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.

Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad

Steven E. Aschleim

Princeton ISBN 978-0-691-12223-6
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.

Belsen 1945
Susanne Bardgett and David Cesarani
Vallentine Mitchell 9780853037170

New Historical Perspectives

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

Princeton University Press ISBN 978-0-691-13121-4

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.

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

Michael Berkowitz

University of California Press ISBN 978-0520251144

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.

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

Jonathan Cape ISBN 0224078100

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 978-0306815393

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.

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

Helen Fry

Sutton Publishing ISBN 978-0750947008

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.

Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction

Martin Gilbert

HarperCollins ISBN 0007192401

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 1843545535

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 978-0-8032-2217-5

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: 0-691-12878-2

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Jonathan Cape ISBN 9780224077927

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.

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 978-0-00-725193-3

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.

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

Kristen Renwick Monroe

Princeton University Press ISBN: 0-691-12773-5

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? Monroe's analysis points not to traditional explanations--such as religion or reason--but to identity. 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.

We listen as the rescuers themselves tell the stories of their lives and their efforts to save 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.

But always Monroe returns us to the rescuers, to their strong voices, reminding us that the Holocaust need not have happened and revealing the minds of the ethically exemplary as they negotiated the moral quicksand that was the Holocaust.

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).

This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz

Piera Sonnino

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Palgrave ISBN 1403975086

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.

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 1842752057

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.

'Her story is indeed a miraculous one' Jewish Chronicle

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 1905147112

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.

Nine Suitcases

Bella Zsolt

Translated by Ladislaus Lob

Pimlico ISBN 978-0712606899

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.