World War II / Holocaust

In this section we'll keep you up to date with news of books you might be interested in. The information will come from the publishers' website and we will add our reviews as often as we can.

Do also look out for events information and keep us posted if you are an organiser.

And remember, feedback is always welcome

The Zookeeper's Wife

Diane Ackerman

Old Street Publishing ISBN 9781905847464

April 2008

When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw - and the city's zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski - both Christians - began smuggling Jews into the empty cages.

Another dozen 'guests' hid inside the Zabinskis' villa. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants - otters, a badger, hyena pups, several lynxes…

With her exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman engages us wholeheartedly in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers and their hidden visitors. Antonina emerges as an unforgettable character, refusing to give in to the fear of discovery, keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her.

Diane Ackerman is the author of the best-selling A Natural History of the Senses, among many other books of non-fiction and poetry. She lives in upstate New York.

Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbruck
Judith Buber Agassi

Oneworld Publications ISBN 9781851684700

March 2007

In May 1939 the Ravensbrück labour camp for women was founded in Germany. The only camp of its kind, Ravensbrück was designed to hold 15,000 prisoners, and eventually housed over 42,000 women from 23 countries. But who, Judith Buber Agassi asks, were they?

Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbrück offers insight into the identities of the women within Ravensbrück’s walls, presenting original research from major archives in Germany, Israel and the USA. The author has recovered the identity of over 16,000 Jewish women over the six year history of the camp, drawing data from transport and death registration lists, as well as from records that were smuggled out of the camp before liberation, all double-checked, where possible, with personal testimonies.

Unlike many Ravensbrück memoirs, these testimonies are intended to corroborate details, rather than produce an impressionistic account of camp life. And yet Buber Agassi’s laboriously constructed data is no dispassionate array of facts: at the very heart of her work is the quest to give the dignity of an identity – a memory – to thousands of women.
For further information, please visit the author's website at www.tau.ac.il/~agass/judith-book.html.

Judith Buber Agassi has taught sociology and political science at universities in the United States, Canada, Israel, Germany and Hong Kong. She currently resides in Tel Aviv with her family.

Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad

Steven E. Aschleim

Princeton ISBN 9780691122236
January 2007

The modern German-Jewish experience through the rise of Nazism in 1933 was characterized by an explosion of cultural and intellectual creativity. Yet well after that history has ended, the influence of Weimar German-Jewish intellectuals has become ever greater. Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Leo Strauss have become household names and possess a continuing resonance. Beyond the Border seeks to explain this phenomenon and analyze how the German-Jewish legacy has continuingly permeated wider modes of Western thought and sensibility, and why these émigrés occupy an increasingly iconic place in contemporary society.

Steven Aschheim traces the odyssey of a fascinating group of German-speaking Zionists--among them Martin Buber and Hans Kohn--who recognized the moral dilemmas of Jewish settlement in pre-Israel Palestine and sought a binationalist solution to the Arab-Israel conflict. He explores how German-Jewish émigré historians like Fritz Stern and George Mosse created a new kind of cultural history written against the background of their exile from Nazi Germany and in implicit tension with postwar German social historians. And finally, he examines the reasons behind the remarkable contemporary canonization of these Weimar intellectuals--from Arendt to Strauss--within Western academic and cultural life.

Beyond the Border is about more than the physical act of departure. It also points to the pioneering ways these émigrés questioned normative cognitive boundaries and have continued to play a vital role in addressing the predicaments that engage and perplex us today.

Steven E. Aschheim holds the Vigevani Chair of European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews, and The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890-1990.

The Man who Broke Into Auschwitz

Denis Avey

Hodder and Stoughton ISBN 9781444714166

The Man who Broke into Auschwitz is the extraordinary true story of a British soldier who marched willingly into the notorious concentration camp. In the summer of 1944, Denis Avey was being held in a British POW labour camp, E715, near the site of Auschwitz III. He had heard of the brutality meted out to the prisoners there and he was determined to witness what he could. He hatched a plan to swap places with a Jewish inmate and smuggled himself into his sector of the camp. He spent the night there on two occasions and experienced first-hand the cruelty of a place where slave workers, had been sentenced to death through labour. Astonishingly, he survived to witness the aftermath of the Death March where thousands of prisoners were murdered by the Nazis as the Soviet Army advanced. After his own long trek right across central Europe he was repatriated to Britain where no one took his story seriously. For decades he couldn't bring himself to revisit the past that haunted his dreams. Now Denis Avey feels able to tell the full story --a tale as gripping as it is moving -- which offers us a unique insight into the mind of an ordinary man whose moral and physical courage are almost beyond belief.

Love and War in the Pyrennees: A Story of Courage, Fear and Hope 1939-1944

Rosemary Bailey

Phoenix ISBN 9780753825914

July 2009

Over the fifteen years Rosemary has been living in

the region, the more she realised she didn't know

about the war; about the French during the Occupation, the real role of the Resistance, the level of collaboration, the concentration camps in the Pyrenees and the treatment of Jews and other refugees. It is still very much a veiled history and most of the archives remain firmly closed.

Love and War in the Pyerenees is a portrait of human tragedy, heroism and cruelty that will create a picture of the period from a contemporary angle, the history linked to sights that can still be visited, and brought to life by letters, interviews and encounters with people today, including the historians currently trying to investigate what really happened.

Belsen 1945
Susanne Bardgett and David Cesarani
Vallentine Mitchell 9780853037170

Recent years have brought a more intimate understanding of how survivors experienced the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, of the challenge faced by the army and medical relief teams who buried the dead and tried to save lives, how this effort was recorded at the time, and how its memory has been passed on. This volume brings together essays from international experts based on the 60th anniversary seminar held at the Imperial War Museum in 2005. It also includes testimony from survivors, eyewitness accounts from liberators and relief workers, and the scripts of two BBC radio broadcasts. With the benefits of new documentation and a rigorous scholarly approach, this book offers an original and at times controversial reassessment of the camp, its liberation, and the way Belsen is remembered in Britain and Germany.

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Person of No Nationality

Ruth Barnett

David Paul Press ISBN 9780954848279

January 2010

Ruth Barnett’s autobiography starts in 1939, at the age of four in Berlin, when her parents sent her to Britain on the Kindertransport to escape the Nazis because of her father’s Jewish background. She describes, in wonderful detail, her early memories of Germany, and how she grew up a farm girl, in rural southern England, not knowing for sure if her parents were alive or dead.  She had three sets of foster families, each of whom she thought were going to adopt her, when her parents unexpectedly turned up, in 1949, and, against her will, forced her to return to Germany. Her father, who was a judge in Mainz had taken out a court order to bring her ‘home’. Ruth found this very traumatic. She later learns that he had converted to Christianity before the war but still had to flee to Shanghai to escape the Nazis. But her mother, who was not Jewish, had stayed in Germany and joined in protests against deportations.

Her account is full fascinating insights and observations - of her search for her identity, her difficult relationship with her parents, many arguments with them when she decided to convert to Judaism and marry a Jewish man, and her experience of living in Britain and in Germany after the war in the shadow of the Holocaust.  She describes how her subsequent career as a teacher and psychotherapist was affected by her early experiences but her expertise also enables her to recall her conflicting feelings as she felt them at the time in an authentic way and she shows how she channelled her energies to make a successful life and career for herself.  She now gives talks about the Holocaust and shares her testimony in schools and colleges.

Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine
Omer Bartov

Princeton University Press ISBN 9780691131214

November 2007

In Erased, Omer Bartov uncovers the rapidly disappearing vestiges of the Jews of western Ukraine, who were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis during World War II with help from the local populace. What begins as a deeply personal chronicle of the Holocaust in his mother's hometown of Buchach--in former Eastern Galicia--carries him on a journey across the region and back through history. This poignant travelogue reveals the complete erasure of the Jews and their removal from public memory, a blatant act of forgetting done in the service of a fiercely aggressive Ukrainian nationalism.

Bartov, a leading Holocaust scholar, discovers that to make sense of the heartbreaking events of the war, he must first grapple with the complex interethnic relationships and conflicts that have existed there for centuries. Visiting twenty Ukrainian towns, he recreates the histories of the vibrant Jewish and Polish communities who once lived there-and describes what is left today following their brutal and complete destruction.

Bartov encounters Jewish cemeteries turned into marketplaces, synagogues made into garbage dumps, and unmarked burial pits from the mass killings. He bears witness to the hastily erected monuments following Ukraine's independence in 1991, memorials that glorify leaders who collaborated with the Nazis in the murder of Jews. He finds that the newly independent Ukraine-with its ethnically cleansed and deeply anti-Semitic population--has recreated its past by suppressing all memory of its victims.

Illustrated with dozens of hauntingly beautiful photographs from Bartov's travels, Erased forces us to recognize the shocking intimacy of genocide.

Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. His books include Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation and Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich.

The Death of the Shtetl

Yehuda Bauer

Yale University Press ISBN 9780300152098

January 2010

In this book Yehuda Bauer, an internationally acclaimed Holocaust historian recounts the destruction of the shtetls, small Jewish townships in what was the eastern part of Poland, by the Nazis in 1941-1942. Bauer brings together all available documents, testimonies, and scholarship, including previously unpublished material from the Yad Vashem archives, pertaining to nine representative shtetls. In line with his belief that 'history is the story of real people in real situations', Bauer tells moving stories about what happened to individual Jews and their communities. Over a million people, approximately a quarter of all victims of the Holocaust came from the shtetls. Bauer writes of the relations between Jews and non-Jews (including the actions of rescuers); he describes attempts to create underground resistance groups, some people's escape to the forests, and Jewish participation in the Soviet partisan movement. Bauer's book is a definitive examination of the demise of the shtetls, a topic of vast importance to the history of the Holocaust.

Journal

Helene Berr

Translated from the French by David Bellos

Quercus Publishing ISBN 9781847245748 

October 2008

From April 1942 to March 1944, Helene Berr, a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, kept a journal that is both an intensely moving, intimate, harrowing, appalling document and a text of astonishing literary maturity. With her colleagues, she plays the violin and she seeks refuge from the everyday in what she calls the "selfish magic" of English literature and poetry. But this is Paris under the occupation and her family is Jewish. Eventually, there comes the time when all Jews are required to wear a yellow star. She tries to remain calm and rational, keeping to what routine she can: studying, reading, enjoying the beauty of Paris.Yet always there is fear for the future, and eventually, in March 1944, Helene and her family are arrested, taken to Drancy Transit Camp and soon sent to Auschwitz. She went - as is later discovered - on the death march to Bergen-Belsen and there she died in 1945, only weeks before the liberation of the camp. The last words in the journal she had left behind in Paris were "Horror, Horror, Horror...", a hideous and poignant echo of her English studies from The Heart of Darkness. Helene Berr's story is almost too painful to read, foreshadowing horror as it does amidst an enviable appetite for life, for beauty, for literature, for all that lasts.

David Bellos was the first ever winner of the Man Booker International Translator's prize for his translations of the distinguished Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare. He is the translator of, among others, Fred Vargas and Georges Perec, and he has also written a number of award-winning literary biographies. He is currently the professor of French and Comparitive Literature at Princeton University.

The Crime of my Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality

Michael Berkowitz

University of California Press ISBN 9780520251144

September 2007

The Crime of My Very Existence investigates a rarely considered yet critical dimension of anti-Semitism that was instrumental in the making of the Holocaust: the association of Jews with criminality.

In a lucid, wide-ranging narrative that draws from a rich body of documentary evidence, including memoirs and little-studied photographs, Michael Berkowitz traces the myths and the realities pertinent to the discourse on Jewish criminality from the eighteenth century through the Weimar Republic and on into the complex Nazi assault on the Jews.

In addition to reconstructing a little-recognized but protean element of the Nazi perpetrators' mind-set, this important study of the social construction of criminality is also the first to ask how Jewish victims themselves understood the assault on them as criminals.

Michael Berkowitz is Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. He is author of The Jewish Self-Image, Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, and Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War, and has co-edited, most recently, Fighting Back? Jewish and Black Boxers in Britain.

Genocide, the World Wars and the Unweaving of Europe
Donald Bloxham

Vallentine Mitchell ISBN 9780853037217
March 2008

The murder of at least one million Armenian Christians in 1915-16 and of some six million Jews from 1939-45 were the most extreme instances of mass murder in the First and Second World Wars respectively. This book examines the development and dynamics of both genocides. While bringing out the many differences in the origins, course, and nature of the crimes, the book argues that both need to be placed into the context of the wider violent agendas and demographic schemes of the perpetrator states. In the earlier case, it is important to consider the Ottoman violence against Assyrian Christians and Greek Orthodox subjects, and programs of forced assimilation of non-Turkish Muslim groups, including many Muslims victimized by other states. In the later case, it is impossible to understand the development of the 'final solution of the Jewish question' without paying attention to Nazi policy against Slavic groups, the 'disabled,' and Europe's Romany population. Both genocides, furthermore, need to be examined in the deeper contexts of the multi-causal violence resulting from the collapse of the eastern and southeastern European dynastic empires from the late nineteenth century, and from the establishment of new types of state in their aftermath. Finally, the book explains why these two major genocides occupy very different places in our contemporary memorial culture. It argues that the memory politics of the Armenian genocide illustrate the very tight limits to what we can expect in the way of meaningful international concern for ongoing genocides. Meanwhile, the instrumentalization of the memory of the Holocaust can actually inhibit self-criticism on the parts of the western states that increasingly foreground Holocaust memorial days and museums in their civic education.

Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust: A Jewish Family's Untold Story

Rebecca Boehling and Uta Larkey

Cambridge University Press ISBN 9780521899918

June 2011

A family's recently discovered correspondence provides the inspiration for this fascinating and deeply moving account of Jewish family life before, during and after the Holocaust. Rebecca Boehling and Uta Larkey reveal how the Kaufmann-Steinberg family was pulled apart under the Nazi regime and dispersed over three continents. The family's unique eight-way correspondence across two generations brings into sharp focus the dilemma of Jews in Nazi Germany facing the painful decisions of when, if and to where they should emigrate. The authors capture the family members' fluctuating emotions of hope, optimism, resignation and despair as well as the day-to-day concerns, experiences and dynamics of family life despite increasing persecution and impending deportation. Headed by two sisters who were among the first female business owners in Essen, the family was far from conventional and their story contributes new dimensions to our understanding of Jewish life in Germany and in exile during these dark years.

To Leo with Love: Letters from Amsterdam, Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen, 1943-1944

Miriam Bolle

Audley Square ISBN 9781906793005

February 2009

Mirjam Bolle was born in Amsterdam in 1917 into a middle class family, proud of being "Amsterdammers," and trained as a secretary. A gifted linguist (Dutch, Hebrew, German, English & French ) she was employed by the Jewish Council in Amsterdam during the war years.  An orthodox Jew,  Zionist, Socialist and intellectual she planned, with her fiance, Leo Bolle, to emigrate to Palestine. Leo settled there in 1939 within the intention that she would shortly join him. However the invasion of the Netherlands by Germany in 1940  eventually caused her deportation, along with that of her parents and sister, to Westerbork transit camp, and from thence to Bergen-Belsen. 

During the time of separation from Leo, she wrote letters to him describing the political situation and what was happening to those they knew. Not only did she have a historians eye for detail but she was one of the few to write about the Jewish faith, the keeping of the festivals and practices within the camps. Her letters are the most important eyewitness account of the destruction of Dutch Jewry  during the war and the only account to have been secreted out of  Bergen-Belsen (at great personal risk) before liberation. 

Leo (Menachem) had been a Rabbinical student in the Orthodox Seminary in Amsterdam and continued his studies in Jerusalem. Mirjam, her parents and sister managed to acquire places on the Palestine exchange list and in 1944 they were among the 222 Jews exchanged for German Templars from Palestine. They settled in Israel and Mirjam obtained a position with the Dutch Embassy. Leo fought with the Hagganah against the British and became a teacher and author of the Hebrew-Dutch Dictionary.  Their son, an army  pilot was shot down and killed and their daughter was blown up by a Syrian landmine.  Their surviving daughter works at Ben Gurion airport.  Nearly all of Mirjam's relatives were killed during WW2.

The Letters, originally published in Dutch, are now deposited in the Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam, and have been translated into French, German, Swedish, Danish, and are being translated into Finnish and Hebrew.

A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy
Thomas Buergenthal
Profile Books ISBN 9781846681783
January 2009

Thomas Buergenthal is unique. He is a judge at the International Court in The Hague who was rescued from the death camps of Auschwitz at the age of eleven. In his funny and heartfelt memoirs, he tells the story of his extraordinary journey – from the horrors of Nazism to an investigation of modern day genocide.

At the age of seven Thomas Buergenthal was imprisoned in Nazi ghettos and camps, being rescued by Soviet and Polish troops when he was eleven. Separated from his parents in Auschwitz and surviving the ‘Death March’ of 1945 he was miraculously reunited with his mother a year and a half later. The rest of his family and almost all of his friends were killed.

After experiencing the turmoil of Europe’s post-war years – from the Battle of Berlin, to a Jewish orphanage in Poland – Buergenthal went to America in the 1950s at the age of seventeen. He eventually became one of the world’s leading experts on international law and human rights. His story of survival and his determination to use law and justice to prevent further genocide is an epic journey through 20th Century history.

Buergenthal gives his perspective – as a child – on life in the camps. And, uniquely, he shows how his past has informed his understanding of the modern day war-crimes he sees as a judge. His book is both a special historical document and a great literary achievement, comparable only to Primo Levi’s masterpieces.

The Devil's Workshop

Adolf Burger

Frontline Books ISBN 9781848325234

February 2009

One of the most remarkable episodes of WWII was the Nazi attempt to

forge currency and trigger the economic collapse of the Allies. The

counterfeit operation was one of the largest the world has ever seen

and lead to the postwar reissue of sterling.

At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, 144 Jewish

prisoners of 13 different nationalities were forced to work on producing

counterfeit pound and dollar notes worth billions. The plan was known

as Operation Bernhard.

The forgeries that were produced were virtually undetectable: only the most senior forgers were able to spot fakes, where even the Bank of England failed to do so.

In this extraordinary memoir, the sole surviving Czech counterfeiter Adolf Burger describes his wartime experiences, including the murder of his wife Gizela in Auschwtiz and his time as a prisoner in four concentration camps. He was working as a counterfeiter until his liberation from the Ebensee camp on 5 May 1945 and was present at Toplitzee lake on July 5th 2000 when thousands of forged notes were brought to the surface.

Supported by hitherto unseen documentation and photographs that Burger took of his fellow prisoners after the war, this is a shocking account which sheds fresh light on the calculated barbarity of the Nazi war machine.

Adolf Burger was a consultant for the film The Counterfeiters, winner of the 2008 Foreign Language Oscar. His memoir has been published in Hungarian, Persian, Japanese and Czech. He continues to travel to speak about his wartime experiences and will take part in JBW 2009.

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland
Carmen Callil

Vintage ISBN 9780099498285  

Carmen Callil tells the story of one of history’s most despicable villains and conmen – Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Nazi collaborator and ‘Commissioner for Jewish Affairs’, who managed the Vichy government’s dirty work, ‘controlling’ its Jewish population.

Born into a politically moderate family, Louis Darquier (‘de Pellepoix’ was a later affectation) proceeded from modest beginnings to claw his way to power. He was the ultimate chancer: always broke, always desperate for attention, status, women and drink, he became ‘one of the few men to put on weight during the Second World War’. After it was over he decamped to Spain and would never be brought to justice for having sent thousands of Jews to the camps.

Early on in his career he married the alcoholic Myrtle Jones from Tasmania, equally practised in the arts of deception. Together they had a child, Anne Darquier, whom they promptly abandoned to grow up in England under an oppressive mantle of silence. Her tragic story is woven through the narrative. Darquier’s ascent to power during the years leading up to World War II mirrors the rise of French anti-Semitism and the role it played in the horrors that were to follow. The book is a portrait of a society that was desperate and fragmented and which was collectively guilty in choosing to turn a blind eye.

Carmen Callil founded the Virago Press. Among the writers she published were Iris Murdoch, A.S.Byatt, Angela Carter, David Malouf, Rosamond Lehmann, Amos Oz, Edward Said, Michael Ignatieff, Marina Warner and Toni Morrison. She is now a critic and writer.

Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes and Trial of a Desk Murderer

David Cesarani

Da Capo Press ISBN 9780306815393

April 2007

Since Adolf Eichmann's trial and execution, scholars have looked to the events of the Holocaust logistician's life to assess the depth of his guilt and to speculate on the social mechanisms that turn individuals genocidal. Cesarani aims to strip away some of the mythology that such efforts have invariably generated. His thesis--that Eichmann's evil arose not from banal bean counting but from the bureaucrat's ambitious careerism--both builds upon and pointedly rejects Hannah Arendt's visceral Eichmann in Jerusalem and will certainly attract attention for doing so. Yet Cesarani does more than simply reopen the cog-or-monster debates that surrounded Arendt's assessment. Pointing out key moments in which Eichmann overcame his own humanity--swallowing his initial shock at the sight of mass shootings and finding recovery from a "total moral collapse" in Hungary in 1944--Cesarani emphasizes Eichmann's deliberate choices, habituation to power, and gradual desensitization to mass atrocity. In doing so, he presents a compelling vision of Eichmann that comports with our current awareness of the psychological dynamics of genocide. Similarly compelling is Cesarani's fascinatingly Darwinian description of the ever-changing bureaucratic structures of Nazism to which Eichmann was continually adapting as he rose in the ranks. Few biographies, and fewer Holocaust histories, are as innovative or as nuanced.

Traces of the Holocaust: Ghettoization and Deportation

Tim Cole

Continuum ISBN 9781441169969

April 2011

'The universe began shrinking,' wrote Elie Wiesel of his Holocaust experiences in Hungary, 'first we were supposed to leave our towns and concentrate in the larger cities. Then the towns shrank to the ghetto, and the ghetto to a house, the house to a room, the room to a cattle car...' Adopting an innovative multi-perspectival approach framed around a wide variety of material traces – from receipts to maps, name lists to photographs – Tim Cole tells stories of journeys into and out of Hungarian ghettos. These stories of the perpetrators who oversaw ghettoization and deportation, the bystanders who witnessed and aided these journeys, and the victims who undertook them reveal the spatio-temporal dimensions of the Holocaust. But they also point to the visibility of these events within the ordinary spaces of the city, the importance of an economic assault on Jews and the marked gendering of the Holocaust in Hungary.

Dr Tim Cole is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary European Social History at the University of Bristol, UK, specializing in Holocaust studies.

Auschwitz

Angela Morgan Cutler

Two Ravens Press ISBN 9781906120184

February 2008

Auschwitz: a place where millions were killed and which thousands now visit each year. A mass grave – and a tourist destination. The focus of this work of autobiographical fiction is on the sightseers – the curious that are drawn to visit. It is a book that questions our need to look: what is there to uncover, other than the difficulty of peering into such a place and into a subject that has been obsessively documented, yet can never really be understood? How to write about Auschwitz in the twenty-first century, in a time when the last generation of survivors is soon to be lost?

This is also a book that searches for a personal story. It opens on a local bus that takes Angela, her husband En (whose mother survived the holocaust where most of her family did not) and their two sons to Auschwitz sixty years after the holocaust, and ends in a pine forest outside Minsk where En’s grandparents were shot in May 1942.

The backbone of Auschwitz is a series of e-mails between the author and acclaimed American writer Raymond Federman. At the age of 14, Federman (now approaching 80) was hastily thrust into the small upstairs closet of their Paris apartment by his mother just before she, his father and two sisters were taken to Auschwitz, where they were killed. Federman also has spent a lifetime trying to find a language appropriate for the enormity of the holocaust and his part in its legacy, ultimately espousing laughterature – laughter as a means of survival.

This beautiful, powerful and innovative work experiments with new forms – correspondence, reflections, dreams, a travelogue – that mirror the fragmentary legacy of the holocaust itself and that, at the same time, capture its contradictions – and sometimes its absurdity.

The Perfect Nazi: Uncovering my SS Grandfather's Secret Past and How Hitler Seduced a Generation

Martin Davidson

Viking ISBN 9780670916160

August 2010

In 1926, at the age of twenty, a trainee dentist called Bruno Langbehn joined the Nazi party. Growing up in a Germany that was impoverished and humiliated by the defeat of the First World War, and surrounded by a fiercely military environment, Bruno was one of the first young men to sign up. And as the party rose to power, he was there every step of the way. Eventually his loyalty was rewarded with a high-ranking position in Hitler's dreaded SS, the elite security service charged with sending Germany's 'racially impure' to the death camps. For fifty years after the end of the Second World War, his family kept this horrifying secret until his British grandson, Martin Davidson, uncovered the truth. Drawing on an astonishing cache of personal documents, Davidson retraces Bruno's journey from disillusioned adolescent to SS Officer to mysterious grandfather. In this extraordinary account he tries to understand how Langbehn and millions of others like him were seduced by Hitler's regime, and attempts to come to terms with this devastating revelation.

The Holocaust by Bullets

A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Millions Jews

Father Patrick Desbois

Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 9780230617575

December 2009

In this heart-wrenching book, Father Patrick Desbois documents the daunting task of identifying and examining all the sites where Jews were exterminated by Nazi mobile units in the Ukraine in WWII, with the goal of providing proper burials for the victims of the forgotten Ukrainian

Holocaust.

"In Jewish tradition the greatest category of acts one can perform are those of 'loving kindness,' including taking care of the sick, welcoming the stranger, and sheltering the needy. The most treasured of these acts is taking care of the dead because, unlike the others, it cannot be reciprocated. Jewish tradition posits that it is then that the individual most closely emulates God's kindness to humans, which also cannot be reciprocated. Father Patrick Desbois has performed this act of loving kindness not for one person but for hundreds of thousands of people who were murdered in cold blood. He has done so despite the fact that many people would have preferred this story never to be uncovered and others doubted that it ever could be done. His contribution to history and to human memory, as chronicled in this important book, is immeasurable." - Deborah E. Lipstadt

FATHER PATRICK DESBOIS is secretary to the French Conference of Bishops for relations with Judaism, advisor to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Lyon and advisor to the Vatican on the Jewish religion. Grandson of a deportee to the Rawa Ruska camp, he has set out to investigate the mass murder of Eastern European Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War. He is the winner of the B'nai B'rith International Award for Outstanding Contribution to Relations with the Jewish People. He lives in Paris, France.

The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster

Richard J Evans

Allen Lane ISBN 9780713997422

October 2008

The third and final volume in Richard J. Evans's masterly trilogy on the history of Nazi Germany traces the rise and fall of German military might, against the background of the mobilization of the 'people's community' in the service of a war of conquest, racial subjugation and genocide.

Interweaving a broad narrative of the war's progress with personal testimony from a wide range of people, from generals to front-line soldiers, from Hitler Youth activists to middle-class housewives, Richard Evans lays bare the dynamics of a society plunged into war at every level. The great battles and events of the war are here, from the Battle of Stalingrad to Hitler's suicide in the bunker, but just as important is the recreation of the daily experience of ordinary Germans in wartime, under the growing impact of the mass bombing of Germany's towns and cities. At the centre of the book is the Nazi extermination of Europe's Jews, set in the context of Hitler's genocidal plans for the racial restructuring of Europe.

Blending narrative, description and analysis, The Third Reich at War creates a picture of a society rushing headlong to self-destruction and taking a large part of Europe with it.

Richard J. Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. His previous books include In Defence of History, Telling Lies about Hitler and the companions to this title, The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power. He lives outside Cambridge.

Children's Exodus: A History of the Kindertransport

Vera K. Fast

IB Tauris ISBN 9781848855373

Offers a look at the people and politics behind the various chains of rescue as well as the personal narratives of the children who left everything behind in the hope of finding safety. This title examines the religious and political tensions that emerged throughout the migration and at times threatened to bring operations to a halt.

A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction

Ruth Franklin

OUP USA ISBN 9780195313963

January 2011

What is the difference between writing a novel about the Holocaust and fabricating a memoir? Do narratives about the Holocaust have a special obligation to be 'truthful'--that is, faithful to the facts of history?
Or is it okay to lie in such works? 

In her provocative study A Thousand Darknesses, Ruth Franklin investigates these questions as they arise in the most significant works of Holocaust fiction, from Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories to Jonathan Safran Foer's postmodernist family history. Franklin argues that the memory-obsessed culture of the last few decades has led us to mistakenly focus on testimony as the only valid form of Holocaust writing. As even the most canonical texts have come under scrutiny for their fidelity to the facts, we have lost sight of the essential role that imagination plays in the creation of any literary work, including the memoir. 

Taking a fresh look at memoirs by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and examining novels by writers such as Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy Kosinski, W.G. Sebald, and Wolfgang Koeppen, Franklin makes a persuasive case for literature as an equally vital vehicle for understanding the Holocaust (and for memoir as an equally ambiguous form). The result is a study of immense depth and range that offers a lucid view of an often cloudy field.

The King's Most Loyal Enemy Aliens: Germans who Fought for Briain in the Second World War

Helen Fry

Sutton Publishing ISBN 9780750947008

September 2007

This is the compelling story of the 10,000 German and Austrian nationals who fled Nazi persecution to join the British in their fight against Hitler during the Second World War. Most were Jews but a significant number were political opponents of the Nazi regime and so-called 'degenerate artists'. They arrived in Britain between 1933 and 1939, and at the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 became 'enemy aliens'. They volunteered to serve in the British forces, donned the King's uniform, swore allegiance to George VI and became affectionately known as 'the King's most loyal enemy aliens'. This compelling story includes previously unpublished interviews with veterans and an impressive selection of archive photographs, many of which are reproduced for the first time.

Helen Fry PhD is an honorary research fellow in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College, London. While researching Jews in North Devon During the Second World War (Halsgrove, 2005), Helen discovered that one in seven of Britain’s German and Austrian refugees enlisted in the British Forces in the Second World War. So was born the idea for The King’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens.

The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust

Martin Gilbert

Routledge ISBN 9780415484862

January 2009

The graphic history of the Nazi attempt to destroy the Jews of Europe during the Second World War is illustrated in this series of 333 detailed maps.

The maps, and the text and photographs that accompany them, powerfully depict the fate of the Jews between 1933 and 1945, while also setting the chronological story in the wider context of the war itself. The maps include:

-Historical background - from the effects of anti-Jewish violence between 1880 and 1933 to the geography of the existing Jewish communities before the advent of the Nazis

-The beginning of the violence - from the destruction of the synagogues in November 1938 to Jewish migrations and deportations, the ghettos, and the establishment of the concentration camps and death camps throughout German-dominated Europe

-The spread of Nazi rule - the fate of the Jews throughout Europe including Germany, Austria, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Russia, Denmark, Norway, France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, and the Baltic States

-Jewish revolts and resistance– acts of armed resistance, fighting in the forests, individual acts of courage

-Jews in hiding– escape routes, Christians who helped Jews

-The death marches– the advance of the Allies and the liberation of the camps, the survivors, and the final death toll.

This revised edition includes a new section which gives an insight into the layout and organization of some of the most significant places of the Holocaust, including Auschwitz, Treblinka and the Warsaw ghetto, maps that will be especially useful to those visiting the sites.

Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction

HarperCollins ISBN 9780007196043  

An account of the devastating attacks on Jews and Jewish property, and the destruction of more than a thousand synagogues in Germany and Austria on 9/10 November 1938, and of the fate of the Jews who witnessed that destruction.

A study of the German and Austrian Jewish struggle to emigrate, and the story of those diplomats and other individuals in Germany and outside it who did what they could to help Jews and to facilitate their emigration.

Incorporates more than fifty eyewitness accounts that were sent to the author while he was writing the book as well as twenty-five maps compiled by the author, including the previously unmapped locations of every synagogue destroyed and nineteen photographs.

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The Diary of Petr Ginz

Edited by Chava Pressburger and translated by Elena Lappin

Foreword by Jonathan Safran Foer

Atlantic Books ISBN 9781843545545

June 2007

Not since Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl has such an intimately candid, deeply affecting account of a childhood compromised by Nazi tyranny come to light.

In 1941, Petr Ginz was a young teenager living in Prague with his parents and sister. Adventurous, artistic and optimistic, he wrote poems and novels and edited a children's magazine inside the work camp at Theresienstadt. Originally written in his own special code-language, Petr's diaries describe daily life for the Ginz family and document the introduction of anti-Jewish laws from a young adult's point of view - pithy and unsentimental.

The writing stopped in 1942 when Petr received his summons, but the books survived in a Prague attic. They recently came to light in extraordinary circumstances and were published in the Czech Republic in 2005 to a storm of publicity. Edited by his sister, Chava, and including background material and beautiful reproductions of Petr's artwork, this book is a classic in the making.

Imaginary Neighbors Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust

Edited by Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska

University of Nebraska Press ISBN 9780803222175

2007

Imaginary Neighbors offers a unique and significant contribution to the contemporary debate concerning Holocaust memory by exploring the most important current political topic in Poland: Jewish-Polish relations during and after World War II. Drawing on the controversy and attention generated by Jan Gross’s landmark book Neighbors, whose description of the brutal Jedwabne massacre reignited the debate over Polish-Jewish relations during the war, this timely volume presents a rich and nuanced examination of the manner in which past and present relations between Poles and Jews are understood in Poland and in the Polish and Jewish diasporas.   Rather than revisiting historical details of Jedwabne, this innovative collection uses an interdisciplinary approach to understand the reverberations of the events—and the scholarship that has evolved around them—within the context of the Polish national community. Combining scholarly essays with literary and journalistic accounts, Imaginary Neighbors demonstrates that the Holocaust memory in Poland, together with the memory of Polish Jews and Jewish culture, continues to be engaged in conflict. What emerges is a passionate conversation among cultural critics, philosophers, literary theorists, historians, theologians, and writers on the vexing issues of responsibility, forgiveness, reconciliation, and national and religious identity.

Dorota Glowacka is an associate professor in Contemporary Studies at the University of King’s College, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is a coeditor of Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries. Joanna Zylinska is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College at the University of London. She is the author of The Ethics of Cultural Studies and On Spiders, Cyborgs, and Being Scared: The Feminine and the Sublime.

Fear: Anti -Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation

Jan T. Gross

Princeton University Press  ISBN: 9780691128788

Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Close to five million Poles were killed. Of these, more than half were Jews killed in the Holocaust. Ninety percent of the world's second largest Jewish community was annihilated. But despite the calamity shared by Poland's Jews and non-Jews, anti-Semitic violence did not stop in Poland with the end of the war. Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their Polish hometowns after the war experienced widespread hostility, including murder, at the hands of their neighbors. The bloodiest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century

Europe took place in Kielce, Poland, a year after the war ended. Jan Gross's Fear is a detailed reconstruction of this pogrom and the Polish reactions to it that attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism possible in Poland after the war?

Gross argues that postwar Polish anti-Semitism cannot be understood simply as a continuation of prewar attitudes. Rather, it developed in the context of the Holocaust and the Communist takeover: Anti-Semitism eventually became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society filled with people who had participated in the Nazi campaign of murder and plunder, people for whom Jewish survivors were a standing reproach. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz said that Poland's Communist rulers fulfilled the

dream of Polish nationalists by bringing into existence an ethnically pure state.

For more than half a century, what happened to Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland has been cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Gross at last brings the truth to light.

Jan T. Gross was a 2001 National Book Award nominee for his widely acclaimed Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. He teaches history at Princeton University, where he is Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society.

The Other Schindlers: Why Some People Chose to Save Jews in the Holocaust

Agnes Grunwald-Spier

The History Press ISBN 9780752457062

May 2010

Thanks to Thomas Keneally's book Schindler's Ark, and the film based on it, Schindler's List, we have become more aware of the fact that, in the midst of Hitler's extermination of the Jews, courage and humanity could still overcome evil. While 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime, some were saved through the actions of non-Jews whose consciences would not allow them to pass by on the other side, and many are honoured by Yad Vashem as 'Righteous Among the Nations' for their actions. As a baby, Agnes Grunwald-Spier was herself saved from the horrors of Auschwitz by an unknown official, and is now a trustee of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. She has collected together the stories of thirty individuals who rescued Jews, and these provide a new insight into why these people were prepared to risk so much for their fellow men and women. With a foreword by Sir Martin Gilbert, one of the leading experts on the subject, this is an ultimately uplifting account of how some good deeds really do shine in a weary world. 'Unfortunately, to kill thousands of people only a few men with machine guns are needed, and they do not risk anything except their souls. Saving of just one man involved exceptional devotion, undescribable courage of many people, and they were risking not only their lives, but also those of their children.'

Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933

Representations in Film and Television Since 1933
Edited by Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman
Wallflower Press ISBN 9781904764519 

2005

Based on a major symposium held at the Imperial War Museum in 2001, this book is a unique blend of voices and perspectives – archivists, curators, filmmakers, scholars and Holocaust survivors. Each section of the book is dedicated to a different category of moving image: film as witness; propaganda; documentary in film and television; feature films; the legacy of the Holocaust and other genocides. These considerations are set within the wider context of the history of the Holocaust and with the authors also assessing how film has contributed to awareness and understanding of the cataclysm since the war. Accessible, engaging and stimulating, this book is an excellent introduction to the subject, covering such key titles as The Eternal Jew (1940) and Night and Fog (1955) and the discussion of crucial themes such as the use of film and video in war crimes trials, film and memory, film and video in exhibitions and memorials, and the moving image and post-Holocaust genocides. The book also encourages the reader to move beyond Schindler's List (1993) and Life is Beautiful (1997) to consider forgotten classics of the genre, such as The Long Journey (1949) and Passenger (1963).


Toby Haggith is Head of Public Services Section, Film and Video Archive at the Imperial War Museum. Joanna Newman is Strategic Partnerships Manager at the British Library. She is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Southampton, was executive director of the London Jewish Cultural Centre.

The Philosopher of Auschwitz: Jean Amery and Living with the Holocaust

Irene Heidelberger-Leonard

IB Tauris ISBN 9781848851504

March 2010

Who was Jean Amery? Victim or survivor? Agnostic or Jew? Austrian or exile? Philosopher or journalist? Jean Amery is not easy to classify but what this biography (the first in any language) demonstrates is that he is more - far more - than some enigmatic cult figure: he is one of the most influential of Holocaust survivors and one of the most provocative writers and thinkers of the 20th century. Jean Amery - born Hans Maier in Austria in 1912 - is perhaps best known for his seminal work, "At the Mind's Limits", one of the central texts on what Amery himself described as 'the subjective state of the victim.' But as Irene Heidelberger-Leonard's book reveals, Amery was not just a 'professional concentration camper', as he sometimes dubbed himself in a mixture of mockery and resignation. Drawing on a wide range of previously unpublished documents, Heidelberger-Leonard illuminates the turbulent life of this complex figure, from his middle class origins in pre-war Austria; his flight from his homeland to join the Resistance; his imprisonment in Auschwitz and Belsen; to his eventual suicide in 1978. This definitive biography examines how Amery grappled with what it meant to be both a victim and survivor of the concentration camps and what his experiences there reveal about the tension between human dignity and the reality of horror. Focusing chiefly on Amery's literary works, one of the book's great strengths lies in exploring how every aspect of Amery's life and thought is inextricably connected with his writings. This biography brilliantly demonstrates the importance of Amery in his own time and shows how his relevance extends far beyond.

Irene Heidelberger-Leonard is Professor of German Literature at the Free University of Brussels. She has written extensively on the German post-war period and its relationship to National Socialism and is the editor of a nine-volume edition of Amery's writings. Her biography of Jean Amery was named as non-fiction Book of the Year by the German Cultural Foundation in 2004 and was awarded the prestigious biennial Einhard Prize for Outstanding European Biography 2005.

The Holocaust and Antisemitism: A Short History
Jocelyn Hellig

Oneworld Publications ISBN 9781851683130

February 2003

This is a sensitive yet challenging introduction that seeks out the root

causes of a hatred that has had such catastrophic consequences for

the Jewish people.

Opening with a detailed account of Holocaust historiography, Jocelyn Hellig explores the history of antisemitic thought, from classical Greek and pagan hostility through to the inter-religious rivalry between Christianity, Islam and Judaism, along with the role of the secular world in Jewish persecution. Other timely issues include:

- Anti-Zionism, Jewish sovereignty and the state of Israel
- Modernity and prejudice: antisemitism on the internet
- Holocaust denial and the revision of history

Jocelyn Hellig was Associate Professor of World Religions at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, until her recent retirement. She is an expert on Judaism and interfaith relations, and is a prominent spokesperson for Jewish affairs in South Africa.

Between Two Streams: A Diary from Bergen-Belsen
Abel J. Herzberg

Translated by Jack Santcross

IB Tauris ISBN 9781845117504

An extraordinary and unique eye-witness account of life in one of Nazi Germany's most notorious concentration camps.

At the height of the Holocaust it was Nazi policy to preserve small groups of ‘privileged’ Jews for possible use in exchanges with Allied-held German civilians. Held in the special ‘Sternlager’ at Bergen-Belsen their ‘privilege’ amounted to being kept alive rather than gassed. One such internee - Abel Herzberg, a Dutch lawyer and writer - managed, in the hell of Bergen-Belsen, to keep a diary which chronicles the horrific reality of daily existence in the camp.

Among the passengers on the train that carried Herzberg both to Belsen and away from
the camp a year later was a 9-year-old boy. That same boy - Jack Santcross -undertook to translate Herzberg’s diary half a century later. The result is this unique eyewitness account of life in one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps and a work of great historical importance.

Abel Herzberg, who was arrested by the Nazis in Holland and incarcerated in Bergen-Belsen during WWII, wrote many books on a wide variety of subjects, receiving numerous honours and prizes. In 1965 he was made Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau. In 1974 he was awarded the Dutch prize for literature for his collected works. He died in 1989.

Jack Santcross and his family moved to Britain after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen. He would later study Dutch language and literature at the University of London. He is a translator and former fellow of the Institute of Linguists.

The Himmler Brothers

Katrin Himmler

Pan Macmillan ISBN 9780230529076 
July 2007

Heinrich Himmler's great-niece offers a unique account of one woman's attempt to deal with her chilling inheritance

Once upon a time the Himmlers were just a normal German family, middle-class, hard-working, well-educated. There were three brothers, Gebhart, Heinrich and Ernst. Heinrich grew up to become the head of Hitler’s SS, mastermind of the concentration camp system and chief perpetrator of the Holocaust.

When Katrin Himmler, Heinrich’s great-niece, was fifteen, one of her school mates asked during a history lesson if she was related to the Himmler. ‘Yes’, she stammered, at which there was a deathly hush in the classroom and the teacher, embarrassed and unsure, quickly moved the lesson on. As she grew older, Katrin gave her family history a wide berth, but married to an Israeli whose family was confined to the Warsaw Ghetto and with a young, half-Jewish son, she realizes that she cannot evade the past so easily. Katrin Himmler’s cool but meticulous examination of the Himmler story reveals – in all its dark complexity – the gulf between the ‘normality’ of bourgeois family life and the horrors perpetrated by one member and a more nuanced portrait of Heinrich himself emerges – not a lone evil executioner, but a middle-class family man, loved and fully supported by his respectable German family.

Katrin Himmler is the great-niece of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, Gestapo and leading organiser of the Holocaust. She was born in 1967. She is a political scientist and lives in Berlin.

After Such Knowledge

Eva Hoffman

Vintage ISBN 9780099464721
March 2005

As the Holocaust recedes from us in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the generation after. How should we, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors, and the second generation's responsibilities to its received memories?

Eva Hoffman probes these questions through personal reflections and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological and moral implications of the second-generation experience. She examines the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted, and the more wilful stratagems of collective memory.

As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past, and urges the need to transform potent family stories into a fully-informed understanding of a forbidding history.

My Hometown Concentration Camp
Norman Jacobs with Bernard Offen

Vallentine Mitchell ISBN 9780853036364

September 2007

My Hometown Concentration Camp tells the story of the young Bernard Offen's endurance and survival of the Krakow Ghetto and five concentration camps, including Plaszow and Auschwitz-Birkenau, until his liberation near Dachau by American troops in 1945. The author tells of his experiences in the ghetto and camps and how he set out, after the war, in search of his brothers, eventually finding them in Italy with the Polish Army. Having returned to the United States, Bernard Offen was drafted into the US Army to serve in the Korean War. After the war, he founded his own business and built a family, both helping to restore a sense of normality to his life. This was the start of his own unique process of healing that led, ultimately, to his retirement and decision to dedicate his life to educating audiences around the world about his experiences during the Holocaust. Bernard Offen's story recounts his one-man journey across America, Europe, Israel, and back to his native Poland, and his development as a filmmaker, educator, and healer. My Hometown Concentration Camp will touch readers through the strength of the author's self-determination to attempt to confront and conquer the traumatic experiences he witnessed as a young man.

Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World

Jan Karski

Penguin ISBN 9780141196664

May 2011

'I do not pretend to have given an exhaustive picture of the Polish Underground, its organization and its activities.Because of our methods, I believe that there is no one today who could give an all-embracing recital…This book is a purely personal story, my story.'

Jan Karski's 1944 war memoir is a heroic act of witness: the courageous testimony of a man who risked everything for his country. At times overwhelming in the details it reveals of the suffering of ordinary people, it is an unforgettable and deeply affecting record of brutality, courage, and survival under conditions of extreme bleakness. During the first four years of World War II, Karski worked as a messenger for the underground, risking his life in secret missions. He was captured, tortured, rescued, smuggled through a tunnel into the Warsaw ghetto and, finally, disguised himself as a guard to infiltrate a Nazi death camp. Then, travelling across occupied Europe to England, with his eye-witness report smuggled on microfilm in the handle of a razor, he became the first man to tell the Allies about the Holocaust - only to be ignored.

Who Will Write Our History?

Samuel D. Kassow

Penguin ISBN 9780141039688 

February 2009

"This may well be the most important book about history

that anyone will ever read".               The New Republic

In 1940 the historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine organization, code named Oyneg Shabes, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to study and document all facets of Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would preserve this history for posterity. To contemplate, to plan, and to carry out such an elaborate project of scholarly self-study under such conditions is almost unimaginable.

As the Final Solution unfolded, although decimated by murders and deportations, the group persevered in its work until 1943. Of its more than 60 members, only three survived. Ringelblum and his family perished in March 1944. But before he died, he managed to hide thousands of documents in milk cans and tin boxes under the ghetto's buildings. These were found beneath the rubble in 1946 and 1950. This is a truly unforgettable story of survival and the very human need to record history in the face of oppression.

Samuel D. Kassow is the Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College. He is the author of Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia, 1814-1917 and editor (with Edith W.Clowes and James L. West) of Between Tsar and People: The Search for a Public Identity in Tsarist Russia. He has lectured on Russian and Jewish history in many countries, including Israel, Russia, and Poland.

ORT, the Second World War and the Rehabilitation of Holocaust Survivors

Sarah Kavanaugh

Vallentine Mitchell ISBN 9780853038061
March 2008

This book centres on the role played by ORT in the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors inside the Displaced Persons (DP) camps after the Second World War. A brief history of the ORT organisation is followed by the author highlighting ORT's work during the 1920s and 1930s, using Berlin as a case study. The important and often life-saving work carried out by ORT workers inside the ghettos of Eastern Europe, primarily in Warsaw and Kovno, is then examined. The book then focuses on the liberation of the concentration camps, the set-up of the post-war allied zones of occupation, the establishment of the DP camps, and ORT's arrival within them. The mature period of ORT's work in the DP camps is then covered, looking at Belsen in the British zone of occupation and Landsberg in the American zone. The book also explores ORT's work in Austria and Italy. The final chapter highlights the closure of the DP camps, the subsequent immigration of the DPs, and the creation of the State of Israel.

If This Is a Man / The Truce

Primo Levi

Abacus ISBN 9780349100135

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contempible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in The Periodic Table and The Wrench, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a "magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I've ever known" - PHILIP ROTH

The Eichmann Trial

Deborah Lipstadt

Schocken Books ISBN 9780805242607

March 2011

The capture of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann by Israeli agents in Argentina in May of 1960 and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem by an Israeli court electrified the world. The public debate it sparked on where, how, and by whom Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice, and the international media coverage of the trial itself, was a watershed moment in how the civilized world in general and Holocaust survivors in particular found the means to deal with the legacy of genocide on a scale that had never been seen before.
 
Award-winning historian Deborah E. Lipstadt gives us an overview of the trial and analyzes the dramatic effect that the survivors’ courtroom testimony—which was itself not without controversy—had on a world that had until then regularly commemorated the Holocaust but never fully understood what the millions who died and the hundreds of thousands who managed to survive had actually experienced.
 
As the world continues to confront the ongoing reality of genocide and ponder the fate of those who survive it, this trial of the century, which has become a touchstone for judicial proceedings throughout the world, offers a legal, moral, and political framework for coming to terms with unfathomable evil. Lipstadt infuses a gripping narrative with historical perspective and contemporary urgency.

From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust

Meir Litvak and Esther Webman

Hurst ISBN 9781850659242 

May 2009

Based on years of research conducted mostly in Arabic sources, Meir Litvak and Ester Webman track the evolution of post-World War II perceptions of the Holocaust and their parallel emergence in the wake of the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948.

Following the establishment of the State of Israel, Arab attitudes toward the Holocaust became entangled with broader anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic sentiments. Litvak and Webman track this discourse through the work of leading intellectuals and turn to representations of the Holocaust in the media and culture of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and among the Palestinian people. Their chronological history, which spans sixty years, provides a remarkable perspective on the origins, development, and tenaciousness of anti-Holocaust belief.

"'Litvak and Webman's work constitutes a huge step forward in scholarship on Arab attitudes vis-a-vis the Holocaust. It fills a major gap in our knowledge by providing a detailed survey and systematic analysis of the key themes on the issue, in a detached, scholarly manner. ... In a sweep of research that covers the sixty-plus year period from the end of the Second World War to the present-day, Litvak and Webman thoroughly mine Arab public commentary on the Holocaust in books, journals, magazines and newspapers to present a clear, compelling yet nuanced portrait of the various strands of Arab attitudes on the issue and how they developed over the decades, especially in reaction to critical milestones in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Indeed, their principal finding "that Arab attitudes keep pace with the evolution of that conflict" underscores the organic connection between history and politics that continues to dominate the Middle East today.' -- Robert Satloff, Director, The Washington Institute, author, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories of the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands

Meir Litvak is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University and is the author of Shi'i Scholars in 19th Century Iraq: The Shi'i 'Ulama of Najaf and Karbala; Esther Webman is a research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University.

Dealing with Satan: Rezso Kasztner's Daring Rescue of Hungarian Jews
Ladislaus Lob

Jonathan Cape ISBN 9781845950088

February 2008

Two months after his eleventh birthday, on 9 July 1944, the gates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp closed behind Ladislaus Lob. Five months later, with the Second World War still raging, he crossed the border into Switzerland, cold and hungry, but alive and safe. He was not alone, but part of a group of some 1,670 Jewish men, women and children from Hungary, who had been rescued from the Nazis as a result of a deal made by a man called Reszo Kasztner – himself a Hungarian Jew – with Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Holocaust. Twelve years and a miscarriage of justice later Kasztner was murdered by an extremist Jewish gang in Israel. To this day he remains a highly controversial figure, regarded by some as a traitor and by many others as a hero. Dealing with Satan tells the story of the man who saved hundreds – indeed probably thousands – from the Holocaust. It is also the story of a child who lived to grow up after the Holocaust thanks to that man.

The book is the first comprehensive account of a highly dramatic and controversial episode of the Holocaust and its implications for Jewish/Israeli politics today. Combining objective research with autobiography, Dealing with Satan traces Kasztner’s negotiations with the SS and describes in detail the lives of author and his fellow inmates at Bergen-Belsen. It is an examination of one individual’s unique achievement and a consideration of the profound moral issues raised by his dealings with some of the most evil men ever known.

Ladislaus Lob was born in Transylvania. He is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Sussex.

Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

Peter Longerich

Oxford University Press ISBN 9780192804365

March 2010

A comprehensive history of the Nazi persecution and murder of European Jews, paying detailed attention to an unrivalled range sources.

Focusing clearly on the perpetrators and exploring closely the process of decision making, Longerich argues that anti-Semitism was not a mere by-product of the Nazis' political mobilization or an attempt to deflect the attention of the masses, but that anti-Jewish policy was a central tenet of the Nazi movement's attempts to implement, disseminate, and secure National Socialist rule - and one which crucially shaped Nazi policy decisions, from their earliest days in power through to the invasion of the Soviet Union and the Final Solution.

As Longerich shows, the 'disappearance' of Jews was designed as a first step towards a racially homogeneous society - first within the 'Reich', later in the whole of a German-dominated Europe.

Peter Longerich is Professor of Modern German History at Royal Holloway, University of London

Ruth Maier's Diary: A Young Girl's Life under Nazism

Ruth Maier, translated by Jamie Bulloch

Harvill Secker ISBN 9781846552144

March 2009

Ruth Maier was born into a middle-class Jewish family in interwar Vienna. Following the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, the world of the substantial Viennese Jewish community crumbled. In early 1939, her sister having left for England, Ruth emigrated to Norway and lived with a family in Lillestrøm, about thirty miles from Oslo. Although she loved many things about her new country and its people, Ruth’s relationship with her hosts soon turned stale, then sour. Ruth became increasingly isolated in Norway until she met a soul mate, Gunvor Hofmo, who was to become a celebrated poet. Norway itself became a Nazi conquest in April 1940, and Ruth’s attempts to join the rest of her family – now in Britain – became ever more urgent. She never left Norway, and in November 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz where she was exterminated on arrival. She had recently turned twenty-two.

Ruth Maier kept a diary from 1934 until just before she was murdered. Despite being only in her teens she shows a sophisticated understanding of the political forces shaping central Europe as well as extraordinary prescience. However, the book is much more than just historical documentation. In a lucid yet highly lyrical style, with an incisive talent for narrative and a sharp wit, Ruth explores universal themes of isolation, identity, friendship, love, sexuality, desire, morality, justice and sacrifice. Most of all, however, she seeks what it means to be a human being. Published only recently for the first time in Norway, Ruth Maier’s Diary is one of the most moving testimonies to emerge from this dark period of European history.

German Writers in French Exile: 1933- 1940

Martin Mauthner

Vallentine Mitchell ISBN 9780853035401

This book relates what happened to some of the most celebrated German writers and journalists after they fled the Nazi terror to find shelter in France.
It is a tragic intellectual drama that unfolds over seven years, featuring authors such as Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, as well as H. G. Wells, André Malraux, Aldous Huxley and André Gide. It recounts how persecuted writers settled in a colony in the south of
France, how they tried to counter-attack, aided by British and French novelists, how they quarrelled among themselves and how they sought to alert the West to Nazi plans for military conquest and warn the German people that Hitler was plunging the nation into ruin.

Martin Mauthner was born of Austrian parents in Leningrad. He went to school in South Africa, where he grew up among émigré families from Europe. After graduating from Wadham College, Oxford, he worked as a journalist in Johannesburg, before returning to Britain to help Randolph Churchill with the research for his biography of Winston Churchill. He later moved to Paris and then to Brussels, where he served as a senior information
official for the European Commission, with extensive service in North and South America and in Germany.

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Daniel Mendelsohn

HarperPress ISBN 9780007251933

April 2007

In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic - part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work - that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history.

The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust - an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by the fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relative's fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents, and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him.

Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews, and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.

Daniel Mendelsohn was born in Long Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books as well as the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times Book Review, and is contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. His first book, The Elusive Embrace, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. He teaches at Bard College.

In the Lion's Shadow: The Iranian Schindler and His Homeland in the Second World War

Fariborz L. Mokhtari

The History Press ISBN 9780752463704

October 2011

After the invasion of France in 1940 a junior Iranian diplomat, the aristocratic Abdol-Hossein Sardari, more or less accidentally found himself in charge of Iran's legation in Paris. He set about cultivating German and Vichy officials in order to protect the Iranian Jewish community in the country. In a dangerous but brilliant manoeuvre he met the absurd racial purity laws head-on to claim that despite the fact that some Iranians had followed the teachings of Moses for thousands of years, they had always been of Iranian stock and therefore were Mosaique not Juden . This book includes the Nazi official correspondence seeking expert opinion on this troublesome argument! Alongside the dramatic, not to say romantic narrative of Sardari s life (he refused to abandon the Iranian Jews in France even when recalled by his government and continued without pay) is the larger picture of the betrayal of Iran s neutrality by the Allies, then the eventual handing over of Axis diplomats and citizens to the Soviets to be interrogated severely . Author Dr Mokhtari argues that contrary to constant accusations Iran did not favour the Nazis and he employs previously unpublished archival documents to bolster that argument. This is the story of a man who to the uninformed may look to be one of the most unlikely of the Righteous in his background and religion but as the author shows, he represents the true, tolerant Iranian culture that is still alive today, despite the expressions and actions of the current repressive regime

The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice during the Holocaust

Kristen Renwick Monroe

Princeton University Press ISBN: 9780691127736

Through moving interviews with five ordinary people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, Kristen Monroe casts new light on a question at the heart of ethics: Why do people risk their lives for strangers and what drives such moral choice? The rescuers' perceptions of themselves in relation to others made their extraordinary acts spontaneous and left the rescuers no choice but to act. To turn away Jews was, for them, literally unimaginable. In the words of one German Czech rescuer, "The hand of compassion was faster than the calculus of reason."

At the heart of this unusual book are interviews with the rescuers, complex human beings from all parts of the Third Reich and all walks of life: Margot, a wealthy German who saved Jews while in exile in Holland; Otto, a German living in Prague who saved more than 100 Jews and provides surprising information about the plot to kill Hitler; John, a Dutchman on the Gestapo's "Most Wanted List"; Irene, a Polish student who hid eighteen Jews in the home of the German major for whom she was keeping house; and Knud, a Danish wartime policeman who took part in the extraordinary rescue of 85 percent of his country's Jews.

Monroe's analysis of these stories draws on philosophy, ethics, and political psychology to suggest why and how identity constrains our choices, both cognitively and ethically. Her work offers a powerful counterpoint to conventional arguments about rational choice and a valuable addition to the literature on ethics and moral psychology. It is a dramatic illumination of the power of identity to shape our most basic political acts, including our treatment of others.

Kristen Renwick Monroe is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, where she directs the UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality. Her books include the prize-winning The Heart of Altruism (Princeton).

Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe

Bob Moore

Oxford University Press ISBN 9780199208234

May 2010

Survivors is the first examination of how more than half of the Jews in Western Europe survived the Holocaust. The widely differing rates of Jewish mortality have long vexed historians, who have traditionally concentrated on explaining this problem through national studies or by using a comparative approach, concentrating on the role of perpetrators, victims, and circumstances. In contrast, Survivors emphasizes the factors that helped Jews to avoid deportation, either through escape or by going underground. Taken as a whole, it book provides the first comprehensive study of Jewish survival in Western Europe in all its forms. 

Firstly, the book focuses on the escape routes used by Jews fleeing from the Nazis, and the disparate networks that ran them, including the routes from France into Spain and Switzerland, but also the lesser know history of the escape of Norwegian Jewry and the famous rescue from Denmark in 1943. Few of these networks were exclusively devoted to helping Jews - in fact, most of them helped all manner of people, including Allied aircrew, escaping Prisoners of War, and political opponents. Moreover, they were not exclusively the product of the Second World War - as Bob Moore shows, many had linkages with resistance in the First World War, and indeed to opposition to state power stretching back centuries. 

The second half of the book is devoted to three national case studies (France, Belgium, and the Netherlands) that focus on the interrelationship between Jewish self-help and the individuals and organizations that assisted in hiding them, including the Christian churches. These case studies serve to highlight the very different circumstances and structures pertaining in these three countries and how this had a direct bearing on levels of survival. Separate chapters then deal with the case of child rescue and the motivations of those involved in this most contentious of issues. Finally, the spotlight is turned on cases where Jews were saved, either directly or indirectly, by the Nazis themselves - and on the vexed question of Jews who survived by collaborating with the arrest and deportation of their co-religionists.

Bob Moore, Professor of Twentieth Century European History, University of Sheffield

Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler's Capital, 1939-45

Roger Moorhouse

Bodley Head ISBN 9780224080712

August 2010

Berlin was the nerve-centre of Hitler’s Germany. It was the backdrop for the most lavish of Nazi ceremonies, the venue for Albert Speer’s grandiose plans to forge a new ‘world metropolis’, and the scene of the final climactic battle to defeat Nazism. Berlin was the stage upon which the rise and fall of the Third Reich was most visibly played out.

For all the exhaustive coverage devoted to the Third Reich, however, the social history of Nazism is one of the very few remaining subjects of the period that are under-explored. Though our understanding of the Holocaust is well developed, we know little about the wider challenges posed to the German people by living under a dictatorship in wartime; the compromises demanded and the hardships endured. The consequence of this is that our understanding of everyday life in Nazi Germany is profoundly imbalanced. We know in intimate detail how a minority died under Nazism, but we understand precious little about how the majority lived.And there is much to understand. As one of the very few European capitals to experience the horror of World War Two at very first hand, Berlin was not only subjected to the full wrath of the Soviet ground offensive and siege in 1945, it also found itself in the very front rank of the air war; attracting more raids, more aircraft and more tonnage than any other German city.Moreover, though the political heart of the Nazi Reich, Berlin was never a natural home for Hitler and his cohorts, and its strong socialist and non-conformist traditions would ensure a steady source both of resistance to Nazism and of succour for the city’s Jews. More Jews survived the Holocaust underground in Berlin, for instance, than anywhere else in Hitler’s Reich.This book seeks to examine the German experience of World War Two, not through an examination of grand politics, but rather from the viewpoint of Berlin’s streets and homes – a ‘Berlin-eye view’ – using first-hand material as far as is possible: published and unpublished memoirs, diaries and interviews.

As well as giving a flavour of everyday life in the German capital, this book will also raise issues about consent and dissent, morality and authority, which will go to the heart of the experience of conflict and dictatorship. Above all, it will chart the violent humbling of a once-proud metropolis; the fear, the cruelty, the petty heroism and the individual tragedy. It will provide a vivid and gripping portrait of Berlin at War.

When Even the Poets Were Silent: The Life of a Jewish Hungarian Holocaust Survivor Under Nazism and Communism

George Pogany

Takeaway Publishing ISBN 9780956384751

Jan 2012

Some of the darkest episodes of twentieth-century European history come vividly to life in this fascinating memoir. George Pogany beautifully portrays a 1930s childhood in the Hungarian town of Oroshaza and the spread of anti-Semitism. He describes life in the town's Jewish ghetto, his family's journey in a sealed cattle-wagon to Vienna, and their experiences in a forced labour camp there before being liberated by Soviet troops. Returning home to Hungary on foot, Pogany soon finds himself in a country in which freedom has been savagely curtailed. He offers a stark but often humorous account of what daily life was like under Hungary's brand of Stalinism, first as a student and then as an industrial chemist. After Moscow's brutal suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, Pogany manages to escape one night to the West, right under the noses of the Red Army. "When Even The Poets Were Silent" is a wry and dispassionate account full of surprises and challenges.

Treasures from the Attic

Mirjam Pressler

Weidenfeld ISBN 9780297860884

February 2011

Anne Frank wrote a diary from the age of 13 as she hid for over two years in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse escaping the horrors of Nazi occupation. An intimate record of tension and struggle, adolescence and confinement, anger and heartbreak, it is among the most enduring documents of the twentieth century, famed throughout the world. Since first publication in 1947, the diary has been read by tens of millions of people in many different translations. A bestseller in its 1952 and 1997 (definitive) editions, it remains a beloved and deeply admired testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit. Recently discovered letters, documents and photographs of Anne and her family including letters from her, her father's letters from Auschwitz and his poignant descriptions of searching for his family after the war and his discovery of the diaries, have been made into a family saga by Mirjam Pressler, the editor of the definitive edition of the Diary. The book, which reads like a novel, an epic, fateful, family saga, recounts the story of Anne's family both before, during and after the war. It contrasts the normality of family life with the horrors of persecution, deportation and the concentration camps and through it we gain new insight into Anne and her iconic diary, one of those unique documents that portrays innocence and humanity, suffering and survival in the starkest and most moving terms.

The story of Anne Frank, her family and the famous diaries, told with the help of thousands of letters, documents and photographs recently discovered in an attic.

Simon Wiesenthal

Tom Segev

Jonathan Cape ISBN 9780224091046

September 2010

Simon Wiesenthal was the legendary ‘Nazi hunter’, a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to the punishment of Nazi criminals. A hero in the eyes of many, he was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget. 

For this definitive biography, Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal’s hundreds of thousands of private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal’s life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel.

Tom Segev has written a brilliant character study of a ‘hunter’ who was driven by his own memories to ensure that the destruction of European Jewry never be forgotten.

The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War

Ben Shephard

Vintage ISBN 9780712600590

April 2011

After the Great War, the millions killed on the battlefields were eclipsed by the millions more civilians carried off by disease and starvation when the conflict was over. Haunted by memories, the Allies were determined that the end of the Second World War would not be followed by a similar disaster, and they began to lay plans long before victory was assured.

Confronted by an entire continent starving and uprooted, Allied planners devised strategies to help all 'displaced persons', and repatriate the fifteen million people who had been deprived of their homes and in many cases forced to work for the Germans. But over a million Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Yugoslavs refused to go home.

This book offers a radical reassessment of the aftermath of World War II. Unlike most recent writing about the 1940s, it assesses the events and personalities of that decade in terms of contemporary standards and values. This the true and epic story of how millions ultimately found relief, reconciliation and a place to call home.

Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis

Daniel Silver

Clarion Books ISBN 9780618485406

2004

Washington lawyer Daniel B. Silver has been in private international law practice for most of his career. He has served as General Counsel to the National Security Agency, the CIA, and a House of Representatives investigative committee, has been an adjunct professor and Distinguished Professor from Practice at the Georgetown Law Center, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a board member of several Washington cultural institutions. In Refuge in Hell: How Berlin?s Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), Dr. Silver explores the fascinating history of a medical center which continued to operate, through the end of World War II, right in the capital of the world?s most notorious anti-Semitic regime and delivered what medical care it could while sheltering a large percentage of the city's remaining Jews. Based on personal interviews with Jewish survivors who were in the hospital during the war years ? patients, staff members, and others ?, Dr. Silver traces an extraordinary story of survival and reconstructs the essence of a community that lived and worked in conditions of agonizing fear and uncertainty, under the constant threat of deportation to the death camps, and subject to all the indignities and horrors of Jewish existence in Nazi Germany.

This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz

Piera Sonnino

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Palgrave ISBN 9780230613997 

December 2006

Ten years after her return home from the lager, Piera Sonnino found the courage and the strength to tell the story of the extermination of her family by the Nazis' the tragedy of deportation, the death of her parents, her three brothers and two sisters in the concentration camps. Extraordinarily written, this account is strikingly accurate in bringing to life the methodical and relentless siege, the erosion of the freedoms and human dignity of the Italian Jews, from Mussolini's racial laws of 1938 to the final catastrophe of Auschwitz. In describing her arrival at the death camps, her writing dwells on the sea of mud, on a 'dimension that is completely contrary to all that which is human, a dimension that has even absorbed its own creators'. But the strength of her testimony rises from the mud, the personal diary becomes a universal voice that gives a name to that which cannot be expressed. Through her words, memory has the power to disarm this unspeakable evil.

2006 National Jewish Book Award Biography Category

Piera Sonnino was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. She was later transferred to Bergen Belsen and Braunschweig. The sole survivor of a family of eight, she returned to Italy in 1950. She died in 1999.

Ann Goldstein is an editor at the New Yorker. She has translated works by Roberto Calasso, Alessandro Baricco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Aldo Buzzi. The recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award, she is the editor of the forthcoming collected works of Primo Levi. She lives in New York, USA.

Escape, Evasion and Revenge: The True Story of a German-Jewish RAF Pilot Who Bombed Berlin and Became a PoW

Marc H Stevens

Pen and Sword Books ISBN 9781848841062  

October 2009

Peter Stevens was a German-Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi persecution as a teenager in 1933. He joined the RAF in 1939 and after eighteen months of pilot training he started flying bombing missions against his own country. He completed twenty-two missions before being shot down and taken prisoner by the Nazis in September 1941. To escape became his raison d'être and his great advantage was that he was in his native country. He was recaptured after each of his several escapes, but the Nazis never realised his true identity. He took part in the logistics and planning of several major breakouts, including The Great Escape, but was never successful in getting back to England. After liberation, when the true nature of his exploits came to light, he was awarded the Military Cross. He then served as a British spy at the beginning of the Cold War before emigrating to Canada to resume a normal life. 
 
This is the story of a heavily conflicted young man, alone in a world that is in the midst of destruction. He is afforded an opportunity to help his persecuted people to obtain a small measure of revenge. It is at once a sad yet uplifting tale of thankless and unheralded heroism.

Nazis and the Cinema

Susan Tegel

Continuum ISBN 9781847250001

June 2007

Before the rise of television, the cinema was a key medium of entertainment and information. The Nazi regime, which inherited the largest film industry outside Hollywood, realised this clearly, with some of the most memorable images of Hitler and his party coming from Leni Riefenstahl's film "Triumph of the Will". Susan Tegel has written a comprehensive account of the films made in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, including the notorious feature film, "Jud Suss", and the compilation documentary Der Ewige Jude. She explores in detail how the film makers were controlled and used by the regime. She also examines other less well-known films featuring Jewish characters. In such films, she relates the historical context to government policies concerning the Jews. Newsreels and documentaries and their place within a cinema programme are discussed as are the two documentaries made in Theresienstadt under the SS rather than the Propaganda Ministry. She looks at the industry itself, its reorganization, funding, the interventions of the Propaganda Ministry headed by Goebbels, the compromises which people had to make, the careerism and the dangers which some faced either of unemployment or worse.

The Children of Belsen

Hetty Verolme

Politico's ISBN 9781842752050  

January 2007

A painfully poignant, ultimately uplifting and highly unusual Holocaust story

When their father and then their mother was taken away, Hetty, Max and Jacky had to fend for themselves. Initially separated from her brothers, Hetty later joined them in the 'Children's House', a barrack room which directly overlooked one of the open mass graves. Under the inspirational figure of the children's mentor Sister Luba - 'The Angel of Belsen' - it came to form an oasis of hope and humanity amid the horrors.

The children were finally liberated by the British in April 1945 - just too late for Anne Frank, who had died in the same camp the previous month.

Hetty Verolme, oldest of three children of a Jewish family in Amsterdam, was thirteen when in 1943 she was transported with her parents and brothers to the repatriation camp at Westerbork, and from there to the concentration camp at Belsen.

L'Oreal Took My Home: The Secrets of a Theft
Monica Waitzfelder
Translated from the French by Peter Bush (Preface by Serge Klarsfeld)

Arcadia ISBN 9781905147540 

A legal case led by a lone woman against one of the largest multinationals. A personal and explosive true story.

'L'Oreal took my home,' Edith Rosenfelder was always saying. This claim affected her daughter Monica, who decided when she grew up she'd try to understand what lay behind it. It was the start of true investigation leading to action in the French courts. Prior to 1937, Monica Waitzfelder's family lived in Germany. Being Jewish, they were forced to flee the country, abandoning all their possessions, and their property was looted in the same way as happened to many other European Jews, who were victims of persecution prior to the Holocaust.

This is the story of how the Rosenfelder family never recovered their house, which was located in the centre of Karlsruhe, Germany. It was a wonderful location in which the L'Oreal cosmetics firm opened its head office. It refused - and refuses - to recognisie the legitimate owners.

Night

Eli Wiesel

Penguin ISBN 9780141038995

Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor’s perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of hope, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

Etty Hillesum, A Life Transformed

Patrick Woodhouse

Forword by Archbishop Rowan Williams

Continuum ISBN 9781847064264

January 2009

On 8 March 1941, a 27-year-old Dutch Jewish student living in enemy-

occupied Amsterdam made the first entry in a diary that was to become one of the most remarkable documents to emerge from the Nazi Holocaust. Over the course of the next two and a half years, an insecure, chaotic and troubled young woman was transformed into someone who inspired those with whom she shared the suffering of the transit camp at Westerbork and with whom she eventually perished at Auschwitz. Through her diary and letters, she continues to inspire those whose lives she has touched since: an extraordinarily alive and vivid young woman who shaped and lived a spirituality of hope in the darkest period of the twentieth century.This book explores Etty Hillesum's life and writings, seeking to understand what it was about her that was so remarkable, how her journey developed, how her spirituality was shaped, and what her profound reflections on the roots of violence and the nature of evil can teach us today.

Patrick Woodhouse is Canon Precentor of Wells Cathedral where he has responsibility for music and liturgy. He has been a parish priest, a diocesan social responsibility adviser, and has a particular interest in inter-faith issues.  He is the author of Beyond Words, an introduction, guide and resource for a contemplative way of prayer, and With You is the Well of Life, a collection of prayers for public and private use.

Nine Suitcases

Bella Zsolt

Translated by Ladislaus Lob

Pimlico ISBN 9780712606899

April 2005

Nine Suitcases is Bela Zsolt's memoir of the Holocaust--his personal experiences in the Hungarian ghetto of Nagyvarad and as a forced labourer in the Ukraine is as tragic as it is moving. Zsolt's writing forces us past the simplicities of good versus evil and shows the awful human weaknesses, personal complicities and daily heroism and tragedy of war at its most brutal.

Originally published in weekly instalments, Zsolt describes in detail how he came to be in the ghetto (and the significance of those eponymous suitcases), his work as a gravedigger and labourer (ironically, in 1942, force to fight alongside the Germans); the bravery of a local Madame in serving her Jewish prostitutes; his feelings towards his Orthodox fellow inmates; and his plan to pretend a Typhus outbreak. And all of this is done with a matter-of-fact simplicity and without rhetorical flourishes or indulgences. This is an important, great book. Sometimes, Zsolt says, in the ghetto there was "a silence that provoke(d) prayer or blasphemy". We should read Zsolt and, in the ensuing quiet, decide anew what our strategies for learning and understanding should be.

Operation Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice

Efraim Zuroff

Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 9780230617308

December 2009

The gripping personal journey of the world's last Nazi hunter as he scours the globe looking for the men and women responsible for the atrocities of the Holocaust

Sixty years after the end of World War II, not all those who were faithful to the Third Reich are dead—some members of the Nazi party and their collaborators are still alive, and increasingly difficult to track down. Time is rapidly running out, but Efraim Zuroff won't give up. Launching Operation Last Chance in 2002, he spearheaded a vast public campaign to locate and bring to justice the worst suspected Nazi criminals before ill health or death spare them from potential punishment. Despite the passage of many years, the reluctance of many governments to cooperate, and even death threats and a price on his head, Zuroff's project yielded the names of over 520 hereto unknown suspects in 24 different countries and led to dozens of murder investigations, as well as several indictments and extradition requests currently pending.

Combining the thrill of a detective story with the inherent poignancy of the history of World War II and its aftermath, Operation Last Chance delivers the important and moving story of one man's heroic efforts to honor the victims of the Holocaust.