Moving first-hand accounts of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust are supported by photographs, ritual objects, and art produced clandestinely by Jews in ghettos and camps. Several entries are from well-known resistance figures such as Abba Kovner, the first to raise a cry for armed Jewish resistance; Rabbi Leo Baeck, who spearheaded attempts to save German Jewry; and Dr. Janusz Korczak, who protected 200 orphans in the Warsaw Ghetto. This anthology of written and visual materials illustrates the tremendous resourcefulness, diverse methods, and daring initiatives of Jewish men and women in occupied countries who risked their lives defying their Nazi oppressors, saving their fellow Jews, and preserving their Jewish traditions.
Faced with infectious diseases, starvation, lack of medicines, lack of clean water, and safe sewage, Jewish physicians practiced medicine under severe conditions in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust. Despite the odds against them, physicians managed to supply public health education, enforce hygiene protocols, inspect buildings and latrines, enact quarantine, and perform triage. Many gave their lives to help fellow prisoners. Based on archival materials and featuring memoirs of Holocaust survivors, this volume offers a rich array of both tragic and inspiring studies of the sanctification of life as practiced by Jewish medical professionals. More than simply a medical story, these histories represent the finest exemplification of a humanist moral imperative during a dark hour of recent history.
This volume puts to rest the myth that the Jews went passively to the slaughter like sheep. Indeed Jews resisted in every Nazi-occupied country - in the forests, the ghettos, and the concentration camps.The essays presented here consider Jewish resistance to be resistance by Jewish persons in specifically Jewish groups, or by Jewish persons working within non-Jewish organizations. Resistance could be armed revolt; flight; the rescue of targeted individuals by concealment in non-Jewish homes, farms, and institutions; or by the smuggling of Jews into countries where Jews were not objects of Nazi persecution. Other forms of resistance include every act that Jewish people carried out to fight against the dehumanizing agenda of the Nazis - acts such as smuggling food, clothing, and medicine into the ghettos, putting on plays, reading poetry, organizing orchestras and art exhibits, forming schools, leaving diaries, and praying. These attempts to remain physically, intellectually, culturally, morally, and theologically alive constituted resistance to Nazi oppression, which was designed to demolish individuals, destroy their soul, and obliterate their desire to live.
The information has been methodically collected and divided [giving] the reader a clear pictureThe analysis of the Holocaust period is enriched by accounts from the human aspect, which further our understanding of the individuals action and their motives.Prof. Dina Porat, the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism, Tel Aviv UniversityA comprehensive work on the third largest Jewish community in Poland during the Nazi occupationThe research constitutes an important contribution to the history of the Holocaust in general and to the history of Polish and Ukrainian Jewry of this period in particular.Prof. Israel Gutman, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and former Head Historian, Yad VashemAn exceedingly thorough examination.The [book] includes an important section on the many labor camps in East Galicia, which except for the Janowska camp, have not been fully dealt with in research studies.Dr. Yitzchak Arad, former Executive Director, Yad Vashem
Shortlisted for the 2018 RBC Taylor prize for literary nonfiction “A riveting tale of the previously unknown and fascinating story of the unsung angels who strove to foil the Final Solution.”—Kirkus starred review On November 25, 1944, prisoners at Auschwitz heard a deafening explosion. Emerging from their barracks, they witnessed the crematoria and gas chambers--part of the largest killing machine in human history--come crashing down. Most assumed they had fallen victim to inmate sabotage and thousands silently cheered. However, the Final Solution's most efficient murder apparatus had not been felled by Jews, but rather by the ruthless architect of mass genocide, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. It was an edict that has puzzled historians for more than six decades. Holocaust historian and New York Times bestselling author Max Wallace--a veteran interviewer for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation--draws on an explosive cache of recently declassified documents and an account from the only living eyewitness to unravel the mystery. He uncovers an astounding story involving the secret negotiations of an unlikely trio--a former fascist President of Switzerland, a courageous Orthodox Jewish woman, and Himmler's Finnish osteopath--to end the Holocaust, aided by clandestine Swedish and American intelligence efforts. He documents their efforts to deceive Himmler, who, as Germany's defeat loomed, sought to enter an alliance with the West against the Soviet Union. By exploiting that fantasy and persuading Himmler to betray Hitler's orders, the group helped to prevent the liquidation of tens of thousands of Jews during the last months of the Second World War, and thwarted Hitler's plan to take "every last Jew" down with the Reich. Deeply researched and dramatically recounted, In the Name of Humanity is a remarkable tale of bravery and audacious tactics that will help rewrite the history of the Holocaust.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Alan Gratz comes a gripping, 80-page bonus story about D-Day that can be read alongside the novel Allies, or on its own! Samira Zidane lives in Nazi-occupied France during World War II...and she has a secret. She and her mother are spies for the underground resistance. They crack codes and trade messages that will help sabotage the Nazis' plans. When her mother is captured by enemy soldiers, Samira must travel through the war-torn countryside on a desperate and daring rescue mission. And today just happens to be D-Day: the pivotal moment when Allied soldiers are landing in France. Battles rage all around her, and Samira only has a small dog named Cyrano for company. Can she find a way to save her mother before time runs out?
n June 1944, Freda Wineman and her family arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous Nazi concentration and death camp. After a cursory look from an SS doctor, Freda's life was spared and her mother was sent to the gas chambers. Freda only survived because the Allies won the war -- the Nazis ultimately wanted every Jew to die. Her mother was one of millions who lost their lives because of a racist regime that believed that some human beings simply did not deserve to live -- not because of what they had done, but because of who they were. Laurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting the survivors and perpetrators of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. In this sweeping history, he combines this testimony with the latest academic research to investigate how history's greatest crime was possible. Rees argues that while hatred of the Jews was at the epicenter of Nazi thinking, we cannot fully understand the Holocaust without considering Nazi plans to kill millions of non-Jews as well. He also reveals that there was no single overarching blueprint for the Holocaust. Instead, a series of escalations compounded into the horror. Though Hitler was most responsible for what happened, the blame is widespread, Rees reminds us, and the effects are enduring. The Holocaust: A New History is an accessible yet authoritative account of this terrible crime. A chronological, intensely readable narrative, this is a compelling exposition of humanity's darkest moment.
How the Murder of More Than Two Million Jews Was Carried Out—In Broad Daylight Based on a decade of work by Father Patrick Desbois and his team at Yahad–In Unum that has culminated to date in interviews with more than 5,700 neighbors to the murdered Jews and visits to more than 2,700 extermination sites, many of them unmarked. One key finding: Genocide does not happen without the neighbors. The neighbors are instrumental to the crime. In his National Jewish Book Award–winning book The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois documented for the first time the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II. Nearly a decade of further work by his team, drawing on interviews with neighbors of the Jews, wartime records, and the application of modern forensic practices to long-hidden grave sites. has resulted in stunning new findings about the extent and nature of the genocide. In Broad Daylight documents mass killings in seven countries formerly part of the Soviet Union that were invaded by Nazi Germany. It shows how these murders followed a template, or script, which included a timetable that was duplicated from place to place. Far from being kept secret, the killings were done in broad daylight, before witnesses. Often, they were treated as public spectacle. The Nazis deliberately involved the local inhabitants in the mechanics of death—whether it was to cook for the killers, to dig or cover the graves, to witness their Jewish neighbors being marched off, or to take part in the slaughter. They availed themselves of local people and the structures of Soviet life in order to make the Eastern Holocaust happen. Narrating in lucid, powerful prose that has the immediacy of a crime report, Father Desbois assembles a chilling account of how, concretely, these events took place in village after village, from the selection of the date to the twenty-four-hour period in which the mass murders unfolded. Today, such groups as ISIS put into practice the Nazis’ lessons on making genocide efficient. The book includes an historical introduction by Andrej Umansky, research fellow at the Institute for Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, University of Cologne, Germany, and historical and legal advisor to Yahad-In Unum.
Judy Batalion grew up in a house filled with endless piles of junk, obsessively gathered and stored by her hoarder mother. The first chance she had, she escaped the clutter to create a new identity - one made of order, regimen and clean white walls. Until, one day, she found herself enmeshed in life's biggest chaos: motherhood. Told with heartbreaking honesty and humour, this is Judy's poignant account of her trials negotiating the messiness of motherhood and the indelible marks that mothers and daughters make on each other's lives.
