Essays mapping the history of relief parcels sent to Jewish prisoners during World War II. More than Parcels: Wartime Aid for Jews in Nazi-Era Camps and Ghettos edited by Jan Lani?ek and Jan Lambertz explores the horrors of the Holocaust by focusing on the systematic starvation of Jewish civilians confined to Nazi ghettos and camps. The modest relief parcel, often weighing no more than a few pounds and containing food, medicine, and clothing, could extend the lives and health of prisoners. For Jews in occupied Europe, receiving packages simultaneously provided critical emotional sustenance in the face of despair and grief. Placing these parcels front and center in a history of World War II challenges several myths about Nazi rule and Allied responses. First, the traffic in relief parcels and remittances shows that the walls of Nazi detention sites and the wartime borders separating Axis Europe from the outside world were not hermetically sealed, even for Jewish prisoners. Aid shipments were often damaged or stolen, but they continued to be sent throughout the war. Second, the flow of relief parcels-and prisoner requests for them-contributed to information about the lethal nature of Nazi detention sites. Aid requests and parcel receipts became one means of transmitting news about the location, living conditions, and fate of Jewish prisoners to families, humanitarians, and Jewish advocacy groups scattered across the globe. Third, the contributors to More than Parcels reveal that tens of thousands of individuals, along with religious communities and philanthropies, mobilized parcel relief for Jews trapped in Europe. Recent histories of wartime rescue have focused on a handful of courageous activists who hid or led Jews to safety under perilous conditions. The parallel story of relief shipments is no less important. The astonishing accounts offered in More than Parcels add texture and depth to the story of organized Jewish responses to wartime persecution that will be of interest to students and scholars of Holocaust studies and modern Jewish history, as well as members of professional associations with a focus on humanitarianism and human rights.

A literary memoir of exile and survival in Soviet prison camps during the Holocaust. Most Polish Jews who survived the Second World War did not go to concentration camps, but were banished by Stalin to the remote prison settlements and Gulags of the Soviet Union. Less than ten percent of Polish Jews came out of the war alive-the largest population of East European Jews who endured-for whom Soviet exile was the main chance for survival. Ellen G. Friedman's The Seven, A Family HolocaustStory is an account of this displacement. Friedman always knew that she was born to Polish-Jewish parents on the run from Hitler, but her family did not describe themselves as Holocaust survivors since that label seemed only to apply only to those who came out of the concentration camps with numbers tattooed on their arms. The title of the book comes from the closeness that set seven individuals apart from the hundreds of thousands of other refugees in the Gulags of the USSR. The Seven-a name given to them by their fellow refugees-were Polish Jews from Warsaw, most of them related. The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story brings together the very different perspectives of the survivors and others who came to be linked to them, providing a glimpse into the repercussions of the Holocaust in one extended family who survived because they were loyal to one another, lucky, and endlessly enterprising. Interwoven into the survivors' accounts of their experiences before, during, and after the war are their own and the author's reflections on the themes of exile, memory, love, and resentment. Based on primary interviews and told in a blending of past and present experiences, Friedman gives a new voice to Holocaust memory-one that is sure to resonate with today's exiles and refugees. Those with an interest in World War II memoir and genocide studies will welcome this unique perspective.

Designed for secondary school and college student research, this work is a readable history and ready-reference guide to the Holocaust based on the most recent scholarship. It provides the reader with an overview of Nazi Germany's attempt to exterminate world Jewry. Fischel, a leading authority on the Holocaust, combines narrative description, analytical essays, a timeline of events, lengthy biographical profiles, and the text of key primary documents relating to the Nazi plan for the "Final Solution" to help students gain a comprehensive understanding of the causative factors and major events and personalities that shaped the Nazi genocide. A glossary of key terms, selected tables, and an annotated bibliography of recommended further reading will aid student research. Topical essays designed for the student and general reader provide an accessible historical overview and analysis of Hitler and the Jews, the racial state, genocide, the "Final Solution," and resistance to the Nazis. Fischel explains the factors that led to the Holocaust, the implementation of the decision to exterminate the Jews, the response of the free world and the Papacy, the role of "righteous gentiles" who risked their lives to save Jews, and the resistance of the Jews to their fate under the Nazis. Biographical sketches provide valuable information on the key personalities among both the Nazis and Allies, and the text of key primary documents brings the Nazis blatant plan for genocide to stark reality. In providing valuable information, analysis, and ready-reference features, this work is a one-stop resource on the Holocaust for students, teachers, library media specialists, and interested readers.

This volume provides an indispensable resource for anyone studying the Holocaust. The reference entries are enhanced by documents and other tools that make this volume a vital contribution to Holocaust research. This volume showcases a detailed look at the multifaceted attempts by Germany's Nazi regime, together with its collaborators, to annihilate the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. Several introductory essays, along with a rich chronology, reference entries, primary documents, images, and a bibliography provide crucial information that readers will need in order to try to understand the Holocaust while undertaking research on that horrible event. This text looks not only at the history of the Holocaust, but also at examples of resistance (through armed violence, attempts at rescue, or the very act of survival itself); literary and cultural expressions that have attempted to deal with the Holocaust; the social and psychological implications of the Holocaust for today; and how historians and others have attempted to do justice to the memory of those killed and seek insight into why the Holocaust happened in the first place. Comprehensively examines all angles of the Holocaust within one easily readable volume written by experts Includes primary documents, with appropriate introductions, to set the historical and contemporary contexts for the entries Contains useful chronologies of the events surrounding the Holocaust Provides a number of contextualizing essays on various facets of the Holocaust, which precede the reference entries themselves

It takes courage beyond belief to sneak out in the night to dig in the garbage for scraps to keep from starving when you know you would be killed if you were caught, or to crawl through ice and snow to freedom because the muscles in your legs atrophied from sitting in a hay mow for almost two years. To defect to the west, leaving all your family behind, not knowing when or if you'll ever see them again, or to endure the work, starvation diet, and beatings of concentration camp life also were courageous acts. However, these and other challenges were everyday living for millions such as those in this book. While those around them fell victim to WWII atrocities and did not survive, these people fought hard and won the right to live.

The murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust is a crime that has had a lasting and massive impact on our time. Despite the immense, ever-increasing body of Holocaust literature and representation, no single interpretation can provide definitive answers. Shaped by different historical experiences, political and national interests, our approximations of the Holocaust remain elusive. Holocaust responses-past, present, and future-reflect our changing understanding of history and the shifting landscapes of memory. This book takes stock of the attempts within and across nations to come to terms with the murders. Volume editors establish the thematic and conceptual framework within which the various Holocaust responses are being analyzed. Specific chapters cover responses in Germany and in Eastern Europe; the Holocaust industry; Jewish ultra-Orthodox reflections; and the Jewish intellectuals' search for a new Jewish identity. Experts comment upon the changes in Christian-Jewish relations since the Holocaust; the issue of restitution; and post-1945 responses to genocide. Other topics include Holocaust education, Holocaust films, and the national memorial landscapes in Germany, Poland, Israel, and the United States.

Flares of Memory is a collection of ninety-two stories written by over forty Jewish survivors and several US Army liberators about their experiences during the Holocaust. The stories collected in this volume were developed in a writing workshop led by Brostoff and Chamovitz for survivors of the Holocaust in the hope of preserving their memories for posterity. The contributors to this collection relate their recollections of being children, teenagers, and young adults during the Holocaust. Their individual experiences testify to the horror of the period as well as the moments of courage and luck that allowed them to survive while offering a tribute to the lives and cultures that were destroyed. The volume organizes the stories thematically into chapters, and includes a detailed timeline of the Holocaust, a map of concentration camps, and photographs of the contributors.

Examines literature and art to reveal the German genocidal gaze in Africa and the Holocaust. The first genocide of the twentieth century, though not well known, was committed by Germans between 1904-1907 in the country we know today as Namibia, where they exterminated thousands of Herero and Nama people and subjected the surviving indigenous men, women, and children to forced labor. The perception of Africans as subhuman-lacking any kind of civilization, history, or meaningful religion-and theresulting justification for the violence against them is what author Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the "genocidal gaze," an attitude that was later perpetuated by the Nazis. In The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, Baer uses the trope of the gaze to trace linkages between the genocide of the Herero and Nama and that of the victims of the Holocaust. Baer also considers the African gaze of resistance returned by the indigenous people and their leaders upon the German imperialists. Baer explores the threads of shared ideology in the Herero and Nama genocide and the Holocaust-concepts such as racial hierarchies, lebensraum (living space), rassenschande (racial shame), and endloesung (final solution) that were deployed by German authorities in 1904 and again in the 1930s and 1940s to justify genocide. She also notes the use of shared methodology-concentration camps, death camps, intentional starvation, rape, indiscriminate killing of women and children-in both instances. While previous scholars have made these links between the Herero and Nama genocide and that of the Holocaust, Baer's book is the first to examine literary texts that demonstrate this connection. Texts under consideration include the archive of Nama revolutionary Hendrik Witbooi; a colonial novel by German Gustav Frenssen (1906), in which the genocidal gaze conveyed an acceptance of racial annihilation; and three post-Holocaust texts that critique the genocidal gaze. Baer posits that writing and reading about the gaze is an act of mediation, a power dynamic that calls those who commit genocide to account for their crimes and discloses their malignant convictions. Her transnational analysis provides the groundwork for future studies of links between imperialism and genocide, links among genocides, and the devastating impact of the genocidal gaze.

We commonly associate the term "Holocaust" with Nuremberg and Kristallnacht, the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos, Auschwitz and Treblinka. Appearing as they do in countless books and films, these symbols of hatred penetrate our consciousness, memory, and history. But, unfortunately, our memory is selective, and, in the case of Romania, our knowledge is scant. In 1939 the Jewish population of Romania exceeded 750,000: the third largest concentration of Jews in Europe. By 1944, some 400,000 had disappeared. Another 150,000 Ukrainian Jews died at the hands of Romanian soldiers. In the quest for a "final solution" Romania proved to be Hitler's most enthusiastic ally. In The Silent Holocaust, Butnaru, himself a survivor of the Romanian labor camps, provides a full account and demonstrates that anti-Semitism was a central force in Romania's history. He begins by examining the precarious status of Romanian Jewry in the years prior to World War I. He then reviews the period to the establishment in September, 1940, of the National Legionary State, a period when anti-Semitism became the unifying force in politics. The remainder of the book covers the Holocaust years, and reveals that Romania's premeditated mass murder of Jews was well underway before the Reich's gas chambers became operational. The Silent Holocaust has been called a "work of epic and historical worth" and it is invaluable for students of World War II, the Holocaust, and Jewish and Eastern European studies.

Does religion encourage altruism on behalf of those who do not belong? Are the very religious more likely to be altruistic toward outsiders than those who are less religious? In this book Pearl M. Oliner examines data on Christian rescuers and nonrescuers of Jews during the Holocaust to shed light on these important questions.

Drawing on interviews with more than five hundred Christians--Protestant and Catholic, very religious, irreligious, and moderately religious rescuers and nonrescuers living in Nazi-occupied Europe, Oliner offers a sociological perspective on the values and attitudes that distinguished each group. She presents several case studies of rescuers and nonrescuers within each group and then interprets the individual's behavior as it relates to his or her group. She finds that the value patterns of the religious groups differ significantly from one another, and she is able to highlight those factors that appear to have contributed most toward rescue within each group.

Interdisciplinary overview of American Jewish life post-Holocaust. The 1950s and early 1960s have not traditionally been viewed as a particularly creative era in American Jewish life. On the contrary, these years have been painted as a period of inactivity and Americanization. As if exhausted by the traumas of World War II, the American Jewish community took a rest until suddenly reawakened by the 1967 Six-Day War and its implications for world Jewry. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that previous assumptions about the early silence of American Jewry with regard to the Holocaust were exaggerated. And while historians have expanded their borders and definitions to encompass the postwar decades, scholars from other disciplines have been paying increasing attention to the unique literary, photographic, artistic, dramatic, political, and other cultural creations of this period and the ways in which they hearken back to not only the Holocaust itself but also to images of prewar Eastern Europe. Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades brings together scholars of literature, art, history, ethnography, and related fields to examine how the American Jewish community in the post-Holocaust era was shaped by its encounter with literary relics, living refugees, and other cultural productions which grew out of an encounter with Eastern European Jewish life from the pre-Holocaust era.

This innovative study shows how the imaginary constructions of self and Other are shaping identification with Jewishness in the twenty-first century. The texts and artworks discussed in this book test a diverse range of ways of identifying as Jews and with the Jewish people, while engaging with postmodern and postcolonial discourses of hybridity and multiculturalism. This book selects six key areas in which the boundaries of Jewish identities have been interrogated and renegotiated: nation, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and the Holocaust. In each of these areas Sicher explores how major and emerging contemporary writers and artists re-envision the meaning of their identities. Such re-envisioning may be literally visual or metaphorical in the search for expression of artistic self between the conventional paradigms of the past and new ways of thinking.