During World War II, more than five million Jews lived under Nazi rule in Eastern Europe. In occupied Poland, the Baltic countries, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, they were stripped of property and “resettled” in ghettos. The German authorities established in each ghetto a Jewish Council, or Judenrat, to maintain minimal living standards. The Judenrat was required to carry out Nazi directives against other Jews, to supply forced labor, and eventually to cooperate in the Final Solution. Did the Jewish leaders of the ghettos, who were also victims, assist their murderers? If cooperation with the Nazi oppressors was morally defensible during the first stage in organizing the ghettos, what about later, when deportations to death camps began? Trunk analyzes situations where the Councils and ghetto police were forced to send their own communities to death. Some Council members chose suicide rather than supply lists to the Nazis; others used delaying tactics. Some handed over the lists. Some joined their families in the gas chamber. In assessing guilt and innocence, Trunk never allows the reader to forget that the impossible choices facing the Jewish leaders were created by the Nazis.
On May 6, 1939, Ilse Weber, in writing to her sister-in-law, Zofiah Mareni, noted "You will probably be happy to know how do we live here now? Well, at least we're not pestered by boredom. It's like dancing on a powder keg. The air is impregnated with insane rumors, which we no longer believe." Starting in 1933, Ilse's letters recorded the lives of her small family during a time of increasing danger, when Europe descended from peace to the chaos of war and genocide. In 1933, Ilse Weber lived in her ancestral town, Vítkovice, near the industrial area of Moravia-Ostrava in northern Czechoslovakia. She was thirty, married to Willi Weber, and had a son Hanus, aged two. As author of children's books and radio scripts, she used her maiden name, Ilse Herlinger. She wrote in German, the language of that border region, thinking of herself as a Czech. Lilian von Löwenadler, to whom the letters were mostly addressed, was the daughter of a Swedish diplomat, with whom Ilse had maintained an epistolary relationship since childhood, enhanced by personal visits. At that time Lilian was living in England. In 1934, Ilse gave birth to a second son, Thomas. In 1938, Hitler's Third Reich annexed Vítkovice and the rest of what it called Sudetenland. Soon after, it occupied all of Czechoslovakia. In the spring of 1939, the Webers, now living in Prague, sent Hanus on a Kindertransport to London, to Lilian, who took him to Sweden to live with her mother. In 1942, Ilse, Willi and Tommy were sent to the Thersienstadt Ghetto. Working there in the children's infirmary, Ilse entertained the patients with songs, accompanying herself on her contraband guitar. It is these songs and poems, mail correspondence having become near impossible, in which we can trace Ilse's last years. As inmates disappeared on trains to 'the East,' Willi hid his wife's music and poems in a work shed with his gardening tools. He went 'east,' followed, later in 1944, by Ilse and Tommy. In the autumn of 1945, Willi, having survived in a labor camp, was joined by fourteen year-old Hanus and they recovered Ilse's songs and poems. After a year of anxious inquiry, they relinquished hope that Tommy and Ilse were alive. We would not have the letters had not someone, decades later, while cleaning out a London attic, found them in a box.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski gathered up tens of thousands of documents from Nazi buildings in Berlin, and later, public archives and private synagogues in France, and moved them all, illicitly, to New York. In The Archive Thief, Lisa Moses Leff reconstructs Szajkowski's story in all its ambiguity.
The Holocaust—one of the most horrific examples of man's inhumanity to man in recorded history—resulted in the genocide of millions of people, most of them Jews. This volume explores the daily lives of the Holocaust victims and their heroic efforts to maintain a normal existence under inhumane conditions. Readers will learn about the effects of pogroms, Jewish ghettoes, Nazi rule, and deportation on everyday tasks like going to school, practicing religion, or eating dinner. Chapters on life in the concentration camps describe the incomprehensible conditions that plagued the inmates and the ways in which they managed to survive. Soumerai, a survivor herself, offers a unique perspective on the events. Coverage also includes accounts of resistance and the role of rescuers. Four new chapters explore current human rights abuses, including Holocaust denials, modern genocide, and human trafficking, enabling readers to contrast present and past events. In addition to a timeline, a glossary, and engaging illustrations, the second edition also features an extensive bibliography and resource center that guides student researchers toward web sites, organizations, films, and books on the Holocaust and other human rights abuses. Primary source testimonies from survivors provide powerful insight into the devastating effects of Nazi rule on people's lives. Soumerai, a survivor herself, offers a unique perspective on the events and insight into the persecution of non-Jews: Gypsies, gays, clergy who protested or protected victims, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, the mentally ill and handicapped. Readers will explore the effects of pogroms, Jewish ghettoes, Nazi rule, and deportation on everyday tasks like going to school, practicing religion, or eating dinner. Chapters on life in the concentration camps describe the incomprehensible conditions within the camps, including the ways in which inmates managed to survive: avoiding the infirmary, rationing food, utilizing the market system to trade for goods and clothing. Four new chapters shed a modern light on the events of the Holocaust, exploring human rights abuses that continue even today, including Holocaust Denials; genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Sudan; and child slavery and human trafficking. The new material allows readers to compare and contrast present and past human rights abuses, exploring what lessons we have learned, if any, from the Holocaust. An expanded bibliography and resource center guides readers toward related web sites, organizations, films and books related to the Holocaust, modern-day slavery and genocide, child soldiers, and related human rights topics. Illustrations, a timeline of events and a glossary of terms are also included, making this a comprehensive resource for student researchers.
Increasingly, German Studies programs include courses on the Holocaust, but suitable course materials are often difficult to find. Teachers in higher education will therefore very much welcome this volume that examines and reflects both the practical and theoretical aspects of teaching about the Holocaust. Though designed primarily by and for North American Germanists and German Studies specialists, this book will prove no less useful for teachers in other countries and associated disciplines. It presents and describes successful Holocaust-related courses that have been developed and taught at U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities, demonstrating the depth, breadth, and variety of such offerings, while remaining mindful of the instructor's special moral responsibilities. Reflecting as it does, the innovative Holocaust pedagogy in North American German and German Studies, this collection serves the needs of educators who wish to revise or update their existing Holocaust courses and of those who are seeking guidance, ideas, and resources to enable them to develop their first Holocaust course or unit.
Shedding new light on a controversial and intriguing issue, this book will reshape the debate on how the Judeo-Christian tradition views the morality of personal and national self-defense. Are self-defense, national warfare, and revolts against tyranny holy duties—or violations of God's will? Pacifists insist these actions are the latter, forbidden by Judeo-Christian morality. This book maintains that the pacifists are wrong. To make his case, the author analyzes the full sweep of Judeo-Christian history from earliest times to the present, combining history, scriptural analysis, and philosophy to describe the changes and continuity of Jewish and Christian doctrine about the use of lethal force. He reveals the shifting patterns of thought in both religions and presents the strongest arguments on both sides of the issue. The book begins with the ancient Hebrews and Genesis and covers Jewish history through the Holocaust and beyond. The analysis then shifts to the story of Christianity from its origins, through the Middle Ages and the Reformation, up the present day. Based on this scrutiny, the author concludes that—contrary to popular belief—the legitimacy of self-defense is strongly supported by Judeo-Christian scripture and commentary, by philosophical analysis, and by the respect for human dignity and human rights on which both Judaism and Christianity are based.
First published in a Yiddish edition in 1958, Profiles of a Lost World is a source of information about Eastern Europe before World War II as well as an touchstone for understanding a rich and complex cultural environment. Hirsz Abramowicz (1881-1960), a prominent Jewish educator, writer and cultural activist, knew that world and wrote about it, and his writings provide an eyewitness account of Jewish life during the first half of the twentieth century. Abramowicz was a witness to war, revolution and major cultural transformations in the Jewish world. His essays, written and originally published in Yiddish between 1920 and 1955, document the local history of Lithuanian Jewry in rural and small-town settings, and in the city of Vilna-the "Jerusalem of Lithuania"-which was a major center of East European Jewish intellectual and cultural life. They shed light on the daily life of Jews and the flourishing of modern Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe during the early 20th century and offer a personal perspective on the rise of Jewish radical politics. The collection incorporates local history of Lithuanian Jewry, shtetl folklore, observations on rural occupations, Jewish education, and life under German occupation during World War I. It also includes a series of profiles of leading social and intellectual Jewish personalities of the author's day, from traditional scholars to revolutionaries. Together the selections provide a blend of social and personal history and a window on a lost world.
The neutrality maintained by Turkey during most of the Second World War enabled it to rescue thousands of Jews from the Holocaust in the Nazi-occupied or collaborating countries of Europe. This book shows how in France, the Turkish consuls in Paris and Marseilles intervened to protect Turkish Jews from application of anti-Jewish laws introduced both by the German occupying authorities and the Vichy government and rescued them from concentration camps, getting them off trains destined for the extermination chambers in the East, and arranging train caravans and other special transportation to take them through Nazi-occupied territory to safety in Turkey. 'an important and unique addition to the vast scholarship available on that tragic era' Rabbi Abraham Cooper
Jeffrey Lesser's invaluable book tells the poignant and puzzling story of how earlier this century, in spite of the power of anti-Semitic politicians and intellectuals, Jews made their exodus to Brazil, "the land of the future." What motivated the Brazilian government, he asks, to create a secret ban on Jewish entry in 1937 just as Jews desperately sought refuge from Nazism? And why, just one year later, did more Jews enter Brazil legally than ever before? The answers lie in the Brazilian elite's radically contradictory images of Jews and the profound effect of these images on Brazilian national identity and immigration policy. Lesser's work reveals the convoluted workings of Brazil's wartime immigration policy as well as the attempts of desperate refugees to twist the prejudices on which it was based to their advantage. His subtle analysis and telling anecdotes shed light on such pressing issues as race, ethnicity, nativism, and nationalism in postcolonial societies at a time when "ethnic cleansing" in Europe is once again driving increasing numbers of refugees from their homelands.
