Yehuda Bauer, one of the world's premier historians of the Holocaust, here presents an insightful overview and reconsideration of its history and meaning. Drawing on research he and other historians have done in recent years, he offers fresh opinions on such basic issues as how to define and explain the Holocaust; whether it can be compared with other genocides; how Jews reacted to the murder campaign against them; and what the relationship is between the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel. The Holocaust says something terribly important about humanity, says Bauer. He analyzes explanations of the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman, Jeffrey Herf, Goetz Aly, Daniel Goldhagen, John Weiss, and Saul Friedlander and then offers his own interpretation of how the Holocaust could occur. Providing fascinating narratives as examples, he deals with reactions of Jewish men and women during the Holocaust and tells of several attempts at rescue operations. He also explores Jewish theology of the Holocaust, arguing that our view of the Holocaust should not be clouded by mysticism: it was an action by humans against other humans and is therefore an explicable event that we can prevent from recurring.

On a quiet winter night in 1944, as part of their support of the Third Reich's pogrom of European Jews, French authorities arrested Ida Grinspan, a young Jewish girl hiding in a neighbor's home in Nazi-occupied France. Of the many lessons she would learn after her arrest and the subsequent year and a half in Auschwitz, the most notorious concentration camp of the Holocaust, the first was that ""barbarity enters on tiptoes . . . [even] in a hamlet where everything seemed to promise the peaceful slumber of places forgotten by history."" Translated by Charles B. Potter, You've Got to Tell Them is the result of a friendship that formed in 1988, when Grinspan returned to visit Auschwitz for the first time since 1945 and where she met Bertrand Poirot-Delpeche, a distinguished writer for the Paris newspaper Le Monde. Sometimes speaking alone, sometimes speaking in close alternation, Grinspan and Poirot-Delpeche simultaneously narrate the story of her survival and the decades that followed, including how she began lecturing in schools and guiding groups that visited the death camps. Replete with pedagogical resources including a discussion of how and why the Holocaust should be taught, a timeline, and suggestions for further reading, Potter's expert translation of You've Got to Tell Them showcases a clear and moving narrative of a young French girl overcoming one of the darkest periods in her life and in European history.

The Diary of Bergen-Belsen is a unique, deeply political survivor's diary from the final year inside the notorious concentration camp. Hanna Levy-Hass, a Yugoslavian Jew, emerged a defiant survivor of the Holocaust. Her observations shed new light on the lived experience of Nazi internment. Levy-Hass stands alone as the only resistance fighter to record on her own experience inside the camps, and she does so with unflinching clarity and attention to the political and social divisions inside Bergen-Belsen.

A stirring testament to the strength of the human spirit and the power of music, Violins of Hope tells the remarkable stories of violins played by Jewish musicians during the Holocaust, and the Israeli violin maker dedicated to bringing these inspirational instruments back to life.

The violin has formed an important aspect of Jewish culture for centuries, both as a popular instrument with classical Jewish musicians--Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman--and also a central factor of social life as part of the enduring Klezmer tradition. But during the Holocaust, the violin assumed extraordinary new roles within the Jewish community. For some musicians, the instrument was a liberator; for others, it was a savior that spared their lives. For many, the violin provided comfort in mankind's darkest hour, and, in at least one case, helped avenge murdered family members. Above all, the violins of the Holocaust represented strength and optimism for the future.

In Violins of Hope, music historian James A. Grymes tells the amazing, horrifying, and inspiring story of the violins of the Holocaust, and of Amnon Weinstein, the renowned Israeli violinmaker who has devoted the past twenty years to restoring these instruments in tribute to those who were lost, including 400 members of his own family. Juxtaposing tales of individual violins with one man's harrowing struggle to reconcile his own family's history and the history of his people, it is a poignant, affecting, and ultimately uplifting look at the Holocaust and its enduring impact.

The remarkable story of how a consul and his allies helped save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust in one of the greatest rescue operations of the twentieth century. In May 1940, desperate Jewish refugees in Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania, faced annihilation in the Holocaust - until an ordinary Dutch man became their saviour. Over a period of ten feverish days, Jan Zwartendijk, the newly appointed Dutch consul, wrote thousands of visas that would ostensibly allow Jews to travel to the Dutch colony of Curacao on the other side of the world. With the help of Chiune Sugihara, the consul for Japan, while taking great personal and professional risks, Zwartendijk enabled up to 10,000 men, women, and children to escape the country on the Trans-Siberian Express, through Soviet Russia to Japan and then on to China, saving them from the Nazis and the concentration camps. Most of the Jews whom Zwartendijk helped escape survived the war, and they and their descendants settled in America, Canada, Australia, and other countries. Zwartendijk and Sugihara were true heroes, and yet they were both shunned by their own countries after the war, and their courageous, unstinting actions have remained relatively unknown. In The Just, renowned Dutch author Jan Brokken wrests this heroic story from oblivion and traces the journeys of a number of the rescued Jews. This epic narrative shows how, even in life-threatening circumstances, some people make the just choice at the right time. It is a lesson in character and courage.

Horrified by the Holocaust, social psychologist Stanley Milgram wondered if he could recreate the Holocaust in the laboratory setting. Unabated for more than half a century, his (in)famous results have continued to intrigue scholars. Based on unpublished archival data from Milgram's personal collection, volume one of this two-volume set introduces readers to a behind the scenes account showing how during Milgram's unpublished pilot studies he step-by-step invented his official experimental procedure-how he gradually learnt to transform most ordinary people into willing inflictors of harm. The open access volume two then illustrates how certain innovators within the Nazi regime used the very same Milgram-like learning techniques that with increasing effectiveness gradually enabled them to also transform most ordinary people into increasingly capable executioners of other men, women, and children. Volume two effectively attempts to capture how step-by-step these Nazi innovators attempted to transform the Fuhrer's wish of a Jewish-free Europe into a frightening reality. By the books' end the reader will gain an insight into how the seemingly undoable can become increasingly doable.

On a November evening in 1989, Laura Levitt was raped in her own bed. Her landlord heard the assault taking place and called 911, but the police arrived too late to apprehend Laura's attacker. When they left, investigators took items with them-a pair of sweatpants, the bedclothes-and a rape exam was performed at the hospital. However, this evidence was never processed. Decades later, Laura returns to these objects, viewing them not as clues that will lead to the identification of her assailant but rather as a means of engaging traumatic legacies writ large. The Objects That Remain is equal parts personal memoir and fascinating examination of the ways in which the material remains of violent crimes inform our experience of, and thinking about, trauma and loss. Considering artifacts in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and evidence in police storage facilities across the country, Laura's story moves between intimate trauma, the story of an unsolved rape, and genocide. Throughout, she asks what it might mean to do justice to these violent pasts outside the juridical system or through historical empiricism, which are the dominant ways in which we think about evidence from violent crimes and other highly traumatic events. Over the course of her investigation, the author reveals how these objects that remain and the stories that surround them enable forms of intimacy. In this way, she models for us a different kind of reckoning, where justice is an animating process of telling and holding.

Published in sixteen languages and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Andre Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just is considered by many the single greatest novel of the Holocaust. This classic work -- long unavailable in a trade edition -- is one of those few novels that, once read, is never forgotten.

On March 11, 1185, tn the old Anglican city of York, the Jews of the city were brutally massacred by their townsmen. As legend has it, God blessed the only survivor of this Medieval pogrom, Rabbi Yom Tov Levy, as one of the Lamed-vov, the thirty-six Just Men of Jewish tradition, a blessing which extended to one Levy of each succeeding generation. This terrifying and remarkable Legacy is traced over eight centuries, from the Spanish Inquisition, to expulsions from England, France, Portugal Germany, and Russia, and to the small Polish village of Zemyock, where the Levys settle for two centuries in relative peace. It is in the twentieth century that Ernie Levy emerges, the Last of the Just, in 1920s Germany, as Hitter's sinister star is on the rise and the agonies of Auschwitz loom on the horizon.

'An extraordinary book . . . vivid and heart-breaking' The Jewish Chronicle Through the discovery of a precious friendship album which belonged to 12-year-old Alie, a Jewish schoolgirl in Amsterdam, Claudia Carli has traced and preserved the lives of an entire class of girls, most of whom did not survive the War. Alie and her friends are brought touchingly and vividly to life, along with their writings, in this extraordinary book. Their everyday hopes, pleasures and longings are offset by the constant fear of a knock on the door, a missing friend from class, a family member taken away. Alie and her mother were to die in Sobibor in 1943. Alie's sister Gretha survived Auschwitz and kept her promise to her sister to preserve the friendship album so long as she hoped to live. This book will sit alongside Anne Frank's diary and The Cutout Girl as a unique window into occupied Amsterdam and the girls who will now never be forgotten.

May God Avenge Their Blood: a Holocaust Memoir Triptych presents three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks (1912-1974). In "Those Who Didn't Survive," Bryks portrays inter-war life in his shtetl Skarzysko-Kamienna, Poland with great flair and rich anthropological detail, rendering a haunting collective portrait of an annihilated community. "The Fugitives" vividly charts the confusion and terror of the early days of World War II in the industrial city of Lodz and elsewhere. In the final memoir, "From Agony to Life," Bryks tells of his imprisonment in Auschwitz and other camps. Taken together, the triptych takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey from Hasidic life before the Holocaust to the chaos of the early days of war and then to the horrors of Nazi captivity. This translation by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub brings the extraordinary memoirs of an important Yiddish writer to English-language readers for the first time.

This book is a fascinating and gripping examination of birth, sex and abuse during the Nazi era. Dr Chalmers' unique lens on the Holocaust provides a stunning and controversial expose of the voices of both Jewish and non-Jewish women living under Nazi rule. Based on twelve years of study, the book takes an inter-disciplinary view incorporating women's history, Holocaust studies, social sciences and medicine, in a unique, cutting-edge examination of what women themselves said, thought and did.

Volume 4 deals with events, legislative and administrative actions of discrimination as well as affairs, scandals and controversies. 207 articles explain the motives, the backdrop and the consequences of the manifestation of hatred against Jews and also examples of prevention and resistance against it. The examples include the 19th century antisemitism congresses, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, debates on the prohibition of kosher slaughter, the conspiracy of Kremlin doctors, medieval vernacular sermons, the Jenninger case, the Walser-Bubis debate and much more."

Fifteen thousand children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp. Fewer than 100 survived. In these poems and pictures drawn by the young inmates, we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their hopes and fears, their courage and optimism. 60 color illustrations.

Given their geographical separation from Europe, ethno-religious and cultural diversity, and subordinate status within the Nazi racial hierarchy, Middle Eastern societies were both hospitable as well as hostile to National Socialist ideology during the 1930s and 1940s. By focusing on Arab and Turkish reactions to German anti-Semitism and the persecution and mass-murder of European Jews during this period, this expansive collection surveys the institutional and popular reception of Nazism in the Middle East and North Africa. It provides nuanced and scholarly yet accessible case studies of the ways in which nationalism, Islam, anti-Semitism, and colonialism intertwined, all while sensitive to the region's political, cultural, and religious complexities.

In the more than 330 articles in this fifth volume of the Handbook of Anti-Semitism, over 140 authors examine the parties, associations, government authorities, Church associations, non-governmental organizations, informal groups, institutes, and scientific and social societies in whose programs or practices animosity against Jews played a part. Similarly, this volume also contains descriptions of the organizations and collaborative efforts that have sought to combat anti-Semitism.

The memoir of Charlotte Delbo, a French writer sent to Auschwitz for her resistance activities against the Nazi occupation of France and the Vichy government "Delbo's exquisite and unflinching account of life and death under Nazi atrocity grows fiercer and richer with time."-Sara R. Horowitz, York University Charlotte Delbo's moving memoir of life and death in Auschwitz and the postwar trauma of survivors, Auschwitz and After, is now a classic of Holocaust literature. Offering the rare perspective of a non-Jew, Delbo records moments of horror and of desperate efforts at mutual support, of the everyday deprivation and abuse experienced by everyone in the camps, and especially by children. Auschwitz and After conveys how a survivor must "carry the word" and continue to live after surviving one of the greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century. This second edition includes an updated and expanded introduction by Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer. "No memoir of those times is more sensitive and less sentimental."-Geoffrey Hartman "I find Rosette C. Lamont's remarkable translation of Charlotte Delbo's work perceptive, delicate, and poignant, in short: exceptional."-Elie Wiesel "Delbo's exquisite and unflinching account of life and death under Nazi atrocity grows fiercer and richer with time. The superb new introduction by Lawrence L. Langer illuminates the subtlety and complexity of Delbo's meditation on memory, time, culpability, and survival, in the context of what Langer calls the 'afterdeath' of the Holocaust. Delbo's powerful trilogy belongs on every bookshelf."-Sara R. Horowitz, York University Winner of the 1995 American Literary Translators Association Award

An engrossing saga that adds significantly to the body of Holocaust literature. Abraham H Foxman, National Director, Anti-Defamation League. Abrashe Szabrinski used the Yiddish typewriter given to him by his son Joe to record his unique story of survival and courage during the dark days of WWII. But it was only after his father's death that Joe found out the extent of Abrashe's exploits as a leader of the partisans who fought the Nazis in the forests of Lithuania. An officer in the Polish army, Abrashe fled ghettos and forced labor camps, joined the resistance in Vilna, and became not only a fighter, but also commander of partisan units serving under the Red Army. Alongside well-known figures such as Abba Kovner, he helped blow up bridges, railroad tracks, and munitions convoys, slowing down the Nazi war machine. An outspoken critic of those who headed the Judenrat as well as leaders of ideological movements, Abrashe speaks directly to us. His straightforward, unpretentious style makes his descriptions of heroic deeds his own and others all the more riveting. This remarkable memoir is enhanced with historical notes that help the reader follow Abrashe Szabrinski's journey and learn more about the people he encounters along the way. Like many Holocaust survivors, Abrashe did not divulge the entire story of his survival to his children. Dared to Live is his legacy to them, their children and grandchildren, and to us.