The Weavers of Trautenau
The Weavers of Trautenau

Author: Janine Holc

Publisher: Brandeis University Press

Published: 2023-10-16

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1684581702

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A sympathetic history that focuses on the experiences of women and girls during the Holocaust and draws on new archival sources. Beginning in late 1940, over three thousand Jewish girls and young women were forced from their family homes in Sosnowiec, Poland, and its surrounding towns to worksites in Germany. Believing that they were helping their families to survive, these young people were thrust into a world where they labored at textile work for twelve hours a day, lived in barracks with little food, and received only periodic news of events back home. By late 1943, their barracks had been transformed into concentration camps, where they were held until liberation in 1945. Using a fresh approach to testimony collections, Janine P. Holc reconstructs the forced labor experiences of young Jewish females, as told by the women who survived and shared their testimony. Incorporating new source material, the book carefully constructs survivors’ stories while also taking a theoretical approach, one alert to socially constructed, intersectional systems of exploitation and harm. The Weavers of Trautenau elucidates the limits and possibilities of social relations inside camps and the challenges of moral and emotional repair in the face of indescribable loss during the Holocaust.

The Weavers of Trautenau
The Weavers of Trautenau

Author: Janine P. Holc

Publisher:

Published: 2023-10-16

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781684581696

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A sympathetic history that focuses on the experiences of women and girls during the Holocaust and draws on new archival sources. Beginning in late 1940, over three thousand Jewish girls and young women were forced from their family homes in Sosnowiec, Poland, and its surrounding towns to worksites in Germany. Believing that they were helping their families to survive, these young people were thrust into a world where they labored at textile work for twelve hours a day, lived in barracks with little food, and received only periodic news of events back home. By late 1943, their barracks had been transformed into concentration camps, where they were held until liberation in 1945. Using a fresh approach to testimony collections, Janine P. Holc reconstructs the forced labor experiences of young Jewish females, as told by the women who survived and shared their testimony. Incorporating new source material, the book carefully constructs survivors' stories while also taking a theoretical approach, one alert to socially constructed, intersectional systems of exploitation and harm. The Weavers of Trautenau elucidates the limits and possibilities of social relations inside camps and the challenges of moral and emotional repair in the face of indescribable loss during the Holocaust.

Testimonial Montage
Testimonial Montage

Author: Sheila E. Jelen

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2024-04-30

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1666907456

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Testimonial Montage: A Family of Israeli Holocaust Testimonies from the Cracow Ghetto Resistance explores interconnected testimonies of four Holocaust survivors who were members of the Akiva youth group in Cracow, Poland, who participated in the ghetto resistance. Drawing on literary and photographic discourse, Jelen extracts the contours of personal narrative from the collective voice present in these interconnected testimonies. Attuned to stories of lost youth, sexual exploitation, and the dissolution of community and family, Jelen approaches Holocaust testimonies as one would members of a family with their shared experiences and common background, but also as individuals with their own unique voices. Departing from historical methodologies, Jelen models a different, wholistic approach to Holocaust testimonies, one which seeks to make sense of testimonies in the full breadth of their unfolding, across time, across space, and across genre.

If This Is a Woman
If This Is a Woman

Author: Denisa Nešťáková

Publisher: Academic Studies PRess

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1644697122

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The present volume contains thirteen articles based on work presented at the “XX. Century Conference: If This Is A Woman” at Comenius University Bratislava in January 2019. The conference was organized against anti-gender narratives and related attacks on academic freedom and women’s rights currently all too prevalent in East-Central Europe. The papers presented at the conference and in this volume focus, to a significant extent, on this region. They touch upon numerous points concerning gendered experiences of World War II and the Holocaust. By purposely emphasizing the female experience in the title, we encourage to fill the lacunae that still, four decades after the enrichment of Holocaust studies with a gendered lens, exist when it comes to female experiences.

The Last Ghetto
The Last Ghetto

Author: Anna Hájková

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-11-05

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0190051787

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Terezín, as it was known in Czech, or Theresienstadt as it was known in German, was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for murder in the East. Terezín was the last ghetto to be liberated, one day after the end of World War II. The Last Ghetto is the first in-depth analytical history of a prison society during the Holocaust. Rather than depict the prison society which existed within the ghetto as an exceptional one, unique in kind and not understandable by normal analytical methods, Anna Hájková argues that such prison societies that developed during the Holocaust are best understood as simply other instances of the societies human beings create under normal circumstances. Challenging conventional claims of Holocaust exceptionalism, Hájková insists instead that we ought to view the Holocaust with the same analytical tools as other historical events. The prison society of Terezín produced its own social hierarchies under which seemingly small differences among prisoners (of age, ethnicity, or previous occupation) could determine whether one ultimately lived or died. During the three and a half years of the camp's existence, prisoners created their own culture and habits, bonded, fell in love, and forged new families. Based on extensive archival research in nine languages and on empathetic reading of victim testimonies, The Last Ghetto is a transnational, cultural, social, gender, and organizational history of Terezín, revealing how human society works in extremis and highlighting the key issues of responsibility, agency and its boundaries, and belonging.

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.

Collected Memories
Collected Memories

Author: Christopher R. Browning

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2003-11-24

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 029918983X

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Christopher R. Browning addresses some of the most heated controversies that have arisen from the use of postwar testimony: Hannah Arendt’s uncritical acceptance of Adolf Eichmann’s self-portrayal in Jerusalem; the conviction of Ivan Demjanuk (accused of being Treblinka death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible") on the basis of survivor testimony and its subsequent reversal by the Israeli Supreme Court; the debate in Poland sparked by Jan Gross’s use of both survivor and communist courtroom testimony in his book Neighbors; and the conflict between Browning himself and Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, regarding methodology and interpretation in the use of pre-trial testimony. Despite these controversies and challenges, Browning delineates the ways in which the critical use of such problematic sources can provide telling evidence for writing Holocaust history. He examines and discusses two starkly different sets of "collected memories"—the voluminous testimonies of notorious Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann and the testimonies of 175 survivors of an obscure complex of factory slave labor camps in the Polish town of Starachowice.