Encyclopedia of the Holocaust is a comprehensive, authoritative one-volume reference that provides reliable information on this ignoble and frightening episode of modern history. It features eight essays on the history of the Holocaust and its antecedents, as well as coverage of such topics as the history of European Jewry, Jewish contributions to European culture, and the rise of anti-semitism and Nazism. The essays are followed by more than 650 entries on significant aspects of the Holocaust, including people, cities and countries, camps, resistance movements, political actions, and outcomes. More than 300 black-and-white photographs from the archives at Yad Vashem bear witness to the horrors of the Nazi regime and at the same time attest to the invincibility of the human spirit. Best Specialist Reference Work of the Year - Reference Reviews UK
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.
Nazis began detaining Jews in camps as soon as they came to power in 1933. Kim Wünschmann reveals the origin of these extralegal detention sites, the harsh treatment Jews received there, and the message the camps sent to Germans: that Jews were enemies of the state, dangerous to associate with and fair game for acts of intimidation and violence.
In this fascinating book, the planning and building of Yad Vashem, Israel's central and most important institution for commemorating the Holocaust, merits an outstanding in-depth account. Following the development of Yad Vashem since 1942, when the idea to commemorate the Holocaust in Eretz-Israel was raised for the first time, the narrative continues until the inauguration of Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial in 1976. The prolonged and complicated planning process of Yad Vashem's various monuments reveals the debates, failures and achievements involved in commemorating the Holocaust. In reading this thought-provoking description, one learns how Israel's leaders aspired both to fulfill a moral debt towards the victims of the Holocaust a well as to make Yad Vashem an exclusive center of Holocaust commemoration both in the Jewish world and beyond.
Drawing on research from various historians, the author offers opinions on how to define and explain the Holocaust, comparison to other genocides, and the connection between the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel.
