This important collection brings together contributions from an impressive group of scholars to comprehensively examine Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust. Addressing the severe critiques of FDR that arose after the war and what some see as his failure to stop the genocide of Europe's Jewish community, the book looks at his policies between 1933 and 1942, his rescue efforts during the war, and the possibility for future research and analysis. This is the definitive resource on a pivotal issue in American history.

Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper is an in-depth look at how The New York Times failed in its coverage of the fate of European Jews from 1939-1945. It examines how the decisions that were made at The Times ultimately resulted in the minimizing and misunderstanding of modern history's worst genocide. Laurel Leff, a veteran journalist and professor of journalism, recounts how personal relationships at the newspaper, the assimilationist tendencies of The Times' Jewish owner, and the ethos of mid-century America all led the Times to consistently downplay news of the Holocaust. It recalls how news of Hitler's 'final solution' was hidden from readers and - because of the newspaper's influence on other media - from America at large. Buried by The Times is required reading for anyone interested in America's response to the Holocaust and for anyone curious about how journalists determine what is newsworthy.

In this book, Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. This ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.

First ever volume on Holocaust in Thessaloniki in English, utilizing new sources and interpretation schemes Thessaloniki was for centuries one of the most prominent Jewish communities in the world, which lost more than 90% of its population during the Holocaust Book will be a great contribution to the local efforts underway to reconcile Thessaloniki with its Jewish past and honor the victims of the Holocaust An ambitious Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the backing of several governments and institutions, is schedule to open in the city by 2021.

The incorporation of German territories east of the Oder and Western Neisse rivers into Poland in 1945 was linked with the difficult process of an almost total exchange of population and involved the taking over of a region in which the Second World War had effected an enormous level of destruction. The contemporary term 'Polish Wild West' not only alluded to the reigning atmosphere of chaos and 'survival of the fittest' in the Polish-German borderland but was also associated with a new kind of freedom and the opportunity to start everything anew. The arrival in this region of Polish settlers from different parts of Poland led to Poles, Germans and Soviet soldiers temporarily coming into contact with one another. Living together in this war-damaged space was far from easy. On the basis of ego-documents, the author recreates the beginnings of the shaping of this new society, one affected by a repressive political system, internal conflicts and human tragedy. In distancing oneself from the until-recently dominant narratives concerning expellees in Germany or pioneers of the 'Recovered Territories' in Poland, Beata Halicka tells the story of the disintegration of a previous cultural landscape and the establishment of one which was new, in a colourful and vivid manner and encompassing different points of view.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'Original and compelling, an untold story of rare and captivating power' Philippe Sands 'A fascinating history about a little-known group who took on the Nazis . . . The individual tales of these courageous young women are remarkable' Independent 'Rescues a long-neglected aspect of history from oblivion, and puts paid to the idea of Jewish, and especially female, passivity during the Holocaust. It is uncompromising, written with passion - and it preserves truly significant knowledge. ... Judy Batalion has uncovered a trove of unknown or forgotten information about the Holocaust of genuine import and impact.' Eva Hoffman, TLS One of the most important untold stories of World War II, The Light of Days is a soaring landmark history that brings to light the extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who inspired Poland's Jewish youth groups to resist the Nazis. Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland - some still in their teens - became the heart of a wide-ranging resistance network that fought the Nazis. With courage, guile and nerves of steel, these 'ghetto girls' smuggled guns in loaves of bread and coded intelligence messages in their plaited hair. They helped build life-saving systems of underground bunkers and sustained thousands of Jews in safe hiding places. They bribed Gestapo guards with liquor, assassinated Nazis and sabotaged German supply lines. The Light of Days at last reveals the real history of these incredible women whose courageous yet little-known feats have been eclipsed by time.

Based on work conducted by scholars as part of a Summer Research Workshop organized by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2007, this book takes a fresh look at how American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews responded to the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany and German-occupied territory in the 1930s. The essays focus specifically on American religious responses to the November 9-10, 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Today understood as the first act of the Holocaust because of its systematized brutality against Germany's Jews, Kristallnacht, generated a dramatic response among mainline Protestants, Catholic clerical and lay leaders, Orthodox Jews, Protestant fundamentalists, and Jewish War Veterans. Together, the essays represent the first examination of multi-religious group responses to the beginnings of one of the pivotal moral events of the twentieth century, the Holocaust. They possess implications for the history of anti-Semitism globally and in the U.S., the history of interfaith cooperation and religious belief in America, the influence of American ideals on religious thought, and the impact of historical events on Jewish and Christian theology.

Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis' genocidal vision of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Historians have estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps. In his writings on the "Final Solution," Raul Hilberg pondered the role of trains: "How can railways be regarded as anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds and gas chambers in Eastern Europe?" This book explores the question by analyzing the victims' experiences at each stage of forced relocation: the round-ups and departures from the ghettos, the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps. Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced the train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to the more studied, fixed locations of persecution, such as ghettos and camps.

The Holocaust as history ended seventy-five years ago, about the span of a full human life; the Holocaust as culture is very much of the present, its meanings and lessons still actively in formation. For twenty-five years, Jason Francisco has wrestled with the afterlife of the genocide, creating a large number of photoworks and essays, including extensive work with the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland. At the center of his work work has been his long-term project Alive and Destroyed: A Meditation on the Holocaust in Time, begun in 2010. With a large format camera and antique lenses, Jason Francisco has undertaken a series of deep journeys extending from Berlin in the west to Kharkov in the east, Riga in the north to Bucharest in the south-for the sake of images that might carry the complications of remembering and forgetting in the places where the events we collectively call the Holocaust occurred. His destinations included the notorious sites of the genocide, such as Auschwitz and the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz, which often are taken to stand for the whole. And has made his way to hundreds of small, often remote concentrationary sites in Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Hungary and Slovakia-massacre sites in forests, fields, riverbanks and cemeteries, deportation routes, subcamps, labor camps, transit camps, short-term ghettoes, escape routes, hiding places, not to mention countless sites of erstwhile Jewish life and civilization, some intact, more in ruins, vastly more in states of nothingness. Jason Francisco's decentralized approach follows recent scholarship, which has identified more than 42,500 locations in Nazi-occupied Europe where the Holocaust was perpetrated: venturing into the physical geography of the genocide venturing into the territory of remembrance and forgetting, and search for an image form that might carry register what he found and felt. In its method and form, Alive and Destroyed is an unconventional work of witness. Documentary in spirit and conceptualist in method, it does not use photography to "capture" the worlds that the Holocaust left behind-to use the most common metaphor for the photographic act, itself reflecting a carceral understanding of photography as a medium. Rather Alive and Destroyed draws on the capacities of photography to test and redefine what we mean by presence and absence in memory and imagination. The photographs in Alive and Destroyed set out to release-to uncapture-the volatile mixture of incomprehension, argument, reclamation and loss that constitute the Holocaust as an inheritance for the living. Beyond being representations of sites in the world the Holocaust left behind, the images in Alive and Destroyed are themselves primary sites of meditation and mourning. -- Jason Francisco * Jason Francisco *

Who Will Say Kaddish? is an exploration of the fragile resurgence of Jewish life and identity in post-Communist Poland. By the eve of the Holocaust, Poland was home to the second largest Jewish population in the world. By war's end, its Jews had been exterminated and their once-vibrant culture all but destroyed. In this book Larry Mayer and Gary Gelb, themselves descendants of Polish Jews, explore reports that Jewish life is being rekindled in modern Poland. What they discover are three generations of Jews-Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren-with differing historical perspectives. As survivors' descendants learn of their hidden Jewish heritage through deathbed revelations, a compelling drama about personal identity unfolds. Mayer and Gelb chronicle a new chapter in the life of Poland's Jewish community as the present generation seeks to celebrate its members' recent freedom and to honor the rich traditions of their forebears. Through interviews, photography, reportage, and personal memoir Who Will Say Kaddish? creates a sociocultural portrait of the multilayered community of renewed Jewish life and tradition in Poland that has emerged since the fall of the Communist regime in 1989.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, Holocaust category (2017) Runner-up for the National Jewish Book Award, history category (2017) The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts-first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets-by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion-including the readiness to risk one's life-to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author's interviews with several of the story's participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi "expert" on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city's great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed "the Paper Brigade," and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group's worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto's secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet "liberation" of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved-only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR. Thoroughly researched by the foremost scholar of the Vilna Ghetto-a writer of exceptional daring, style, and reach-The Book Smugglers is an epic story of human heroism, a little-known tale from the blackest days of the war.

William I. Brustein provides a systematic comparative and empirical examination of anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust. Brustein studies the evolution of the four principal roots of anti-Semitism--religious, racial, economic, and political--and demonstrates how these roots became ignited in the decades before the Holocaust. The book explains the epidemic rise of modern anti-Semitism, societal differences in anti-Semitism, and how anti-Semitism varies from other forms of prejudice. The book draws upon an extensive body of data from Europe's leading newspapers and the American Jewish Year Book.

This book explores the roots of goodness and evil by gathering together the knowledge gained in a lifelong study of harmful or altruistic behavior. Ervin Staub has studied what leads children and adults to help others in need and how caring, helping, and altruism develop in children; bullying and youth violence and their prevention; the roots of genocide, mass killing, and other harmful behavior between groups of people; the prevention of violence; healing victimized groups and reconciliation between groups. He presents a broad panorama of the roots of violence and caring and how we create societies and a world that is caring, peaceful, and harmonious.

"A well-structured, ambitious collection of essays, it will certainly be an essential read for anyone interested in the anti-Jewish policies of National Socialist Germany and their long-term consequences for postwar Europe." . H-German The robbery and restitution of Jewish property are two inextricably linked social processes. It is not possible to understand the lawsuits and international agreements on the restoration of Jewish property of the late 1990s without examining what was robbed and by whom. In this volume distinguished historians first outline the mechanisms and scope of the European-wide program of plunder, before assessing the effectiveness and historical implications of post-war restitution efforts. Integrating the abundance of new research on the material effects of the Holocaust and its aftermath, a comparative perspective is offered on both robbery and restitution, examining developments in countries such as Germany, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The international and interrelated nature of property confiscation initiated by Nazi Germany and its satellite states offers new insights into the functions and beneficiaries of state sanctioned robbery. Although the extent of implementation varied, Jewish spoils were used to boost support for anti-Jewish policies and prop up ailing war finances throughout Europe. Thus the combination of personal enrichment and state plunder were two sides of the same coin. The prolonged struggles over restitution issues are confronted in the second section of the book on the basis of eight national studies. Everywhere the solution of legal and material problems was intertwined with changing national myths about the war and conflicting interpretations of justice. Even those countries that pursued extensive restitution programs using rigorous legal means were unable to compensate or comprehend fully the scale of Jewish loss. Especially in Eastern Europe, it was not until the collapse of communism that even the concept of restoring some Jewish property rights became a viable option. The legacy of robbery and restitution offers both a model for redefining the practice of human rights and keys to understanding the lingering ghosts of antisemitism in countries where few Jews remain. Martin Dean is a Research Scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). He is the author of Collaboration in the Holocaust, published in association with the USHMM in 2000, and of several articles on the confiscation of Jewish property. From 1992 to 1997 he worked as Senior Historian for the Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit. Constantin Goschler teaches modern history at the Humboldt-University, Berlin. He also taught at the universities of Prague, Jena and Bochum. His main fields of interest are transitional justice in the 20th century, history of science and the history of political ideas in the 19th century. He published several articles and books on restitution and indemnification for Nazi victims. Philipp Ther teaches modern Central and Eastern European History at the European University Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. His fields of interest are comparative nationalism studies, migrations and "ethnic cleansing," postwar social history of Central Europe and most recently the history of opera theatres in the long 19th century."

British state-supported Holocaust remembrance has dramatically grown in prominence since the 1990s. This monograph provides the first substantial discussion of the interface between public Holocaust memory in contemporary Britain and the nation's changing religious-secular landscape. In the first half of the book attention is given to the relationships between remembrance activities and Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and post-Christian communities. Such relationships are far from monolithic, being entangled in diverse histories, identities, power-structures, and notions of 'British values'. In the book's second half, the focus turns to ways in which public initiatives concerned with Holocaust commemoration and education are intertwined with evocations and perceptions of the sacred. Three state-supported endeavours are addressed in detail: Holocaust Memorial Day, plans for a major new memorial site in London, and school visits to Auschwitz. Considering these phenomena through concepts of ritual, sacred space, and pilgrimage, it is proposed that response to the Holocaust has become a key feature of Britain's 21st century religious-secular landscape. Critical consideration of these topics, it is argued, is necessary for both a better understanding of religious-secular change in modern Britain and a sustainable culture of remembrance and national self-examination. This is the first study to examine Holocaust remembrance and British religiosity/secularity in relation to one another. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Jewish studies and Holocaust Studies, as well as the Sociology of Religion, Material Religion and Secularism.

On October 14, 1943, Aleksandr "Sasha" Pechersky led a mass escape of inmates from Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Despite leading the only successful prisoner revolt at a World War II death camp, Pechersky never received the public recognition he deserved in his home country of Russia. This story of a forgotten hero reveals the tremendous difference in memorial cultures between societies in the West and societies in the former Communist world. Pechersky, along with other Russian and Jewish inmates who had been prisoners of the Nazis, was considered suspect by the Russian government simply because he had been imprisoned. In this volume, Selma Leydesdorff describes the official silence in the Eastern Bloc about Pechersky's role in the Sobibor escape and how an effort was made to recognize his actions. The narrative is based on eyewitness accounts from people in Pechersky's life and a discussion of the mechanism of memory, mixing written sources with varied recollections and assessing the collisions of collective memory held by the East and the West. Specifically, this book critiques the ideological refusal of many societies to acknowledge the suffering of Jews at Sobibor. Offering fascinating insights into a crucial period of history, emphasizing that Jews were not passive in the face of German violence, and exploring the history of the Jews who fell victim to Stalinism after surviving Nazism, this is valuable reading for students and scholars of the Holocaust and the position of Jews under Communism.

Indelible Shadows investigates questions raised by films about the Holocaust. How does one make a movie that is both morally just and marketable? Film scholar Annette Insdorf provides sensitive readings of individual films and analyzes theoretical issues such as the "truth claims" of the cinematic medium. The third edition of Indelible Shadows includes five new chapters that cover recent trends, as well as rediscoveries of motion pictures made during and just after World War II. It addresses the treatment of rescuers, as in Schindler's List; the controversial use of humor, as in Life is Beautiful; the distorted image of survivors, and the growing genre of documentaries that return to the scene of the crime or rescue. The annotated filmography offers capsule summaries and information about another hundred Holocaust films from around the world, making this edition the most comprehensive and up to date discussion of films about the Holocaust, and an invaluable resource for film programmers and educators. Annette Insdorf is Director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia University, and a Professor in the Graduate Film Division of the School of the Arts. She is the author of Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kielowski (Hyperion, 1999) and Francois Truffaut (Cambridge, 1995). She served as a jury member at the Berlin Film Festival and the Locarno Film Festival, and is the panel moderator at the Telluride Film Festival. Insdorf co-hosts (with Roger Ebert) Cannes Film Festival coverage for BRAVo/IFC.

"Becoming My Mother's Daughter: A Story of Survival and Renewal" tells the story of three generations of a Jewish Hungarian family whose fate has been inextricably bound up with the turbulent history of Europe, from the First World War through the Holocaust and the communist takeover after World War II, to the family's dramatic escape and emmigration to Canada. The emotional centre and narrative voice of the story belong to Eva, an artist, dreamer, and writer trying to work through her complex and deep relationship with her mother, whose portrait she cannot paint until she completes her journey through memory.

The core of the book is Eva's riveting recollection of the last months of World War II in Budapest, seen through a child's eyes, and is reminiscent in its power of scenes in Joy Kogawa's "Obasan." Exploring the bond between generations of mothers and daughters, the book illustrates the struggle between the need for independence and the search for continuity, the significant impact of childhood on adult life, the reshaping of personality in immigration, the importance of dreams in making us face reality, and the redemptive power of memory. Illustrations by the author throughout the book, some in colour, enhance the story.

How do democratic and pluralistic societies cope with traumatic events in their past? What strategies and taboos are employed to reconstruct wars, revolutions, torturing, mass killings and genocide in a way to make their contradiction to basic human rights and values invisible? This interdisciplinary volume analyzes in detail for the first time, in multiple genres, the history and image of the "German "Wehrmacht"" and the debates in Austria and Germany surrounding two highly contested exhibitions about the war crimes of the German "Wehrmacht" during WWII.

The representation of the Holocaust in literature and film has confronted lecturers and students with some challenging questions. Does this unique and disturbing subject demand alternative pedagogic strategies? What is the role of ethics in the classroom encounter with the Holocaust? Scholars address these and other questions in this collection.

The representation of the Holocaust in literature and film has confronted lecturers and students with some challenging questions. Does this unique and disturbing subject demand alternative pedagogic strategies? What is the role of ethics in the classroom encounter with the Holocaust? Scholars address these and other questions in this collection.

Written shortly after the close of World War II, Escaping Extermination tells the poignant story of war, survival, and rebirth for a young, already acclaimed, Jewish Hungarian concert pianist, Agi Jambor. From the hell that was the siege of Budapest to a fresh start in America. Agi Jambor describes how she and her husband escaped the extermination of Hungary's Jews through a combination of luck and wit. As a child prodigy studying with the great musicians of Budapest and Berlin before the war, Agi played piano duets with Albert Einstein and won a prize in the 1937 International Chopin Piano Competition. Trapped with her husband, prominent physicist Imre Patai, after the Nazis overran Holland, they returned to the illusory safety of Hungary just before the roundup of Jews to be sent to Auschwitz was about to begin. Agi participated in the Resistance, often dressed as a prostitute in seductive clothes and heavy makeup, calling herself Maryushka. Under constant threat by the Gestapo and Hungarian collaborators, the couple was forced out of their flat after Agi gave birth to a baby who survived only a few days. They avoided arrest by seeking refuge in dwellings of friendly Hungarians, while knowing betrayal could come at any moment. Facing starvation, they saw the war end while crouching in a cellar with freezing water up to their knees. After moving to America in 1947, Agi made a brilliant new career as a musician, feminist, political activist, professor, and role model for the younger generation. She played for President Harry Truman in the White House, performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and became a recording artist with Capitol Records. Unpublished until now but written in the immediacy of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, Escaping Extermination is a story of hope, resilience, and even humor in the fight against evil.

Exploring five key texts from the emerging canon of second generation writing, this exciting new study" "brings together theories of autobiography, trauma, and fantasy to understand the how traumatic family histories are represented. In doing so, it demonstrates the continuing impact of familial and community Holocaust trauma, and the need for a precise, clearly developed theoretical framework in which to situate these works. This book will appeal to final year undergraduates and postgraduate students, as well as scholars in literary and Holocaust-related fields, and an audience with personal and professional interests in the 'second generation'.