Due to the generation shift, the central challenge has become to preserve the memories of the survivors of National Socialist persecution and to anchor these within 21st century cultural memory. In this transition phase, which includes rapid technical developments within information and communications technology, high expectations are being made of the collections of survivors audio and video interviews. This publication reflects the interdisciplinary debates currently taking place on the various digital techniques of preserving eyewitness interviews. The focus is how the changes in media technology are affecting the various fields of work, which include storage/archiving, education as well as the reception of the interviews.
The Azrieli Foundation established the Sustaining Memories Project to help survivors write their stories. A unique partnership between survivors and volunteer writing partners who were trained to work with Holocaust survivors on recording and transcribing their stories, volunteers spent countless hours on these testimonies. The strength of the bonds that form when a volunteer and a survivor create a memoir, of the emotional challenges that a survivor faces in the telling and the understanding, and the insight that the listener experiences were all part of an incredible journey. Excerpts of these co-written memoirs, never before published, are produced in this anthology to give readers a wide range of understanding of the varieties of experiences of Holocaust survivors. Sustaining Memories gives voice to Canadian Jews who suffered through ghettos, camps, hiding, fighting in the underground, as refugees in foreign countries or passing as non-Jews in daily fear of betrayal. Following their liberation, survivors often had to congregate in displaced persons camps, where many married, had children and waited years for countries to offer them new homes. Some would end up in the detention camps of Cyprus on their way to pre-state Israel; others found themselves locked behind the Iron Curtain for decades. Between 1946 and the 1980s, they all built new lives in Canada.
"This behind-the-scenes account details the emotionally complex fifteen-year struggle surrounding the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's birth."--
Lottie, a talented violinist, disappeared during the Holocaust. Can her grand-niece, Charlie, discover what happened? A long-lost cousin, a mysterious locket, a visit to Nana Rose in Florida, a diary written in German, and a very special violin all lead twelve-year-old Charlie to the truth about her great-aunt Lottie in this intriguing, intergenerational mystery. Charlie, a budding violinist, decides to research the life of her great-aunt and namesake for her middle school ancestry project. Everyone in Charlie's family believes Great-Aunt Charlotte (called Lottie), a violin prodigy, died at the hands of the Nazis, but the more Charlie uncovers about her long-lost relative, the more muddied Great-Aunt Lottie's story becomes. Could it be that Lottie somehow survived the war by hiding in Hungary? Could she even still be alive today? In Searching for Lottie, Susan Ross has written a highly personal work of historical fiction that is closely inspired by her own family history, exploring the ongoing effects of the Holocaust on families today. Includes a letter from the author describing the research that shaped this story.
Abe Korn was only 16 when the Nazis invaded his hometown of Lipno, Poland, on the first day of World War II. He survived the entire war as a Jewish prisoner, enduring two Nazi ghettos, eight concentration camps, and a 45-day Death March from Auschwitz. Astonishingly, Abe kept his sense of human dignity- with gangrenous feet he struggled to stay on the healthy workers list; with scan supplies he bargained for food and coal and helped others survive. Abe never gave up hope. He always believed he could live one more day, and on April 11, 1945, when Buchenwald was liberated, Abe was finally free. After Liberation, Abe focused on going to school and earning a living. Eventually, as a man earnest to forgive past sins and take individuals at face value, he married a German Lutheran, who later converted to Judaism. They moved to the United States, where Abe had a remarkably successful business. Abram Korn died in 1972. Abe left the rough draft of a manuscript of his story. Twenty years after his death, Abe's son, Joey began completing his father's story and the First Edition of Abe's Story was published by Longstreet Press on April 11th, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of Abe's liberation. The current edition is published by Sugarcreek Press. To the family he raised proudly in the Jewish tradition, Abe left a legacy of powerful inspiration. For modern-day readers seeking the best in Holocaust literature and riveting drama, Abe's Story is an incredible story of hope, of the human potential to do good in the face of horrible evil. Abe's Story is about hope, not despair. It's about life, not death. It's a powerful source of inspiration for a all who read it. "Important testimony." ¬- Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Price Laureate and author of Night. "Powerful. Unforgettable. Abe's Story is an inspiration to all who read it." - Pat Conroy, author of Prince of Tides and Beach Music. "An extraordinary memoir by an Auschwitz survivor, whose son rescued the manuscript from oblivion." - John Stoessinger, Trinity University, author of Might of Nations and Why Nations Go to War.'
Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age explores the nexus of new media and memory practices, raising questions about how advances in digital technologies continue to influence the nature of Holocaust memorialization. Through an in-depth study of the largest and most widely available collection of videotaped interviews with survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust, the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, Jeffrey Shandler weighs the possibilities and challenges brought about by digital forms of public memory. The Visual History Archive's holdings are extensive—over 100,000 hours of video, including interviews with over 50,000 individuals—and came about at a time of heightened anxiety about the imminent passing of the generation of Holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses. Now, the Shoah Foundation's investment in new digital media is instrumental to its commitment to remembering the Holocaust both as a subject of historical importance in its own right and as a paradigmatic moral exhortation against intolerance. Shandler not only considers the Archive as a whole, but also looks closely at individual survivors' stories, focusing on narrative, language, and spectacle to understand how Holocaust remembrance is mediated.
Named a Best Book of the Year by The San Francisco Chronicle "Survivor Café . . . feels like the book Rosner was born to write. Each page is imbued with urgency, with sincerity, with heartache, with heart.... Her words, alongside the words of other survivors of atrocity and their descendants across the globe, can help us build a more humane world." —San Francisco Chronicle As firsthand survivors of many of the twentieth century's most monumental events—the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Killing Fields—begin to pass away, Survivor Café addresses urgent questions: How do we carry those stories forward? How do we collectively ensure that the horrors of the past are not forgotten? Elizabeth Rosner organizes her book around three trips with her father to Buchenwald concentration camp—in 1983, in 1995, and in 2015—each journey an experience in which personal history confronts both commemoration and memorialization. She explores the echoes of similar legacies among descendants of African American slaves, descendants of Cambodian survivors of the Killing Fields, descendants of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the effects of 9/11 on the general population. Examining current brain research, Rosner depicts the efforts to understand the intergenerational inheritance of trauma, as well as the intricacies of remembrance in the aftermath of atrocity. Survivor Café becomes a lens for numerous constructs of memory—from museums and commemorative sites to national reconciliation projects to small–group cross–cultural encounters. Beyond preserving the firsthand testimonies of participants and witnesses, individuals and societies must continually take responsibility for learning the painful lessons of the past in order to offer hope for the future. Survivor Café offers a clear–eyed sense of the enormity of our twenty–first–century human inheritance—not only among direct descendants of the Holocaust but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy, and to keep the ever–changing conversations alive between the past and the present.
In March 1939, seven-year-old Eva Weiss’s innocence was shattered by Germany’s invasion of her homeland, Slovakia. Over the next five years, as the Nazi persecution of Europe’s Jews gathered momentum, Eva’s parents were forced to send their children into hiding, but she and her sister Marta could not avoid capture. In this remarkable memoir, Eva recounts her experiences at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. There, she witnessed countless horrors and was herself subjected to torture, extreme deprivation, and medical experimentation at the hands of the notorious Dr Josef Mengele. When the Soviet army liberated the survivors of Auschwitz early in 1945, Eva and Marta faced a new challenge: crossing war-torn Europe to be reunited with their family. Narrated with the heartbreaking innocence of a young girl and the wisdom of a woman of eighty-three, Gazing at the Stars is a record of survival in the face of unimaginable evil. It is the culmination of Eva Slonim’s lifelong commitment to educating the world about the Holocaust, and to keeping alive the memory of the many who perished. Eva Slonim (née Weiss) was born in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 1931. A survivor of the Holocaust, Eva relocated with her family to Melbourne in 1948. She married Ben Slonim in 1953, and together they had five children, and many grandchildren and great- grandchildren, fulfilling Eva’s wish to rebuild what was lost in Europe. A gifted storyteller, and deeply passionate about the importance of education and community, Eva has for many years given public talks on her experiences during the war.
"Perhaps there is no simple, easy way to educate children about the Holocaust. Yet [this] new extraordinary work in the form of a nonfiction graphic novel for children is a valiant attempt to do just that. These testimonials... serve as a reminder never to allow such a tragedy to happen again."—BookTrib Between 1933 and 1945, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were responsible for the persecution of millions of Jews across Europe. This extraordinary graphic novel tells the true stories of six Jewish children who survived the Holocaust. From suffering the horrors of Auschwitz, to hiding from Nazi soldiers in war-torn Paris, to sheltering from the Blitz in England, each true story is a powerful testament to the survivors' courage. These remarkable testimonials serve as a reminder never to allow such a tragedy to happen again. Features a current photograph of each contributor and an update about their lives, along with a glossary and timeline to support reader understanding of this period in world history.
Annotation This important and original book is the first sustained analysis of the unique ways in which oral testimony of survivors contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust. Langer argues that it is necessary to deromanticize the survival experience and that to burden it with accolades about the "indomitable human spirit" is to slight its painful complexity and ambivalence.
