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Books > History > European history > From 1900 > Second World War > The Holocaust
'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.
Despite the massive literature on the Holocaust, our understanding
of it has traditionally been influenced by rather unsophisticated
early perspectives and silences. This book summarises and
criticises the existing scholarship on the subject and suggests new
ways by which we can approach its study. It addresses the use of
victim testimony and asks important questions: What function does
recording the past serve for the victim? What do historians want
from it? Are these two perspectives incompatible? The perpetrators
of the Holocaust and the development of the murder process are
closely examined. The book also compares the mentalities of the
killers and the contexts of the killing with those in other acts of
genocide and ethnic cleansing in the first half of the twentieth
century, searching for an explanation within these comparisons. In
addition, it looks at the bystanders to the Holocaust - considering
the complexity and ambiguity at the heart of contemporary
responses, especially within the western liberal democracies.
Ultimately, this text highlights the essential need to place the
Holocaust in the broadest possible context, emphasising the
importance of producing high quality but sensitive scholarship in
its study. -- .
Final Solutions offers a ground-breaking and genuinely unique
analysis of modern genocide. Sabby Sagall draws on the insights of
the Frankfurt school and Wilhelm Reich to create an innovative
combination of Marxism and psychoanalysis. He argues that genocide
is a product of an "irrational" destructiveness by social classes
or communities that have suffered major historical defeats or
similar forms of extreme stress. Sagall shows how the denial of
human needs and the ensuing feelings of isolation and powerlessness
propel groups to project their impotent rage, hatred and
destructiveness engendered by these defeats on to the "outsider"
and the "other."The book applies this theoretical framework to four
modern genocides - that of the Native Americans, the Armenians, the
Jews and the Rwandan Tutsis. This is a truly pioneering
contribution which adds to our understanding of some of the darkest
hours of humanity - and how we can stop them from happening again.
When Hitler assumed power in 1933, he and other Nazis had firm
ideas on what they called a racially pure "community of the
people." They quickly took steps against those whom they wanted to
isolate, deport, or destroy. In these essays informed by the latest
research, leading scholars offer rich histories of the people
branded as "social outsiders" in Nazi Germany: Communists, Jews,
"Gypsies," foreign workers, prostitutes, criminals, homosexuals,
and the homeless, unemployed, and chronically ill. Although many
works have concentrated exclusively on the relationship between
Jews and the Third Reich, this collection also includes
often-overlooked victims of Nazism while reintegrating the
Holocaust into its wider social context.
The Nazis knew what attitudes and values they shared with many
other Germans, and most of their targets were individuals and
groups long regarded as outsiders, nuisances, or "problem cases."
The identification, the treatment, and even the pace of their
persecution of political opponents and social outsiders illustrated
that the Nazis attuned their law-and-order policies to German
society, history, and traditions. Hitler's personal convictions,
Nazi ideology, and what he deemed to be the wishes and hopes of
many people, came together in deciding where it would be
politically most advantageous to begin.
The first essay explores the political strategies used by the
Third Reich to gain support for its ideologies and programs, and
each following essay concentrates on one group of outsiders.
Together the contributions debate the motivations behind the
purges. For example, was the persecution of Jews the direct result
of intense, widespread anti-Semitism, or was it part of a more
encompassing and arbitrary persecution of "unwanted populations"
that intensified with the war? The collection overall offers a
nuanced portrayal of German citizens, showing that many supported
the Third Reich while some tried to resist, and that the war
radicalized social thinking on nearly everyone's part.
In addition to the editors, the contributors are Frank Bajohr,
Omer Bartov, Doris L. Bergen, Richard J. Evans, Henry Friedlander,
Geoffrey J. Giles, Marion A. Kaplan, Sybil H. Milton, Alan E.
Steinweis, Annette F. Timm, and Nikolaus Wachsmann.
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Augustow Memorial Book
(Hardcover)
Molly Karp; Edited by Y Aleksandroni; Cover design or artwork by Rachel Kolokoff Kolokoff Hopper
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R1,827
R1,472
Discovery Miles 14 720
Save R355 (19%)
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Most accounts of the Holocaust focus on trainloads of prisoners
speeding toward Auschwitz, with its chimneys belching smoke and
flames, in the summer of 1944. This book provides a hitherto untold
chapter of the Holocaust by exploring a prequel to the gas
chambers: the face-to-face mass murder of Jews in Galicia by
bullets. The summer of 1941 ushered in a chain of events that had
no precedent in the rapidly unfolding history of World War II and
the Holocaust. In six weeks, more than twenty thousand Hungarian
Jews were forcefully deported to Galicia and summarily executed. In
exploring the fate of these Hungarian Jews and their local
coreligionists, A Summer of Mass Murder transcends conventional
history by introducing a multitude of layers of politics, culture,
and, above all, psychology-for both the victims and the
executioners. The narrative presents an uncharted territory in
Holocaust scholarship with extensive archival research, interviews,
and corresponding literature across countries and languages,
incorporating many previously unexplored documents and testimonies.
Eisen reflects upon the voices of the victims, the images of the
perpetrators, whose motivation for murder remains inexplicable. In
addition, the author incorporates the long-forgotten testimonies of
bystander contemporaries, who unwittingly became part of the
unfolding nightmare and recorded the horror in simple words. This
book also serves as a personal journey of discovery. Among the
twenty thousand people killed was the tale of two brothers, the
author's uncles. In retracing their final fate and how they were
swept up in the looming genocide, A Summer of Mass Murder also
gives voice to their story.
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Dachau
(Paperback)
Jim Wickham
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R707
R616
Discovery Miles 6 160
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One of Booklist's Must Read Nonfiction picks of 2019 The acclaimed
author of A Replacement Life shifts between heartbreak and humor in
this gorgeously told, recipe-filled memoir. A family story, an
immigrant story, a love story, and an epic meal, Savage Feast
explores the challenges of navigating two cultures from an unusual
angle. A revealing personal story and family memoir told through
meals and recipes, Savage Feast begins with Boris's childhood in
Soviet Belarus, where good food was often worth more than money. He
describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and
how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with
bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. She was the stove
magician and Boris' grandfather the master black marketer who
supplied her, evading at least one firing squad on the way. These
spoils kept Boris' family-Jews who lived under threat of
discrimination and violence-provided-for and protected. Despite its
abundance, food becomes even more important in America, which
Boris' family reaches after an emigration through Vienna and Rome
filled with marvel, despair, and bratwurst. How to remain connected
to one's roots while shedding their trauma? The ambrosial cooking
of Oksana, Boris's grandfather's Ukrainian home aide, begins to
show him the way. His quest takes him to a farm in the Hudson River
Valley, the kitchen of a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side,
a Native American reservation in South Dakota, and back to Oksana's
kitchen in Brooklyn. His relationships with women-troubled, he
realizes, for reasons that go back many generations-unfold
concurrently, finally bringing him, after many misadventures, to an
American soulmate. Savage Feast is Boris' tribute to food, that
secret passage to an intimate conversation about identity,
belonging, family, displacement, and love.
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