In March 2010, twenty-seven Britons who took matters into their own hands to protect Jews from the Nazis during one of the darkest times in human history were formally recognised as 'Heroes of the Holocaust' by the British Government. The silver medal, inscribed with the words 'In the Service of Humanity', was created to acknowledge those 'whose selfless actions preserved life in the face of persecution'. Gordon Brown described the medal's recipients, who risked their lives to save those of Jewish friends, or complete strangers, as, 'true British heroes and a source of national pride for all of us. They were shining beacons of hope in the midst of terrible evil because they were prepared to take a stand against prejudice, hatred and intolerance.' Some, like Frank Foley, a British spy whose cover was working at the British embassy in Berlin, took huge risks issuing forged visas to enable around 10,000 Jews to escape Germany before the outbreak of World War 2. Others, like the ten British POWs who hid and cared for Hannah Sarah Rigler as she escaped from a death march, showed great humanity in the face of horrendous cruelty and suffering. All the recipients of the award were ordinary people, acting on no one's authority but their own, who found they could not stand idly by in the face of this great evil. Heroes of the Holocaust collects for the first time the remarkable stories of the recipients of the medal. Written by acclaimed Holocaust historian Lyn Smith, it is a moving testament to the bravery of those whose inspiring actions stand out in stark relief at a time of such horror.

This volume is a brief history of the Jewish community of Volodymyr-Volynsky, going back to its first historical mentions. It explores Jewish settlement in the city, the kahal, and the role of the community in the Vaad Arba Aratsot, and profiles several important historical figures, including Shelomoh of Karlin and Khane-Rokhl Werbermacher (the Maiden of Ludmir). It also considers the city's synagogues and Jewish cemetery, and explores the twentieth-century history of the community, especially during the Holocaust. Drawing on survivor eyewitness testimonies, the author pays tribute to the town's Righteous among the Nations and describes efforts to preserve the memory of its Jewish community, including the creation of the Piatydni memorial, and lists prominent Jews born in Volodymyr-Volynsky and natives of the city living abroad. This book will be of interest to historians of the Jewish communities and the Holocaust in Ukraine, as well as to the general reader.

When Louis Hagen returned to Berlin immediately after the war, having survived not only incarceration and torture in a German concentration camp but also the Battle of Arnhem, it was through a desire to see the great German eagle toppled, its talons drawn. The son of a wealthy Jewish banker, he had seen his family flee their home, and many of his relatives had died at the hands of the Third Reich. He wanted to understand the German people; why had so many welcomed the Nazi Party, and were they now humbled and wiser? Hagen interviewed nine people he had known before the war who represented a wide spectrum of German society. They were an SA officer, a businessman, a doctor, a socialite, a journalist, a professional soldier, an SS wife, a member of the Hitler Youth and a mischling, or half Jew. Four were Nazis, three were collaborators, and two were anti-Nazi. The very fact that none of these people was a high-ranking Nazi official or a survivor of the Holocaust provides an insight into the Third Reich that is a revelation even for those who know this period of history intimately. How could the Baroness sent to Theriesenstadt concentration camp hold salons for ex-Nazis after the war? Through the lives of nine ordinary Germans, tracing their experiences of Nazism from the first hopeful days until the horrors of the Russian occupation of Berlin, Louis Hagen provides a salutary and unforgettable record of the German people in the shadow of the swastika.

Haunted Images takes a close look at a range of treatments of the Holocaust in film, using sustained textual analysis to radically rethink film as a witness to history. Questioning the legitimacy of persistent claims that the Holocaust remains 'unrepresentable', this volume seeks to redefine the singular challenges this event presents to filmmakers, suggesting that filmic representations address the Holocaust as much through what they leave unseen -- through silences and ellipses -- as through what they visualise directly. Discussing films such as "Kapo" (1960), "Shoah" (1985) and "Histoire(s) du cin?ma" (1997), this important new study provides a compelling reading of how European cinema has responded to the particular problems that the Holocaust presents to filmmakers, and suggests compelling fresh insights into the relationship between visual art, cultural trauma and the power of the image.

Der erste Band LAnder und Regionen enthAlt Artikel zur Judenfeindschaft in85 LAndern und Regionen. Die BeitrAge sind von hervorragenden Kennern der Thematik in der jeweiligen Region verfasst. Alle BeitrAge stellen sowohl die historische Entwicklung jA1/4dischen Lebens wie aktuelle AusprAgungen von Judenfeindschaft dar. Behandelt werden alle wichtigen Staaten, auAerdem historische RAume a " wie Bessarabien, Bukowina, Transnistrien. Der Band bietet eine Topographie des Antisemitismus in Geschichte und Gegenwart.

Appreciating the power of language, and how discriminatory words can have deadly consequences, is pivotal to our understanding of the Holocaust. Engaging with a wealth of primary sources and significant Holocaust scholarship, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust traces the historical tradition of anti-Semitism to explore this in detail. From religious anti-Semitism in ancient Rome to racially-led anti-Semites focused on building superior nation-states in 19th-century Europe to Hitler's vitriolic attacks, Griech-Polelle analyzes how tropes and stereotypes incited suspicion, dislike and hatred of the Jews - and, ultimately, how this was used to drive anti-Semitic feeling toward genocide. Crucially, this 2nd edition sheds further light on the everyday experience of ordinary Germans and Jews under the Nazi regime, with new chapters examining the role of the Christian Churches in Hitler's persecution of the Jews and those who participated in rescue work and resistance more broadly. With new illustrations, a detailed glossary and up-to-date further reading suggestions and questions, this 2nd edition provides a concise and lucid survey of European Jewry, the Holocaust, and the language of anti-Semitism.

This study investigates the function of the radio play as cultural medium of memory, based on the memories of the holocaust found in the radio plays of the GDR. In comparison to the presentation of the holocaust in other media, which has already been explored various times, here for the first time the focus is on the specific aesthetic means of the radio play and the role of radio as political instrument of power in the FRG-GDR conflict. Extracts from the analyzed radio plays are included in the enclosed audio CD.

The recognized cultural historian and researcher of the Middle Ages relates about the gruesome year of 1944 in Hungary, as she has seen the events with the eyes of a small Jewish girl. The memoir describes life in Budapest and in Komarom, in the Hungarian countryside, in the preceding years before March 1944 when the German army marched in, and what happened thereafter. "It is not true that you can no longer write anything new about the Holocaust. All you need is an excellent memory, restraint, irony hidden among the lines, and know-how. The bulk of Marianna D. Birnbaum's book is about her relatives, her childhood friends and their parents who have not returned. She attached photos of several of them; here and there the author too appears as a small child. Well-to-do adults, nicely dressed children: They ought to have lived out their days in peace. With a vision pointing toward the grotesque and using experience honed on literary criticism, the author avoids provoking our tears. That makes this book beautiful and true." (G. Spiro)

Nathan is a young, impressionable boy who is saved from the Nazis by Catholic gentiles in his homeland, Holland. But in order to survive he must learn to be a good Catholic and undergo baptism. From there it is only a small leap to begin his studies in the Catholic priesthood. By the time he is fifteen, Nathan learns of his parent's conversion to Catholicism. While studying to be a priest, Nathan confronts a notorious Jew-hating priest and realises that he cannot represent a religion nurtured from the seeds of anti-Semitism. After his father's death he leaves the Catholic boarding school to fulfil his army duty and then begins the study of law. Becoming a member of the Dutch Zionist Students Union helps Nathan further identify with his Jewish roots, and he decides to return to the Jewish tradition. He marries a Jewish woman, but the traumas he has undergone begin to insidiously destroy his ability to love and be loved. When he immigrates to Israel with his wife he makes a momentous decision: he will take on the obligations and practices of an Orthodox Jew. This is a true story of one man's heroic battle for physical survival in the face of Nazi persecution and his never-ending spiritual battle to recapture his soul.

Emil Fackenheim's life work was to call upon the world at large - and on philosophers, Christians, Jews, and Germans in particular - to confront the Holocaust as an unprecedented assault on the Jewish people, Judaism, and all humanity. In this memoir, to which he was making final revisions at the time of his death, Fackenheim looks back on his life, at the profound and painful circumstances that shaped him as a philosopher and a committed Jewish thinker. Interned for three months in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp after Kristallnacht, Fackenheim was released and escaped to Scotland and then to Canada, where he lived in a refugee internment camp before eventually becoming a congregational rabbi and then, for thirty-five years, a professor of philosophy. He recalls here what it meant to be a German Jew in North America, the desperate need to respond to the crisis in Europe and to cope with its overwhelming implications for Jewish identity and community. His second great turning point came in 1967, as he saw Jews threatened with another Holocaust, this time in Israel. This crisis led him on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and ultimately back to Germany, where he continued to grapple with the question, How can the Jewish faith - and the Christian faith - exist after the Holocaust?

Ruth Klein's story is about merchants and landowners-aristocratic Polish Jews. It's about their lives in refugee and concentration camps. About parents who survived the Holocaust but could not overcome the tragedy they had experienced, and about their children, who became indirect victims of the atrocities endured by Holocaust victims. After their liberation, Ruth's parents were brought to the Displaced Person Camps in Germany, where they awaited departure to the United States. They were traumatized, starving, and impoverished-but they were among the survivors. Once in America, however, their struggles didn't end. Nearly penniless, Ruth's family-and the close-knit group of Polish refugees they belonged to-were placed for settlement in Los Angeles, where they lived in poverty only a few miles away from the wealth and glamor of Hollywood and Beverly Hills in the early 1950s. Ruth tells how, time after time, her parents had their dreams broken, only to rebuild them again. She also shares what it was like to grow up with parents who were permanently damaged by the effects of the war. Theirs was a dysfunctional household; her parents found great joy and delight moving through life's experiences in their new country, yet tumult and discord colored their world as well. As a young girl, Ruth developed a passionate relationship with the piano, which allowed her to express a wide range of feelings through her music-and survive the chaos at home. Full of both humor and unfathomable tragedy, Surviving the Survivors is Ruth's story of growing up in an environment unique in time and place, and of how, ultimately, her upbringing gave her a keen appreciation for the value of life and made her, like her parents, a survivor.

In 1939, in the shadow of Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia, six-year-old Milena Roth was sent away from her home and her loving parents and taken to safety by what came to be know as the Kindertransport, which rescued ten thousand Jewish children from the Holocaust and placed them with guardians in England. When she boarded the train in Prague, expecting to be reunited soon with her parents, Milena was aware of the danger and terror that surrounded her: "I knew I would die if I didn't go." At the end of her long journey she found a xenophobic, racist society, "an anti-Semitic country in an anti-Semitic world." Milena settled into the household of her mother's English friend from the Girl Guides, who had agreed to take Milena in and who planned to bring her parents to England as well. She spent six uncertain years waiting for her parents and enduring her foster mother's complex ambivalence. Milena learned only after the war that her parents were deported from Czechoslovakia in July 1943 and died at Auschwitz. Whatever the faults of Milena's guardian, she had been genuinely fond of Milena's mother and preserved her old friend's letters. These she gave to Milena, and they form the heart of this book. The first letter dates from 1930; the last, written less than a year before Milena's parents were captured and murdered, is heavy with "an air of despairing farewell," an understanding that escape was no longer possible. As an adult, Milena Roth spent many years piecing together the fate of her family and making sense of her life. In this book, drawing on her mother's poignant letters and on her own memories and experiences, she recounts the challenges of integrating, in adulthood, the wounds and bereavements of childhood and of "regaining the confidence of my place in the universe that had been lost."

a oeWide-screen booka or a oeNight of the Nightsa ? The verdict of German literary critics was already oscillating between these two extremes in 1978. This controversy, which was ignited by Hilsenratha (TM)s first work Nacht (a oeNighta ) and was specific to Germany compared with the international reception of his work, runs throughout his writing. This study traces the history of the reception of his novels, i.e. the readings revealed by arts pages, literary studies and general readers, and analyses how they function.

The study examines literary and filmic works on the subject of the Shoah, principally from the French-speaking world. Memory, space and time are the main categories used in the comparative interpretation of the works. By comparing the narrative processes through a systematic analysis of the spatial and temporal structures in film and literature, a differentiation and definition is achieved of the types of space. The study provides a compressed account of the various interacting factors within the process of memory.

Naomi Kramer and Ronald Headland approach the universal issues that inevitably arise in discussing the Holocaust - evil, courage, human dignity, moral responsibility and the existential qualities of humankind - through individual experience. Consisting of two main parts, the book explores one individual's experience during the Shoah and the historical context in which these experiences occurred. It includes a comprehensive historical summary of the Shoah and represents a succinct synopsis of existing secondary literature and primary sources. A bibliography and extensive glossary of terms relating to both Jewish life and the Shoah are included.

Translated into English for the first time, this book is a personal story of a teenage boy in the concentration camps of the Holocaust. Israel Rosengarten writes with no historical pretension beyond the insight his own experience provides about everyday life and the horrors of the camps.

His memoir begins with his deportation in 1942 to the Belgium concentration camp of Breendonk at the age of sixteen and follows his movements through a series of camps until 1945. The book concludes with the Auschwitz death march and the author's return to Belgium, only to discover that he was the lone survivor of a family of seven.

Rosengarten survived his 1,000 days of incarceration through incredible coincidences, miracles, and by his fierce struggle to emerge from this atrocious nightmare.