Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis of the Holocaust-perpetrators, victims, and bystanders-it is the last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described by Hilberg as those who were "once a part of this history," bystanders present unique challenges for those seeking to understand the decisions, attitudes, and self-understanding of historical actors who were neither obviously the instigators nor the targets of Nazi crimes. Combining historiographical, conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.

An award-winning teacher takes a journey into alien territory: Austria, Hitler's birthplace, and the territory of her own hatred. A teaching memoir that offers a pedagogy of hope.

Josef Rosin's "Preserving Our Litvak Heritage" is a monumental work documenting the history of 31 Jewish communities in Lithuanaia from their inception to their total destruction in 1941 at the hands of the Nazis and their Lithuania helpers. Rosin gathered his material from traditional sources, archives, public records, and remembrance books. He has enriched and enhanced the entry for each community with personal memoirs and contributions from widely dispersed survivors who opened family albums and shared treasured photographs of family and friends. He made use of sources originally written in Hebrew, Yiddish, Lithuanian, German and Russian. In over 700 pages, Rosin documents each community from its beginning until World War I, through the years of Independent Lithuania (1918-1940), and finally during the indescribable Nazi annihilation of nearly all of Lithuanian Jewry. Most impressive is the record of cultural richness, the important town personalities, the welfare institutions, the glorious Hebrew educational system of the Tarbuth elementary schools and the Yavneh high schools, the world famous Telz and Ponevezh Yeshivoth (in the towns of Telsiai and Panevezys), the Yiddish press and other significant events of the period. Rosin has provided a documentary and a testament to once vibrant communities almost totally destroyed but which come alive again in the pages of this book. 736 page, Hard Cover. List of towns included in the book: Alite Birzh Yurburg Koshedar Kopcheve Memel Naishtot Kibart Lazdey Ligum Mariampol Meretch Ponevezh Pikvishok Pren Shaki Salant Serey Shat Stoklishok Sudarg Tavrig Taragin Telzh Utyan Aran Vishey Vilkovishk Verzhbelov Zheiml Naishtot Tavrig 786 page, Hard Cover

"The Oryx Holocaust Sourcebook" provides a comprehensive selection of high quality resources in the field of Holocaust studies. The "Sourcebook's" 17 chapters cover general reference works; narrative histories; monographs in the social sciences; fiction, drama, and poetry; books for children and young adults; periodicals; primary sources; electronic resources in various formats; audiovisual materials; photographs; music; film and video; educational and teaching materials; and information on organizations, museums, and memorials. In addition, each chapter begins with a concise overview essay. The book also includes a preface, and index, and an appendix listing general distributors and vendors of Holocaust materials.

Drawn from a wide array of scholarly disciplines ranging across the humanities and social sciences, the items included in each chapter were selected using the following criteria: (1) current availability for use or purchase; (2) availability in English, unless a non-English item was too significant to exclude; (3) scholarly legitimacy, meaning it is recognized as a work of authentic scholarship that contributes to advancement of knowledge in the field; (4) relationship to topical categories for study of the Holocaust as noted in the Curriculum Guidelines of the Association of Holocaust Organizations, as listed in major bibliographic works, and as used as topics in the contents of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the leading journal in the field; and, (5) in the case of online resources (Internet sites), adherence to standards of scholarly documentation established by learned societies or recognized by reputable scholarly institutions, as well as the display of accurate and credible content about the Holocaust drawn from reputable scholarship.

Covering Western and Eastern Europe, this book looks at the Holocaust on the local level. It compares and contrasts the behaviour and attitude of neighbours in the face of the Holocaust. Topics covered include deportation programmes, relations between Jews and Gentiles, violence against Jews, perceptions of Jewish persecution, and reports of the Holocaust in the Jewish and non-Jewish press.

For five horrifying years in Vilna, the Vilna ghetto, and concentration camps in Estonia, Herman Kruk recorded his own experiences as well as the life and death of the Jewish community of the city symbolically called "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." This unique chronicle includes many recovered pages of Kruk's diaries and provides a powerful eyewitness account of the annihilation of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. This volume includes the Yiddish edition of Kruk's diaries, published in 1961 and translated here for the first time, as well as many widely scattered pages of the chronicles, collected here for the first time and meticulously deciphered, translated, and annotated. Kruk describes vividly the collapse of Poland in September, 1939, life as a refugee in Vilna, the manhunt that destroyed most of Vilna Jewry in the summer of 1941, the creation of a ghetto and the persecution and self-rule of the remnants of the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," the internment of the last survivors in concentration camps in Estonia, and their brutal deaths. Kruk scribbled his final diary entry on September 17, 1944, managing to bury the small, loose pages of his manuscript just hours before he and other camp inmates were shot to death and their bodies burnt on a pyre. Kruk's writings illuminate the tragedy of the Vilna Jews and their courageous efforts to maintain an ideological, social, and cultural life even as their world was being destroyed. To read Kruk's day-by-day account of the unfolding of the Holocaust is to discern the possibilities for human courage and perseverance even in the face of profound fear. Co-published with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

A new edition of Primo Levi's classic memoir of the Holocaust, with an introduction by David Baddiel, author of Jews Don't Count 'With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose... One of the greatest human testaments of the era' Philip Roth 'Levi's voice is especially affecting, so clear, firm and gentle, yet humane and apparently untouched by anger, bitterness or self-pity... If This Is a Man is miraculous, finding the human in every individual who traverses its pages' Philippe Sands 'The death of Primo Levi robs Italy of one of its finest writers... One of the few survivors of the Holocaust to speak of his experiences with a gentle voice' Guardian '[What] gave it such power... was the sheer, unmitigated truth of it; the sense of what a book could achieve in terms of expanding one's own knowledge and understanding at a single sitting... few writers have left such a legacy... A necessary book' Independent

This book explores the subject of genocide through key debates and case studies. It analyses the dynamics of genocide - the processes and mechanisms of acts committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, religious or racial group - in order to shed light upon its origins, characteristics and consequences. Debating Genocide begins with an introduction to the concept of genocide. It then examines the colonial genocides at the end of the 19th- and start of the 20th-centuries; the Armenian Genocide of 1915-16; the Nazi 'Final Solution'; the Nazi genocide of the Gypsies; mass murder in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge; the genocides in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; and the genocide in Sudan in the early 21st century. It also includes a thematic chapter which covers gender and genocide, as well as issues of memory and memorialisation. Finally, the book considers how genocides end, as well as the questions of resolution and denial, with Lisa Pine examining the debates around prediction and prevention and the R2P (Responsibility to Protect) initiative. This book is crucial for any students wanting to understand why genocides have occurred, why they still occur and what the key historical discussions around this subject entail.

If we expose students to a study of human suffering, we have a responsibility to guide them through it. But, is this the role of school history? Is the rationale behind teaching the Holocaust primarily historical, moral or social? Is the Holocaust to be taught as a historical event, with a view to developing students' critical historical skills, or as a tool to combat continuing prejudice and discrimination? These profound questions lie at the heart of Lucy Russell's fascinating analysis of teaching the Holocaust in school history. She considers how the topic of the Holocaust is currently being taught in schools in the UK and overseas. Drawing on interviews with educationalists, academics and teachers, she discovers that there is, in fact, a surprising lack of consensus regarding the purpose of, and approaches to, teaching the Holocaust in history. Indeed the majority view is distinctly non-historical; there is a tendency to teach the Holocaust from a social and moral perspective and not as history. This book attempts to explain and debate this phenomenon.

Since the end of World War II, the ongoing efforts aimed at criminal prosecution, restitution, and other forms of justice in the wake of the Holocaust have constituted one of the most significant episodes in the history of human rights and international law. As such, they have attracted sustained attention from historians and legal scholars. This edited collection substantially enlarges the topical and disciplinary scope of this burgeoning field, exploring such varied subjects as literary analysis of Hannah Arendt's work, the restitution case for Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, and the ritualistic aspects of criminal trials.

These essays, written in the course of half a century of research and thought on German and Jewish history, deal with the uniqueness of a phenomenon in its historical and philosophical context. Applying the "classical" empirical tools to this unprecedented historical chapter, Kulka strives to incorporate it into the continuum of Jewish and universal history. At the same time he endeavors to fathom the meaning of the ideologically motivated mass murder and incalculable suffering. The author presents a multifaceted, integrative history, encompassing the German society, its attitudes toward the Jews and toward the anti-Jewish policy of the Nazi regime; as well as the Jewish society, its self-perception and its leadership.

From twins torn away from their family and separated, to a girl shut in a basement, maltreated and malnourished, the world of Jewish children who were hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust becomes painfully clear in this volume. Psychiatrist Bluglass presents interviews with 15 adults who avoided execution in their childhoods thanks to being hidden by Christians, all of whom have since developed remarkably positive lives. All are stable, healthy, intelligent, and share a surprising sense of humor. Together, they show a profound ability to recover and thrive--an unexpected resilience. That their adjustment with such positive outcomes was possible after such harsh childhood experiences challenges a popular perception that inevitable physical and psychological damage ensues such adversity. Their stories offer new optimism, hope and grounds for research that may help traumatized children of today, and of the future, become more resilient. The book's core consists of these remarkable survivors' narratives, told in their own words. Also included are childhood and current pictures of each survivor, a list naming their rescuers (people who hid them), and a detailed bibliography.

The memoir of Helen Weinberg depicts the plight of a young woman who hailed from Kremenitz, Poland. Separated from her family during World War Two, she was imprisoned, beaten, starved and tortured. This story is told using her own words from stories, essays and poetry translated from Yiddish and Polish, and serve as a guide through the different periods of her life. The pen and paper were her catharsis for the emotional torture she endured and provide a window into her soul. PRAISE FOR WHITE ANGEL "This book is a wonderful tribute to the multifaceted life of an extraordinary grandmother. Written by P'nina Seplowitz with great respect and much love, it traces the story of a woman who was exposed to the most horrific manifestations of human cruelty and who emerged with powerful strength to create a new world, who responded to the assault of death with an outpouring of life. The book is warm, touching and beautifully written; it will inspire its readers, young and not so young alike." - RABBI JACOB J. SCHACTER, Yeshiva University "White Angel is a thought provoking work of Holocaust literature. Helen Weinberg's remarkable story elicits the sorrowful burden of a broken nation and the glimmer of hope that existed with the establishment of the State of Israel. White Angel is an essential staple for any home or school." - RABBI DOV LIPMAN, Member Israeli Knesset "P'nina Seplowitz does a terrific job of telling an inspirational, yet tragic story, through the eyes of her heroic grandmother. This book is a must read for all those looking to be inspired by the strength of the human spirit." - RABBI STEVEN BURG, Simon Wiesenthal Center

What was the role played by local police volunteers in the Holocaust? Using eye witness descriptions from the towns and villages of Belorussia and Ukraine, this text reveals local policemen as hands on collaborators of the Nazis. They brutally drove Jewish neighbours from their homes and guarded them closely on the way to their deaths. Some distinguished themselves as ruthless murderers. Outnumbering German police manpower in these areas, the local police were the foot soldiers of the Holocaust in the east.