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Despite some pioneering work by scholars, historians still find it hard to listen to the voices of women in the Holocaust. Learning more about the women who both survived and did not survive the Nazi genocide -- through the testimony of the women themselves -- not only increases our understanding of this terrible period in history, but makes us rethink our relationship to the gendered nature of knowledge itself. Women in the Holocaust is about the ways in which socially- and culturally-constructed gender roles were placed under extreme pressure; yet also about the fact that gender continued to operate as an important arbiter of experience. Indeed, paradoxically enough, the extreme conditions...
The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most famous – and bestselling – books of all time. Yet the girl who wrote it remains an enigma. The real Anne Frank has been lost, hidden behind the phenomenon that her posthumously published Diary produced. This concise biography will rediscover Anne Frank: telling her story from the beginning to the tragic end. It will place her life within the wider context of the Holocaust itself, and also explore her afterlife: seeking to explain why her Diary still speaks to us today.
Arguing against the prevailing view that Holocaust survivors (encouraged by a new and flourishing culture of 'witnessing') have come forward only recently to tell their stories,Writing the Holocaust examines the full history of Holocaust testimony, from the first chroniclers confined to Nazi-enforced ghettos to today's survivors writing as part of collective memory.Zoë Waxman shows how the conditions and motivations for bearing witness changed immeasurably. She reveals the multiplicity of Holocaust experiences, the historically contingent nature of victims' responses, and the extent to which their identities - secular or religious, male or female, East or West European - affected not only what they observed but also how they have written about their experiences. In particular, she demonstrates that what survivors remember is substantially determinedby the context in which they are remembering.
Despite some pioneering work by scholars, historians still find it hard to listen to the voices of women in the Holocaust. Learning more about the women who both survived and did not survive the Nazi genocide - through the testimony of the women themselves - not only increases our understanding of this terrible period in history, but makes us rethink our relationship to the gendered nature of knowledge itself. Women in the Holocaust is about the ways in which socially- and culturally-constructed gender roles were placed under extreme pressure; yet also about the fact that gender continued to operate as an important arbiter of experience. Indeed, paradoxically enough, the extreme conditions o...
One Family: Before, During, and After the Holocaust, Third Edition, written by the son of a survivor, revisits and expands the author’s research on his relatives while they lived in Poland, France, Denmark and the U.S. Kolin draws on newly available secondary and archival sources, successfully providing readers with a dynamic portrait of this one family as a microcosm of what happened to families throughout Europe during the Holocaust. He explores the identities of his relatives not only as Jews, but also as workers in specific sectors, from the slaughterhouses of Warsaw to the leather workers and pocketbook makers of Paris. He traces the political and military experiences of family members and how each family wrestled with the decision of whether or not to emigrate and whether or not to be politically active. The author describes how his relatives responded to, and coped with, the unfolding of anti-Jewish measures in Poland and France. He then traces how that response, whether it was flight and/or resistance, affected their ultimate fate.
Given the extensive body of Holocaust literature, it may be surprising to note that there is a distinct gap of reflection, analysis, and qualification in the area of sexual violence. The subject of sexual violence during the Holocaust, in particular, the sexual violation of Jewish women, is a subject that has been largely repressed and silenced. Thus, this thesis is an attempt to not only rectify the omission of sexual violence from Holocaust history, but to bring a level of analysis to this under-examined aspect of National Socialism to a point commensurate with that devoted to other aspects of Holocaust studies. During the Holocaust, sexual violence against Jewish women was both unique and...
The first book in English to specifically address the sexual violation of Jewish women during the Holocaust
In what has become a famous quotation, the philosopher Theodor Adorno commented that to write poetry "after Auschwitz" is barbaric. If the holocaust is an "event" that may legitimately be described as unspeakable, it is hard to see why poetry deserves more opprobrium than other ways of framing it, including what may broadly be called social theory. After all, if social theory were once guilty of ignoring the holocaust, it has also exhibited the barbarism of reason involved in transforming this "event" into social processes, conditions, systems, classificatory schemes and statistical tables. This collection of essays explores the character, impact and abiding legacy upon social theory of the Nazi holocaust. The premise which informs the contributions is that Zygmunt Bauman's claim that social theory has failed to address the holocaust remains true.
This book is the first to bring together analyses of the full range of post-war testimony given by survivors of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando were slave labourers in the gas chambers and crematoria, forced to process and dispose of the bodies of those who were murdered. They have been central to a number of key topics in post-war debates about the Shoah: collaboration, moral compromise and survival, resistance, representation, and the possibility of bearing witness. Their testimony however has mostly met with a reluctance to engage in depth with it. Moving from testimonies produced within the event, the Scrolls of Auschwitz and the Sonderkommando photographs, to testimonies given at trials and for video archives, and to the paintings of David Olère and the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, this book demonstrates the importance of their witnessing in the post-war memory of the Holocaust, and provides vital new insights into the questions of representation, memory, gender, and the Shoah.
This book is timely and necessary and often extremely challenging. It brings together an impressive cast of scholars, spanning several academic generations. Anyone interested in writing about the Holocaust should read this book and consider the implications of what is written here for their own work. There seems to me little doubt that Holocaust history writing stands at something of a cross roads, and the ways forward that this volume points to are extremely thought provoking. -- Tom Lawson, University of Winchester.