Author: Kazimierz Sakowicz
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300129173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

View

Book Description
About sixty thousand Jews from Wilno (Vilnius, Jewish Vilna) and surrounding townships in present-day Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators in huge pits on the outskirts of Ponary. Over a period of several years, Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish journalist who lived in the village of Ponary, was an eyewitness to the murder of these Jews as well as to the murders of thousands of non-Jews on an almost daily basis. He chronicled these events in a diary that he kept at great personal risk. Written as a simple account of what Sakowicz witnessed, the diary is devoid of personal involvement or identification with the victims. It is thus a unique document: testimony from a bystander, an “objective” observer without an emotional or a political agenda, to the extermination of the Jews of the city known as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” Sakowicz did not survive the war, but much of his diary did. Painstakingly pieced together by Rahel Margolis from scraps of paper hidden in various locations, the diary was published in Polish in 1999. It is here published in English for the first time, extensively annotated by Yitzhak Arad to guide readers through the events at Ponary.

Author: Alex J. Kay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107146348
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 261

View

Book Description
The first in-depth biography of a frontline Holocaust perpetrator from one of the SS mobile killing squads.

Author: Christine Berberich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000368629
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

View

Book Description
Over the past decades, the memory of the Holocaust has not only become a common cultural consciousness but also a cultural property shared by people all over the world. This collection brings together academics, critics and creative practitioners from the fields of Holocaust Studies, Literature, History, Media Studies, Creative Writing and German Studies to discuss contemporary trends in Holocaust commemoration and representation in literature, film, TV, the entertainment industry and social media. The essays in this trans-disciplinary collection debate how contemporary culture engages with the legacy of the Holocaust now that, 75 years on from the end of the Second World War, the number of actual survivors is dwindling. It engages with ongoing cultural debates in Holocaust Studies that have seen a development from, largely, testimonial presentations of the Holocaust to more fictional narratives both in literature and film. In addition to a number of chapters focusing in particular on literary trends in Holocaust representation, the collection also assesses other forms of cultural production surrounding the Holocaust, ranging from recent official memorialisation in Germany to Holocaust presentation in film, computer games and social media. The collection also highlights the contributions by creative practitioners such as writers and performers who use drama and the traditional art of storytelling in order to keep memories alive and pass them on to new generations. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

Author: David Cesarani
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0230771750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

View

Book Description
Final Solution is an intelligent and thought-provoking short history of the Holocaust, by historian David Cesarani. Not only does David Cesarani draw together and engage with the latest scholarly research, making extensive use of previously untapped resources such as diaries and letters from within the ghettos and camps (many of them in Polish or Yiddish and therefore previously largely inaccessible to Anglo-American scholars) but by adopting a rigorously Judeocentric approach the whole narrative of the march to genocide and its aftermath, the book presents a subtly different timeline which casts afresh the horror of the period and engenders a significant re-evaluation of the how and why. Eschewing some of the more fevered theses about the guilt of the perpetrators (and indeed recasting how wide that net should be spread), David Cesarani's measured and skilful negotiation of a crowded field is, as a result, all the more devastating.

Author: Theodore R. Weeks
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 150175808X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

View

Book Description

Author: Paul R. Bartrop
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
ISBN: 1440840849
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1440

View

Book Description
This four-volume set provides reference entries, primary documents, and personal accounts from individuals who lived through the Holocaust that allow readers to better understand the cultural, political, and economic motivations that spurred the Final Solution. • Provides an easily readable encyclopedic collection of secondary source materials, such as reference entries, maps, and tables, that offer a breadth of content for understanding the Holocaust • Examines a broad range of themes relating to the Holocaust, enabling readers to consider important questions about the historical experience and its implications for today • Includes two volumes of primary source material that introduce users to the cultural, political, and economic motivations that spurred the Final Solution • Presents memoirs and personal narratives that showcase the experiences of survivors and resistors who lived through the chaos and horror of the Final Solution • Includes a comprehensive bibliography that serves as a gateway to further research

Author: Peter Fritzsche
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674254015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

View

Book Description
Fritzsche deciphers the puzzle of Nazism's ideological grip. Its basic appeal lay in the Volksgemeinschaft - a "people’s community" that appealed to Germans to be part of a great project to redress the wrongs of the Versailles treaty, make the country strong and vital, and rid the body politic of unhealthy elements. Diaries and letters reveal Germans' fears, desires, and reservations, while showing how Nazi concepts saturated everyday life.

Author: Jan Tomasz Gross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190614536
Category : Grave goods
Languages : en
Pages : 160

View

Book Description
It seems at first commonplace: a group photograph of peasants at harvest time, after hard work well done, resting contentedly with their tools behind the fruits of their labor. But when one finally notices the "crops" scattered in front of the group, what seemed innocent on first view become horrific skulls and bones. Where are we? Who are the people in the photograph, and what are they doing? The starting pointof Jan Tomasz and Irena Grudzinska Gross's Golden Harvest, this haunting photograph in fact depicts a group of peasants--"diggers"--atop a mountain of ashes at Treblinka, where some 800,000 Jews were gassed and cremated. The diggers are searching for gold and precious stones that Nazi executioners may have overlooked. The story captured in this grainy black-and-white photograph symbolizes the vast, continent-wide plunder of Jewish wealth that went hand-in-hand with the Holocaust. The seizure of Jewish assets during World War II occasionally generates widespread attention when Swiss banks are challenged to produce lists of dormant accounts, or national museums are forced to return stolen paintings. But the theft of Europe's Jewish population was not limited to conquering armies, leading banks, or museums. It was perpetrated also by local people, such as those pictured in the photograph. Lyrical and often heartbreaking, A Golden Harvest takes readers across Europe as it exposes the economic ravaging of an entire society. Beginning with a simple group shot, the authors have written a moving book that evokes the depth and range, as well as the intimacy, of the Final Solution.

Author: Robert Gerwarth
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 019968605X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

View

Book Description
The First World War did not end in November 1918. In Russia and Eastern Europe it finished up to a year earlier, and both there and elsewhere in Europe it triggered conflicts that lasted down to 1923. Paramilitary formations were prominent in this continuation of the war. They had some features of formal military organizations, but were used in opposition to the regular military as an instrument of revolution or as an adjunct or substitute for military forces when these were unable by themselves to put down a revolution (whether class or national). Paramilitary violence thus arose in different contexts. It was an important aspect of the violence unleashed by class revolution in Russia. It structured the counter-revolution in central and Eastern Europe, including Finland and Italy, which reacted against a mythic version of Bolshevik class violence in the name of order and authority. It also shaped the struggles over borders and ethnicity in the new states that replaced the multi-national empires of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. It was prominent on all sides in the wars for Irish independence. In many cases, paramilitary violence was charged with political significance and acquired a long-lasting symbolism and influence. War in Peace explores the differences and similarities between these various kinds of paramilitary violence within one volume for the first time. It thereby contributes to our understanding of the difficult transitions from war to peace. It also helps to re-situate the Great War in a longer-term context and to explain its enduring impact.

Author: Tomas Balkelis
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004314105
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

View

Book Description
Population Displacement in Lithuania in the 20th Century: Experiences, Identities and Legacies offers an account on how two world wars produced a series of population displacements in Lithuania in the course of the 20th century.