A poignant memoir of lives cleaved by war, Otto and Daria is the first-hand account of Eric Koch, a man who once was called Otto. As a Jewish refugee from WWII Germany, Otto first left his country for England, and later arrived in Canada, where he was for a time imprisoned in a camp. The counterpoint to Otto's recollections are the letters from his long-distance love interest, Daria Hambourg, a London girl of bohemian temperament, unusual literary talents and a distinguished, but restrictive, family background. These parallel writings tell the story of two young people caught in the grip of history, and together show what you have to give up in order to move forward.

Jewish radicals manned the barricades on the avenues of Petrograd and the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto; they were in the vanguard of those resisting Franco and the Nazis. They originated in Yiddishland, a vast expanse of Eastern Europe that, before the Holocaust, ran from the Baltic Sea to the western edge of Russia and incorporated hundreds of Jewish communities with a combined population of some 11 million people. Within this territory, revolutionaries arose from the Jewish misery of Eastern and Central Europe; they were raised in the fear of God and taught to respect religious tradition, but were caught up in the great current of revolutionary utopian thinking. Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals, they embodied the multifarious activity and radicalism of a Jewish working class that glimpsed the Messiah in the folds of the red flag. Today, the world from which they came has disappeared, dismantled and destroyed by the Nazi genocide. After this irremediable break, there remain only survivors, and the work of memory for red Yiddishland.This book traces the struggles of these militants, their singular trajectories, their oscillation between great hope and doubt, their lost illusions-a red and Jewish gaze on the history of the twentieth century.

A collection honoring Elie Wiesel's seventieth birthday. Based on a three-day symposium, ""The Claims of Memory,"" this volume conveys the omnipresence of memory in Elie Wiesel's writing and attempts to preserve the flavor of the exchange that took place. It represents several intersecting approaches to memory: the nature of memoir writing; an analysis of contrasting dimensions of memory in victims and persecutors; the ethics of memory; and chronicling of the ""memory"" of God through key texts in Christian and Jewish traditions.

In The Listener, a daughter receives a troubling gift: her mother's stories of surviving World War II in Poland. During the Holocaust, Irene Oore's mother escaped the death camps by concealing her Jewish identity. Those years found her constantly on the run and on the verge of starvation, living a harrowing and peripatetic existence as she struggled to keep herself and her family alive. Throughout the memoir, Oore reveals a certain ambivalence towards the gift bestowed upon her. The stories of fear, love, and constant hunger traumatised her as a child. Now, she shares these same stories with her own children, to keep the history alive.

This book presents archaeological research from places of war, violence, protest and oppression of the 20th and the 21st century; sites where the material relics give a deep insight to fateful events - a shadow of war. Alongside renewed interest in National Socialism and the Holocaust, archaeological interest started in former concentration camps of the Nazi dictatorship. The focus was on the central places of the camps, such as the gas chambers, the crematoria, or execution sites, as well as prisoners' barracks and the parade ground. In many cases, these sites revealed forgotten and vanished structures, where archaeological excavations can offer the possibility for commemorating the victims. The research has since widened and includes other sites of Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War, as well as the First World War, the Cold War and locations of civil wars and civilian protest against state authorities and against companies and corporations in many parts of the world. In order to come to a comprehensive understanding contemporary archaeology must take a global perspective. Archaeological finds often shed light on daily life, revealing survival conditions in the internment camps; the lives of people and their fighting and dying on battlefields and in trenches. Likewise, the relics of politically active people in protest camps give an impression of their commitment in civilian protest. Sometimes material remains can help to tell an alternative or balancing narrative to the state's official recorded history. The enormous volume and diverse range of material culture presents challenges and opportunities. Through careful archaeological investigation, we can present different and new perspectives that are not recorded clearly in existing written, pictorial or oral archives. The merging and examination of all sources together is what enables us to understand the complexity of the history. This book will also present future directions in contemporary archaeology that will help bring the study focus beyond sites and assemblages of war and protest.

Based on American, German and Soviet sources, this book provides an in-depth study of the Romanian administration in Odessa and Transnistria. It draws a sharp contrast between the relatively more successful occupation policies of the Romanian administration in Odessa and Transnistria and those of the Germans in occupied areas of the Soviet Union. Alexander Dallin, formerly president of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, presents an essential text for anyone interested in the occupation of Soviet Territory during World War II and its consequences.

On June 22, 1941, the German invasion of the Soviet Union began. In a matter of days, the war reached the suburbs of Kaunas, Lithuania, where a young Jewish violinist, Yochanan Fein, led a happy childhood. On June 22, 1941, that childhood ended. In Boy with a Violin, Fein recounts his early life under Nazi occupation-his survival in the Kaunas Ghetto, the separation from his parents, his narrow escapes from death at the hands of Nazi officers, the harrowing stories of those he knew who did not survive, and the abhorrent conditions he endured while in hiding. He tells the tale of his rescuer, Jonas Paulavicius, the Lithuanian carpenter who sought to save the Jewish spirit. Paulavicius rescued those he believed could rebuild in the wake of the Holocaust, hiding engineers and doctors in his underground Noah's Ark. Among the sixteen he saved stood one fourteen-year-old violinist. Following liberation, Fein describes the aftermath of the war as survivors returned to what was left of their homes and attempted to piece together the fragmented remains of their lives. He recounts the difficulties of returning to some semblance of normal life in the midst of a complex political climate, culminating in his daring escape from Soviet Lithuania. In one of the darkest eras of human history, there were those who proved that the goodness of the human spirit survives against all odds. Boy with a Violin pays tribute to those who risked everything to save a life, and whose altruism crossed the boundaries of race and religion. In this first English translation of Boy with a Violin, Fein continues to offer his testimony to the strength of the human spirit.

Escaping Hitler is the true story, covering ninety years, of a fourteen-year-old boy Gunter Stern who, when Adolf Hitler threatened hisfamily, education and future, resolved to escape from his rural village of Nickenich in the German Rhineland. In July 1939 Gunter boarded a bus to the border with Luxembourg, illegally crossed the river and walked alone for seven days through Belgium into Holland, intent on catching a ferry to England and freedom. The outcome was not exactly as he had planned.The author gathered her information through interviews with Gunter, now known as Joe Stirling, and with those closest to him. During an emotional 'foot-stepping' journey in September 2013 the author visited Gunter's birthplace, met with a school friend, discovered the apartment in Koblenz where he fled following Kristallnacht in 1938, drove the route of Gunter's walk through Europe and retraced the final steps of his parents prior to their deportation to a Nazi death camp in Poland during 1942.

'An extraordinary family tale of survival' Sunday Times Jonathan Dean's great-grandfather, David Schapira, fled the Russian threat in Ukraine for Vienna in 1914. Blinded in the First World War, he survived to find love and start a family, only to be sent to a concentration camp during the next war. David's son, Heinz, was also a refugee. In 1939, aged 16, he embarked on a nail-biting journey to London, to escape his fate as an Austrian Jew. Drawing on David's memoir and Heinz's wartime diaries, Dean visits the places that changed the course of his family tree - Vienna, Cologne, Ukraine - where he finds history repeating itself and meets a new wave of people leaving loved ones for an uncertain future. I Must Belong Somewhere is an unforgettable family tale of exile and survival, and a powerful meditation on what it means to be a refugee today.

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age explores the nexus of new media and memory practices, raising questions about how advances in digital technologies continue to influence the nature of Holocaust memorialization. Through an in-depth study of the largest and most widely available collection of videotaped interviews with survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust, the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, Jeffrey Shandler weighs the possibilities and challenges brought about by digital forms of public memory. The Visual History Archive's holdings are extensive-over 100,000 hours of video, including interviews with over 50,000 individuals-and came about at a time of heightened anxiety about the imminent passing of the generation of Holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses. Now, the Shoah Foundation's investment in new digital media is instrumental to its commitment to remembering the Holocaust both as a subject of historical importance in its own right and as a paradigmatic moral exhortation against intolerance. Shandler not only considers the Archive as a whole, but also looks closely at individual survivors' stories, focusing on narrative, language, and spectacle to understand how Holocaust remembrance is mediated.

Twenty years since its first publication, this new anniversary edition of the Holocaust memoir of George Salton (then Lucjan Salzman), gives readers a personal and powerful account of his survival through one of the darkest periods in human history. With heartbreaking and honest reflection, the author shares a gripping first-person narrative of his transformation from a Jewish eleven-year-old boy living happily in Tyczyn, Poland with his brother and parents, to his experiences as a teenage victim of growing persecution, brutality and imprisonment as the Nazis pursued the Final Solution. The author takes the reader back in time as he reveals in vivid and engrossing details the painful memories of life in his childhood town during Nazi occupation, the forced march before his jeering and cold-eyed former friends and neighbors as they are driven from their homes into the crowded and terrible conditions in the Rzeszow ghetto, and the heart-wrenching memory of his final farewell as he is separated from his parents who would be sent in boxcars to the Belzec extermination camp. Alone at age 14, George begins a three-year horror filled odyssey as part of a Daimler-Benz slave labor group that will take him through ten concentration camps in Poland, Germany, and France. In Plaszow he digs up graves with his bare hands, in Flossenburg he labors in a stone quarry and in France he works as a prisoner in a secret tunnel the Nazis have converted into an armaments factory. In every concentration camp including Sachsenhausen, Braunschweig, Ravensbruck and others, George recounts the agonizing and excruciating details of what it was like to barely survive the rollcalls, selections, beatings, hunger, and despair he both endured and witnessed. Of the 465 Jewish prisoners with him in the labor group in the Rzeszow ghetto in 1942, less than fifty were alive three years later when the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division liberated the Wobbelin concentration camp on the afternoon of May 2, 1945. George recalls not only the painful details of his survival, but also the tales of his fellow prisoners, a small group who became more than friends as they shared their meager rations, their fragile strength, and their waning hope. The memoir moves us as we behold the life sustaining powers of friendship among this band of young prisoners. With gratitude for his courageous liberators, Salton expresses his powerful emotions as he acknowledges his miraculous freedom: "I felt something stir deep within my soul. It was my true self, the one who had stayed deep within and had not forgotten how to love and how to cry, the one who had chosen life and was still standing when the last roll call ended."

The mass murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany went hand in hand with the destruction of evidence attesting to this genocide. As Holocaust survivor Jules Schelvis puts it, "[v]ery few documents relating to Sobibor and the other death camps" remain. With its rich photographic imagery, the collection featured in From "Euthanasia" to Sobibor: An SS Officer's Photo Collection sheds new light on the Holocaust and other key aspects of Nazi extermination policy. The materials were compiled by Johann Niemann, an SS officer whose earlier participation in the Nazi "euthanasia" murders made him second-in-command at Sobibor and the first to get killed in the prisoner uprising of October 13, 1943. These documents allow crucial insights into the making of mass murderers, the evolution of the "final solution," and its consequences for the victims. As prevalent as the perpetrator perspective is in Niemann's collection, From "Euthanasia" to Sobibor offers a welcome corrective by complementing his images and documents with testimonies of Sobibor survivors, many of which also available in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) archives. With its compilation of unique primary sources and skillful explication, From "Euthanasia" to Sobibor addresses under-researched aspects of Nazi mass violence beyond the Holocaust and offers a rich resource for researching and teaching.

For decades scholars have pored over Hitler's autobiographical journey/political treatise, debating if Mein Kampf has genocidal overtones and arguably led to the Holocaust. For the first time, Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Holocaust sees celebrated international scholars analyse the book from various angles to demonstrate how it laid the groundwork for the Shoah through Hitler's venomous attack on the Jews in his text. Split into three main sections which focus on 'contexts', 'eugenics' and 'religion', the book reflects carefully on the point at which the Fuhrer's actions and policies turn genocidal during the Third Reich and whether Mein Kampf presaged Nazi Germany's descent into genocide. There are contributions from leading academics from across the United States and Germany, including Magnus Brechtken, Susannah Heschel and Nathan Stoltzfus, along with totally new insights into the source material in light of the 2016 German critical edition of Mein Kampf. Hitler's views on Marxism, violence, and leadership, as well as his anti-Semitic rhetoric are examined in detail as you are taken down the disturbing path from a hateful book to the Holocaust.

Each scholar working in the field of Holocaust literature and representation has a story to tell. Not only the scholarly story of the work they do, but their personal story, their journey to becoming a specialist in Holocaust studies. What academic, political, cultural, and personal experiences led them to choose Holocaust representation as their subject of research and teaching? What challenges did they face on their journey? What approaches, genres, media, or other forms of Holocaust representation did they choose and why? How and where did they find a scholarly "home" in which to share their work productively? Have political, social, and cultural conditions today affected how they think about their work on Holocaust representation? How do they imagine their work moving forward, including new challenges, responses, and audiences? These are but a few of the questions that the authors in this volume address, showing how a scholar's field of research and resulting writings are not arbitrary, and are often informed by their personal history and professional experiences.

There is no more gruesome and tragic record in the history of the 20th century than the photographs taken at the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany after World War II. These images are seared into our collective memory as brutal evidence of the atrocity of war and the evil of which humanity is capable. But the horrific content of these images has somewhat obscured their status as historical documents. This text reveals the unique significance of the concentration camp photographs - how they have become the basis of our memory of the Holocaust and how they have affected our presentations and perceptions of contemporary history's subsequent atrocities. Prior to the Holocaust, news reporters primarily told their stories in words, using photographs almost as an afterthought. When the camps were liberated, however, journalists and reporters turned to photography to bear witness to the unspeakable and indescribable scenes of the dead and dying. Through this process, the text argues, photographs earned a new legitimacy as tools of reporting. The author shows how, since the end of the war, the use of "atrocity photos" has fallen into patterns - or waves of memory - determined by the different roles that the photos occupy in the public imagination. Most recently, for example, the images from Bosnia hark back to the Holocaust imagery, an echo that can actually dilute our response to what happened both then and now.

A fearless new work from the acclaimed author of the prize-winning novels THE SPEED OF LIGHT and BLUE NUDE. Composed over a period of some twenty years, GRAVITY is Elizabeth Rosner's profoundly searching account of her experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. In an extraordinarily powerful mix of poetry and prose, Rosner traces the earliest remembered resonances of her parents' past and her dawning awareness of the war history that colored her family home during her youth. She recounts her false starts in raising the subject with her father (a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp), his piecemeal revelations and their eventual travels together to the sites of the nightmare in Germany. And she evokes, courageously and heart-wrenchingly, her search for identity against the gravitational pull of her parents' experience and the traditional upbringing they've given her. Like Rosner's celebrated novels, GRAVITY plumbs the deep complexities of inherited grief, but here the author discloses, with breathtaking candor and sensitivity, "what it felt like to grow up inside my family." Also featuring spellbinding artwork by Lola Fraknoi, these astonishing pages remind us that history happens at home and that the past is something we all embody, knowingly or not.

This volume offers the first, in-depth comparison of the Holocaust and new world slavery. Providing a reliable view of the relevant issues, and based on a broad and comprehensive set of data and evidence, Steven Katz analyzes the fundamental differences between the two systems and re-evaluates our understanding of the Nazi agenda. Among the subjects he examines are: the use of black slaves as workers compared to the Nazi use of Jewish labor; the causes of slave demographic decline and growth in different New World locations; the main features of Jewish life during the Holocaust relative to slave life with regard to such topics as diet, physical punishment, medical care, and the role of religion; the treatment of slave women and children as compared to the treatment of Jewish women and children in the Holocaust. Katz shows that slave women were valued as workers, as reproducers of future slaves, and as sexual objects, and that slave children were valued as commodities. For these reasons, neither slave women nor children were intentionally murdered. By comparison, Jewish slave women and children were viewed as the ultimate racial enemy and therefore had to be exterminated. These and other findings conclusively demonstrate the uniqueness of the Holocaust compared with other historical instances of slavery.

This memorial book of the Jewish Community of Antopol, Belarus weaves together the history of a vibrant Jewish community, annihilated during World War II, as told through first-hand accounts gathered from its original inhabitants. These stories edited and translated from Yiddish and Hebrew are dedicated to the Antopol survivors and the memory of the 3,000 martyrs, whose names and stories fill these pages. May these messages reach the hearts of the readers as a reminder of the enduring strength of the Jewish Heritage. This book can serve as a research resource of first-hand accounts of the Jewish community of Antopol, Belarus and a personal history book for the descendants of the town.

When the Allies stormed Berlin in 1945, Adolf Eichmann, the operational manager of the Final Solution, shed his SS uniform and vanished. Bringing him to justice would require a harrowing fifteen-year chase stretching from war-ravaged Europe to the shores of Argentina. "Hunting Eichmann" follows the Nazi as he escapes two American POW camps, hides out in the mountains, slips out of Europe on the ratlines, and builds an anonymous life in Buenos Aires.
Meanwhile, concentration camp survivor Simon Wiesenthal's persistent search for the monster gradually evolves into an international manhunt that involves the Mossad, whose operatives have their own scores to settle. Presented in a pulse-pounding, hour-by-hour account, the capture of Eichmann and efforts by Israeli agents to smuggle him out of Argentina to stand trial bring the narrative to a stunning conclusion. Based on groundbreaking new information and interviews, recently declassified documents, and meticulous research, "Hunting Eichmann" is an authoritative, finely nuanced history that offers the intrigue of a detective story and the thrill of great spy fiction.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.;Inspired by the trial of a bureaucrat who helped cause the Holocaust, this radical work on the banality of evil stunned the world with its exploration of a regime's moral blindness and one man's insistence that he be absolved all guilt because he was only following orders'.