Boy 30529
Boy 30529

Author: Felix Weinberg

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2013-04-09

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1781680787

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A Holocaust survivor reflects on his childhood in Nazi concentration camps, and the hardships of being a postwar refugee, in this deeply moving memoir written with surprising wit and humor. In 1939, 12-year-old Felix Weinberg lost everything: hope, home, and even his own identity. Born into a respectable Czech family, Felix’s early years were idyllic. But when Nazi persecution threatened in 1938, his father travelled to England, hoping to arrange for his family to emigrate there. His efforts came too late—and his wife and children fell into the hands of the Fascist occupiers. Thus begins a harrowing tale of survival, horror, and determination. Over the following years, Felix survived 5 concentration camps, including Terezín, Auschwitz and Birkenau, as well as the Death March from Blechhammer in 1945. Losing both his brother and mother in the camps, Felix was liberated at Buchenwald and eventually reunited at the age of 17 with his father in Britain, where they built a new life together. An extraordinary memoir, as well as a meditation on the nature of memory. It helps us understand why the Holocaust remains a singular presence at the heart of historical debate.

From Schmelt Camp to “Little Auschwitz”
From Schmelt Camp to “Little Auschwitz”

Author: Susanne Barth

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2024-08-15

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1612499562

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From Schmelt Camp to “Little Auschwitz”: Blechhammer’s Role in the Holocaust is the first in-depth study of the second largest Auschwitz subcamp, Blechhammer (Blachownia Śląska), and its lesser known yet significant prehistory as a so-called Schmelt camp, a forced labor camp for Jews operating outside the concentration camp system. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents and a wide array of survivor testimonies, the book provides novel findings on Blechhammer’s role in the Holocaust in Eastern Upper Silesia, a formerly Polish territory annexed to Nazi Germany in the fall of 1939, where 120,000 Jews lived. Established in the spring of 1942 to construct a synthetic fuel plant, the camp’s abhorrent living conditions led to the death of thousands of young Jews conscripted from the ghettos or taken off deportation convoys from Western Europe. Blechhammer was not only used for selecting parts of the Jewish ghetto population for Auschwitz, but also for killing pregnant women and babies. As an Auschwitz satellite, Blechhammer became the scene of brutal executions and massacres of prisoners refusing to go on the Death March. This microhistory unearths the far-reaching complicity of often overlooked perpetrators, such as the industrialists, factory guards, policemen, and “ordinary” civilians in these atrocities, but more importantly, it focuses on the victims, reconstructing the prisoners’ daily life and suffering, as well as their survival strategies.

Fate Unknown
Fate Unknown

Author: Dan Stone

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-06-06

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0192585800

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Dan Stone tells the story of the last great unknown archive of Nazism, the International Tracing Service. Set up by the Allies at the end of World War II, the ITS has worked until today to find missing persons and to aid survivors with restitution claims or to reunite them with loved ones. From retracing the steps of the 'death marches' with the aim of discovering the burial sites of those murdered across the towns and villages of Central Europe, to knocking on doors of German foster homes to find the children of forced labourers, Fate Unknown uncovers the history of this remarkable archive and its more than 30 million documents. Under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the tracing service became one of the most secretive of postwar institutions, unknown even to historians of the period. Delving deeply into the archival material, Stone examines the little-known sub-camps and, after the war, survivors' experience of displaced persons' camps, bringing to life remarkable stories of tracing. Fate Unknown combs the archives to reveal the real horror of the Holocaust by following survivors' horrific journeys through the Nazi camp system and its aftermath. The postwar period was an age of shortage of resources, bitterness, and revenge. Yet the ITS tells a different story: of international collaboration, of commitment to justice, and of helping survivors and their relatives in the context of Cold War suspicion. These stories speak to a remarkable attempt by the ITS, before the Holocaust was a matter of worldwide interest, to carry out a programme of ethical repair and to counteract some of the worst effects of the Nazis' crimes.

American Jews with Czechoslovak Roots
American Jews with Czechoslovak Roots

Author: Miloslav Rechcigl Jr.

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2018-06-19

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 154623893X

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This is a pioneering, comprehensive bibliography of existing publications relating to American Jews with ancestry in the former Czechoslovakia and its successor states, the Czech and the Slovak Republics, which has never before been attempted. Since only a few studies have been written on the subject, the present work has been extended to include biobibliography, in which area a plethora of papers and monographs exist. Consequently, this compendium can also be viewed as a comprehensive listing of biographical sources relating to American Jews with the Czechoslovak roots. As the reader will find out, they have been involved, practically, in every field of human endeavor, in numbers that surprise. As for the definition of Jews, the present work encompasses not only the individuals that have professed in Judaism but also the descendants of the former Jews who originally lived on the territory of the former Czechoslovakia, regardless of the generation or where they were born.

Drunk on Genocide
Drunk on Genocide

Author: Edward B. Westermann

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-03-15

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1501754211

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In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe. Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated "performative masculinity," expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. Such inebriated exhibitions extended from meetings of top Nazi officials to the rank and file, celebrating at the grave sites of their victims. Westermann argues that, contrary to the common misconception of the SS and police as stone-cold killers, they were, in fact, intoxicated with the act of murder itself. Drunk on Genocide highlights the intersections of masculinity, drinking ritual, sexual violence, and mass murder to expose the role of alcohol and celebratory ritual in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Its surprising and disturbing findings offer a new perspective on the mindset, motivation, and mentality of killers as they prepared for, and participated in, mass extermination. Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust
Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust

Author: Jean Boase-Beier

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-05-24

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1441186662

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Taking a cognitive approach, this book asks what poetry, and in particular Holocaust poetry, does to the reader - and to what extent the translation of this poetry can have the same effects. It is informed by current theoretical discussion and features many practical examples. Holocaust poetry differs from other genres of writing about the Holocaust in that it is not so much concerned to document facts as to document feelings and the sense of an experience. It shares the potential of all poetry to have profound effects on the thoughts and feelings of the reader. This book examines how the openness to engagement that Holocaust poetry can engender, achieved through stylistic means, needs to be preserved in translation if the translated poem is to function as a Holocaust poem in any meaningful sense. This is especially true when historical and cultural distance intervenes. The first book of its kind and by a world-renowned scholar and translator, this is required reading.

Food in Memory and Imagination
Food in Memory and Imagination

Author: Beth Forrest

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-01-13

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1350096172

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How do we engage with food through memory and imagination? This expansive volume spans time and space to illustrate how, through food, people have engaged with the past, the future, and their alternative presents. Beth M. Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice have brought together first-class contributions, from both established and up-and-coming scholars, to consider how imagination and memory intertwine and sometimes diverge. Chapters draw on cases around the world-including Iran, Italy, Japan, Kenya, and the US-and include topics such as national identity, food insecurity, and the phenomenon of knowledge. Contributions represent a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. This volume is a veritable feast for the contemporary food studies scholar.