The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police
The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police

Author: Samuel Schalkowsky

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2014-04-14

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 025301297X

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“Remarkable . . . provides a graphic and unparalleled description of the conditions under which the Jews of Kaunas tried to live and survive.” —The Forward As a force that had to serve two masters, both the Jewish population of the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania and its German occupiers, the Kovno Jewish ghetto police walked a fine line between helping Jews survive and meeting Nazi orders. In 1942 and 1943 some of its members secretly composed this history and buried it in tin boxes. This book details the creation and organization of the ghetto, the violent German attacks on the population in the summer of 1941, the periodic selections of Jews to be deported and killed, the labor required of the surviving Jewish population, and the efforts of the police to provide a semblance of stability. A substantial introduction by distinguished historian Samuel D. Kassow places this powerful work within the context of the history of the Kovno Jewish community and its experience and fate at the hands of the Nazis. “No book I've read in recent time about the Holocaust has so moved me, evoking the utter helplessness of the Jew, the plight of the Jewish police and the cunning cruelty of the German. This is a gripping story, page by page, and it reminds us again that there but for the grace of God go we all.” —Marvin Kalb, Senior Advisor to the Pulitzer Center and Edward R. Murrow Professor, Emeritus, Harvard Kennedy School “A landmark of Holocaust historiography.” —Slavic Review

The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police
The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police

Author: Anonymous members of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13:

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As a force that had to serve two masters, both the Jewish population of the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania and its German occupiers, the Kovno Jewish ghetto police walked a fine line between helping Jews survive and meeting Nazi orders. In 1942 and 1943 some of its members secretly composed this history and buried it in tin boxes. The book offers a rare glimpse into the complex situation faced by the ghetto leadership and the Jewish policemen, caught between carrying out the demands of the Germans and mollifying the anger and frustration of their own people. It details the creation and organizat.

Warsaw Ghetto Police
Warsaw Ghetto Police

Author: Katarzyna Person

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-04-15

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1501754084

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In Warsaw Ghetto Police, Katarzyna Person shines a spotlight on the lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of connected businessmen who, in the autumn of 1940, joined the newly formed Jewish Order Service. Person tracks the everyday life of policemen as their involvement with the horrors of ghetto life gradually increased. Facing and engaging with brutality, corruption, and the degradation and humiliation of their own people, these policemen found it virtually impossible to exercise individual agency. While some saw the Jewish police as fellow victims, others viewed them as a more dangerous threat than the German occupation authorities; both were held responsible for the destruction of a historically important and thriving community. Person emphasizes the complexity of the situation, the policemen's place in the network of social life in the ghetto, and the difficulty behind the choices that they made. By placing the actions of the Jewish Order Service in historical context, she explores both the decisions that its members were forced to make and the consequences of those actions. Featuring testimonies of members of the Jewish Order Service, and of others who could see them as they themselves could not, Warsaw Ghetto Police brings these impossible situations to life. It also demonstrates how a community chooses to remember those whose allegiances did not seem clear. Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Story of an Underground
The Story of an Underground

Author: Dov Levin

Publisher: Gefen Books

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789652296160

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This is the story of the fighting underground of the Jews of Kovno, Lithuania, in World War II. The authors, Zvie A. Brown and Dov Levin, were themselves members of the underground, and this well-researched book based on documentary material, verbal and written testimonies, memoirs of witnesses, is supplemented by the authors own accounts.

Who Will Write Our History?
Who Will Write Our History?

Author: Samuel D. Kassow

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2018-08-01

Total Pages: 603

ISBN-13: 0253041058

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In 1940, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine organization, code named Oyneg Shabes, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to study and document all facets of Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would preserve this history for posterity. As the Final Solution unfolded, although decimated by murders and deportations, the group persevered in its work until the spring of 1943. Of its more than 60 members, only three survived. Ringelblum and his family perished in March 1944. But before he died, he managed to hide thousands of documents in milk cans and tin boxes. Searchers found two of these buried caches in 1946 and 1950. Who Will Write Our History tells the gripping story of Ringelblum and his determination to use historical scholarship and the collection of documents to resist Nazi oppression.

New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust
New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust

Author: Frédéric Bonnesoeur

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-11-06

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 3110733919

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In 1997, Saul Friedländer emphasized the need for an integrated history of the Holocaust. His suggestion to connect ‘the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society, and the world of the victims’ provides the inspiration for this volume. Following in these footsteps, this innovative study approaches Holocaust history through a combination of macro analysis with micro studies. Featuring a range of contemporary research from emerging scholars in the field, this peer-reviewed volume provides detailed engagement with a variety of historical sources, such as documents, artifacts, photos, or text passages. The contributors investigate particular aspects of sound, materiality, space and social perceptions to provide a deeper understanding of the Holocaust, which have often been overlooked or generalised in previous historical research. Yet, as we approach an era of no first hand witnesses, this multidisciplinary, micro-historical approach remains a fundamental aspect of Holocaust research, and can provide a theoretical framework for future studies.

Jewish Responses to Persecution
Jewish Responses to Persecution

Author: Emil Kerenji

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-10-10

Total Pages: 599

ISBN-13: 1442236272

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Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum With its unique combination of primary sources and historical narrative, this volume provides an important new perspective on Holocaust history. Covering the peak years of the Nazi “Final Solution,” it traces the Jewish struggle for survival, which became increasingly urgent in this period, including armed resistance and organized escape attempts. Shedding light on personal and public lives of Jews, the book provides compelling insights into a wide range of Jewish experiences during the Holocaust. Jewish individuals and communities suffered through this devastating period and reflected on the Holocaust differently, depending on their nationality, personal and communal histories and traditions, political beliefs, economic situation, and other circumstances. The rich spectrum of primary source material collected, including letters, diary entries, photographs, transcripts of speeches and radio addresses, newspaper articles, drawings, and institutional memos and reports, makes this volume an essential research tool and curriculum companion.

Eli's Story
Eli's Story

Author: Meri-Jane Rochelson

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0814340229

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Biography of a Jewish doctor who survived and triumphed over the horrors of the Holocaust. Eli's Story: A Twentieth-Century Jewish Life is first and foremost a biography. Its subject is Eli G. Rochelson, MD (1907–1984), author Meri-Jane Rochelson's father. At its core is Eli's story in his own words, taken from an interview he did with his son, Burt Rochelson, in the mid-1970s. The book tells the story of a man whose life and memory spanned two world wars, several migrations, an educational odyssey, the massive upheaval of the Holocaust, and finally, a frustrating yet ultimately successful effort to restore his professional credentials and identity, as well as reestablish family life. Eli's Story contains a mostly chronological narration that embeds the story in the context of further research. It begins with Eli's earliest memories of childhood in Kovno and ends with his death, his legacy, and the author's own unanswered questions that are as much a part of Eli's story as his own words. The narrative is illuminated and expanded through Eli's personal archive of papers, letters, and photographs, as well as research in institutional archives, libraries, and personal interviews. Rochelson covers Eli's family's relocation to southern Russia; his education, military service, and first marriage after he returned to Kovno; his and his family's experiences in the Dachau, Stutthof, and Auschwitz concentration camps—including the deaths of his wife and child; his postwar experience in the Landsberg Displaced Persons (DP) camp, and his immigration to the United States, where he determinedly restored his medical credentials and started a new family. Rochelson recognizes that both the effort of reconstructing events and the reality of having personal accounts that confirm and also differ from each other in detail, make the process of gap-filling itself a kind of fiction—an attempt to shape the incompleteness that is inherent to the story. In the epilogue, the author reminds readers that the stories of lives don't have clear chronologies. They go off in many directions, and in some ways they never end. An earlier reviewer said of the book, "Eli's Story combines the care of a scholar with the care of a daughter." Both scholars and general readers interested in Holocaust narratives will be moved by this monograph.

Surviving the Holocaust
Surviving the Holocaust

Author: Avraham Tory

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1991-09-01

Total Pages: 616

ISBN-13: 0674246292

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This remarkable chronicle of life and death in the Jewish Ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania, from June 1941 to January 1944, was written under conditions of extreme danger by a Ghetto inmate and secretary of the Jewish Council. After the war, in order to escape from Lithuania, the author was forced to entrust the diary to leaders of the Escape movement; eventually it made its way to his new home in Israel. The diary incorporates Avraham Tory’s collections of official documents, Jewish Council reports, and original photographs and drawings made in the Ghetto. It depicts in grim detail the struggle for survival under Nazi domination, when—if not simply carted off and murdered in a random “action”—Jews were exploited as slave labor while being systematically starved and denied adequate housing and medical care. Through it all, Tory’s overriding purpose was to record the unimaginable events of these years and to memorialize the determination of the Jews to sustain their community life in the midst of the Nazi terror. Of the surviving diaries originating in the principal European Ghettos of this period, Tory’s is the longest written by an adult, a dramatic and horrifying document that makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary history. Tory provides an insider’s view of the desperate efforts of Ghetto leaders to protect Jews. Martin Gilbert’s masterly introduction establishes the authenticity of the diary, presents its events against the backdrop of the war in Europe, and considers the crucial questions of collaboration and resistance.