Jewish armed resistance during the Holocaust has been amply documented, debunking the stereotypical view of the Jews as passive victims of Hitler and the Nazis. The stories of the revolts in a number of ghettos and camps have been told and retold. Jewish participation in partisan activities has been fully recorded. There is another form of resistance, spiritual in nature, which has yet to be fully documented. Spiritual resistance was expressed on an organized communal level, maintained to thwart the Nazi intention of dehumanizing their Jewish victims. The victims responded by initiating religious, educational, and cultural activities in an organized manner. These activities were both open and clandestine. In addition, many individuals expressed themselves through their writings. To Live with Hope, To Die with Dignity, based principally on materials created and activities conducted in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, Lodz, Kovno, during the Holocaust, concerns itself with this particular aspect of the Holocaust tragedy.

Contrary to the common notion that news regarding the genocide was unavailable or unreliable, news from Europe was often communicated to North American Poles through the Polish-language press. This work engages with the origins of this debate and demonstrates that the Polish-language press covered seminal issues during the inter-war years, the war, and the Holocaust extensively on their front and main story pages, and were extremely responsive, professional, and vocal in their journalism. From Polish-Jewish relations, to the cause of the Second World War and subsequently the development of genocide-related policy, North American Poles, had a different perspective from mainstream society on the "causes and effects" of what was happening. New research for this book examines attitudes toward Jews prior to and during the Holocaust, and how information on such attitudes was disseminated. It utilizes original research from selected Polish newspapers, predominantly the Republika-Gornik, as well as survivor testimony from 1926-1945.

This is the first work in any language that offers both an overarching exploration of the flight and evacuation of Soviet Jews viewed at the macro level, and a personal history of one Soviet Jewish family. It is also the first study to examine Jewish life in the Northern Caucasus, a Soviet region that history scholars have rarely addressed. Drawing on a collection of family letters, Kiril Feferman provides a history of the Ginsburgs as they debate whether to evacuate their home of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia and are eventually swept away by the Soviet-German War, the German invasion of Soviet Russia, and the Holocaust. The book makes a significant contribution to the history of the Holocaust and Second World War in the Soviet Union, presenting one Soviet region as an illustration of wartime social and media politics.

Until recently, historians believed America gave asylum only to key Nazi scientists after World War II, along with some less famous perpetrators who managed to sneak in and who eventually were exposed by Nazi hunters. But the truth is much worse, and has been covered up for decades: the CIA and FBI brought thousands of perpetrators to America as possible assets against their new Cold War enemies. When the Justice Department finally investigated and learned the truth, the results were classified and buried. Using the dramatic story of one former perpetrator who settled in New Jersey, conned the CIA into hiring him, and begged for the agency's support when his wartime identity emerged, Eric Lichtblau tells the full, shocking story of how America became a refuge for hundreds of postwar Nazis.

Diane Tuckman and Cecile Spiegel fled religious persecution with WWII conflicts at their heels. Separately, from Egypt and from Germany, each leaped continents, cultures, and languages as a refugee before finding a new home in the United States. Hiding in plain sight in France, Cecile eluded capture by the Nazis, but lost many dear to her. Diane came of age there, far from the Mediterranean idyll of her childhood in Egypt. They relied on family, faith, and resilience to overcome the otherness felt by displaced peoples. As they dictated their memoirs to one another, Diane and Cecile discovered the anatomy of their friendship in their parallel odysseys and the optimism of 20th-century American womanhood.

The fateful story of Adolf Hitler's transformation from awkward, feckless loner to lethal, charismatic demagogue. The story of the making of Adolf Hitler that we are all familiar with is the one Hitler himself wove in his 1924 trial, and then expanded upon in Mein Kampf. It tells of his rapid emergence as National Socialist leader in 1919, and of how he successfully rallied most of Munich and the majority of Bavaria's establishment to support the famous beer-hall putsch of 1923. It is an account which has largely been taken at face value for over ninety years. Yet, on closer examination, Hitler's account of his experiences in the years immediately following the First World War turns out to be every bit as unreliable as his account of his experiences as a soldier during the war itself. In Becoming Hitler, Thomas Weber continues from where he left off in his previous book, Hitler's First War, stripping away the layers of myth and fabrication in Hitler's own tale to tell the real story of Hitler's politicization and radicalization in post-First World War Munich. It is the gripping account of how an awkward and unemployed loner with virtually no recognizable leadership qualities and fluctuating political ideas turned into the charismatic, self-assured, virulently anti-Semitic leader with an all-or-nothing approach to politics with whom the world was soon to become tragically familiar. As Weber clearly shows, far from the picture of a fully-formed political leader which Hitler wanted to portray in Mein Kampf, his ideas and priorities were still very uncertain and largely undefined in early 1919 - and they continued to shift until 1923. It was the failed Ludendorff putsch of November 1923 - and the subsequent Ludendorff trial - which was to prove the making of Hitler. And he was not slow to spot the opportunity that it offered. As the movers and shakers of Munich's political scene tried to blame everything on him in the course of the trial, Hitler was presented with a golden opportunity to place himself at the centre of attention, turning what had been the 'Ludendorff trial' into the 'Hitler trial'. Henceforth, he would no longer be merely a local Bavarian political leader. From now on, he would present himself as a potential 'national saviour'. In the months after the trial, Hitler cemented this myth by writing Mein Kampf from his comfortable prison cell. His years of metamorphosis were now behind him. His years as Fuhrer were soon to come.

As child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl's cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna's Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer, but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed. Unearthed is the story of Meryl's search for Franya and a timely history of hatred and resistance. Through archives across four continents, by way of chance encounters and miraculous discoveries, and eventually, guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl conjures the rogue spirit of her cousin-her beauty and her tragedy. Meryl's search reveals a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. As she seeks to find her lost family legacy, Meryl looks for answers to the questions that have defined her life: what is our duty to the past? How do we honor such memories while keeping them from consuming us? And what do we teach our children about tragedy?

In recent years, a lively debate has developed in Poland on the question of what responsibility the Poles share for the mass murder of the Jews, which took place largely on Polish soil. This debate was sparked off by the showing in Poland of Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah , which revealed how deeply-rooted anti-Jewish prejudice could still be found in the Polish countryside. Anti-semitism is something which Poland has preferred to forget. But before the Second World War hostility to the Jews was widespread and this climate of pervasive anti-semitism may have facilitated the Nazis' murderous plans. But Poles now, with great courage, are facing this dark side of their past. This book, translated and edited by a leading British historian of Poland, Antony Polonsky, is a major contribution to the history of the Holocaust. It gathers together the most important contribution to the current debate, revealing the agony many Poles feel about their lack of action during the war.

To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment. Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered? In this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political significance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with and overcoming divisive pasts? Taking Argentina, Spain and a number of sites in post-communist Europe as test cases, this book illustrates the transformation from a nationally oriented ethics to a trans-national one. The authors look at media, scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and memorial sites, and examine how a new generation of memory activists revisits the past to construct a new future. Baer and Sznaider follow these attempts to manoeuvre between the duties of remembrance and the benefits of forgetting. This, the authors argue, is the "ethics of Never Again."

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Otto Rosenberg is 9 and living in Berlin, poor but happy, when his family are first detained. All around them, Sinti and Roma families are being torn from their homes by Nazis , leaving behind schools, jobs, friends, and businesses to live in forced encampments outside the city. One by one, families are broken up, adults and children disappear or are 'sent East'. Otto arrives in Auschwitz aged 15 and is later transferred to Buechenwald and Bergen-Belsen. He works, scrounges food whenever he can, witnesses and suffers horrific violence and is driven close to death by illness more than once. Unbelievably, he also joins an armed revolt of prisoners who, facing the SS and certain death, refuse to back down. Somehow, through luck, sheer human will to live, or both, he survives. The stories of Sinti and Roma suffering in Nazi Germany are all too often lost or untold. In this haunting account, Otto shares his story with a remarkable simplicity. Deeply moving, A Gypsy in Auschwitz is the incredible story of how a young Sinti boy miraculously survived the unimaginable darkness of the Holocaust.

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915-1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz's rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz's life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life. From Left to Right is structured in four parts. Part 1 tells the story of Dawidowicz's childhood, adolescence, and college years when she was an immigrant daughter living in New York City. Part 2 narrates Dawidowicz's formative European years in Poland, New York City (when she was enclosed in the European-like world of the New York YIVO), and Germany. Part 3 tells how Dawidowicz became an American while Polish Jewish civilization was still inscribed in her heart and also explores when and how Dawidowicz became the voice of East European Jewry for the American Jewish public. Part 4 exposes the fissure between Dawidowicz's European-inflected diaspora nationalist modern Jewish identity and the shifting definition of American liberalism from the late 1960s forward, which also saw the emergence of neoconservatism. The book includes an interpretation of her memoir From that Place and Time, as well as an appendix of thirty-one previously unpublished letters that illustrate the broad reach of her work and person. Dawidowicz's right-wing politics, sex, and unabashed commitment to Jewish particularism in an East European Jewish key have resulted in scholarly neglect. Therefore, this book is strongly recommended for scholars and general readers interested in Jewish and women's studies.

In To Be an Actress, Nava Shean tells about her life on the stage: from children's theater in Prague to traveling theater in the Czech countryside, to performances of prisoners in Terezin concentration camp, to Israel's national theater, Munich State theater, and her one-woman shows. The common theme that runs through the memoir is Ms. Shean's passion for the theater and her dedication to acting despite excruciating circumstances. The memoir provides first-hand account of life in Terezin concentration camp and the incredible artistic activity under the shadow of the transports to the death camps. It also portrays the author's reconnection with her Jewish heritage against the background of her family's assimilation. Upon her arrival in Israel in 1948, Ms. Shean took part in the development of the Israeli theater, an alliance that continued into the 1980s and culminated in her one-woman show Requiem in Terezin.

Out of the Holocaust recounts the plight of two Jewish-born orphans in Latvia and Germany during WWII. It is a tribute to the many brave individuals who cared for a large group of orphans on their journey through the war-torn land. It is also a testimony of God's love. May it be a spiritual igniter for you, especially during times of hardship.

This evocative and wide-ranging set of articles is a forceful demonstration of how much the experience of East-Central and Eastern Europe, largely neglected until now, needs to be integrated into evolving scholarship on the era of the world wars. The collection diagnoses the challenge of achieving an enlarged historical and artistic perspective, and then goes on to meet it. Themes that are universal (exile, loss, trauma, survival, memory) and the undying subjects of art and artistic efforts at representation, here find specific expression. The case of Lithuania and its diverse populations is revealed in its full significance for a modern European history of the impact of the age of the world wars.

Seven decades after the destruction of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian genocide remains largely ignored by governments and forgotten by the world public, even though the annihilation of Armenians was headlined around the world in 1915. Scholarly investigation of the Armenian genocide is just beginning, made more difficult by the tendency of many establishment figures to rationalize the past and the attempt of perpetrator governments and their successors to deny the past.

This volume is a pioneering collective attempt to assess and analyze the Armenian genocide from differing perspectives, including history, political science, ethics, religion, literature, and psychiatry. Focusing on the general implications of denial, rationalization, and responsibility, it is particularly important as a precursor to the study of the Holocaust and other genocides.

Contents: Israel Charny, "Preface"; Terrence Des Pres, "Introduction"; Richard G. Hovannisian, "The Historical Dimensions of the Armenian Question, 1878-1923"; Leo Kuper, "The Turkish Genocide of the Armenians, 1915-1917"; Robert Melson, "Provocation of Nationalism: A Critical Inquiry into the Armenian Genocide of 1915"; Richard Hrair Dekmejian, "Determinants of Genocide: Armenians and Jews as Case Studies"; Marjorie Housepian-Dobkin, "What Genocide? What Holocaust? News from Turkey, 1915-1923: A Case Study"; Richard G. Hovannisian, "The Armenian Genocide and Denial Patterns"; Vigen Guroian, "Collective Responsibility and Official Excuse Making: The Case of the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians"; Leo Hamalian, "The Armenian Genocide and the Literary Imagination"; Vahe Oshagan, "The Impact of the Genocide on Western Armenian Letters"; Levon Boyajian and Haigaz Grigorian, "Psychological Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide"; Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, "An Oral History Perspective on Responses to the Armenian Genocide."

Holocaust Education: Promise, Practice, Power and Potential provides timely studies of some of the most pressing issues in teaching and learning about the Holocaust around the world. Europe is experiencing both anti-Semitic attacks, many by radicals claiming the banner of Islam, and the resurgence of right wing movements that are openly hostile to minority rights, particularly for marginalized and vulnerable groups like the Roma/Sinti, and Muslim refugees. Can Holocaust education, an encounter with the most extreme racial ideology to afflict the continent, reduce violence and prejudice against Jewish and other minority groups? The important studies in this volume address these and other pressing issues for the field, including the progress of Central and Eastern European countries that experienced both Soviet hegemony and Nazi terror in grappling with the history of the Holocaust. This book was originally published as a special issue of Intercultural Education.

"Masterful...An indispensable warning for our own time." -Samuel Moyn "Magisterial...Covers this dark history with insight and skill...A major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history." -The Nation For much of the last century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. The belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and quickly spread. During World War II, fears of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy were fanned by the fascists and sparked a genocide. But the myth did not die with the end of Nazi Germany. A Specter Haunting Europe shows that this paranoid fantasy persists today in the toxic politics of revitalized right-wing nationalism. "It is both salutary and depressing to be reminded of how enduring the trope of an exploitative global Jewish conspiracy against pure, humble, and selfless nationalists really is...A century after the end of the first world war, we have, it seems, learned very little." -Mark Mazower, Financial Times "From the start, the fantasy held that an alien element-the Jews-aimed to subvert the cultural values and national identities of Western societies...The writers, politicians, and shills whose poisonous ideas he exhumes have many contemporary admirers." -Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs

The thirst for post-World War II justice transcended the Cold War and mobilized diverse social groups. This is a story of their multilayered and at times conflictual interactions. In this edited collection, sixteen historians develop a new approach to the trials against persons accused of war crimes and mass murder in Europe during the ascendancy of Nazism and the Second World War (1933-1945). Focusing on the social aspects of the demand for justice and making use of previously underexploited local and international sources, contributors put to the test the notion of "show trials" and explore a range of judicial and political cultures from Germany to the Soviet Union. Essays uncover the expectations around accountability and forms of mobilization on the part of a range of citizens involved in the trials: survivors, witnesses, perpetrators, Nazi hunters, and civic activists. In addition to the perspective of these citizens, contributors invoke the expertise of reporters, filmmakers, historians, investigators, and prosecutors who shaped public representations of justice. These shaping efforts, the authors show, often supported the desire of political authorities to benefit from the publicity of the trials and to contain the spontaneous dissemination of information. The book's close examination of interactions between citizens and authorities thus demonstrates the extent and limits of what might be called a "coproduction" of justice, in the process shedding light on the interdependence between historical knowledge and legal prosecution of mass crimes.

Examines how German-Jewish writers from Eastern Europe who migrated to Germany during or after the Cold War have widened European cultural memory to include the traumas of the Gulag. Preserving the memory of the Holocaust as a moral and ethical limit case is key to the European Union's attempt to construct a pan-European identity. But with the Eastern expansion of the EU, new member states have challenged the Holocaust's singularity, calling for the traumas of the Stalinist Gulag to be acknowledged much more explicitly. Thus even though Europe has been unified politically, it is divided by its diverging perceptions of the past. Jessica Ortner argues that German-Jewish writers from Eastern Europe and the GDR who migrated to Germany as refugees during or after the Cold War have responded critically to the need to widen European cultural memory to include the traumatic experiences of the East. The writers focused on include Katja Petrowskaja, Olga Grjasnowa, Lena Gorelik, Vladimir Vertlib, and Barbara Honigmann. A central focus of the book is the "traveling of memories" from Eastern Europe and the GDR to (Western) Germany and Austria. Introducing the term "literature of mnemonic migration," Ortner asserts that these authors' writings negotiate the mnemonic divide between East and West. They criticize the normative memory politics of both Germany and the Soviet Union and address not only the politically explosive question of how to remember both National Socialism and Communism but also the status of Jews in contemporary Germany.

Rudolf Hoss has been called the greatest mass murderer in history. As the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, he supervised the killing of more than 1.1 million people. Unlike many of his Nazi colleagues who denied either knowing about or participating in the Holocaust, Hoss remorselessly admitted, both at the Nuremberg war crimes trial and in his memoirs, that he sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers, frankly describing the killing process. His "innovations" included the use of hydrogen cyanide (derived from the pesticide Zyklon B) in the camp's gas chambers. Hoss lent his name to the 1944 operation that gassed 430,000 Hungarian Jews in 56 days, exceeding the capacity of the Auschwitz's crematoria. This biography follows Hoss throughout his life, from his childhood through his Nazi command and eventual reckoning at Nuremberg. Using historical records and Hoss' autobiography, it explores the life and mind of one of history's most notorious and sadistic individuals.

The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders. Claudia Koonz's latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Her careful reading of the voluminous Nazi writings on race traces the transformation of longtime Nazis' vulgar anti-Semitism into a racial ideology that seemed credible to the vast majority of ordinary Germans who never joined the Nazi Party. Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate, but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk. From 1933 to 1939, Nazi public culture was saturated with a blend of racial fear and ethnic pride that Koonz calls ethnic fundamentalism. Ordinary Germans were prepared for wartime atrocities by racial concepts widely disseminated in media not perceived as political: academic research, documentary films, mass-market magazines, racial hygiene and art exhibits, slide lectures, textbooks, and humor. By showing how Germans learned to countenance the everyday persecution of fellow citizens labeled as alien, Koonz makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust. The Nazi Conscience chronicles the chilling saga of a modern state so powerful that it extinguished neighborliness, respect, and, ultimately, compassion for all those banished from the ethnic majority.

This is the true story of one man's efforts to bring horrific news of the Nazi genocide to the Swiss public and to the rest of the world. Armed with this information, prominent Swiss church leaders and theologians condemned the unfolding Holocaust from their pulpits, spurring large public demonstrations.

In 400 articles appearing in 120 newspapers, Mantello reached opinion makers throughout the world community. International pressure halted the Hungarian deportations, and Mantello distributed thousands of Salvadoran citizenship papers to Jews in Nazi-occupied territories.

In addition to Mantello's role, Kranzler shows how Swiss theologians such as Karl Barth and Paul Vogt mobilized thousands of Christians against the Germans and against the indifference of the Swiss government and the International Red Cross. This fresh look at the intersection of politics and religion also allows for a new assessment of Swiss complicity in the crimes of the Nazi Third Reich.

It has been more than sixty years since the end of World War II and the liberation of the survivors of the Holocaust. Since then, many rich personal and historical accounts have been written of the horrific events of those times. Mental health workers have strived to give survivors solace for their loss, and help them return to a meaningful life. Meanwhile, scholars continue to ponder the inexplicable facts of genocide. Yet Studies of the Holocaust: Lessons in Survivorship continues to be timely. Based on more than 100 interviews in nine U.S. locations, the book offers a powerful view of survivors' hope, determination, and resilience. Study questions elicited survival strategies, and revealed how, following the war, survivors overcame the horrors of the Holocaust, formed families, built careers, and gave to their communities. Survivor quotes taken from these interviews illuminate how the survivors maintained competence into old age. While memories of pain persist, accomplishments are acknowledged, and provide lessons for students of human development, mental health practitioners, and the general public. This book was previously published as a special issue of Journal of Human Behaviour and the Social Environment.

Heinz Hartmann, a young, ambitious medical student, had fulfilled all the requirements for his degree in medicine except one - Aryan descent. As a Jew in the Germany of the 1930's, Hartmann saw his professors flee the country or be shipped off to concentration camps, Jewish-owned stores and homes looted and vandalised, and musicians forbidden to play music by Jewish composers. Because Hartmann was not allowed to graduate from a German medical school, he earned his M.D. degree at the University of Berne in Switzerland. But he later returned to Germany to marry Herta, a young nurse. Two weeks after the wedding, Hartmann and scores of other Jewish men were rounded up, loaded on to trains, and sent to Buchenwald. Hartmann was one of the more fortunate prisoners of the Nazis. In 1939, he was released from the camp and undertook the complicated, expensive, and dangerous procedures necessary to free his wife and himself from Germany to go to the United States. He then began his long and distinguished career as a general practitioner and his unending search for the meaning of Judaism. In "Once a Doctor, Always a Doctor", the author tells of the struggles, tragedies, and joys of his life with a spirit of innocence and good-heartedness. His narrative is filled with poignant, sometimes simple, often warm and funny stories about his early medical practice, his family life, the similarities and differences he has discovered between various religions, and the 'missionaries' who have tried to convert him. This book enlightens, delights, and inspires. It is the story of a sensitive, compassionate man - a doctor who has spent his life caring for the sick and healing the scars left by the Nazis.