Born in 1933, Jacques Saurel might well have known the fate of so many children of Jewish parents who emigrated from Poland between the wars: Auschwitz and the gas chamber. He owed it to his father that he initially had no problems with the authorities. As a volunteer for military service and then a prisoner of war, his father protected Jacques and his family under the Geneva Convention. But the Nazis were looking for hostages to deport. Thus, in early February 1944, Jacques, his oldest sister (the younger one was in hiding) and his little brother were detained with their mother for three months in the Drancy internment camp, before being deported to the _x001A_Star Camp_x001A_, Bergen-Belsen. It
A resistance fighter’s “remarkable” memoir of her imprisonment at the infamous Nazi concentration camp (The New Yorker). Hanna Lévy-Hass, a Yugoslavian Jew, emerged a defiant survivor of the Holocaust. Her observations shed new light on the lived experience of Nazi internment during World War II, and she stands alone as the only resistance fighter to report on her own experience inside the camps—doing so with unflinching clarity in dealing with the political and social divisions inside Bergen-Belsen. In this volume, her insightful diary is accompanied by an introduction from her daughter, Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist renowned for her reporting from the West Bank and Gaza. “A poignant testimonial . . . Hanna Lévy-Hass was clearly a quite extraordinary woman.”—Tony Judt, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
For over 25 years, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard has tirelessly recounted what she endured during the Second World War, especially to young people. How she and her mother escaped from the Vél’ d’Hiv’ on the first night after the round-up on July 16th, 1942, and how they were reported in May 1944, thrusting them into the maelstrom of Nazi torment: Drancy, the hell of Auschwitz-Birkenau and, finally, Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated on April 15th, 1945. Sarah has put her experiences down on paper for those she cares about most, interspersing the account of her life as a wife and mother deeply marked by the Holocaust with the story of her shattered adolescence. This powerful book delivers a universal message of hope and courage.
Holocaust survivors often say that the circumstances in which they defied death were a matter of sheer luck. They also mention the random, arbitrary nature of the Nazi concentration camp system. Theodore Woda puts luck at the heart of his story, showing that, although the Third Reich was intent on destroying all the Jews of Europe, gas chambers or a slow death by starvation and/or mistreatment did not always lie at the end of the road. It cannot really be said that luck was on Theodore’s side when the Gestapo arrested him during a spot check for the sole crime of being Jewish and deported him from the Drancy camp on transport 33. His “luck”, then, was relative. It came into play when the train taking him to the Auschwitz extermination camp stopped at the railway station in Opole, where he and some fellow deportees were selected for slave labor. But during the 32 months he spent in three slave labor and two concentration camps in Silesia, Theodore’s “luck” did not keep him safe from hunger, beatings, unhygienic conditions and abuse. As he relates in plain, matter-of-fact words, he was “lucky” to work in workshops, know German and possess the resourcefulness to live by his wits. Under those circumstances, he managed not only to find food to supplement his insufficient diet, but to correspond with his family and even receive parcels sent to him under the names of men in the STO (the French acronym for Service de travail obligatoire, or Compulsory Labor Service). In sum, he was “lucky” to return alive from the maelstrom that claimed the lives of his mother, two of his brothers, one of his sisters, his uncle and his aunt. His testimonial has been unpublished until now.
Eugène Klein led an extraordinary life, whose many facets he weaves together in this rich and unique account. Eugène grew up destitute in Hungary. He enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I and served in several theaters, including the Carpathian Front, where living conditions were harsh. He found happiness in France during the interwar period. He ran footraces, and his athletic talent allowed him to settle in France and start a family there. As a Jew, Eugène and his family faced persecution by the Nazis: They were arrested in Paris on May 1, 1943 and deported to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in Poland. After surviving forced labor and a «death march», Eugène would be reunited with his wife, but his son would never return. This dignified account highlights the intelligence and integrity of a man who was both physically and mentally exceptional. With the maturity of age, Eugène combines sincerity with restraint to deliver an account devoid of useless moralizing. Through a series of flashbacks, he demonstrates how his survival in the Nazi camps was certainly due to luck, but also to his prior life experiences, since he had already come face-to-face with humiliation, bitter cold, hunger and mass death, inhumane conditions... and wolves.
This book analyses the minority politics of the Turkish republic and the country's ambivalent policies regarding Jewish refugees and Turkish Jews living abroad.
Forgetting is a brief but searing sojourn inside the mind of Alma as she navigates the complexity of the past and future within her identity. On her nighttime wanderings through a Paris saturated with cultural and historical meaning, she begins the slow work of grieving for her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, and begins to unravel the ways that his experience continues to reverberate across generations. The journey, both inward and outward, simple and infinitely varied, brings Alma to reconsider her whole life and the circumstances that led to her very birth. In Forgetting, Finkelstein sheds new light on the oldest dilemmas, asking: "What to do with the brief time that is given to us?"
A historical investigation of children’s memory of the Holocaust in Greece illustrates that age, generation and geographical background shaped postwar Jewish identities. The examination of children’s narratives deposited in the era of digital archives enables an understanding of the age-specific construction of the memory of genocide, which shakes established assumptions about the memory of the Holocaust. In the context of a global Holocaust memory established through testimony archives, the present research constructs a genealogy of the testimonial culture in Greece by framing the rich source of written and oral testimonies in the political discourses and public memory of the aftermath of the Second World War. The testimonies of former hidden children and child survivors of concentration camps illuminate the questions that haunted postwar attempts to reconstruct communities, related to the specific evolution of genocide in Greece and to the rising anti-Semitism of postwar Greece. As an oral history of child survivors of the Holocaust, the book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of the history of childhood, Jewish studies, memory studies and Holocaust and genocide studies.
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: “This valuable resource covers an aspect of the Holocaust rarely addressed and never in such detail.” —Library Journal This is the first volume in a monumental seven-volume encyclopedia, reflecting years of work by the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which will describe the universe of camps and ghettos—many thousands more than previously known—that the Nazis and their allies operated, from Norway to North Africa and from France to Russia. For the first time, a single reference work will provide detailed information on each individual site. This first volume covers three groups of camps: the early camps that the Nazis established in the first year of Hitler’s rule, the major SS concentration camps with their constellations of subcamps, and the special camps for Polish and German children and adolescents. Overview essays provide context for each category, while each camp entry provides basic information about the site’s purpose; prisoners; guards; working and living conditions; and key events in the camp’s history. Material from personal testimonies helps convey the character of the site, while source citations provide a path to additional information.
In this literary study of memoirs describing at first hand the horrors of German concentration camps, the principal question asked is: How did the survivors find the words to talk about experiences hitherto unknown, even unimaginable? Beyond being a mere analysis of discourse, Narrating the Holocaust reflects the situations in camp that triggered these responses, and shows how the professional authors adapted certain literary genres (e.g. the travel story, the Hassidic tale) to serve as models for communication, while the vast majority who were not trained as writers merely used the form of the report. A comparison between these memoirs and the more frequently discussed camp novel identifies the different narrative strategies by which the two are determined. Most of the 130 texts discussed here were published in German between l934 and the present; some famous Italian, French and Polish texts have also been included for comparison.
