A story of one of the few survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and of an underground existence in the non-Jewish part of the city during the Second World War. Based entirely on the author s original diary, rediscovered twenty years after the war, Michael Zylberberg tells of the ghetto uprising and the Polish uprising of General Bor-Komorowski; of the moral conflicts of the Poles who helped the Jews and those who betrayed them. There is valuable historical detail never before revealed, as in the chapters on the educationalist and martyr, Janusz Korczak and tales of the author s last-minute escapes and desperate games of bluff, when he posed as a Catholic and a Polish Officer.

In 1945, the day after liberation, Soviet soldiers in control of the Katowice camp in Poland asked Primo Levi and his fellow captive Leonardo De Benedetti to compile a detailed report on the sanitary conditions in Auschwitz. The result was 'Auschwitz Report', an extraordinary testimony and one of the first accounts of the extermination camps ever written. The report, published in a scientific journal in 1946, marked the beginnings of Levi's life-long work as writer, analyst and witness. In the subsequent four decades, Levi never ceased to recount his experiences in Auschwitz in a wide variety of texts, many of which are assembled together here for the first time. From early research into the fate of his companions to the deposition written for Eichmann's trial, from the 'letter to the daughter of a fascist who wants to know the truth' to newspaper and magazine articles, Auschwitz Testimonies is a rich mosaic of memories and critical reflections of great historic and human value. Underpinned by his characteristically clear language, rigorous method, and deep psychological insight, this collection of testimonies, reports and analyses reaffirms Primo Levi's position as one of the most important chroniclers of the Holocaust. It will find a wide readership, both among the many readers of Levi's work and among all those who wish to understand one of the greatest human tragedies of all time.

This book concerns building an idealized image of the society in which the Holocaust occurred. It inspects the category of the bystander (in Polish culture closely related to the witness), since the war recognized as the axis of self-presentation and majority politics of memory. The category is of performative character since it defines the roles of event participants, assumes passivity of the non-Jewish environment, and alienates the exterminated, thus making it impossible to speak about the bystanders' violence at the border between the ghetto and the 'Aryan' side. Bystanders were neither passive nor distanced; rather, they participated and played important roles in Nazi plans. Starting with the war, the authors analyze the functions of this category in the Polish discourse of memory through following its changing forms and showing links with social practices organizing the collective memory. Despite being often critiqued, this point of dispute about Polish memory rarely belongs to mainstream culture. It also blocks the memory of Polish violence against Jews. The book is intended for students and researchers interested in memory studies, the history of the Holocaust, the memory of genocide, and the war and postwar cultures of Poland and Eastern Europe.

Ensure your students have access to the authoritative and in-depth content of this popular and trusted A Level History series. For over twenty years Access to History has been providing students with reliable, engaging and accessible content on a wide range of topics. Each title in the series provides comprehensive coverage of different history topics on current AS and A2 level history specifications, alongside exam-style practice questions and tips to help students achieve their best. The series: - Ensures students gain a good understanding of the AS and A2 level history topics through an engaging, in-depth and up-to-date narrative, presented in an accessible way. - Aids revision of the key A level history topics and themes through frequent summary diagrams - Gives support with assessment, both through the books providing exam-style questions and tips for AQA, Edexcel and OCR A level history specifications and through FREE model answers with supporting commentary at Access to History online (www.accesstohistory.co.uk) Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust This title covers the origins of anti-Semitism from the nineteenth century, and traces the events that took place in Germany from 1933 to 1945. The anti-Semitic views of Hitler are analysed as is the means by which these views shaped the racial state in the Third Reich. The impact of the Second World War and the events which led ultimately to the Final Solution are then assessed. All of these events are also considered within the wider historiographical debates which have surrounded this period of history, from questions on who should ultimately bear the blame, to issues of Holocaust denial.

Ordinary Men has been admired all over the world and is now published in the UK for the first time. It takes as its basis the detailed records of one squad from the Nazis' extermination groups and explores in detail its composition, its actions, and the methods by which it was trained to perform acts of genocide on an industrial scale. He introduces us to cheerful, friendly, ordinary men who killed without hesitation or apparent remorse for years on end, in docile obedience to an authority they happily accepted as legitimate. It is a valuable corrective to the idea of German uniqueness and offers a much more chilling picture of human beings as avidly suggestible and desperate for an organising purpose in their lives, however disgusting.

For centuries Jewish shtetls were an active part of Belarusian life; today, they are gone. The Belarusian Shtetl is a landmark volume which offers, for the first time in English, an illuminating look at the shtetls' histories, the lives lived and lost in them, and the memories, records, and physical traces of these communities that remain today. Since 2012, under the auspices of the Sefer Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, teams of scholars and students from many different disciplines have returned to the sites of former Jewish shtetls in Belarus to reconstruct their past. These researchers have interviewed a wide range of both Jews and non-Jews to find and document traces of Shtetl history, to gain insights into community memories, and to discover surviving markers of identity and ethnic affiliation. In the process, they have also unearthed evidence from old cemeteries and prewar houses and the stories behind memorials erected for Holocaust victims. Drawing on the wealth of information these researchers have gathered, The Belarusian Shtetl creates compelling and richly textured portraits of the histories and everyday lives of each shtetl. Important for scholars and accessible to the public, these portraits set out to return the Jewish shtetls to their rightful places of prominence in the histories and legacies of Belarus.

This handbook is the most comprehensive and up-to-date single volume on the history and memory of the Holocaust in Britain. It traces the complex relationship between Britain and the destruction of Europe's Jews, from societal and political responses to persecution in the 1930s, through formal reactions to war and genocide, to works of representation and remembrance in post-war Britain. Through this process the handbook not only updates existing historiography of Britain and the Holocaust; it also adds new dimensions to our understanding by exploring the constant interface and interplay of history and memory. The chapters bring together internationally renowned academics and talented younger scholars. Collectively, they examine a raft of themes and issues concerning the actions of contemporaries to the Holocaust, and the responses of those who came 'after'. At a time when the Holocaust-related activity in Britain proceeds apace, the contributors to this handbook highlight the importance of rooting what we know and understand about Britain and the Holocaust in historical actuality. This, the volume suggests, is the only way to respond meaningfully to the challenges posed by the Holocaust and ensure that the memory of it has purpose.

The dramatic story of a Jewish child's rescue at Buchenwald and its use as propaganda in both East and united Germany. At the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, communist prisoners organized resistance against the SS and even planned an uprising. They helped rescue a three-year-old Jewish boy, Stefan Jerzy Zweig, from certain death in the gas chambers. After the war, his story became a focus for the German Democratic Republic's celebration of its resistance to the Nazis. Now Bill Niven tells the true story of Stefan Zweig: what actually happened to him in Buchenwald, how he was protected, and at what price. He explores the (mis)representation of Zweig's rescue in East Germany and what this reveals about that country's understanding of its Nazi past. Finally he looks at the telling of the Zweig rescue story since German unification: a story told in the GDR to praise communists has become a story used to condemn them. Bill Niven is Professor of Contemporary German History at the Nottingham Trent University, UK.

As Adolf Eichmann sent hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz gas chambers, the Jews of Budapest needed the eyewitness testimony of Auschwitz escapees Ceslav Mordowicz and Arnost Rosinto save them. The clock was ticking on the Nazi plan to annihilate the last group of the Hungarian Jewry. But after nearly suffocating in an underground bunker, Auschwitz prisoners Ceslav Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin escaped and told Jewish leaders what they had seen. Their testimony in early June, 1944, corroborated earlier hard-to-believe reports of mass killing in Auschwitz by lethal gas and provided eyewitness accounts of record daily arrivals of Hungarian Jews meeting the same fate. It was the spark needed to stir a call for action to pressure Hungary's premier to defy Hitler-just hours before more than 200,000 Budapest Jews were to be deported.

Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History is a brief but comprehensive survey of the Third Reich based on current research findings that provides a balanced approach to the study of Hitler's role in the history of the Third Reich. The book considers the economic, social, and political forces that made possible the rise and development of Nazism; the institutional, cultural, and social life of the Third Reich; World War II; and the Holocaust. World War II and the Holocaust are presented as logical outcomes of the ideology of Hitler and the Nazi movement. This new edition contains more information on the Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany), as well as Nazi complicity in the Reichstag Fire and increased discussion of consent and dissent during the Nazi attempt to create the ideal Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). It takes a greater focus on the experiences of ordinary bystanders, perpetrators, and victims throughout the text, includes more discussion of race and space, and the final chapter has been completely revised. Fully updated, the book ensures that students gain a complete and thorough picture of the period and issues. Supported by maps, images, and thoroughly updated bibliographies that offer further reading suggestions for students to take their study further, the book offers the perfect overview of Hitler and the Third Reich.

Winner of the Booker Prize and international bestseller, made into the award-winning film Schindler's List. In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mercy.

You've seen them as background "extras" in motion pictures with Holocaust themes. One was a guard who escorted Meryl Streep across the grim landscape of Auschwitz in Sophie's Choice (1982). In the dark comedy Seven Beauties (1976), a hapless Italian POW finds himself having to patronize an exceedingly large version of one. In The Boys from Brazil (1978), Nazi hunter Sir Lawrence Olivier interviews the aging prison inmate who is attempting to broker a deal through him. In Playing for Time, Triumph of the Spirit, and Schindler's List, similar representations appear. These are the female SS guards, and even ardent students of the Holocaust know little about these feminine shadows of camp terror. In truth, the so-called "SS Women" served in guard capacities in the camps, but their official status in the SS was strictly that of auxiliaries. The female guards were never truly considered members of the "sacred corps" of Hitler's elite guard: they were never actual SS members. All this notwithstanding, the overwhelming majority of these women inflicted tremendous pain and suffering on the thousands of unfortunate, helpless victims, who came under their power. The rank-and-file female guards were frequently singled out in postwar trials as being worse than the male tormentors. Indeed, as the world witnessed photographic evidence of well-fed, usually hefty female guards throwing emaciated corpses in the the mass graves of Bergen-Belsen, the scope and extent of these culprits' participation in the Nazi orgy of death became clearer. Sadly, with the passage of time, the world has largely forgotten these female oppressors. The Camp Women is the first complete resource volume dedicated to the SS-Aufseherinnen - the female guards of the camps. Although no directory, database, or index on the subject has ever existed, Daniel Patrick Brown has taken the bank records of the concentration camp designated for women, RavensbrA"ck, to begin to catalog all of these overseers who can be documented. Furtherm with added data from the German Federal Archives in Berlin, the Polish State Museum in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), and the Central Office (for prosecution of Nazi war crimes) in Ludwigsburg, essential material on these women has finally been synthetized into this valuable tool for subsequent research on the female guards. In addition, the role of the girl's youth organization in developing future overseers, and the eventual recruitment, training, and employment of these women is likewise examined. Because of their participation in the slaughter in the camps, a number of female overseers were tried, convicted, and executed following the war. This aspect of their organization's brief history is also analyzed. Finally, a section of photographs and maps will provide the reader with some heretofore unseen data. Professor Brown's timely work fills a void in the terrible annals of the Nazism: at last, the women guards and their crimes are subject to public scrutiny.

'Through thick and thin, never separate. Stick together, guard each other, and live for one another.' As Hitler's war intensified, the Ovitz family would have good reason to stand by their mother's mantra. Descending from the cattle train into the death camp of Auschwitz, all twelve emerged in 1945 as survivors - the largest family to survive intact. What saved them? Ironically, the fact that they were sought out by the 'Angel of Death' himself - Dr Joseph Mengele. For seven of the Ovitzes were dwarfs - and not just any dwarfs, but a beloved and highly successful vaudeville act known as the Lilliput Troupe. Together, they were the only all-dwarf ensemble with a full show of their own in the history of entertainment. The Ovitzes intrigued Mengele, and amongst the thousands on whom he performed his loathsome experiments, they became his prize 'patients': 'You're something special, not like the rest of them.' It was this disturbing affection that saved their lives. After being plunged into the darkest moments in modern history, this remarkable troupe emerged with spirits undimmed, and went on to light up Europe and Israel, which offered them a new home, with their unique performances. Giants reveals their moving and inspirational story.

Ten autors form five countries present a variety of fresh analyses of the strategies Germans have adopted in coping with the Nazi past. Through historical, sociological, educational, and cultural approaches the unresolved tensions existing in German society--between the will to be accepted as an integral part of west ern civilization and to put the Nazi chapter in general and the Holocaust in particular behind, on the one hand, and an awareness of responsibility combined with recurring, sometiems sudden, manifestations of long-term results and implications of the past, on the other--are analyzed. through its multifaceted approach, this book contributes to a better understanding of present-day German society and of Germany's delicate relationships with both the United States and Israel. Contents: Dan Michman: Introduction-Jeffrey Herf: The HOlocaust and the Competition of Memories in Germany, 1945-1999--Gilad Margalit: Divide Memory? Expressions of a United German Memory--Y. Michal Bodemann: The Uncanny Clatter: The Holocaust in Germany beofore Its Mass Commemoration--Inge Marszolek: Memory and Amnesia: A Comment on the Lecutrees by Gilad Margalit and Michal Bodemann--Chris Lorenz: Border-crossings: Some Reflections on the Role of German Historians in Recent Public Debates on Nazi History--Dan Diner: The Irrenconcilability of an Event: Integrating the Holocaust into the Narrative of the Century--Michael Brenner: The Changing Role of the Holocaust in the German-Jewish Public Voice--Shlomo Shafir: Constantly Disturbing the German Conscience: The Impact of American Jewry--Yehuda Ben-Avner: Ambivalent Cooperation: The German-Israeli Joint Committee on School-book--Yfaat Weiss: The VagueEchoes of German Discourse in Israel.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable-whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.

During the occupation of France in WWII the villages around Le Chambon-sur-Lignon pulled off an astonishing and largely unknown feat. Risking everything, they underwent a long-running battle of nerves and daring to hide 5,000 men, women and children, 3,500 of them Jews, from the Nazis and their Vichy stooges. Despite the danger, a whole community rallied together, from the pacifist pastor who defied orders to the glamorous female agent with a wooden leg, from the 18-year-old master forger to the schoolgirl who ran suitcases stuffed with money for the Resistance. Told using first-hand testimonies of many of the survivors and face-to-face interviews conducted by the author, A Good Place to Hide is the thrilling story of ordinary people who thwarted the Nazis and sheltered strangers in desperate need.

"A Wolf in the Attic: Even though she was only two, the little girl knew she must never go into the attic. Strange noises came from there. Mama said there was a wolf upstairs, a hungry, dangerous wolf . . . but the truth was far more dangerous than that. Much too dangerous to tell a Jewish child marked for death. ""One cannot mourn what one doesn't acknowledge, and one cannot heal if one does not mourn . . . "A Wolf in the Attic is a powerful memoir written by a psychoanalyst who was a hidden child in Poland during World War II. Her story, in addition to its immediate impact, illustrates her struggle to come to terms with the powerful yet sometimes subtle impact of childhood trauma.In the author's words: "As a very young child I experienced the Holocaust in a way that made it almost impossible to integrate and make sense of the experience. For me, there was no life before the war, no secure early childhood to hold in mind, no context in which to place what was happening to me and around me. The Holocaust was in the air that I breathed daily for the first four years of my life. I took it in deeply without awareness or critical judgment. I ingested it with the milk I drank from my mother's breast. It had the taste of fear and despair."Born during the Holocaust in what was once a part of Poland, Sophia Richman spent her early years in hiding in a small village near Lwow, the city where she was born. Hidden in plain sight, both she and her mother passed as Christian Poles. Later, her father, who escaped from a concentration camp, found them and hid in their attic until the liberation.The story of the miraculous survival of this Jewish family is only the beginning of their long journey out of the Holocaust. The war years are followed by migration and displacement as the refugees search for a new homeland. They move from Ukraine to Poland to France and eventually settle in America. A Wolf in the Attic traces the effects of the author's experiences on her role as an American teen, a wife, a mother, and eventually, a psychoanalyst. A Wolf in the Attic explores the impact of early childhood trauma on the author's: education career choices attitudes toward therapy, both as patient and therapist social interactions love/family relationships parenting style and decisions regarding her daughter religious orientationRepeatedly told by her parents that she was too young to remember the war years, Sophia spent much of her life trying to "remember to forget" what she did indeed remember. A Wolf in the Attic follows her life as she gradually becomes able to reclaim her past, to understand its impact on her life and the choices she has made, and finally, to heal a part of herself that she had been so long taught to deny.

"A Wolf in the Attic: Even though she was only two, the little girl knew she must never go into the attic. Strange noises came from there. Mama said there was a wolf upstairs, a hungry, dangerous wolf . . . but the truth was far more dangerous than that. Much too dangerous to tell a Jewish child marked for death. ""One cannot mourn what one doesn't acknowledge, and one cannot heal if one does not mourn . . . "A Wolf in the Attic is a powerful memoir written by a psychoanalyst who was a hidden child in Poland during World War II. Her story, in addition to its immediate impact, illustrates her struggle to come to terms with the powerful yet sometimes subtle impact of childhood trauma.In the author's words: "As a very young child I experienced the Holocaust in a way that made it almost impossible to integrate and make sense of the experience. For me, there was no life before the war, no secure early childhood to hold in mind, no context in which to place what was happening to me and around me. The Holocaust was in the air that I breathed daily for the first four years of my life. I took it in deeply without awareness or critical judgment. I ingested it with the milk I drank from my mother's breast. It had the taste of fear and despair."Born during the Holocaust in what was once a part of Poland, Sophia Richman spent her early years in hiding in a small village near Lwow, the city where she was born. Hidden in plain sight, both she and her mother passed as Christian Poles. Later, her father, who escaped from a concentration camp, found them and hid in their attic until the liberation.The story of the miraculous survival of this Jewish family is only the beginning of their long journey out of the Holocaust. The war years are followed by migration and displacement as the refugees search for a new homeland. They move from Ukraine to Poland to France and eventually settle in America. A Wolf in the Attic traces the effects of the author's experiences on her role as an American teen, a wife, a mother, and eventually, a psychoanalyst. A Wolf in the Attic explores the impact of early childhood trauma on the author's: education career choices attitudes toward therapy, both as patient and therapist social interactions love/family relationships parenting style and decisions regarding her daughter religious orientationRepeatedly told by her parents that she was too young to remember the war years, Sophia spent much of her life trying to "remember to forget" what she did indeed remember. A Wolf in the Attic follows her life as she gradually becomes able to reclaim her past, to understand its impact on her life and the choices she has made, and finally, to heal a part of herself that she had been so long taught to deny.

The second edition of this book frames the Holocaust as a catastrophe emerging from varied international responses to the Jewish question during an age of global crisis and war. The chapters are arranged chronologically, thematically, and geographically, reflecting how persecution, responses, and experience varied over time and place, conveying a sense of the Holocaust's complexity. Fully updated, this edition incorporates the past decade's scholarship concerning perpetrators, victims, and bystanders from political, national, and gendered perspectives. It also frames the Holocaust within the broader genocide perspective and within current debates on memory politics and causation. Global in approach and supported by images, maps, diverse voices, and suggestions for further reading, this is the ideal textbook for students of this catastrophic period in world history.

Finally a single volume detailing the SS officers that served in the largest and most infamous of Hitler's concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau. This volume begins with a brief history of this concentration camp and then details briefly the different departments that made up the command structure of this camp. The book goes on to describe the evacuation and liberation of Auschwitz and some of the major trials are described before the author gives brief descriptions of what Auschwitz-Birkenau is like today. The second part of the book is a biographical study of the SS officers in alphabetical order. The SS officers described inside this book were the commanders of the camp, the men with power, some with power over life and death. Inside you will meet the commandants, LagerfA"hrers, doctors, dentists, Gestapo officials, adjutants, administration officers, and sentry commanders. Some went on to fight at the front and won awards for bravery, others helped to save the lives of the inmates, and of course others were there to help with the administration of the Holocaust. The biographical details of the SS officers have been set out in the following way. Under the name is the last rank held by the officer, with his most important position obtained at Auschwitz. Next is the officers SS number and Nazi Party number where known, followed by his promotions, which in some cases included both the Allgemeine-SS (General SS) and Waffen-SS (Armed SS). The biographical detail of this book alone adds vast clarity to the gaps in biographical information in other books on Auschwitz. Inside this book are the details of 162 SS officers who served at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Along with over 140 rare black and white photographs, some never published before, is a detailed appendix and index.