Search results

The uneasy link between tourism and collective memory at Holocaust museums and memorials Each year, millions of people visit Holocaust memorials and museums, with the number of tourists steadily on the rise. What lies behind the phenomenon of "Holocaust tourism" and what role do its participants play in shaping how we remember and think about the Holocaust? In Postcards from Auschwitz, Daniel P. Reynolds argues that tourism to former concentration camps, ghettos, and other places associated...

One summer day in 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children, all but seven of the town's Jews. Neighbors tells their story. This is a shocking, brutal story that has never before been told. It is the most important study of Polish-Jewish relations to be published in decades and should become a classic of Holocaust literature. Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts and other evidence into an engulfing reconstruction of the horrific Ju...

This is the story of a young Greek Jew, who was transported with his family to Auschwitz. His parents exterminated immediately, the boy's survival depended upon his ability to survive unspeakable tasks as a trade-off for life, until his liberation by the advancing American troops.

A noted French thinker's poignant reflections, in words and photographs, on his visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. On a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Georges Didi-Huberman tears three pieces of bark from birch trees on the edge of the site. Looking at these pieces after his return home, he sees them as letters, a flood, a path, time, memory, flesh. The bark serves as a springboard to Didi-Huberman's meditations on his visit, recorded in this spare, poetic, and powerful book. Bark is a personal account...

Broken Threads tells the story of the destruction of the Jewish fashion industry under the Nazis.Jewish designers were very prominent in the fashion industry of 1930s Germany and Austria. The emergence of Konfektion, or ready-to-wear, and the development of the modern department store, with its innovative merchandising and lavish interior design, only emphasized this prominence. The Nazis came to see German high fashion as too heavily influenced by Jewish designers, manufacturers and merchandise...

An account of the Krakow Jewish resistance, written during World War II, this book is the story of a group of young Jewish idealists who formed a clandestine unit to commit acts of defiance against the Nazi's, and was written on scraps of paper smuggled into the author's prison cell.

The book narrates the last days of the once prominent Jewish community of Thessaloniki, the overwhelming majority of which was transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1943. Focusing on the Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki, this book maps the reactions of the authorities, the Church and the civil society as events unfolded. In so doing, it seeks to answer the questions, did the Christian society of their hometown stand up to their defense and did they try to undermine or object t...

It All Began in Nuremberg is a translation of Rita Thalmann’s moving memoir, Tout Commença à Nuremberg, originally published in France in 2004. Thalmann’s memoir represents one of the last voices to witness personally the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. The author, a scholar of significance in France, died on August 18, 2013. Rita Thalmann was born in Nuremberg in 1926 and lived there until 1933, when anti-Semitic events made life intolerable.  Her father abandoned his successful business and...

How did "ordinary women" like their male counterparts, become capable of brutal violence during the Holocaust? Cultural historian Elissa Mailander examines the daily work of twenty-eight women employed by the SS to oversee prisoners in the concentration and death camp Majdanek/Lublin in Poland. Many female SS overseers in Majdanek perpetrated violence and terrorized prisoners not only when ordered to do so but also on their own initiative. The social order of the concentration camp, combined wi...

Jorge Semprun was twenty years old - already an accomplished philosopher and poet - when arrested by Nazis for activites in the French Resistance. He was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. Literature or Life, a bestseller in France, is a deeply personal account not only of Semprun's time at Buchenwald, but also of the years before and after, of his painful attempts to write this book...created out of obsessions that returned him again and again like themes in a nightmarish rhapsody.His long...

This is the story of Pierre Toureille, a French Protestant pastor whose efforts resulted in the rescue of hundreds of refugees, most of them Jewish. Inspired by his Huguenot heritage, Pastor Toureille participated in international Protestant church efforts to combat Nazism during the 1930s and headed a major refugee aid organization in Vichy, France during World War II. After the war, Pastor Toureille was honoured by the Jewish organization Yad Vashem as one of the ""Righteous Among the Nations"...

The breadth of Werner Weinberg’s scholarship was prodigious, yielding monographs on ancient Hebrew epigraphy and biblical exegesis; the syntax of Rabbinic Hebrew; medieval grammars; and numerous studies on various aspects of Modern Hebrew. Both Weinberg and Lisl, his wife, survived internment at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. This collection of essays reprinted here, a little more than three decades after it first appeared, conveys Weinberg’s ongoing struggle to put into words something...

The author of The Devil's Candy and White Lies--herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors--shares her family's stories: her mother's memory of Josef Mengele; her father's relocation to Ohio after the war; and her own Jewish upbringing in the heartland of America.