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.

Examining how the press in Britain, Sweden and Finland responded to the Holocaust immediately after the Second World War, Holmila offers new insights into the challenge posed by the Holocaust for liberal democracies by looking at the reporting of the liberation of the camps, the Nuremberg trial and the Jewish immigration to Palestine.

After the Fact studies the terrain of Holocaust documentaries subsequent to the turn of the twenty-first century. Until now most studies have centered primarily on canonical films such as Shoah and Night and Fog, but over the course of the last ten years filmmaking practices have altered dramatically. Changing techniques, diminishing communities of survivors, and the public's response to familiar, even iconic imagery, have all challenged filmmakers to radically revise and newly envision how they depict the Holocaust. Innovative styles have emerged, including groundbreaking techniques of incorporating archival footage, survivor testimony, and reenactment. Carrying wider implications for the fields of Film Studies, Jewish Studies, and Visual Studies, this book closely analyzes thirteen contemporary and internationally produced films, most of which have hardly been touched upon in the critical literature or elsewhere.

Alter Wiener's father was brutally murdered on September 11, 1939 by the German invaders of Poland. Alter was then a boy of 13. At the age of 15 he was deported to Blechhammer, a Forced Labor Camp for Jews, in Germany. He survived five camps. Upon liberation by the Russian Army on May 9, 1945, Alter weighed 80 lbs as reflected on the book's cover. Alter Wiener is one of the very few Holocaust survivors still living in Portland, Oregon. He moved to Oregon in 2000 and since then he has shared his life story with over 800 audiences (as of April, 2013) in universities, colleges, middle and high schools, Churches, Synagogues, prisons, clubs, etc. He has also been interviewed by radio and TV stations as well as the press. Wiener's autobiography is a testimony to an unfolding tragedy taking place in WWII. Its message illustrates what prejudice may lead to and how tolerance is imperative. This book is not just Wiener's life story but it reveals many responses to his story. Hopefully, it will enable many readers to truly understand such levels of horror and a chance to empathize with the unique plight of the Holocaust victims. Feel free to visit my website www.alterwiener.com for more information including links.

For decades, historians have debated how and to what extent the Holocaust penetrated the German national consciousness between 1933 and 1945. How much did "ordinary" Germans know about the subjugation and mass murder of the Jews, when did they know it, and how did they respond collectively and as individuals? This compact volume brings together six historical investigations into the subject from leading scholars employing newly accessible and previously underexploited evidence. Ranging from the roots of popular anti-Semitism to the complex motivations of Germans who hid Jews, these studies illuminate some of the most difficult questions in Holocaust historiography, supplemented with an array of fascinating primary source materials.

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.

Of the 400,000 German-speaking Jews that escaped the Third Reich as refugees, approximately 16,000 ended up in Shanghai, China, as part of one of the more remote enclaves within the Jewish diaspora. The stories of the Shanghai Jews contain extremes of the suffering and endurance that defined the refugee experience. Nobody wanted to go to China, and because Shanghai was the last choice of refugees, those who went there had nowhere else left to go. They had endured every stage of escalating Nazi persecution, including the mass arrests during Kristallnacht, the real beginning of the Holocaust. This groundbreaking oral history volume is based on 20 years of interviews with over 100 former Shanghai refugees. It offers a moving and at times astonishing collective portrait of courage, culture shock, persistence, and enduring hope in the face of unimaginable hardships.

In 1932, Isay Rottenberg, a Jewish paper merchant, bought a cigar factory in Germany: Deutsche Zigarren-Werke. When his competitors, supported by Nazi authorities, tried to shut it down, the headstrong entrepreneur refused to give up the fight. Isay Rottenberg was born into a large Jewish family in Russian Poland in 1889 and grew up in Lodz. He left for Berlin at the age of eighteen to escape military service, moving again in 1917 to Amsterdam on the occasion of his marriage. In 1932 he moved to Germany to take over a bankrupt cigar factory. With newfangled American technology, it was the most modern at the time. The energetic and ambitious Rottenberg was certain he could bring it back to life, and with newly hired staff of 670 workers, the cigar factory was soon back in business. Six months later, Hitler came to power and the Nazi government forbade the use of machines in the cigar industry so that traditional hand-rollers could be re-employed. That was when the real struggle began. More than six hundred qualified machine workers and engineers would lose their jobs if the factory had to close down. Supported by the local authorities he managed to keep the factory going, but in 1935 he was imprisoned following accusations of fraud. The factory was expropriated by the Deutsche Bank. When he was released six months later thanks to the efforts of the Dutch consul, he brought a lawsuit of his own. His fight for rehabilitation and restitution of his property would continue until Kristallnacht in 1938. The Cigar Factory of Isay Rottenberg is written by two of Rottenberg's granddaughters, who knew little of their grandfather's past growing up in Amsterdam until a call for claims for stolen or confiscated property started them on a journey of discovery.

In this pioneering volume, a group of "third generation" scholars subject the contested ligature between Finland and the Holocaust to critique. Finland's Holocaust: Silences of History traces the implications of antisemitism in Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through Finland's alliance with the Third Reich during much of World War II, to the complex negotiation with its wartime past. Taking up a range of issues - from cultural history, folklore, the arts, and sports, to the interpretation of military and national history - this collection examines how modern Finnish memory and the writing of history have both engaged and evaded the figure of the Holocaust. As the first English-language introduction to the changing position of Finland in contemporary international Holocaust historiography, Finland's Holocaust is essential reading for any student of antisemitism and the Holocaust, providing a critical perspective on the role of political and cultural historiography in modern Finland.

The testimonies of individuals who survived the Holocaust as children pose distinct emotional and intellectual challenges for researchers: as now-adult interviewees recall profound childhood experiences of suffering and persecution, they also invoke their own historical awareness and memories of their postwar lives, requiring readers to follow simultaneous, disparate narratives. This interdisciplinary volume brings together historians, psychologists, and other scholars to explore child survivors' accounts. With a central focus on the Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive's over 1,500 testimonies, it not only enlarges our understanding of the Holocaust empirically but illuminates the methodological, theoretical, and institutional dimensions of this unique form of historical record.

Sent across the ocean by their parents and taken in by foster parents and distant relatives, approximately 1,000 children, ranging in age from fourteen months to sixteen years, landed in the United States and out of Hitler's reach between 1934 and 1945. Seventy years after the first ship brought a handful of these children to American shores, the general public and many of the children themselves remain unaware of these rescues, and the fact that they were accomplished despite powerful forces in and outside the government that did not want them to occur. This is the first published account, told in the words of the children and their rescuers, to detail this unknown part of America's response to the Holocaust. It will challenge the belief that Americans did nothing to directly and actively save Holocaust victims. Judith Tydor Baumel, Holocaust scholar and sister of two rescued children, provides an introduction explaining why, when, how, and where the rescues were carried out, who the heroes and heroines were, and which individuals and organizations placed almost insurmountable obstacles in their path. This account presents both recollections and experiences recorded at the time of the rescued children, their descendants, and their rescuers. The story demonstrates what a small group of determined people can do to change the course of history.

The rich history of the German rabbinate came to an abrupt halt with the November Pogrom of 1938. The need to leave Germany became clear and many rabbis made use of the visas they had been offered. Their resettlement in Britain was hampered by additional obstacles such as internment, deportation, enlistment in the Pioneer Corps. But rabbis still attempted to support their fellow refugees with spiritual and pastoral care. The refugee rabbis replanted the seed of the once proud German Judaism into British soil. New synagogues were founded and institutions of Jewish learning sprung up, like rabbinic training and the continuation of "Wissenschaft des Judentums." The arrival of Leo Baeck professionalized these efforts and resulted in the foundation of the Leo Baeck College in London. Refugee rabbis now settled and obtained pulpits in the many newly founded synagogues. Their arrival in Britain was the catalyst for much change in British Judaism, an influence that can still be felt today.

The Holocaust is a subject of enormous historical importance. The murder of approximately 6 million Jews stands apart as a perhaps the most horrendous episode in world history; in this fresh introduction, McDonough examines the racial war-within-a-war, outlining controversies and examining how it has been popularized and institutionalized.

THE AWARDWINNING INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

'One of those rare and eternal stories you don't want to end and that leave you forever changed' - Desmond Tutu

'A masterpiece of holocaust literature. Her memoir, like her life, is extraordinary, harrowing and inspiring in equal measure' – The Times Literary Supplement

'Little dancer', Mengele says, ‘dance for me’

In 1944, sixteen-year-old ballerina Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz. Separated from her parents on arrival, she endures unimaginable experiences, including being made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele. When the camp is finally liberated, she is pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive.

The horrors of the Holocaust didn't break Edith. In fact, they helped her learn to live again with a life-affirming strength and a truly remarkable resilience.

The Choice is her unforgettable story. It shows that hope can flower in the most unlikely places.

This story of survival against all odds tells what befell Kurt Pick, an Austrian Jew, after he left his Vienna home and fled the Nazi persecution of his race. He was captured whilst attempting to walk across the German border into Belgium, but escaped and succeeded in being smuggled into Brussels, where he existed in constant fear, freezing cold and near starvation. In the summer of 1939 he was appointed Administrator of a camp for Jewish refugee families at Marneffe, near Brussels, becoming their official link with the outside world. When Germany invaded Belgium, the 600 residents were evacuated and joined the immense tide of refugees clogging the roads. Pick survived the air attacks and reached Avesnes, where he was mistaken for a spy, almost shot, and then nearly lynched by civilians. With the Germans now in occupation, he walked 100 miles back to Brussels. In 1942 he left to become a baker at a boarding school which he found was sheltering many Jews and was being used as a centre for the Resistance. When the Germans raided the school, he bluffed his way out and escaped to Liege. From that point Pick was permanently on the run until the Americans liberated Liege in September 1944. He survived, but was to discover that most of his family had perished.

How does scale affect our understanding of the Holocaust? In the vastness of its implementation and the sheer amount of death and suffering it produced, the genocide of Europe's Jews presents special challenges for historians, who have responded with work ranging in scope from the world-historical to the intimate. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a willingness to study the Holocaust at scales as focused as a single neighborhood, family, or perpetrator. This volume brings together an international cast of scholars to reflect on the ongoing microhistorical turn in Holocaust studies, assessing its historiographical pitfalls as well as the distinctive opportunities it affords researchers.

Faced with infectious diseases, starvation, lack of medicines, lack of clean water, and safe sewage, Jewish physicians practiced medicine under severe conditions in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust. Despite the odds against them, physicians managed to supply public health education, enforce hygiene protocols, inspect buildings and latrines, enact quarantine, and perform triage. Many gave their lives to help fellow prisoners. Based on archival materials and featuring memoirs of Holocaust survivors, this volume offers a rich array of both tragic and inspiring studies of the sanctification of life as practiced by Jewish medical professionals. More than simply a medical story, these histories represent the finest exemplification of a humanist moral imperative during a dark hour of recent history.

While the Netherlands had often been thought of as a champion of racial and ethnic tolerance before and during the Second World War, more than 75% of Dutch Jews were killed and those returning after the war were met with subtle but tough anti-Jewish sentiments as they tried to reclaim their former lives. For most survivors, the negative reactions were unexpected and shocking. Before the war, Dutch Jews had become part of the fabric of Dutch life and society, so the obstacles they faced upon their return were particularly painful and difficult to handle. The sobering picture presented in this book, based on research in archives, survivor's memoirs, and interviews with survivors, examines and chronicles the experiences of repatriated Jews in the Netherlands and sheds light on the continuing uneasiness and sensitivities between Jews and non-Jews there today. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, survivors returned to their home countries not knowing what to expect. In the Netherlands, considered a more tolerant nation, returnees wondered how they would be received by their neighbors; what had happened to their homes, their businesses, and their possessions; and whether or not they would be welcomed back to their jobs or their schools. The answers to many of these questions are now more important than ever, as claims for restitution continue to be made. Hondius shows that survivors returning to the Netherlands were met with a revival in anti-Semitism around the issue of liberation and that many were forced to create two memories of the time: one around the rejoicing and displays of triumph that took place in public and the other around the secret discrimination and cruelty, dealt subtly, inthe private arenas of everyday life. The blinding effect of a long history of generally good Jewish/non-Jewish relations turns out to be a most tragic aspect of the history of the Holocaust and the Netherlands.