The extraordinary experiences of ordinary people-their suffering and their unimaginable bravery-are the subject of Judy Glickman Lauder's remarkable photographs. Beyond the Shadows responds to the world's looking the other way as the Nazis took power and their hate-fueled nationalism steadily turned to mass murder. In the context of the horror of the Holocaust, it also tells the uplifting story of how the citizens and leadership of Denmark, under occupation and at tremendous risk to themselves, defied the Third Reich to transport the country's Jews to safety in Sweden. Over the past thirty years, Glickman Lauder has captured the intensity of death camps in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, in dark and expressive photographs, telling of a world turned upside down, and, in contrast, the redemptive and uplifting story of the "Danish exception." Including texts by Holocaust scholars Michael Berenbaum and Judith S. Goldstein, and a previously unpublished original text by survivor Elie Wiesel, Beyond the Shadows demonstrates passionately what hate can lead to, and what can be done to stand in its path. "This is photography and storytelling for our times, about what hate leads to, and how we can stand up to it. Beyond the Shadows is powerful and revealing, and sharply relevant to all of us who believe in the human family." - Sir Elton John

The story of American Jewry is inextricably entwined with the awesome defeat of the Holocaust and the rebirth of the state of Israel. However, for Michael Berenbaum, and others of his generation, whose adult consciousness included the war in Lebanon and the Palestinian Uprisings, the tale is more anguished, for the Jewish People are now divided, uncertain about the implications of the past and the direction of their future. Berenbaum explores the Jewish identity of this generation, the first to mature after tragedy and triumph. He probes the Holocaust's impact on Jewish consciousness and the imprint of American culture on Jewish identity. Challenging Zionism's conventional assumptions, he details American Jews' changing relationship to Israel as he examines the tensions created within Jewish tradition between a history of victimization and the empowerment of Jews. While demonstrating that the security of victory is one step from the anguish of victims, even when the victors have recently emerged from the fire, Berenbaum holds out the hope of liberation for Judaism, maintaining that five thousand years of history, with its chapter of Holocaust and empowerment, provide a unique foundation upon which to build a future. Michael Berenbaum is Hymen Goldman Professor of Theology at Georgetown University and Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Vision of the Void: Theological Reflections on the Works of Elie Wiesel and The Holocaust: Religious and Political Implications (with John Roth).

Love at first sight. During the Holocaust. Bonds as strong as steel, forged in the flames of hate. These are extraordinary stories of love affairs during the most dangerous, degrading, and deadly conditions of genocidal persecution. The extreme lengths to which two people will go to express their love, and the superhuman strength that is derived from such love, is the stuff of miracles and endless inspiration. This little-known aspect of the Holocaust, seen through the eyes of those in love, is a unique contribution to our understanding of the best and the worst qualities of human nature. This book must be read by anyone who wants to know more about life and love enduring the most horrendous conditions one could imagine.

The story of American Jewry is inextricably entwined with the awesome defeat of the Holocaust and the rebirth of the state of Israel. However, for Michael Berenbaum, and others of his generation, whose adult consciousness included the war in Lebanon and the Palestinian Uprisings, the tale is more anguished, for the Jewish People are now divided, uncertain about the implications of the past and the direction of their future. Berenbaum explores the Jewish identity of this generation, the first to mature after tragedy and triumph. He probes the Holocaust's impact on Jewish consciousness and the imprint of American culture on Jewish identity. Challenging Zionism's conventional assumptions, he details American Jews' changing relationship to Israel as he examines the tensions created within Jewish tradition between a history of victimization and the empowerment of Jews. While demonstrating that the security of victory is one step from the anguish of victims, even when the victors have recently emerged from the fire, Berenbaum holds out the hope of liberation for Judaism, maintaining that five thousand years of history, with its chapter of Holocaust and empowerment, provide a unique foundation upon which to build a future. Michael Berenbaum is Hymen Goldman Professor of Theology at Georgetown University and Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Vision of the Void: Theological Reflections on the Works of Elie Wiesel and The Holocaust: Religious and Political Implications (with John Roth).

Today e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter are sometimes used to spread hateful messages and slurs masking as humor. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries postcards served this purpose. The images collected in this volume make it painfully clear that anti-Semitic propaganda did not simply begin with the Nazis. Nor was it the sole province of politicians, journalists, and rabble-rousers. One of the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism during this time was spread by quite ordinary people through postcards. Of the millions of postcards exchanged during their heyday of 1890 through 1920, a considerable percentage carried the anti-Semitic images that publishers churned out to meet public demand, reflecting deep-seated attitudes of society.

Over 250 examples of such postcards, largely from the pre-Holocaust era, are reproduced here for the first time--selected, translated, and historically contextualized by one of the world's foremost postcard collectors. Although representing but a small sample of the many thousands that were in print, these examples nonetheless offer a disturbing glimpse--one shocking to the modern sensibility--into the many permutations of anti-Semitism eagerly circulated by millions of people. In so doing, they help us to better understand a phenomenon still pervasive today.

Twenty years since its first publication, this new anniversary edition of the Holocaust memoir of George Salton (then Lucjan Salzman), gives readers a personal and powerful account of his survival through one of the darkest periods in human history. With heartbreaking and honest reflection, the author shares a gripping first-person narrative of his transformation from a Jewish eleven-year-old boy living happily in Tyczyn, Poland with his brother and parents, to his experiences as a teenage victim of growing persecution, brutality and imprisonment as the Nazis pursued the Final Solution. The author takes the reader back in time as he reveals in vivid and engrossing details the painful memories of life in his childhood town during Nazi occupation, the forced march before his jeering and cold-eyed former friends and neighbors as they are driven from their homes into the crowded and terrible conditions in the Rzeszow ghetto, and the heart-wrenching memory of his final farewell as he is separated from his parents who would be sent in boxcars to the Belzec extermination camp. Alone at age 14, George begins a three-year horror filled odyssey as part of a Daimler-Benz slave labor group that will take him through ten concentration camps in Poland, Germany, and France. In Plaszow he digs up graves with his bare hands, in Flossenburg he labors in a stone quarry and in France he works as a prisoner in a secret tunnel the Nazis have converted into an armaments factory. In every concentration camp including Sachsenhausen, Braunschweig, Ravensbruck and others, George recounts the agonizing and excruciating details of what it was like to barely survive the rollcalls, selections, beatings, hunger, and despair he both endured and witnessed. Of the 465 Jewish prisoners with him in the labor group in the Rzeszow ghetto in 1942, less than fifty were alive three years later when the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division liberated the Wobbelin concentration camp on the afternoon of May 2, 1945. George recalls not only the painful details of his survival, but also the tales of his fellow prisoners, a small group who became more than friends as they shared their meager rations, their fragile strength, and their waning hope. The memoir moves us as we behold the life sustaining powers of friendship among this band of young prisoners. With gratitude for his courageous liberators, Salton expresses his powerful emotions as he acknowledges his miraculous freedom: "I felt something stir deep within my soul. It was my true self, the one who had stayed deep within and had not forgotten how to love and how to cry, the one who had chosen life and was still standing when the last roll call ended."

The haunting true stories of over 350 Holocaust survivors in their own words. In the shouted words of a woman bound for Auschwitz to a man about to escape from a cattle car, "If you get out, maybe you can tell the story! Who else will tell it?" Our Crime Was Being Jewish contains 576 vivid memories of 358 Holocaust survivors. These are the true, insider stories of victims, told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents and siblings sent to the gas chambers; of starving children beaten for trying to steal a morsel of food; of people who saw their friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured. The recollections are from the start of the war-the home invasions, the Gestapo busts, and the ghettos-as well as the daily hell of the concentration camps and what actually happened inside. Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and this hefty collection of stories told by its survivors is one of the most important books of our time. It was compiled by award-winning author Anthony S. Pitch, who worked with sources such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to get survivors' stories compiled together and to supplement them with images from the war. These memories must be told and held onto so what happened is documented; so the lives of those who perished are not forgotten-so history does not repeat itself.

"This learned volume is about as chilling as historiography gets." Walter Laqueur, The New Republic

..". a one-volume study of Auschwitz without peer in Holocaust literature." Kirkus Reviews

..". a comprehensive portrait of the largest and most lethal of the Nazi death camps... serves as a vital contribution to Holocaust studies and a bulwark against forgetting." Publishers Weekly

More than a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, of whom 90 percent were Jews. Here leading scholars from around the world provide the first comprehensive account of what took place at Auschwitz."

Opened in April 1993, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., summons all who enter its portals to rise to an important and extraordinary challenge: to remember and immortalize the 6 million Jews and millions of other Nazi victims of World War II - Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, the handicapped, Jehovah's Witnesses, political and religious dissidents, Soviet prisoners of war - who were murdered in the most horrifying event of our time: the Holocaust. The World Must Know depicts the evolution of the Holocaust comprehensively, as it is presented in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - the living memorial to the victims of the Holocaust that tells a story the world must know in the most moving and powerful visual and verbal way. Drawing on the museum's artifacts and its extensive eyewitness testimony collection, the second largest in the world, and including over 200 photographic images from the museum's collections, The World Must Know details the four major historical participants: the perpetrator, the bystander, the rescuer, and, above all, the victim. The World Must Know journeys back to a time when Jewish culture thrived in Europe, to family Shabbat dinners and joyous Passover celebrations where the lighting of the candles was done before unshuttered windows, and proceeds to that point when the most unspeakable evil in history began, and then bears witness to the most horrifying shattering of innocent lives. Starting with the rise of nazism, The World Must Know reveals the human stories of the Holocaust, documenting the range of psychological extremes from the evil of the Nazi doctors whostaffed the death camps and determined "who shall live and who shall die", to the nobility of ordinary citizens, like those in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, who risked their own lives by offering their homes as havens to refugee Jews, to the horror of entire families as they received sudden orders to pack up only what they could carry, leave their homes, and report to a train station for "resettlement in the East", a euphemism for deportation to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and other death or concentration camps. The powerful and evocative images in The World Must Know tell the stories of hope and death - the grim reality of the ghettos, the mass murders of the mobile killing units, the concentration camps, and the death camps, as well as the brave and heart-wrenching stories of resistance and rescue, through which we see the human necessity for - and the ultimate power of - personal choice. More than a catalogue of the museum's exhibit, The World Must Know is a study and exploration of the Holocaust that fulfills the commandment from those who perished, which seared the souls of those who survived: Remember. Do not let the world forget. This is a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of the Holocaust that will not only memorialize the past by educating the generations that follow but also transform the future by sensitizing those who will shape it. That is the challenge to, and the responsibility of, all survivors everywhere.

Based on years of archival research, 'The Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto' is the most detailed study ever undertaken into the fate of more than 800 Jewish doctors who devoted themselves, in many cases until the day they died, to the care of the sick and the dying in the Ghetto. The functioning of the Ghetto hospitals, clinics and laboratories is explained in fascinating detail. Readers will learn about the ground-breaking research undertaken in the Ghetto as well as about the underground medical university that prepared hundreds of students for a career in medicine; a career that, in most cases, was to be cut brutally short within weeks of them completing their first year of studies.

Gauleiters Robert Wagner and Joseph Buerckel, the German administrative heads of the States of Baden and the Pfalz/Saar, sought to be the first to make their territories Judenrein (free of Jews). They engineered a massive westward expulsion of over 6,500 Jews to Camp de Gurs, located in unoccupied Vichy France. The event became known as the Wagner-Buerckel Aktion and was offered by the Gauleiters as their gift to the Fuehrer in October 1940. The relocation of Jews to the Gurs internment camp became an intermediate step when the infamous ?Final Solution? was pronounced at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. This Nazi annihilation program triggered yet a second round of transports that would move the incarcerated Jews from Gurs to the Parisian suburb of Drancy, an assembly point where the victims faced a final deportation to the death camp of Auschwitz. The story of this little known tragedy is told by the author who delves into the background of the historical events that led to the Aktion. He recounts the impact of this cataclysm on the area surrounding his boyhood residence in Germany and relates the tribulations and ultimate fate encountered by nearly seven-hundred members of his widely located family in the State of Baden.

Based on years of archival research, 'The Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto' is the most detailed study ever undertaken into the fate of more than 800 Jewish doctors who devoted themselves, in many cases until the day they died, to the care of the sick and the dying in the Ghetto. The functioning of the Ghetto hospitals, clinics and laboratories is explained in fascinating detail. Readers will learn about the ground-breaking research undertaken in the Ghetto as well as about the underground medical university that prepared hundreds of students for a career in medicine; a career that, in most cases, was to be cut brutally short within weeks of them completing their first year of studies.

"A huge and hugely significant collection of much of the best Holocaust scholarship to appear in the last half-century." Kirkus Reviews

..". magnificent... surely among the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum s] greatest achievements to date.... The range of the essays is nothing short of breathtaking." Jerusalem Post

Fifty-four chapters by the world s most eminent Holocaust researchers probe topics such as Nazi politics, racial ideology, leadership, and bureaucracy; the phases of the Holocaust from definition to expropriation, ghettoization, deportation, and the death camps; Jewish leadership and resistance; the role of the Allies, the Axis, and neutral countries; the deeds of the rescuers; and the impact of the Holocaust on survivors."

Love at first sight. During the Holocaust. Bonds as strong as steel, forged in the flames of hate. These are extraordinary stories of love affairs during the most dangerous, degrading, and deadly conditions of genocidal persecution. The extreme lengths to which two people will go to express their love, and the superhuman strength that is derived from such love, is the stuff of miracles and endless inspiration. This little-known aspect of the Holocaust, seen through the eyes of those in love, is a unique contribution to our understanding of the best and the worst qualities of human nature. This book must be read by anyone who wants to know more about life and love enduring the most horrendous conditions one could imagine.

This Conference Volume contains new and original research by genocide and holocaust scholars and commemorates a series of significant anniversaries, as well: 100 years since the beginning of the Armenian Genocide; 80 years since the Barmen Declaration; 75 years since the beginning of World War II; 70 years since the uprising at Auschwitz. Other topics under discussion include: Holocaust Education for Future Generations, Personal Experiences, as well as New Forms of antisemitism. Founded by Franklin H. Littell and Hubert G. Locke in 1970, The Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches provides an invaluable forum for scholars to report the latest findings in Holocaust research, ensuring the lessons of the Holocaust remain relevant for today's world. As the first Conference bringing together Christian and Jewish scholars to examine the lessons of the Holocaust and its message for contemporary society forty-four years ago, the ASC is the oldest continuing conference of its kind in North America and remains the only one to include discussions of the role and responsibilities of the Churches, the Universities, the large Corporations and the Professions (medicine, law and media). The continuing goal of the ASC is to aspire to the continuum of respecting the past, with a realistic involvement of the present, in order that we preserve a future that retains the dignity and integrity of every human person. Table of Contents Acknowledgements In Memorium Elisabeth M. Maxwell: Marcia Sachs Littell Introduction: Michael Berenbaum Part I: The Armenian Experience: 100 Years Later Richard H. Dekmejian Pioneers of Risk Assessment: The Armenian Genocide, Jewish Holocaust & Early Warning Systems Rubina Peroomian The Symbiotic Relationships between Turks and Armenians: A Macabre Outcome Obstructing Healing and Reconciliation Sona Haroutyunian Kaleidoscopic History: Translation and Representation of the Armenian Genocide in Literature and Film Part II: Past or Future? Richard L. Rubenstein The Armenian Genocide as Jihad David Patterson From Hitler to Jihadist Jew Hatred: Influences and Parallels Shimon Samuels The Abuse of Memory as a Fig Leaf for Hate: Why Have the Lessons of the Holocaust not Contained Contemporary Anti-Semitism? Part III: The Event Karen Franklin Against the Odds: American Jews & the Rescue of Europe's Refugees, 1933-1941; Researching the Mayer Lehman Charity Fund Yitzchak Kerem The Role of Greek Jews in the Sonderkommando Revolt in Birkenau Gideon Greif 70 Years After: The Contribution of the Sonderkommando Research to the Understanding and Interpretation of the "Final solution" in Auschwitz-Birkenau Diane Plotkin Medics and Survivors: Emergency Care Administered by the Liberators Part IV: The Aftermath Harold Marcuse The Origin and Reception of Martin Niemoller's quotation, "First they came for the communists " Joan Peterson Against Forgetting: Another Look at Heinrich Boll's Billiards at Half-Past Nine Harriet Tamen Business as Usual: SCNF, Money and Morality Part V: Personal Experiences and Education Mehnaz Afridi Acknowledging the 'Other' in Suffering: Reconciliation in Jewish-Muslim relations? Harriet Sepinwall Holocaust Education for Future Generations: The Role of a Catholic University Sarah Valente The Emergence of Holocaust Memoirs and the Future of Holocaust Education in Brazil Ludmilla Leibman A Course on "The Holocaust and Music" at Boston University Contributors Index"

Religion and Politics in France and the United States compares the current status and views of Jews, Christians, and Muslims regarding political life in two states. Longstanding traditions of laicite and of constitutional law frame discussions of political speech, voting patterns, and attempts to deal with demographic and cultural shifts characteristic of French and American societies. Papers by leading scholars demonstrate the ways that historical experience sheds light on current events; how it is, for example, that previous efforts to deal with religious difference affect current approaches to the display of religious symbols in state schools, or how the struggles of minority groups for recognition affect voting patterns. One question running throughout the volume is, what can French and American policymakers and citizens learn from one another, as they seek to deal with the challenges presented by contemporary life? This book is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.

As a ten-year-old child, Leon Rubinstein fled Germany with his parents in 1933 to Luxembourg and then Belgium, which they fled again on the morning of the Nazi invasion. They dwelt quietly as refugees in the south of France until the Vichy government began its roundup of foreign Jews for deportation. After his father's arrest, Leon endeavors to save himself and his mother with a daring journey to the border towns of southeastern France. Among their encounters, they hitch a ride with German SS officers, while disguising their identities. Their arduous journey leads them to Switzerland, where the memoir provides a rare look at the lives of Jewish refugees in the Swiss work camps. Throughout this deeply felt story is Rubinstein's awareness of his transformation from adolescence to young manhood amid the catastrophic losses and dislocations of the war years in Europe. His personal story resonates with anyone who remembers discovering love, as well as the necessity of choices and sacrifices.

Murder Most Merciful is a collection of insightful essays that consider Sigi Ziering's play, The Judgment of Herbert Bierhoff. In the play, Ziering tells the story of a loving father and his decision during the Holocaust to take the life of his beloved daughter to avoid her deportation. Scholars who have thought long and hard about the ethical implications of the Holocaust continue to grapple with the poignant questions Ziering raised. Commentary from the book's diverse contributors, including Holocaust survivors, scholars, rabbis, philosophers, and historians, results in an insightful and provocative moral and theological exchange. Murder Most Merciful will stimulate further debate on the crucial issues of martyrdom, euthanasia, and the guilt of the innocent. Ultimately, the judgment of Herbert Bierhoff is for the reader to make. The book appears in the Studies in the Shoah series as volume 28.

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ topped box office charts and changed the American religious conversation. The controversies it raised remain unsettled. In After The Passion Is Gone: American Religious Consequences, leading scholars of religion and theology ask what Gibson's film and the resulting controversy reveal about Christians, Jews, and the possibilities of interreligious dialogue in the United States. Landres and Berenbaum's collection moves beyond questions of whether or not the film was faithful to the gospels, too violent, or antisemitic and explores why the debate focused on these issues but not others. The public discussion of The Passion shed light on a wide range of American attitudes evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish about media and faith, politics and history, Jesus and Judaism, fundamentalism and victimhood. After The Passion Is Gone takes a unique view of vital points in Christian-Jewish relations and contemporary American religion.

The Jehovah's Witnesses endured intense persecution under the Nazi regime, from 1933 to 1945. Unlike the Jews and others persecuted and killed by virtue of their birth, Jehovah's Witnesses had the opportunity to escape persecution and personal harm by renouncing their religious beliefs. The vast majority refused and throughout their struggle, continued to meet, preach, and distribute literature. In the face of torture, maltreatment in concentration camps, and sometimes execution, this unique group won the respect of many contemporaries. Up until now, little has been known of their particular persecution.