fierce determination to survive, against all odds. 'She was the bravest person I ever met' Lale Sokolov, The Tattooist of Auschwitz This audiobook edition is an mp3-CD.

As a United States war crimes investigator during World War II, Benhamin B. Ferencz participated in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. He returned to Germany after the war to help bring perpetrators of war crimes to justice and remained to direct restitution programs for Nazi victims. In Less Than Slaves, Ferencz describes the painstaking efforts that were made to persuade German industrial firms such as I. G. Farben, Krupp, AEG, Rheinmetall, and Daimler-Benz to compensate camp inmates who were exploited as forced laborers. The meager outcome of these efforts emerges from searing pages that detail the difficulties confronted by Ferencz and his dedicated colleagues. This engrossing narrative is a vital resource for all who are concerned with the moral, legal, and practical implications of the recent significant increase in the number of compensation claims by victims of persecution. First published in 1979, Ferencz's penetrating firsthand account returns to print with the author's evaluation of its historical significance and current relevance.

My Seven Lives is the English translation of the best-selling memoir of Slovak journalist Agnesa Kalinova (1924-2014): Holocaust survivor, film critic, translator, and political prisoner. An oral history written with her colleague Jana Juranova My Seven Lives provides a window into Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the cultural evolution of Central and Eastern Europe. The conversational approach gives the book a relatable immediacy that vividly conveys the tone and temperament of Agnesa, bringing out her lively personality and extraordinary ability to stay positive in the face of adversity. Each chapter reflects a distinct period of Agnesa's long and tumultuous life. Her idyllic childhood gives way to the rise of Nazism and restrictions of the anti-Jewish legislation, which led to deportations and her escape to Hungary, where she found refuge in a Budapest convent. Surviving the Holocaust, she returned to Slovakia and married writer J?in Ladislav Kalina. They embraced communism, and Agnesa began her career as a journalist and film critic and became involved in the Prague Spring, ending with the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Agnesa and her husband lost their jobs and were imprisoned, which led to their decision to immigrate to West Germany. She found a new career as a political commentator for Radio Free Europe, and after decades of political oppression, Agnesa lived to see the euphoric days of the Velvet Revolution and its freeing aftermath. My Seven Lives shows the impact of an often brutal twentieth century on the life of one remarkable individual. It's a story of survival, perseverance, and ultimately triumph.

This deeply persuasive book presents a new and profound approach to the testimony of the Holocaust. Nicholas Chare offers a critical reassessment of the writings on the abject by Julia Kristeva, including her best known, highly influential work "Powers of Horror," first translated into English in 1982. He re-appraises the value the concept of abjection holds for the study of the witnessing and representation of the Holocaust. Chare also provides fresh interpretations of, for example, the poetic prose of Charlotte Delbo and the paintings of Francis Bacon, and he explores the "Scrolls of Auschwitz," discovered buried in the grounds of the crematoria at Birkenau. These material remains of an event that have become historical documents composed in the most abject circumstance are analyzed through their physical state as excavated objects and testimonial texts extending the complex reading of writing, imaging and the bodily that is the core of Kristevan theses on abjection.

This is a thorough and serious analysis of Friedlander's thinking, as one of the most important Holocaust scholars of our time. This volume provides an in-depth discussion of Saul Friedlander's recently published second volume of his landmark history of the Holocaust, "Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination 1939-1945". This book - the sequel to his volume on the pre-war years, "Nazi Germany and the Jews 1933-1939: The Years of Persecution" (1997) - has received wide acclaim and was awarded the prestigious Friedenspreis in Germany as well as the Pulitzer Prize for History (USA) in 2008. This volume brings together a range of internationally acclaimed historians to address the manifold conceptual and historiographical issues raised in Friedlander's monumental work. The aim of this book is not simply to evaluate Friedlander's work on its own merits, but rather to use his text as a means of exploring the contours and future of Holocaust historiography. Of central concern is to situate his work within the broader terrain of Holocaust studies and European history, as well as to explore the ways in which his book opens up new directions in the knowledge, study and understanding of the Shoah in particular and twentieth century genocide in general.

Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only Lengyel's work in the prisoners' underground resistance and the need to tell this story kept her fighting for survival. She survived by her wit and incredible strength. Despite her horrifying closeness to the subject, FIVE CHIMNEYS does not retreat into self-pity or sensationalism. When first published (two years after World War 2 ended), Albert Einstein was so moved by her story that he wrote a personal letter to Lengyel, thanking her for her ""very frank, very well written book"". Today, with 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia, and neo-Nazism on the rise in western Europe, we cannot afford to forget the grisly lessons of the Holocaust. FIVE CHIMNEYS is a stark reminder that the unspeakable can happen wherever and whenever ethnic hatreds, religious bigotries, and racial discriminations are permitted to exist.

Germany's acceptance of its direct responsibility for the Holocaust has strengthened its relationship with Israel and has led to a deep commitment to combat antisemitism and rebuild Jewish life in Germany. As we draw close to a time when there will be no more firsthand experience of the horrors of the Holocaust, there is great concern about what will happen when German responsibility turns into history. Will the present taboo against open antisemitism be lifted as collective memory fades? There are alarming signs of the rise of the far right, which includes blatantly antisemitic elements, already visible in public discourse. But it is mainly the radicalization of the otherwise moderate Muslim population of Germany and the entry of almost a million refugees since 2015 from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan that appears to make German society less tolerant and somewhat less inhibited about articulating xenophobic attitudes. The evidence is unmistakable-overt antisemitism is dramatically increasing once more.The Future of the German-Jewish Past deals with the formidable challenges created by these developments. It is conceptualized to offer a variety of perspectives and views on the question of the future of the German-Jewish past. The volume addresses topics such as antisemitism, Holocaust memory, historiography, and political issues relating to the future relationship between Jews, Israel, and Germany. While the central focus of this volume is Germany, the implications go beyond the German-Jewish experience and relate to some of the broader challenges facing modern societies today.

From the survivor of ten Nazi concentration camps who went on to create the New England Holocaust Memorial, a "devastating...inspirational" memoir (The Today Show) about finding strength in the face of despair. On August 14, 2017, two days after a white-supremacist activist rammed his car into a group of anti-Fascist protestors, killing one and injuring nineteen, the New England Holocaust Memorial was vandalized for the second time in as many months. At the base of one of its fifty-four-foot glass towers lay a pile of shards. For Steve Ross, the image called to mind Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass in which German authorities ransacked Jewish-owned buildings with sledgehammers. Ross was eight years old when the Nazis invaded his Polish village, forcing his family to flee. He spent his next six years in a day-to-day struggle to survive the notorious camps in which he was imprisoned, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau among them. When he was finally liberated, he no longer knew how old he was, he was literally starving to death, and everyone in his family except for his brother had been killed. Ross learned in his darkest experiences--by observing and enduring inconceivable cruelty as well as by receiving compassion from caring fellow prisoners--the human capacity to rise above even the bleakest circumstances. He decided to devote himself to underprivileged youth, aiming to ensure that despite the obstacles in their lives they would never experience suffering like he had. Over the course of a nearly forty-year career as a psychologist working in the Boston city schools, that was exactly what he did. At the end of his career, he spearheaded the creation of the New England Holocaust Memorial, a site millions of people including young students visit every year. Equal parts heartrending, brutal, and inspiring, From Broken Glass is the story of how one man survived the unimaginable and helped lead a new generation to forge a more compassionate world.

'It's like being in a dream', commented Joseph Goebbels when he visited Nazi-occupied Paris in the summer of 1940. Dream and reality did indeed intermingle in the culture of the Third Reich, racialist fantasies and spectacular propaganda set-pieces contributing to this atmosphere alongside more benign cultural offerings such as performances of classical music or popular film comedies. A cultural palette that catered to the tastes of the majority helped encourage acceptance of the regime. The Third Reich was therefore eager to associate itself with comfortable middle-brow conventionality, while at the same time exploiting the latest trends that modern mass culture had to offer. And it was precisely because the culture of the Nazi period accommodated such a range of different needs and aspirations that it was so successfully able to legitimize war, imperial domination, and destruction. Moritz Foellmer turns the spotlight on this fundamental aspect of the Third Reich's successful cultural appeal in this ground-breaking new study, investigating what 'culture' meant for people in the years between 1933 and 1945: for convinced National Socialists at one end of the spectrum, via the legions of the apparently 'unpolitical', right through to anti-fascist activists, Jewish people, and other victims of the regime at the other end of the spectrum. Relating the everyday experience of people living under Nazism, he is able to give us a privileged insight into the question of why so many Germans enthusiastically embraced the regime and identified so closely with it.

"This learned volume is about as chilling as historiography gets." Walter Laqueur, The New Republic

..". a one-volume study of Auschwitz without peer in Holocaust literature." Kirkus Reviews

..". a comprehensive portrait of the largest and most lethal of the Nazi death camps... serves as a vital contribution to Holocaust studies and a bulwark against forgetting." Publishers Weekly

More than a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, of whom 90 percent were Jews. Here leading scholars from around the world provide the first comprehensive account of what took place at Auschwitz."

Protectors of Pluralism argues that local religious minorities are more likely to save persecuted groups from purification campaigns. Robert Braun utilizes a geo-referenced dataset of Jewish evasion in the Netherlands and Belgium during the Holocaust to assess the minority hypothesis. Spatial statistics and archival work reveal that Protestants were more likely to rescue Jews in Catholic regions of the Low Countries, while Catholics facilitated evasion in Protestant areas. Post-war testimonies and secondary literature demonstrate the importance of minority groups for rescue in other countries during the Holocaust as well as other episodes of mass violence, underlining how the local position of church communities produces networks of assistance, rather than something inherent to any religion itself. This book makes an important contribution to the literature on political violence, social movements, altruism and religion, applying a range of social science methodologies and theories that shed new light on the Holocaust.

In the immediate decades after World War II, the French National Railways (SNCF) was celebrated for its acts of wartime heroism. However, recent debates and litigation have revealed the ways the SNCF worked as an accomplice to the Third Reich and was actively complicit in the deportation of 75,000 Jews and other civilians to death camps. Sarah Federman delves into the interconnected roles-perpetrator, victim, and hero-the company took on during the harrowing years of the Holocaust. Grounded in history and case law, Last Train to Auschwitz traces the SNCF's journey toward accountability in France and the United States, culminating in a multimillion-dollar settlement paid by the French government on behalf of the railways.The poignant and informative testimonies of survivors illuminate the long-term effects of the railroad's impact on individuals, leading the company to make overdue amends. In a time when corporations are increasingly granted the same rights as people, Federman's detailed account demonstrates the obligations businesses have to atone for aiding and abetting governments in committing atrocities. This volume highlights the necessity of corporate integrity and will be essential reading for those called to engage in the difficult work of responding to past harms.

When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, Vera Schiff and her family were sent to Theresienstadt. Touted as the "model ghetto" for propaganda purposes, as well as to deceive Red Cross inspectors, it was in fact a holding camp for famous Jews--in case the world was to inquire. For the rest, however, it was the last stop on the way to the gas chambers. Those "lucky" enough to remain faced slave labor, starvation and disease. Shiff's intimate narrative of endurance recounts her family's three years in Theresienstadt, the challenges of life under postwar communism, and her escape to the nascent and turbulent state of Israel.

This is a chilling story of human depravity and ultimate justice, told for the first time by an eyewitness court reporter for the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Nazi doctors. This is the account of 22 men and 1 woman and the torturing and killing by experiment they authorised in the name of scientific research and patriotism. "Doctors from Hell" includes trial transcripts that have not been easily available to the general public and previously unpublished photographs used as evidence in the trial. The author describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for two years while working on the trial. Once a Nazi sympathiser tossed bombs into the dining room of the hotel where she lived moments before she arrived for dinner. She takes us into the courtroom to hear the dramatic testimony and see the reactions of the defendants to the proceedings. This landmark trial resulted in the establishment of the Nuremberg code, which set the guidelines for medical research involving human beings. It is a significant addition to the literature on World War II and the Holocaust, medical ethics, human rights, and the barbaric depths to which human beings can descend.

This book explores the work and legacy of Professor David Cesarani OBE, a leading British scholar and expert on Jewish history who helped to shape Holocaust research, remembrance and education in the UK. It is a unique combination of chapters produced by researchers, curators and commemoration activists who either worked with and/or were taught by the late Cesarani. The chapters in this collection consider the legacies of Cesarani's contribution to the discipline of history and the practice of public history. The contributors offer reflections on Cesarani's approach and provide new insights into the study of Anglo-Jewish history, immigrants and minorities and the history and public legacies of the Holocaust.

During the occupation of France in WWII the villages around Le Chambon-sur-Lignon pulled off an astonishing and largely unknown feat. Risking everything, they underwent a long-running battle of nerves and daring to hide 5,000 men, women and children, 3,500 of them Jews, from the Nazis and their Vichy stooges. Despite the danger, a whole community rallied together, from the pacifist pastor who defied orders to the glamorous female agent with a wooden leg, from the 18-year-old master forger to the schoolgirl who ran suitcases stuffed with money for the Resistance. Told using first-hand testimonies of many of the survivors and face-to-face interviews conducted by the author, A Good Place to Hide is the thrilling story of ordinary people who thwarted the Nazis and sheltered strangers in desperate need.

Recent years have brought a more intimate understanding of how survivors experienced the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, of the challenge faced by the army and medical relief teams who buried the dead and tried to save lives, how this effort was recorded at the time, and how its memory has been passed on. This volume brings together essays from international experts based on the 60th anniversary seminar held at the Imperial War Museum in 2005. It also includes testimony from survivors, eyewitness accounts from liberators and relief workers, and the scripts of two BBC radio broadcasts. With the benefits of new documentation and a rigorous scholarly approach, this book offers an original and at times controversial reassessment of the camp, its liberation, and the way Belsen is remembered in Britain and Germany.

How do people link the past to the present, marking continuity in the face of the fundamental discontinuities of history? A Time to Gather argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another as well as making claims of access to an "authentic" Jewish culture. Indeed, both before the Holocaust and in its aftermath, Jewish leaders around the world felt a shared imperative to muster the forces and resources of Jewish life and culture. It was a "time to gather," a feverish era of collecting and conflict in which archive making was both a response to the ruptures of modernity and a mechanism for communities to express their cultural hegemony. Jason Lustig explores these themes across the arc of the twentieth century by excavating three distinctive archival traditions, that of the Cairo Genizah (and its transfer to Cambridge in the 1890s), folkloristic efforts like those of YIVO, and the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden (Central or Total Archive of the German Jews) formed in Berlin in 1905. Lustig presents archive-making as an organizing principle of twentieth-century Jewish culture, as a metaphor of great power and broad symbolic meaning with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews' long diasporic history. In this light, creating archives was just as much about the future as it was about the past.

Holocaust to Resistance, My Journey is a powerful, awe-inspiring memoir from author and activist Suzanne Berliner Weiss. Born to Jewish parents in Paris in 1941, Suzanne was hidden from the Nazis on a farm in rural France. Alone after the war, she lived in Communist-run orphanages, where she gained a belief in peace and brotherhood. Adoption by a New York family led to a tumultuous youth haunted by domestic conflict, fear of nuclear war and anti-communist repression, consignment to a detention home and magical steps toward relinking with her origins in Europe. At age seventeen, Suzanne became a lifelong social activist, engaged in student radicalization, the Cuban Revolution, and movements for Black Power, women's liberation, peace in Vietnam and freedom for Palestine. Now nearing eighty, Suzanne tells how the ties of friendship, solidarity and resistance that saved her as a child speak to the needs of our planet today.

This two-part volume combines an accessible overview of contemporary Jewish history with a unique dictionary of Holocaust terms. In addition to assessing the Holocaust specifically, Part 1 of the book discusses the history of European Jewry, anti-Semitism, the rise and fall of Nazism and fascism, World War II, and the postwar implications of the Holocaust. The authors also consider key historiographical and methodological issues related to the Holocaust.Part Two provides a complete dictionary of terms relating to the Holocaust culled from dozens of primary and secondary sources in a range of languages. Included here is a comprehensive set of tables on Aktionen, Aliya Bet, anti-Jewish legislation, anti-semitic organizations, collaboration, concentration camps, Fascism, the Third Reich, the Nazi Party, Jewish and non-sectarian organizations, publications, Judenr te, and resistance movements. Each table is prefaced by a descriptive overview of pertinent issues.Graphs, photographs, and documents supplement the text, and an extensive bibliography as well as separate person, place, and subject indexes make this unique work invaluable as a reference tool.

The life stories of child survivors who rebuilt their post-war lives in Israel have been largely left untold. This work is the first exploration into the experience of child survivors in Israel, focusing on the child survivors' experience in telling his/her past to a wider audience and in publicly identifying themselves as Holocaust survivors. Whilst psychological research focuses on the survivor's personal inhibitions and motivations in retelling his/her pasts, 'The Life Stories of Child Survivors in Israel' attempts to understand the impact that the post-war environment has had on the individual's relationship to it. Using a qualitative narrative approach, this study examines the dynamics of 'silence' and 'retelling' in the post-war experience of child survivors. This work demonstrates the ways in which social dynamics, as well as internal motivations, had an impact on the extent to which these people were likely to speak publicly about their war-time experience or whether they were more inclined to remain silent. The interviews with survivors are presented 'using their own voice', and can thereby be understood in their own unique context. disparate as history and psychology.