This book offers a unique perspective on contemporary Polish cinema's engagement with histories of Polish violence against their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Moving beyond conventional studies of historical representation on screen, the book considers how cinema reframes the unwanted knowledge of violence in its aftermaths. The book draws on Derridean hauntology, Didi-Huberman's confrontations with art images, Levinasian ethics and anamorphosis to examine cinematic reconfigurations of histories and memories that are vulnerable to evasion and formlessness. Innovative analyses of Birthplace (Lozinski, 1992), It Looks Pretty From a Distance (Sasnal, 2011), Aftermath (Pasikowski, 2012), and Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) explore how their rural filmic landscapes are predicated on the radical exclusion of Jewish neighbours, prompting archaeological processes of exhumation. Arguing that the distressing materiality of decomposition disturbs cinematic composition, the book examines how Poland's aftermath cinema attempts to recompose itself through form and narrative as it faces Polish complicity in Jewish death.

Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis of the Holocaust-perpetrators, victims, and bystanders-it is the last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described by Hilberg as those who were "once a part of this history," bystanders present unique challenges for those seeking to understand the decisions, attitudes, and self-understanding of historical actors who were neither obviously the instigators nor the targets of Nazi crimes. Combining historiographical, conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.

An award-winning teacher takes a journey into alien territory: Austria, Hitler's birthplace, and the territory of her own hatred. A teaching memoir that offers a pedagogy of hope.

"The Oryx Holocaust Sourcebook" provides a comprehensive selection of high quality resources in the field of Holocaust studies. The "Sourcebook's" 17 chapters cover general reference works; narrative histories; monographs in the social sciences; fiction, drama, and poetry; books for children and young adults; periodicals; primary sources; electronic resources in various formats; audiovisual materials; photographs; music; film and video; educational and teaching materials; and information on organizations, museums, and memorials. In addition, each chapter begins with a concise overview essay. The book also includes a preface, and index, and an appendix listing general distributors and vendors of Holocaust materials.

Drawn from a wide array of scholarly disciplines ranging across the humanities and social sciences, the items included in each chapter were selected using the following criteria: (1) current availability for use or purchase; (2) availability in English, unless a non-English item was too significant to exclude; (3) scholarly legitimacy, meaning it is recognized as a work of authentic scholarship that contributes to advancement of knowledge in the field; (4) relationship to topical categories for study of the Holocaust as noted in the Curriculum Guidelines of the Association of Holocaust Organizations, as listed in major bibliographic works, and as used as topics in the contents of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the leading journal in the field; and, (5) in the case of online resources (Internet sites), adherence to standards of scholarly documentation established by learned societies or recognized by reputable scholarly institutions, as well as the display of accurate and credible content about the Holocaust drawn from reputable scholarship.

Covering Western and Eastern Europe, this book looks at the Holocaust on the local level. It compares and contrasts the behaviour and attitude of neighbours in the face of the Holocaust. Topics covered include deportation programmes, relations between Jews and Gentiles, violence against Jews, perceptions of Jewish persecution, and reports of the Holocaust in the Jewish and non-Jewish press.

For five horrifying years in Vilna, the Vilna ghetto, and concentration camps in Estonia, Herman Kruk recorded his own experiences as well as the life and death of the Jewish community of the city symbolically called "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." This unique chronicle includes many recovered pages of Kruk's diaries and provides a powerful eyewitness account of the annihilation of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. This volume includes the Yiddish edition of Kruk's diaries, published in 1961 and translated here for the first time, as well as many widely scattered pages of the chronicles, collected here for the first time and meticulously deciphered, translated, and annotated. Kruk describes vividly the collapse of Poland in September, 1939, life as a refugee in Vilna, the manhunt that destroyed most of Vilna Jewry in the summer of 1941, the creation of a ghetto and the persecution and self-rule of the remnants of the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," the internment of the last survivors in concentration camps in Estonia, and their brutal deaths. Kruk scribbled his final diary entry on September 17, 1944, managing to bury the small, loose pages of his manuscript just hours before he and other camp inmates were shot to death and their bodies burnt on a pyre. Kruk's writings illuminate the tragedy of the Vilna Jews and their courageous efforts to maintain an ideological, social, and cultural life even as their world was being destroyed. To read Kruk's day-by-day account of the unfolding of the Holocaust is to discern the possibilities for human courage and perseverance even in the face of profound fear. Co-published with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

This book explores the subject of genocide through key debates and case studies. It analyses the dynamics of genocide - the processes and mechanisms of acts committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, religious or racial group - in order to shed light upon its origins, characteristics and consequences. Debating Genocide begins with an introduction to the concept of genocide. It then examines the colonial genocides at the end of the 19th- and start of the 20th-centuries; the Armenian Genocide of 1915-16; the Nazi 'Final Solution'; the Nazi genocide of the Gypsies; mass murder in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge; the genocides in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; and the genocide in Sudan in the early 21st century. It also includes a thematic chapter which covers gender and genocide, as well as issues of memory and memorialisation. Finally, the book considers how genocides end, as well as the questions of resolution and denial, with Lisa Pine examining the debates around prediction and prevention and the R2P (Responsibility to Protect) initiative. This book is crucial for any students wanting to understand why genocides have occurred, why they still occur and what the key historical discussions around this subject entail.

In August 1945 Great Britain, France, the USSR, and the United States established a tribunal at Nuremberg to try military and civilian leaders of the Nazi regime. G. M. Gilbert, the prison psychologist, had an unrivaled firsthand opportunity to watch and question the Nazi war criminals. With scientific dispassion he encouraged Goeering, Speer, Hess, Ribbentrop, Frank, Jodl, Keitel, Streicher, and the others to reveal their innermost thoughts. In the process Gilbert exposed what motivated them to create the distorted Aryan utopia and the nightmarish worlds of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald. Here are their day-to-day reactions to the trial proceedings their off-the-record opinions of Hitler, the Third Reich, and each other their views on slave labour, death camps, and the Jews their testimony, feuds, and desperate maneuverings to dissociate themselves from the Third Reich's defeat and Nazi guilt. Dr. Gilbert's thorough knowledge of German, deliberately informal approach, and complete freedom of access at all times to the defendants give his spellbinding, chilling study an intimacy and insight that remains unequaled.

Since the end of World War II, the ongoing efforts aimed at criminal prosecution, restitution, and other forms of justice in the wake of the Holocaust have constituted one of the most significant episodes in the history of human rights and international law. As such, they have attracted sustained attention from historians and legal scholars. This edited collection substantially enlarges the topical and disciplinary scope of this burgeoning field, exploring such varied subjects as literary analysis of Hannah Arendt's work, the restitution case for Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, and the ritualistic aspects of criminal trials.

These essays, written in the course of half a century of research and thought on German and Jewish history, deal with the uniqueness of a phenomenon in its historical and philosophical context. Applying the "classical" empirical tools to this unprecedented historical chapter, Kulka strives to incorporate it into the continuum of Jewish and universal history. At the same time he endeavors to fathom the meaning of the ideologically motivated mass murder and incalculable suffering. The author presents a multifaceted, integrative history, encompassing the German society, its attitudes toward the Jews and toward the anti-Jewish policy of the Nazi regime; as well as the Jewish society, its self-perception and its leadership.

From twins torn away from their family and separated, to a girl shut in a basement, maltreated and malnourished, the world of Jewish children who were hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust becomes painfully clear in this volume. Psychiatrist Bluglass presents interviews with 15 adults who avoided execution in their childhoods thanks to being hidden by Christians, all of whom have since developed remarkably positive lives. All are stable, healthy, intelligent, and share a surprising sense of humor. Together, they show a profound ability to recover and thrive--an unexpected resilience. That their adjustment with such positive outcomes was possible after such harsh childhood experiences challenges a popular perception that inevitable physical and psychological damage ensues such adversity. Their stories offer new optimism, hope and grounds for research that may help traumatized children of today, and of the future, become more resilient. The book's core consists of these remarkable survivors' narratives, told in their own words. Also included are childhood and current pictures of each survivor, a list naming their rescuers (people who hid them), and a detailed bibliography.