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Books > Humanities > History > European history > From 1900 > Second World War > The Holocaust
Invisible Ink is the story of Guy Stern's remarkable life. This is
not a Holocaust memoir; however, Stern makes it clear that the
horrors of the Holocaust and his remarkable escape from Nazi
Germany created the central driving force for the rest of his life.
Stern gives much credit to his father's profound cautionary words,
"You have to be like invisible ink. You will leave traces of your
existence when, in better times, we can emerge again and show
ourselves as the individuals we are." Stern carried these words and
their psychological impact for much of his life, shaping himself
around them, until his emergence as someone who would be visible to
thousands over the years. This book is divided into thirteen
chapters, each marking a pivotal moment in Stern's life. His story
begins with Stern's parents-"the two met, or else this chronicle
would not have seen the light of day (nor me, for that matter)."
Then, in 1933, the Nazis come to power, ushering in a fiery and
destructive timeline that Stern recollects by exact dates and calls
"the end of [his] childhood and adolescence." Through a series of
fortunate occurrences, Stern immigrated to the United States at the
tender age of fifteen. While attending St. Louis University, Stern
was drafted into the U.S. Army and soon found himself selected,
along with other German-speaking immigrants, for a special military
intelligence unit that would come to be known as the Ritchie Boys
(named so because their training took place at Ft. Ritchie, MD).
Their primary job was to interrogate Nazi prisoners, often on the
front lines. Although his family did not survive the war (the
details of which the reader is spared), Stern did. He has gone on
to have a long and illustrious career as a scholar, author, husband
and father, mentor, decorated veteran, and friend. Invisible Ink is
a story that will have a lasting impact. If one can name a singular
characteristic that gives Stern strength time after time, it is his
resolute determination to persevere. To that end Stern's memoir
provides hope, strength, and graciousness in times of uncertainty.
Gendered Testimonies of the Holocaust: Writing Life begins with the
premise that writing proves virtually synonymous with survival,
bearing the traces of life and of death carried within those who
survived the atrocities of the Nazis. In reading specific
testimonies by survivor-writers Paul Celan, Charlotte Delbo, Olga
Lengyel, Gisella Perl, and Dan Pagis, this text seeks to answer the
question: How was it possible for these survivors to write about
human destruction, if death is such an intimate part of the
survivors' survival? This book shows how the works of these
survivors arise creatively from a vigorous spark, the desire to
preserve memory. Testimony for each of these writers is a form of
relation to oneself but also to others. It situates each survivor's
anguish in writing as a need to write so as to affirm life. Writing
as such always bears witness to the life of the one who should be
dead by now and thus to the miracle of having survived. This book's
claim is that the act of writing testimony manifests itself as the
most intensive form of life possible. More specifically, its
exploration of writing's affirmation of life and assertion of
identity focuses on the gendered dimension of expression and
language. This book does not engage in the binary structure of
gender and the hierarchically constructed roles in terms of
privileging the male over the female. The criteria that guide its
discussion on Gendered Testimonies emerge out of Levinas's concept
of maternity.
This study investigates the relationship between Lothar-Gunther
Buchheim (1918-2007), his bestselling 1973 novel Das Boot (The
Boat), and West Germany's Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. As a war
reporter during the Battle of the Atlantic, Buchheim benefitted
from distinct privileges, yet he was never in a position of power.
Almost thirty years later, Buchheim confronted the duality of his
own past and railed against what he perceived to be a varnished
public memory of the submarine campaign. Michael Rothberg's theory
of the implicated beneficiary is used as a lens to view Buchheim
and this duality. Das Boot has been retold by others worldwide
because many people claim that the story bears an anti-war message.
Wolfgang Petersen's critically acclaimed 1981 film and
interpretations as a comedy sketch, a theatrical play, and a
streamed television sequel have followed. This trajectory of
Buchheim's personal memory reflects a process that practitioners of
memory studies have described as transnational memory formation.
Archival footage, interviews, and teaching materials reflect the
relevance of Das Boot since its debut. Given the debates that
surrounded Buchheim's endeavors, the question now raised is whether
Germany's "mastering the past" serves as a model for other
societies analyzing their own histories. Sitting at the
intersection of History, Literature and Film Studies, this is an
unprecedented case study depicting how the pre- and postwar times
affected writers and others caught in the middle of the drama of
the era.
This is the first attempt to explain how Jewish doctors survived
extreme adversity in Auschwitz where death could occur at any
moment. The ordinary Jewish slave labourer survived an average of
fifteen weeks. Ross Halpin discovers that Jewish doctors survived
an average of twenty months, many under the same horrendous
conditions as ordinary prisoners. Despite their status as
privileged prisoners Jewish doctors starved, froze, were beaten to
death and executed. Many Holocaust survivors attest that luck, God
and miracles were their saviors. The author suggests that surviving
Auschwitz was far more complex. Interweaving the stories of Jewish
doctors before and during the Holocaust Halpin develops a model
that explains the anatomy of survival. According to his model the
genesis of survival of extreme adversity is the will to live which
must be accompanied by the necessities of life, specific personal
traits and defence mechanisms. For survival all four must co-exist.
Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of German Jews, in fear for their
lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and
live submerged in the shadows of the Nazi capital. Drawing on a
wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this
book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin
during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that "hidden"
Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the
outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable
individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to
ensure their own survival.
Paul Levine presents here for the first time the true history of
Raoul Wallenberg, one of the most-famous heroes of the Holocaust.
It is the first scholarly study of Wallenberg and Swedish diplomacy
in Budapest during the Holocaust which both utilizes and
contextualizes those Swedish diplomatic documents which best
describe his historic mission. Analysing Wallenberg's own
correspondence and reports, it provides a new insight into his
motives and background. The study explores and deconstructs the
many myths which have enveloped his morally important and heroic
story. Together, the two strands of the study explain what
Wallenberg did to assist and save many thousands of Jews in
Budapest.
The province of Grosseto in southern Tuscany shows two extremes in
the treatment of Italian and foreign Jews during the Holocaust. To
the east of the province, the Jews of Pitigliano, a four
hundred-year-old community, were hidden for almost a year by
sympathetic farmers in barns and caves. None of those in hiding
were arrested and all survived the Fascist hunt for Jews. In the
west, near the provincial capital of Grosseto, almost a hundred
Italian and foreign Jews were imprisoned in 1943-1944 in the
bishop's seminary, which he had rented to the Fascists for that
purpose. About half of them, though they had thought that the
bishop would protect them, were deported with his knowledge by
Fascists and Nazis to Auschwitz. Thus, the Holocaust reached into
this provincial corner as it did into all parts of Italy still
under Italian Fascist control. This book is based on new interviews
and research in local and national archives.
In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race," was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi's classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, Survival in Auschwitz remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit. Included in this new edition is an illuminating conversation between Philip Roth and Primo Levi never before published in book form.
A gripping memoir written by a 96-year-old Jewish Holocaust
survivor about his escape from Nazi-occupied Poland in the 1930's
and his adventures with the French Resistance during World War II
In 1937, as the Nazi Party tightened its grip on the city of Danzig
(now Gdansk, Poland), Justus Rosenberg's parents made the wrenching
decision to send their son to Paris, where he would have the hope
of finishing high school and going on to university in safety. He
was sixteen years old, and he would not see his family again for
sixteen years more. Even after war broke out in 1939, life in
France was peaceful for a time-but when the Nazis pushed toward
Paris in the spring of 1940, Justus was forced to flee south to
Toulouse. There, a chance meeting put Justus in contact with Varian
Fry, the American journalist who ran a refugee network that aided
several thousand Jews in escaping Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
With his German background, understanding of French cultural, and
fluency in several languages, including English, Justus was ideally
positioned to thrive in Fry's network, coming to master an
underworld of counterfeit documents, whispered passwords, black
market currency, opportunistic gangsters, and clandestine mountain
passes. Justus would spend the rest of the war working for Fry and
later the French Resistance, helping to provide safe passage for
many intellectuals and artists on the run from the Nazis, among
them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst.
Along the way, he would have a number of close scrapes of his own:
on one occasion, he was rounded up to be sent to a labor camp in
Poland, and had to make a daring escape to save his life; on
another, he narrowly survived after his jeep hits a landmine. An
epic saga of survival, with the soul of a spy thriller, The Art of
Resistance is also an uplifting story of personal triumph. (Several
years after the war, Justus was finally able to track down his
family, who he feared had died at the Nazis' hands.) As Justus
writes, "I survived the war through a rare combination of good
fortune, resourcefulness, optimism, and, most important, the
kindness of many good people."
This book, the first-ever collection of primary documents on North
African history and the Holocaust, gives voice to the diversity of
those involved-Muslims, Christians, and Jews; women, men, and
children; black, brown, and white; the unknown and the notable;
locals, refugees, the displaced, and the interned; soldiers,
officers, bureaucrats, volunteer fighters, and the forcibly
recruited. At times their calls are lofty, full of spiritual
lamentation and political outrage. At others, they are humble,
yearning for medicine, a cigarette, or a pair of shoes. Translated
from French, Arabic, North African Judeo-Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew,
Moroccan Darija, Tamazight (Berber), Italian, and Yiddish, or
transcribed from their original English, these writings shed light
on how war, occupation, race laws, internment, and Vichy French,
Italian fascist, and German Nazi rule were experienced day by day
across North Africa. Though some selections are drawn from
published books, including memoirs, diaries, and collections of
poetry, most have never been published before, nor previously
translated into English. These human experiences, combined, make up
the history of wartime North Africa.
About 5,000 children were imprisoned in the Kaunas Ghetto from
1941-1944, of whom some 250-300 were smuggled out of the ghetto,
hidden by Gentiles and survived. This book is a collective memory
of events that happened to Kaunas Jewry during the Nazi occupation
of Lithuania. It contains 50 stories of people who suffered through
the Holocaust in their childhood in Kaunas. Most of the
contributors are writing about their ordeal for the first time,
after more then 60 years of silence. The stories cover the
background of the families before the war, life in the Ghetto, and
the main tragic events that happened in Kaunas during three years
of fascist regime in Lithuania. The memoirs describe how children
were smuggled out of the Ghetto and their experiences and feelings
living with the gentiles who sheltered them.
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Book of Kobrin
(Hardcover)
Betzalel Shwartz, Israel Chaim Bil(e)Tzki; Index compiled by Jonathan Wind
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R1,203
Discovery Miles 12 030
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The Holocaust swept away the centuries-old Jewish community of
Pozna in western Poland. Zbigniew Pakula traces the history of that
community, its institutions, and its response to crucial but
little-known events like the expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany
in 1938. The Jews of Pozna however, is not only about destruction,
but also about survival and the way that the memory of a lost world
can endure as a cornerstone of individual identity. Pakula locates
the remaining Jews of Pozna, now living scattered around the world.
He accompanies them as they reminisce, meet old friends, or return
to walk again the streets of what will always be their city.
Originally published in 1969, this book discusses the many factors
which atomised German society from 1870 onwards and thus assisted
Nazi evil, and it shows that Hitler and Nazism were mere phenomena
of a mass age. The author wrote with the twin qualifications as
historian and survivor of the camps. To have lived through it and
then dissect it as a scholar is an astonishing achievement and it
is this achievement that this book records.
A study of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture,
drawing on recent memorials, documentaries, and prose narratives
that engage with the material legacy of National Socialism and the
Holocaust. With the passing of those who witnessed National
Socialism and the Holocaust, the archive matters as never before.
However, the material that remains for the work of remembering and
commemorating this period of history is determined by both the
bureaucratic excesses of the Nazi regime and the attempt to
eradicate its victims without trace. This book argues that memory
culture in the Berlin Republic is marked by an archival turn that
reflects this shift from embodied to externalized, material memory
and responds to the particular status of the archive "after
Auschwitz." What remains in this late phase of memory culture is
the post-Holocaust archive, which at once ensures and hauntsthe
future of Holocaust memory. Drawing on the thinking of Freud,
Derrida, and Georges Didi-Huberman, this book traces the political,
ethical, and aesthetic implications of the archival turn in
contemporary German memory culture across different media and
genres. In its discussion of recent memorials, documentary film and
theater, as well as prose narratives, all of which engage with the
material legacy of the Nazi past, it argues that the performanceof
"archive work" is not only crucial to contemporary memory work but
also fundamentally challenges it. Dora Osborne is Senior Lecturer
in German at the University of St Andrews.
The Vienna Gestapo headquarters was the largest of its kind in the
German Reich and the most important instrument of Nazi terror in
Austria, responsible for the persecution of Jews, suppression of
resistance and policing of forced labourers. Of the more than fifty
thousand people arrested by the Vienna Gestapo, many were subjected
to torturous interrogation before being either sent to
concentration camps or handed over to the Nazi judiciary for
prosecution. This comprehensive survey by three expert historians
focuses on these victims of repression and persecution as well as
the structure of the Vienna Gestapo and the perpetrators of its
crimes.
In the wake of the Second World War, how were the Allies to respond
to the enormous crime of the Holocaust? Even in an ideal world, it
would have been impossible to bring all the perpetrators to trial.
Nevertheless, an attempt was made to prosecute some. Most people
have heard of the Nuremberg trial and the Eichmann trial, though
they probably have not heard of the Kharkov Trial--the first trial
of Germans for Nazi-era crimes--or even the Dachau Trials, in which
war criminals were prosecuted by the American military personnel on
the former concentration camp grounds. This book uncovers ten
"forgotten trials" of the Holocaust, selected from the many Nazi
trials that have taken place over the course of the last seven
decades. It showcases how perpetrators of the Holocaust were dealt
with in courtrooms around the world--in the former Soviet Union,
the United Kingdom, Israel, France, Poland, the United States and
Germany--revealing how different legal systems responded to the
horrors of the Holocaust. The book provides a graphic picture of
the genocidal campaign against the Jews through eyewitness
testimony and incriminating documents and traces how the public
memory of the Holocaust was formed over time. The volume covers a
variety of trials--of high-ranking statesmen and minor foot
soldiers, of male and female concentration camps guards and even
trials in Israel of Jewish Kapos--to provide the first global
picture of the laborious efforts to bring perpetrators of the
Holocaust to justice. As law professors and litigators, the authors
provide distinct insights into these trials.
Heda Margolius Kovaly (1919-2010) was a renowned Czech writer and
translator born to Jewish parents. Her bestselling memoir, Under a
Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 has been translated into
more than a dozen languages. Her crime novel Innocence; or, Murder
on Steep Street based on her own experiences living under Stalinist
oppression was named an NPR Best Book in 2015. In the tradition of
Studs Terkel, Hitler, Stalin and I is based on interviews between
Kovaly and award-winning filmmaker Helena Trestikova. In it, Kovaly
recounts her family history in Czechoslovakia, starving in the
deprivations of Lodz Ghetto, how she miraculously left Auschwitz,
fled from a death march, failed to find sanctuary amongst former
friends in Prague as a concentration camp escapee, and participated
in the liberation of Prague. Later under Communist rule, she
suffered extreme social isolation as a pariah after her first
husband Rudolf Margolius was unjustly accused in the infamous
Slansky Trial and executed for treason. Remarkably, Kovaly, exiled
in the United States after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, only
had love for her country and continued to believe in its people.
She returned to Prague in 1996. Heda had an enormous talent for
expressing herself. She spoke with precision and was descriptive
and witty in places. I admired her attitude and composure, even
after she had such extremely difficult experiences. Nazism and
Communism afflicted Heda's life directly with maximum intensity.
Nevertheless, she remained an optimist. Helena Trestikova has made
over fifty documentary films. Hitler, Stalin and I has garnered
several awards in the Czech Republic and Japan. PRAISE FOR KOVALY'S
INNOCENCE A luminous testament from a dark time, Innocence is at
once a clever homage to Raymond Chandler, and a portrait of a city
- Prague - caught and held fast in a state of Kafkaesque paranoia.
Only a great survivor could have written such a book. - John
Banville Innocence is an extraordinary novel ... in 1985, Kovaly
produced a remarkable work of art with the intrigue of a spy
puzzle, the irony of a political fable, the shrewdness of a novel
of manners, and the toughness of a hard-boiled murder mystery ...
Just as few will anticipate the many surprises and artful turns of
Innocence, a book sure to dazzle and please a great many readers. -
Tom Nolan, The Best New Mysteries, The Wall Street Journal Kovaly's
skills as a mystery writer shines, as she uses suspense, hints, and
suggestions to literally play with the reader's mind ... Innocence
is an excellent novel for readers who are up for a challenging,
intelligent, and complex story - one that paints a masterful
picture of a bleak, Kafkaesque, and highly intriguing time, place,
and cast of characters. - The New York Journal of Books Although
not out of love for Hegel, Heda Margolius Kovaly makes a very
Hegelian point: actions, as Hegel tells us in the section on
Antigone in Phenomenology of Spirit - even seemingly small,
meaningless actions - always reach beyond their intent; and the
impossibility of foreseeing how the consequences will ripple
outwards does not absolve us of guilt. As for innocence, the woman
who went to hell twice wants her readers to know that there is no
such thing. - The Times Literary Supplement
A History of the Holocaust is a detailed, factual account of what
happened across Europe during the Holocaust, with balanced coverage
of each country. The Holocaust was unique within the context of the
Second World War because Jews were disproportionately represented
among the civilian casualties in that conflict. Over fifty million
people died as a result of the application of total war. Twelve per
cent of these were Jews. At the time, Jews constituted less than
one-quarter of one per cent of the world's population. This book is
intended as a textbook, not a philosophical interpretation of the
Holocaust. Written in a highly accessible style, it is addressed to
students and will inspire them to read more about the subject and
to question the problems of the world.
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