Between Dignity and Despair

Between Dignity and Despair

Author: Marion A. Kaplan

Publisher: Studies in Jewish History

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780195130928

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their dally lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane.


The Living and the Lost

The Living and the Lost

Author: Ellen Feldman

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1250780837

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the author of Paris Never Leaves You, Ellen Feldman's The Living and the Lost is a gripping story of a young German Jewish woman who returns to Allied Occupied Berlin from America to face the past and unexpected future “A deeply satisfying and truly adult novel.” —Margot Livesey, New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy Millie (Meike) Mosbach and her brother David, manage to escape to the States just before Kristallnacht, leaving their parents and little sister in Berlin. Millie attends Bryn Mawr on a special scholarship for non-Aryan German girls and graduates to a magazine job in Philadelphia. David enlists in the army and is eventually posted to the top-secret Camp Ritchie in Maryland, which trains German-speaking men for intelligence work. Now they are both back in their former hometown, haunted by ghosts and hoping against hope to find their family. Millie, works in the office responsible for rooting out the most dedicated Nazis from publishing; she is consumed with rage at her former country and its citizens, though she is finding it more difficult to hate in proximity. David works trying to help displaced persons build new lives, while hiding his more radical nighttime activities from his sister. Like most of their German-born American colleagues, they suffer from conflicts of rage and guilt at their own good fortune, except for Millie’s boss, Major Harry Sutton, who seems much too eager to be fair to the Germans. Living and working in bombed-out Berlin, a latter day Wild West where drunken soldiers brawl; the desperate prey on the unsuspecting; spies ply their trade; werewolves, as unrepentant Nazis were called, scheme to rise again; black markets thrive, and forbidden fraternization is rampant, Millie must come to terms with a decision she made as a girl in a moment of crisis, and with the enigmatic sometimes infuriating Major Sutton who is mysteriously understanding of her demons. Atmospheric and page-turning, The Living and the Lost is a story of love, survival, and forgiveness of others and of self.


The Gazebo

The Gazebo

Author: Alexander Lebenstein

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2008-12-01

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1467056774

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

November 10, 1938. Germany. Kristallnacht. Night of Broken Glass. Eleven year old Alex Lebenstein comes face to face with the Nazi regime that is determined to exterminate all Jews from the face of Europe. After witnessing the beating of his family, they escape to be hidden for a few days before being forced into the newly created Jewish Ghetto where he will spend the next three years. A six day cattle car ride during one of the coldest winters on record to the larger Jewish Ghetto in Riga, Latvia is merely the first destination of what will become a three year battle of survival. From the concentration camps Kaiserwald and Stutthof, and slave labor camps Hasenpot and Burggraben to liberation and escape, teenaged Alex Lebenstein lived the sights, sounds, and smells of death. Despite facing execution, and living under the shadows of the crematoria chimneys that darkened the skies with black smoke, this is a tale of hope and wonder. It has been some sixty plus years since I have thought about a number of the events that I witnessed or survived during the time that I was a teenager. I must refer to myself as a teenager, and cant say child, because I largely did not have a childhood after the evening of Kristallnacht. This dark period of my life was so traumatic that it is only recently that I have been able to confront the shadows and noises that still cause me to start whenever I see or hear them. Of all the sights and sounds that left a lasting impression on me during the years that I fought to survive, there is no doubt that the sounds I experienced while we huddled on the gazebo are the ones that will forever haunt me. Even now, I cannot hear the sound of leaves scraping on the sidewalk or the bricks of my apartment without flashing back to the time that we huddled on that old gazebo and that eerie sound of dead leaves and vines added to the sheer terror that I was feeling. More than a story of survival, this is a tale of good triumphing over evil, and one mans battle to make a difference in the lives of children. With a new lease on life, he now promotes tolerance through education on two continents, and tells his remarkable story so that the children will know.


Deportations in the Nazi Era

Deportations in the Nazi Era

Author: Henning Borggräfe

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-11-21

Total Pages: 549

ISBN-13: 3110746468

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

During the Nazi era, about three million Jews – half the victims of the Holocaust – were deported from the German Reich, the occupied territories, as well as Nazi-allied countries, and sent to ghettos, camps, and extermination centers. The police and the SS also deported tens of thousands of Sinti and Roma, mainly to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, where most of them were killed. Deportations were central to National Socialist persecution and extermination. In November 2020, an international conference organized by the Arolsen Archives focused on the various historical sources, their research potential, and (digital) methods of cataloging them. It also explored new (systematizing and comparative) approaches in historical research. This volume features over 20 contributions by scholars from different countries and with a variety of perspectives and questions. The main geographical focus is on deportations from the German Reich and German-occupied Southeastern Europe.


Space and Time Under Persecution

Space and Time Under Persecution

Author: Guy Miron

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023-09-19

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0226828158

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"The rapid and radical transformations of the Nazi Era challenged the ways German Jews experienced space and time, two of the most fundamental characteristics of human existence. In Space and Time under Persecution, Guy Miron documents how German Jews came to terms with the harsh challenges of persecution-from social exclusion, economic decline, and relocation to confiscation of their homes, forced labor, and deportation to death in the east-by rethinking their experiences in spatial and temporal terms. Miron first explores the strategies and practices German Jews used to accommodate their shrinking access to public space, in turn reinventing traditional Jewish space and ideas of home. He then turns to how German Jews redesigned the annual calendar, came to terms with the ever-growing need to wait for nearly everything, and developed new interpretations of the past. Miron's insightful analysis reveals how these tactics expressed both the continuous attachment of Jews to key elements of German bourgeois life as well as their struggle to maintain Jewish agency and express Jewish defiance under Nazi persecution"--


Sussen Is Now Free of Jews:World War II, The Holocaust, and Rural Judaism

Sussen Is Now Free of Jews:World War II, The Holocaust, and Rural Judaism

Author: Gilya Gerda Schmidt

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2012-07-09

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 082324329X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Two Jewish families, the Langs and the Ottenheimers, settled in the two separate parts of Suessen, District Goeppingen, in 1902. The Langs established a cattle business in Gross-Suessen, the Ottenheimers established a branch of their weaving business, headquartered in Goeppingen, in Klein-Suessen. Based primarily on archival sources, the study gives an insight into everyday rural Jewish life, persecution and deportation during the Holocaust, an American soldier's World War II experience, experiences of liberation from concentration camps, the reparations process and life after 1945.


Silence and Acts of Memory

Silence and Acts of Memory

Author: Birgit Maier-Katkin

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 9780838756645

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book explores silence and memory in Germany's ongoing discourse about the Nazi past. It examines the ways in which exile literature and critical thought by Anna Seghers joins postwar discourse and current historical research to formulate an acceptable memory of private life during the Third Reich. Seghers' work is particularly relevant in light of a postwar rift between private and public memory discourse. Her texts, The Seventh Cross, The Excursion of the Dead Girls, and especially her depictions of female figures offer a rare in-depth examination of ordinary life under Hitler. From exile, Seghers reveals hidden voices and personal experience with the Nazi regime that linger in the silenced voids of history. Silence and Acts of Memory reconnects private and public discourse about traumatic events of the Nazi past; the book contributes valuable insights to the current discourse about the continuing formative process of German national identity. Birgit Maier-Katkin is an Associate Professor of German at the Florida State University.


Hidden Berlin

Hidden Berlin

Author: Reinhard Zachau

Publisher: Hackett Publishing

Published: 2022-03-01

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1647930111

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Hidden Berlin brings to life the city's tumultuous history by tracing the evolution of six iconic locations: the reconstructed City Palace, the Berlin Wall, the Nazi Olympic Stadium, Potsdamer Platz, the Brandenburg Gate, and the recreated Nikolaiviertel. In exploring each of these areas, Hidden Berlin illustrates how Berlin has become one of Europe's most complex and dynamic cities. Richly illustrated with images and maps, the volume engages readers through detailed timelines and activities. Additional locations of interest and a bibliography present opportunities for readers to explore on their own. A companion website provides a host of internet-based activities, suggestions for readings, and supplementary resources for each chapter: www.hiddenberlinbook.wordpress.com. Hidden Berlin is an engaging volume for courses on the culture of Berlin or modern Germany, students studying abroad, and visitors to the city who want an enlightened experience.


Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

Author: Francis R. Nicosia

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2010-07-01

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1845459792

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

German Jews faced harsh dilemmas in their responses to Nazi persecution, partly a result of Nazi cruelty and brutality but also a result of an understanding of their history and rightful place in Germany. This volume addresses the impact of the anti-Jewish policies of Hitler’s regime on Jewish family life, Jewish women, and the existence of Jewish organizations and institutions and considers some of the Jewish responses to Nazi anti-Semitism and persecution. This volume offers scholars, students, and interested readers a highly accessible but focused introduction to Jewish life under National Socialism, the often painful dilemmas that it produced, and the varied Jewish responses to those dilemmas.


He's Not Coming Here Anymore

He's Not Coming Here Anymore

Author: Isidor Nussenbaum

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Memoirs of a Jew born in 1927 in Bautzen (near Dresden), relating his own experiences and those of his family in the Holocaust. Describes their life under Nazi rule, including the "Kristallnacht" pogrom. In January 1942 the family was deported to the Riga ghetto, from which his father and brother Siegfried were sent briefly to the Salaspils labor camp. Siegfried was then sent to a labor camp at Spilve, and Isidor was sent to Kaiserwald and then to Spilve. In September 1944 the brothers were sent to Stutthof and then to the subcamp of Burggraben. With the approach of the Russian army in January 1945, they were sent on a death march to a camp at Rieben, where they were liberated. Siegfried was killed by a Russian soldier shortly after the liberation; their parents and sister also perished in the Holocaust. After the war Nussenbaum returned to Germany; he emigrated to the U.S. in 1948.