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Books > History > European history > From 1900 > Second World War
Though it has been nearly seventy years since the Holocaust, the
human capacity for evil displayed by its perpetrators is still
shocking and haunting. But the story of the Nazi attempt to
annihilate European Jewry is not all we should remember. Stealth
Altruism tells of secret, non-militant, high-risk efforts by
"Carers," those victims who tried to reduce suffering and improve
everyone's chances of survival. Their empowering acts of altruism
remind us of our inherent longing to do good even in situations of
extraordinary brutality. Arthur B. Shostak explores forbidden acts
of kindness, such as sharing scarce clothing and food rations,
holding up weakened fellow prisoners during roll call, secretly
replacing an ailing friend in an exhausting work detail, and much
more. To date, memorialization has emphasized what was done to
victims and sidelined what victims tried to do for one another.
"Carers" provide an inspiring model and their perilous efforts
should be recognized and taught alongside the horrors of the
Holocaust. Humanity needs such inspiration.
Though it has been nearly seventy years since the Holocaust, the
human capacity for evil displayed by its perpetrators is still
shocking and haunting. But the story of the Nazi attempt to
annihilate European Jewry is not all we should remember. Stealth
Altruism tells of secret, non-militant, high-risk efforts by
"Carers," those victims who tried to reduce suffering and improve
everyone's chances of survival. Their empowering acts of altruism
remind us of our inherent longing to do good even in situations of
extraordinary brutality. Arthur B. Shostak explores forbidden acts
of kindness, such as sharing scarce clothing and food rations,
holding up weakened fellow prisoners during roll call, secretly
replacing an ailing friend in an exhausting work detail, and much
more. To date, memorialization has emphasized what was done to
victims and sidelined what victims tried to do for one another.
"Carers" provide an inspiring model and their perilous efforts
should be recognized and taught alongside the horrors of the
Holocaust. Humanity needs such inspiration.
Holocaust Education in Lithuania is based on a six-year,
multi-sited ethnographic research project that was conducted to
analyze the effects of the controversial policies of Holocaust
education which were introduced as conditions of membership for
access into post-Soviet western alliances. In order to understand
how individuals take up transnational policies and programs
intended to support democratization, Beresniova delves into rarely
discussed issues. She looks at the means through which inherent
cultural and political assumptions have had an impact on the ways
in which memory and history are used in educational programs. She
also scrutinizes the motivating factors for involvement in
Holocaust education, such as the importance of community building,
civic activism beyond the topic of the Holocaust, and the perceived
power of the international community in dictating domestic
education policy guidelines. Beresniova contends that educators
must acknowledge the political and cultural elements in Holocaust
education programs and policies, or risk undermining their own
efforts. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology,
education, history, political science, and European studies.
Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but more than that,
I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my
heart." Anne Frank The Diary of Anne Frank is the story of a
13=year-old Jewish girl and her family who are forced into hiding
by the Nazis during World War II.
During the early 1940s some 5,000 Christians of Jewish origin lived
in the Warsaw Ghetto. In this remarkable book, which combines both
memoir and historical analysis, Peter F. Dembowski describes their
fate. He also brings to light the little known fact that within the
Warsaw Ghetto were fully functioning Christian churches, including
at first three and later two Roman Catholic parishes. Dembowski
contends that Nazi ideology, particularly the Nuremberg Laws,
destroyed the distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.
Jews were defined by, and persecuted because of, their race rather
than their religious beliefs. As a member of a family of
Christianized Jews with many friends who lived in the Warsaw
Ghetto, Dembowski offers a rich portrait of Jewish Christians and
their fate in the Ghetto. An interesting aspect of his account is
his description of Jewish views toward Christian converts.
Dembowski stresses the historical importance of counting baptized,
practicing Christians among Jews in the Ghetto, as well as their
difficult social situation within the Ghetto. At the same time, he
is sensitive to the pain that Christian conversion caused both
secular and religious Jews. important dimension to Holocaust
studies. It will be welcomed by general readers and scholars alike.
By 1944 a large part of Eastern Europe had already been liberated
by the Red Army, and the Allied forces were continuing to move in
from the west after success at Normandy. Yet, in Lower Silesia,
Germany more than sixty new forced labor camps were established,
adding to the approximately forty camps that already existed. The
inmates were Jews from Hungary and Poland who had been deported
from the Lodz ghetto or who had been included on the infamous
"Schindler's List." These camps became satellites of the
Gross-Rosen concentration camp and were the last to be liberated.
Throughout their existence, the Gross-Rosen camp and its satellites
had a special relationship. This is why, although the process of
genocide was proceeding at top speed, some Jews were diverted from
the gas chambers and sent to work at Gross-Rosen.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the main provider of inmate slave laborers
for the Gross-Rosen armaments, munitions, and other factories owned
by giant private enterprises, such as Krupp, I.G. Farben, and
Siemens. Jewish inmates were also used in the construction of
Hitler's secret headquarters in the local Eulen Mountains and the
secret underground tunnels used to store weapons. This book adds
greatly to our knowledge of the complexity of German policy toward
the Jews and forced labor. It not only describes the daily life of
Jewish slave laborers but also traces Reich economic policy and the
big corporations that used forced labor.
What, exactly, does one mean when idealizing tolerance as a
solution to cultural conflict? This book examines a wide range of
young adult texts, both fiction and memoir, representing the
experiences of young adults during WWII and the Holocaust. Author
Rachel Dean-Ruzicka argues for a progressive reading of this
literature. Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust
Literature contests the modern discourse of tolerance, encouraging
educators and readers to more deeply engage with difference and
identity when studying Holocaust texts. Young adult Holocaust
literature is an important nexus for examining issues of identity
and difference because it directly confronts systems of power,
privilege, and personhood. The text delves into the wealth of
material available and examines over forty books written for young
readers on the Holocaust and, in the last chapter, neo-Nazism. The
book also looks at representations of non-Jewish victims, such as
the Romani, the disabled, and homosexuals. In addition to critical
analysis of the texts, each chapter reads the discourses of
tolerance and cosmopolitanism against present-day cultural
contexts: ongoing debates regarding multicultural education, gay
and lesbian rights, and neo-Nazi activities. The book addresses
essential questions of tolerance and toleration that have not been
otherwise considered in Holocaust studies or cultural studies of
children's literature.
Israeli youth voyages to Poland are one of the most popular and
influential forms of transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli
society. Through intensive participant observation, group
discussions, student diaries, and questionnaires, the author
demonstrates how the State shapes Poland into a living deathscape
of Diaspora Jewry. In the course of the voyage, students undergo a
rite de passage, in which they are transformed into victims,
victorious survivors, and finally witnesses of the witnesses. By
viewing, touching, and smelling Holocaust-period ruins and remains,
by accompanying the survivors on the sites of their suffering and
survival, crying together and performing commemorative ceremonies
at the death sites, students from a wide variety of family
backgrounds become carriers of Shoah memory. They come to see the
State and its defense as the romanticized answer to the Shoah.
These voyages are a bureaucratic response to uncertainty and
fluidity of identity in an increasingly globalized and fragmented
society. This study adds a measured and compassionate ethical voice
to ideological debates surrounding educational and cultural forms
of encountering the past in contemporary Israel, and raises further
questions about the representation of the Holocaust after the
demise of the last living witnesses.
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German and Italian fascist armies in the Second World War treated
the Jews quite differently. Jews who fell into the hands of the
German army ended up in concentration camps; none of those taken by
the Italians suffered the same fate. Yet the protectors of the Jews
were no philo-Semites, nor were they (often) great respecters of
human life. Some of those same officers had sanctioned savage
atrocities against Ethiopians and Arabs in the years before the
war. Jonathan Steinberg uses this remarkable and poignant story to
unravel the motives and forces underpinning both Fascism and
Nazism. As a renowned historian of both Germany and Italy, he is
uniquely placed to answer the underlying question; why?
This book re-examines one of the most intense controversies of the
Holocaust: the role of Rezs Kasztner in facilitating the murder of
most of Nazi-occupied Hungary's Jews in 1944. Because he was acting
head of the Jewish rescue operation in Hungary, some have hailed
him as a saviour. Others have charged that he collaborated with the
Nazis in the deportations to Auschwitz. What is indisputable is
that Adolf Eichmann agreed to spare a special group of 1,684 Jews,
who included some of Kasztner's relatives and friends, while nearly
500,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to their deaths. Why were so many
lives lost? After World War II, many Holocaust survivors condemned
Kasztner for complicity in the deportation of Hungarian Jews. It
was alleged that, as a condition of saving a small number of Jewish
leaders and select others, he deceived ordinary Jews into boarding
the trains to Auschwitz. The ultimate question is whether Kastztner
was a Nazi collaborator, as branded by Ben Hecht in his 1961 book
Perfidy, or a hero, as Anna Porter argued in her 2009 book
Kasztner's Train. Opinion remains divided. Paul Bogdanor makes an
original, compelling case that Kasztner helped the Nazis keep order
in Hungary's ghettos before the Jews were sent to Auschwitz, and
sent Nazi disinformation to his Jewish contacts in the free world.
Drawing on unpublished documents, and making extensive use of the
transcripts of the Kasztner and Eichmann trials in Israel,
Kasztner's Crime is a chilling account of one man's descent into
evil during the genocide of his own people.
This book explores portrayals of Anne Frank in American literature,
where she is often invoked, if problematically, as a means of
encouraging readers to think widely about persecution, genocide,
and victimisation; often in relation to gender, ethnicity, and
race. It shows how literary representations of Anne Frank in
America over the past 50 years reflect the continued dominance of
the American dramatic adaptations of Frank's Diary in the 1950s,
and argues that authors feel compelled to engage with the
problematic elements of these adaptations and their iconic power.
At the same time, though, literary representations of Frank are
associated with the adaptations; critics often assume that these
texts unquestioningly perpetuate the problems with the adaptations.
This is not true. This book examines how American authors represent
Frank in order to negotiate difficult questions relating to
representation of the Holocaust in America, and in order to
consider gender, coming of age, and forms of inequality in American
culture in various historical moments; and of course, to consider
the ways Frank herself is represented in America. This book argues
that the most compelling representations of Frank in American
literature are alert to their own limitations, and may caution
against making Frank a universal symbol of goodness or setting up
too easy identifications with her. It will be of great interest to
researchers and students of Frank, the Holocaust in American
fiction and culture, gender studies, life writing, young adult
fiction, and ethics.
The first volume of its kind, Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and
Postwar German Culture draws together three significant areas of
inquiry: Jewish music, German culture, and the legacy of the
Holocaust. Jewish music-a highly debated topic-encompasses a
multiplicity of musics and cultures, reflecting an inherent and
evolving hybridity and transnationalism. German culture refers to
an equally diverse concept that, in this volume, includes the
various cultures of prewar Germany, occupied Germany, the divided
and reunified Germany, and even "German (Jewish) memory," which is
not necessarily physically bound to Germany. In the context of
these perspectives, the volume makes powerful arguments on about
the impact of the Holocaust and its aftermath in changing contexts
of musical performance and composition. In doing so, the essays in
Dislocated Memories cover a wide spectrum of topics from the
immediate postwar period with music in the Displaced Persons camps
to the later twentieth century with compositions conceived in
response to the Holocaust and the klezmer revival at the turn of
this century. Dislocated Memories builds on a wide range of recent
and critical scholarship in Cold War studies, cultural history,
German studies, Holocaust studies, Jewish studies, and memory
studies. What binds these distinct fields tightly together are the
contributors' specific theoretical inquiries that reflect separate
yet interrelated themes such as displacement and memory. While
these concepts link the multi-faceted essays on a micro-level, they
are also largely connected in their conceptual query by focus, on
the macro-level, on the presence and the absence of Jewish music in
Germany after 1945. Filled with original research by scholars at
the forefront of music, history, and Jewish studies, Dislocated
Memories will prove an essential text for scholars and students
alike.
This investigation of Polish, Jewish, and German sources
demonstrates the roles of music in occupied Poland. Its former
citizens had their access to music controlled by the Nazi Ministry
of Propaganda. It was rationed as other goods, depending on racial
(i.e. also legal) status. Official music performances served as a
propagandistic tool to further divide the Nazi-segregated
population. Music played clandestinely embodied resistance. It
restored the sense of community and helped save musicians
persecuted as Jews, like Wladyslaw Szpilman. The documents analyzed
in the monograph confirm the dehumanization of prospective victims,
mixed with a narcissistic self-righteous view of Nazi songs and
propaganda ultimately led to the organized presence of music in the
Holocaust sites.
"Alfred Wetzler was a true hero. His escape from Auschwitz, and the
report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth
about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving
the lives of 120,000 Jews: the Jews of Budapest who were about to
be deported to their deaths. No other single act in the Second
World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler and the SS
had determined for them. This book tells Wetzler's story." . Sir
Martin Gilbert "Wetzler is a master at evoking the universe of
Auschwitz, and especially, his and Vrba's harrowing flight to
Slovakia. The day-by-day account of the tremendous difficulties the
pair faced after the Nazis had called off their search of the camp
and its surroundings is both riveting and heart wrenching. ...]
Shining vibrantly through the pages of the memoir are the tenacity
and valor of two young men, who sought to inform the world about
the greatest outrage ever committed by humans against their fellow
humans." . From Introduction by Dr Robert Rozett] Together with
another young Slovak Jew, both of them deported in 1942, the author
succeeded in escaping from the notorious death camp in the spring
of 1944. There were some very few successful escapes from Auschwitz
during the war, but it was these two who smuggled out the damning
evidence - a ground plan of the camp, constructional details of the
gas chambers and crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from
a canister of Cyclone gas. The present book is cast in the form of
a novel to allow factual information not personally collected by
the two fugitives, but provided for them by a handful of reliable
friends, to be included. Nothing, however, has been invented. It is
a shocking account of Nazi genocide and of the inhuman conditions
in the camp, but equally shocking is the initial disbelief the
fugitive's revelations met with after their return. Ewald Osers has
translated over 150 books and received many translation prizes and
honours.
Seventy years after it took place, the Holocaust committed against
the Jews of Europe during World War II continues to cast a giant
shadow over humankind. Man's inhumanity to man is not a thing of
the past. Genocidal action is still commonplace around the globe.
Has humankind learned the lessons of the past? Is the human race
doomed to live in a perpetual state of war and self-destruction?
Explaining the Holocaust shows how, given the right circumstances,
human beings can lose their humanity. Does that mean that the
ethical teachings of the major religions are wishful thinking? This
book tackles two questions that continue to be asked by people
everywhere: Why did a highly civilized nation like Germany, in the
middle of the twentieth century, commit the most heinous crime in
all of human history? And if indeed there is a loving God who made
a covenant with the people of Israel, why were millions of
innocent, peaceful Jews dehumanized, starved, tortured, and
systematically murdered? Explaining the Holocaust spares no one in
discussing the enormity of the evil. But it also shows how the
divine spark in human beings did not die during those years of
darkness, and why we still have a glimmer of hope.
Essentials of Holocaust Education: Fundamental Issues and
Approaches is a comprehensive guide for pre- and in-service
educators preparing to teach about this watershed event in human
history. An original collection of essays by Holocaust scholars,
teacher educators, and classroom teachers, it covers a full range
of issues relating to Holocaust education, with the goal of helping
teachers to help students gain a deep and thorough understanding of
why and how the Holocaust was perpetrated. Both conceptual and
pragmatic, it delineates key rationales for teaching the Holocaust,
provides useful historical background information for teachers, and
offers a wide array of practical approaches for teaching about the
Holocaust. Various chapters address teaching with film and
literature, incorporating the use of primary accounts into a study
of the Holocaust, using technology to teach the Holocaust, and
gearing the content and instructional approaches and strategies to
age-appropriate audiences. A ground-breaking and highly original
book, Essentials of Holocaust Education will help teachers engage
students in a study of the Holocaust that is compelling,
thought-provoking, and reflective
Essentials of Holocaust Education: Fundamental Issues and
Approaches is a comprehensive guide for pre- and in-service
educators preparing to teach about this watershed event in human
history. An original collection of essays by Holocaust scholars,
teacher educators, and classroom teachers, it covers a full range
of issues relating to Holocaust education, with the goal of helping
teachers to help students gain a deep and thorough understanding of
why and how the Holocaust was perpetrated. Both conceptual and
pragmatic, it delineates key rationales for teaching the Holocaust,
provides useful historical background information for teachers, and
offers a wide array of practical approaches for teaching about the
Holocaust. Various chapters address teaching with film and
literature, incorporating the use of primary accounts into a study
of the Holocaust, using technology to teach the Holocaust, and
gearing the content and instructional approaches and strategies to
age-appropriate audiences. A ground-breaking and highly original
book, Essentials of Holocaust Education will help teachers engage
students in a study of the Holocaust that is compelling,
thought-provoking, and reflective
A challenging interpretation both of the Holocaust and its wider
context, and the Church of England's role during the period. This
is the first book to consider the Anglican church's response to the
Nazi persecution and then murder of Europe's Jews. Acting as a
critique of the historiography of the 'bystanders' to the
Holocaust, it reveals a community that struggled to understand the
depravity of Nazi anti-semitism. The author outlines Anglican
attitudes to war, anti-semitism and many related issues,
demonstrating the extent and the limits of the Church's engagement
with Europeanpolitics, and shows how Christian interpretations of
Nazi persecution contributed to much wider assumptions about
Germany and German history in Britain during the war years. He then
moves on to the post-war world, indicating theimportant role played
by the Church of England in forging memories of the Nazi era and
especially the suffering of Europe's Jews. Overall, this book
offers a challenging new interpretation of the Holocaust and its
wider context, and of the history of the Church of England and its
role in the intellectual life of the nation.Dr TOM LAWSON teaches
in the Department of History, University of Winchester.
This book is the translation of the Yizkor (Memorial) Book of the
destroyed Jewish Community of Rozhnyatov, written by the former
residents who survived the Holocaust (Shoah) or emigrated before
the war. It contains the history of the community in addition to
descriptions of the institutions (synagogues, prayer houses),
cultural activities, personalities (Rabbis, leaders, prominent
people, characters) and other aspects of the town. It also
describes the events of the Shoah in the town and lists the
victims. All information is either first-hand accounts or based
upon first-hand accounts and therefore serves as a primary resource
for either research and to individuals seeking information about
the town from which their parents, grandparents or
great-grandparents had immigrated; this is their history The book
was originally written in Hebrew and Yiddish in 1974, translated
into English by volunteers in the Yizkor Book Project of JewishGen,
Inc. and then published by the Yizkor-Books-In-Print Project. The
town is also known by these names: Rozhnyativ Ukrrainian], Ro
niatow Polish], Rozhniatov Yiddish], Rozhnyatov Russian],
Rozhantov, Rozhnyatuv, Rozintov, Roznatov, Roznitev, Rozhnitiv,
Roznjativ It is located at longitude 48 56' N and latitude 24 10' E
and is 302 miles WSW of Kyyiv (Kiev). Other towns covered in the
book are Rozniatow, Perehinsko, Broszniow, Swaryczow, Dolina,
Stanislawow, Stryj, and Lvov.
The horror of the Holocaust lies not only in its brutality but in
its scale and logistics; it depended upon the machinery and logic
of a rational, industrialised, and empirically organised modern
society. The central thesis of this book is that Art Spiegelman's
comics all identify deeply-rooted madness in post-Enlightenment
society. Spiegelman maintains, in other words, that the Holocaust
was not an aberration, but an inevitable consequence of
modernisation. In service of this argument, Smith offers a reading
of Spiegelman's comics, with a particular focus on his three main
collections: Breakdowns (1977 and 2008), Maus (1980 and 1991), and
In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). He draws upon a taxonomy of
terms from comic book scholarship, attempts to theorize madness
(including literary portrayals of trauma), and critical works on
Holocaust literature.
Half a century after the collapse of the Nazi regime and the Third
Reich, scholars from a range of fields continue to examine the
causes of Nazi Germany. An increasing number of young Americans are
attempting to understand the circumstances that led to the rise of
the Nazi party and the subsequent Holocaust, as well as the
implication such events may have for today as the world faces a
resurgence of neo-Nazism, ethnic warfare, and genocide. In the
months following World War II, extensive psychiatric and
psychological testing was performed on over 200 Nazis in an effort
to understand the key personalities of the Third Reich and of those
individuals who "just followed orders." In addressing these issues,
the current volume examines the strange history of over 200
Rorschach Inkblot protocols that were administered to Nazi war
criminals and answers such questions as: * Why the long delay in
publishing protocols? * What caused such jealousies among the
principals? * How should the protocols be interpreted? * Were the
Nazis monsters or ordinary human beings? This text delivers a
definitive and comprehensive study of the psychological functioning
of Nazi war criminals -- both the elite and the rank-and-file. In
order to apply a fresh perspective to understanding the causes that
created such antisocial behavior, these analyses lead to a
discussion within the context of previous work done in social and
clinical psychology. Subjects discussed include the authoritarian
personality, altruism, obedience to authority, diffusion of
responsibility, and moral indifference. The implications for
current political events are also examined as Neo-Nazism,
anti-Semitism, and ethnic hate are once again on the rise. While
the book does contain some technical material relating to the
psychological interpretations, it is intended to be a scholarly
presentation written in a narrative style. No prior knowledge of
psychological testing is necessary, but it should be of great
benefit for those interested in the Rorschach Inkblot test, or with
a special interest in psychological testing, personality
assessment, and the history of psychology. It is also intended for
readers with a broad interest in Nazi Germany.
The Nazi regime opened its first concentration camps within weeks
of coming to power, but with the exception of Dachau the history of
these early, improvised camps and their inmates is not yet widely
known. Gabriele Herz's memoir, published for the first time, is a
unique record of a Jewish woman's detention in the first women's
concentration camp in Moringen (housed in part of an
old-established workhouse), at a time when most other inmates were
communists or Jehovah's Witnesses. This original translation of her
wry and perceptive memoir is accompanied by an extensive
introduction that sets Herz's experience in the history both of
political detention under the Nazi regime and of the German
workhouse system.
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