A remarkable and compelling story about a Jewish boys coming of age during World War II, his survival, and ultimately, the transformation of his life as an American. Joseph Garays life story is an object lesson about perseverance in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles -- from the loss of his entire family in the concentration camps, to his survival in the Jewish Underground in Bratislava and elsewhere; from his joining the partisan underground and his enlistment in the Czechoslovakian division of the Romanian Red Army to fight the Nazis, to his meeting and marrying his wife. It is also a lesson about the remarkable acts of a single individual, Joseph Paserin, who protected Garay during those tumultuous war years despite grave risk to his own and his familys safety. The actions of Paserin ultimately enabled Garay to start anew in New York City -- to build a new family and to enjoy the safety and security of American freedom.

A revelation and a source of hope. Background essays give a historical overview of how the early pessimistic concentration on pathology has given way to greater emphasis on survivors' adaptive potential and strengths. Many contributors stress the importance of remembering and facing the pain that memory brings, an emphasis shared by Jewish tradition.

"Jewish Chronicle"

This is the first comprehensive anthology on the psychological treatment of Holocaust survivors and their families. It covers the full range of current theoretical and therapeutic approaches. It is a major resource for the clinician working with Holocaust survivors and their children, persecuted and traumatized populations, and patients suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. The chapters are organized around differing perspectives--classical psychoanalytic, self-psychological, group, family, pastoral, empirical research, eclectic. The editors include writings not usually part of the mainstream and focus on relevant yet often unnoticed issues.

This book gives its reader a good sense of how a discipline has struggled and evolved in its efforts to understand the impact of an historical event on its victims. The field's diversity of viewpoints and major controversies are put into sharp focus in this volume. It allows the reader--whether practicing clinician, academic researcher, or lay person--the opportunity to compare a wide range of approaches and draw conclusions. While primarily functioning as a resource, it will also serve as historical record to the Holocaust's unprecedented evil.

On 18 July 1943, one-hundred and twenty Jews were transported from the concentration camp at Drancy to the Levitan furniture store building in the middle of Paris. These were the first detainees of three satellite camps (Levitan, Austerlitz, Bassano) in Paris. Between July 1943 and August 1944, nearly eight hundred prisoners spent a few weeks to a year in one of these buildings, previously been used to store furniture, and were subjected to forced labor. Although the history of the persecution and deportation of France's Jews is well known, the three Parisian satellite camps have been subjected to the silence of both memory and history. This lack of attention by the most authoritative voices on the subject can perhaps be explained by the absence of a collective memory or by the marginal status of the Parisian detainees - the spouses of Aryans, wives of prisoners of war, half-Jews. Still, the Parisian camps did, and continue to this day, lack simple and straightforward descriptions. This book is a much needed study of these camps and is witness to how, sixty years after the events, expressing this memory remains a complex, sometimes painful process, and speaking about it a struggle.

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction examines texts that portray the inner experience of Holocaust perpetrators and thus transform them from archetypes of evil into complex psychological and moral subjects. Employing relevant methodological tools of narrative theory, Erin McGlothlin analyzes these unsettling depictions, which manifest a certain tension regarding the ethics of representation and identification. Such works, she asserts, endeavor to make transparent the mindset of their violent subjects, yet at the same time they also invariably contrive to obfuscate in part its disquieting character. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction contains two parts. The first focuses on portraits of real-life perpetrators in nonfictional interviews and analyses from the 1960s and 1970s. These works provide a nuanced perspective on the mentality of the people who implemented the Holocaust via the interventional role of the interviewer or interpreter in the perpetrators' performances of self-disclosure. In part two, McGlothlin investigates more recent fictional texts that imagine the perspective of their invented perpetrator-narrators. Such works draw readers directly into the perpetrator's experience and at the same time impede their access to the perpetrator's consciousness by retarding their affective connection. Demonstrating that recent fiction featuring perpetrators as narrators employs strategies derived from earlier nonfictional portrayals, McGlothlin establishes not only a historical connection between these two groups of texts, whereby nonfictional engagement with real-life perpetrators gradually gives way to fictional exploration, but also a structural and aesthetic one. The book bespeaks new modes of engagement with ethically fraught questions raised by our increasing willingness to consider the events of the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrator. Students, scholars, and readers of Holocaust studies and literary criticism will appreciate this closer look at a historically taboo topic.

The first comprehensive history of the German Jews on the eve of Hitler's seizure of power, this book examines both their internal debates and their relations with larger German society. It shows that, far from being united, German Jewry was deeply divided along religious, political, and ideological fault lines. Above all, the liberal majority of patriotic and assimilationist Jews was forced to sharpen its self-definition by the onslaught of Zionist zealots who denied the "Germanness" of the Jews. This struggle for the heart and soul of German Jewry was fought at every level, affecting families, synagogues, and community institutions.Although the Jewish role in Germany's economy and culture was exaggerated, they were certainly prominent in many fields, giving rise to charges of privilege and domination. This volume probes the texture of German anti-Semitism, distinguishing between traditional and radical Judeophobia and reaching conclusions that will give no comfort to those who assume that Germans were predisposed to become "willing executioners" under Hitler. It also assesses the quality of Jewish responses to racist attacks. The self-defense campaigns of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith included publishing counter-propaganda, supporting sympathetic political parties, and taking anti-Semitic demagogues to court. Although these measures could only slow the rise of Nazism after 1930, they demonstrate that German Jewry was anything but passive in its responses to the fascist challenge.The German Jews' faith in liberalism is sometimes attributed to self-delusion and wishful thinking. This volume argues that, in fact, German Jewry pursued a clear-sighted perception of Jewish self-interest, apprehended the dangers confronting it, and found allies in socialist and democratic elements that constituted the "other Germany." Sadly, this profound and genuine commitment to liberalism left the German Jews increasingly isolated as the majority of Germans turned to political radicalism in the last years of the Republic. This full-scale history of Weimar Jewry will be of interest to professors, students, and general readers interested in the Holocaust and Jewish History.

Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings brings together a group of international experts to investigate the relationship between Holocaust remembrance and different types of educational activity through consideration of how education has become charged with preserving and perpetuating Holocaust memory and an examination of the challenges and opportunities this presents. The book is divided into two key parts. The first part considers the issues of and approaches to the remembrance of the Holocaust within an educational setting, with essays covering topics such as historical culture, genocide education, familial narratives, the survivor generation, and memory spaces in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. In the second part, contributors explore a wide range of case studies within which education and Holocaust remembrance interact, including young people's understanding of the Holocaust in Germany, Polish identity narratives, Shoah remembrance and education in Israel, the Holocaust and Genocide Centre of Education and Memory in South Africa, and teaching at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. An international and interdisciplinary exploration of how and why the Holocaust is remembered through educational activity, Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings is the ideal book for all students, scholars, and researchers of the history and memory of the Holocaust as well as those studying and working within Holocaust education.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum reveals and traces the transformation of ancient Jewish symbols, rituals, archetypes and narratives deployed in these sites. Demonstrating how cloaking the 'secular' history of the Holocaust in sacred garb, memorial museums generate redemptive yet conflicting visions of the meaning and utility of Holocaust memory.

The interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust, colonialism and extreme violence in post-war French and Francophone fiction and film provide the central focus of this book. It proposes a new model of 'palimpsestic memory', which the author defines as the condensation of different spatio-temporal traces, to describe these interconnections and defines the poetics and the politics of this composite form. In doing so it is argued that a poetics dependent on tropes and techniques, such as metaphor, allegory and montage, establishes connections across space and time which oblige us to perceive cultural memory not in terms of its singular attachment to a particular event or bound to specific ethno-cultural or national communities but as a dynamic process of transfer between different moments of racialized violence and between different cultural communities. The structure of the book allows for both the theoretical elaboration of this paradigm for cultural memory and individual case-studies of novels and films.

First-hand testimony of survivors and eyewitnesses is compiled in this shocking and graphic account of the crimes committed during World War II at the largest death camp in Yugoslavia. At the small Croatian town of Jasenovac, the fascist "Independent State of Croatia" (a satellite state of the Nazi Third Reich) constructed a concentration camp where more than 200,000 people, mostly Orthodox Serbs, were systematically murdered. Among the participants in this genocide were members of the Roman Catholic clergy, from the Franciscan monk who became the camp commandant to the infamous Archbishop Stepinac, the spiritual advisor to the fascist state appointed by Pope Pius XII. Vladimir Dedijer, a close associate of Tito, has collected irrefutable documentary and photographic evidence, attesting to thousands of atrocities and the complicity of the Catholic Church in these crimes. The events described in this important volume provide a historical context to the current conflict in Yugoslavia and shed light on the motivations behind the apparently senseless ethnic and religious strife which is tearing Yugoslavia apart. The massacre at Jasenovac was the terrible culmination of centuries-old animosities between Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats and a dark episode in the history of the Catholic Church, one that the Church has attempted to hush up for fifty years.

In the last two decades our empirical knowledge of the Holocaust has been vastly expanded. Yet this empirical blossoming has not been accompanied by much theoretical reflection on the historiography. This volume argues that reflection on the historical process of (re)constructing the past is as important for understanding the Holocaust-and, by extension, any past event-as is archival research. It aims to go beyond the dominant paradigm of political history and describe the emergence of methods now being used to reconstruct the past in the context of Holocaust historiography.

"We will be judged in our own time and in the future by measuring the aid that we, inhabitants of a free and fortunate country, gave to our brethren in this time of greatest disaster." This declaration, made shortly after the pogroms of November 1938 by the Jewish communities in Sweden, was truer than anyone could have forecast at the time. Pontus Rudberg focuses on this sensitive issue - Jewish responses to the Nazi persecutions and mass murder of Jews. What actions did Swedish Jews take to aid the Jews in Europe during the years 1933-45 and what determined their policies and actions? Specific attention is given to the aid efforts of the Jewish Community of Stockholm, including the range of activities in which the community engaged and the challenges and opportunities presented by official refugee policy in Sweden.

The association of Nazism with the symbol of ultimate evil - the devil - can be found in the works of Klaus and Thomas Mann, Else Lasker-Schuler, and Rolf Hochhuth. He appears either as Satan of the Judeo-Christian tradition, or as Goethe's Mephisto. The devil is not only a metaphor, but a central part of the historical analysis. Barasch-Rubinstein looks into this phenomenon and analyzes the premise that the image of the devil had a substantial impact on Germans' acceptance of Nazi ideas. His diabolic characteristics, the pact between himself and humans, and his prominent place in German culture are part of the intriguing historical observations these four German writers embedded in their work. Whether writing before the outbreak of WWII, during the war, or after it, when the calamities of the Holocaust were already well-known, they all examine Nazism in the light of the ultimate manifestation of evil.

The Hollandsche Schouwburg is a former theatre in Amsterdam where, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, tens of thousands of Jews were assembled before being deported to transit and concentration camps. Before the war, the theatre had been an example of Jewish integration in the Netherlands, and after the war it became a memorial for the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. This book is the first international publication to address all the historical aspects of the site, putting it in a broader European and historical context.

."..the author has identified a significant and little examined subject for study, and displays a deep knowledge of it... Where previously the issue of Polish film and the Holocaust had been addressed in single articles or chapters on the depiction of the Holocaust in particular films, here, for the first time we have a history." Jeremy Hicks, University of London

During World War II Poland lost more than six million people, including about three million Polish Jews who perished in the ghettos and extermination camps built by Nazi Germany in occupied Polish territories. This book is the first to address the representation of the Holocaust in Polish film and does so through a detailed treatment of several films, which the author frames in relation to the political, ideological, and cultural contexts of the times in which they were created. Following the chronological development of Polish Holocaust films, the book begins with two early classics: Wanda Jakubowska's "The Last Stage" (1948) and Aleksander Ford's "Border Street" (1949), and next explores the Polish School period, represented by Andrzej Wajda's "A Generation" (1955) and Andrzej Munk's "The Passenger" (1963). Between 1965 and 1980 there was an "organized silence" regarding sensitive Polish-Jewish relations resulting in only a few relevant films until the return of democracy in 1989 when an increasing number were made, among them Krzysztof Kie lowski's "Decalogue 8" (1988), Andrzej Wajda's "Korczak" (1990), Jan Jakub Kolski's "Keep Away from the Window" (2000), and Roman Pola ski's "The Pianist" (2002). An important contribution to film studies, this book has wider relevance in addressing the issue of Poland's national memory.

Marek Haltof is Professor at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. His recent books include the "Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema" (2007), "Australian Cinema: The Screen Construction of Australia" (in Polish, 2005), "The Cinema of Krzysztof Kie lowski: Variations on Destiny and Chance" (2004), and "Polish National Cinema" (2002).

Since its completion in 1955, Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) has been considered one of the most important films to confront the catastrophe and atrocities of the Nazi era. But was it a film about the Holocaust that failed to recognize the racist genocide? Or was the film not about the Holocaust as we know it today but a political and aesthetic response to what David Rousset, the French political prisoner from Buchenwald, identified on his return in 1945 as the 'concentrationary universe' which, now actualized, might release its totalitarian plague any time and anywhere? What kind of memory does the film create to warn us of the continued presence of this concentrationary universe? This international collection re-examines Resnais's benchmark film in terms of both its political and historical context of representation of the camps and of other instances of the concentrationary in contemporary cinema. Through a range of critical readings, Concentrationary Cinema explores the cinematic aesthetics of political resistance not to the Holocaust as such but to the political novelty of absolute power represented by the concentrationary system and its assault on the human condition.

Over the decades, the Holocaust has remained a critical issue both historically and politically. This is due to the modernisation of anti-Semitism in the West, where accusations of ritual murder have long been passe and claims that the Holocaust was a hoax are de riguer, and to the government sanctions of anti-Semitism in the East in countries such as Iran. The purely scholarly problem of determining the number of victims, like other aspects of demography related to the Holocaust, have suddenly become closely embroiled in geopolitics and the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, which is now a context that has been forced upon it. This book is imbued with these connections and interrelationships. Avraham, Wolfgang Benz, Sergio Della Pergola, Mark Kupovetsky, Dieter Pohl, Aron Shneer, and the editors contribute their voices to the topic.

Sarah, nine years old, endures yet another air-raid in the street shelter in Blitz-torn England. At the same time nine-year old Claude is practising an escape should their house in occupied France be raided by the Gestapo. Sarah and Claude, Jews, and their families experience the devastating effects of Nazi Germany. The children are deeply traumatised, Sarah by the fate of her mother during an air-raid and Claude by the 'disappearance' of his family. The effects of their tragic experiences are played out very differently. The early lives of the children, though in different cultures and different circumstances, manifest very similar parallel experiences. It is only when the two central characters meet as adults that the effects of the trauma show themselves clearly and very dramatically. The novel traces four generations of the two families through to the final powerful and moving outcome.

Paris was home to one of the key European initiatives to document and commemorate the Holocaust, the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine . By analysing the earliest Holocaust narratives and their reception in France, this study provides a new understanding of the institutional development of Holocaust remembrance in France after the War.

Irmin Vinson's Some Thoughts on Hitler and Other Essays is a book about propaganda. Vinson explains how the organized Jewish community uses the memory of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust as weapons to stigmatize the patriotism and ethnic pride not just of Germans, but of all whites, including those who fought against Hitler. In these clear, rational, and highly readable essays, Irmin Vinson demolishes this propaganda and exposes the insidious agenda behind it.

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.