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Susan Zuccotti describes the ever-escalating dangers to which Jewish refugees and recent immigrants were subjected to in France and Italy as the Holocaust marched forward. She chronicles the lives of nine central and eastern European Jewish families, through historical documents and personal testimonies.
This is the story of a young Greek Jew, who was transported with his family to Auschwitz. His parents exterminated immediately, the boy's survival depended upon his ability to survive unspeakable tasks as a trade-off for life, until his liberation by the advancing American troops.
During World War II, the United States government and many Western democracies limited or closed themselves off entirely to Jewish refugees. By contrast, a Pacific island nation decided to keep its doors open. Between 1938 and 1941, the Philippine Commonwealth provided safe asylum to more than 1,300 German Jews. In highlighting the efforts by Philippine president Manual Quezon and High Commissioner Paul V. McNutt, Bonnie M. Harris offers fuller implications for our understanding of the Roosevelt administration's response to the Holocaust. This untold history is brought to life by focusing on the incredible journey of synagogue cantor Joseph Cysner. Drawing from oral histories, memoirs, and personal papers, Harris documents Cysner's harrowing escape from the Nazis and his heroic rescue by the American-led Jewish community of the Philippines in 1939. Moving and rich in historical detail, Philippine Sanctuary reveals new insights for an overlooked period in our recent history, and emphasizes the continued importance of humanitarian efforts to aid those being persecuted.
Memoirs of a Jew from Slovakia, born in the village of Dlhe in 1917 as Jozef Kornfeld. When the independent Slovak state was established in 1939, he lived in Presov. Describes the expulsion of Jews to Hungarian-annexed Kosice in 1939 and restrictions imposed on the Jews by the antisemitic government of Slovakia in that year. Kalina worked in his brother's lumber business in Presov and was considered important to the economy; he was exempted from the deportations of 1942 in which all but 600 Jews of Presov were deported to Auschwitz. In 1944 he fled to Zilina, provided with "Aryan" papers by his friend, Ludovit Argay, and hid. In November 1944 he was arrested and sent to a Messerschmitt labor camp in Augsburg; he was sent by the camp administration on a mission and passed to the liberated area. His wife Maria survived at a farm near Zilina, helped by a local peasant.
In The Odyssey of an Apple Thief, Moishe Rozenbaumas (1922–2016) recounts his fascinating life, from his Lithuanian boyhood, to the fraught experiences that take him across Europe and Central Asia and back again, to his daring escape from Soviet Russia to build a new life in Paris. Along the way, we get a rarely seen portrait of the lives of working-class Jewish youth in Telz/Telsiai, a religious town renowned for its yeshiva. We hear of the games children played, the theft of apples from a Catholic orchard, and Rozenbaumas’s early apprenticeship as a tailor once his father leaves the country. The war breaks out and the teenaged Rozenbaumas flees Lithuania alone, unable to convince his mother and sibling to go with him. We learn of his life as a starved refugee in an Uzbek kolkhoz, his escape into the Red Army, and his unlikely work in the reconnaissance unit of the Soviet Army. After the war, Rozenbaumas is drafted into the Marxist-Leninist university and as a cadre of the Communist Party, ultimately escaping in 1956 with his family to Paris, where he and his wife give an openly Jewish education to their children. In the vast literature of memory written by Jewish witnesses before, during, and after WWII, Rozenbaumas’s account stands out for the singularity of his experience and for his deft narration of events of mythological dimension from a personal perspective. The Odyssey of an Apple Thief offers not only invaluable testimony of this historical moment but also an illuminating and original portrait of Lithuanian Jews in the twentieth century.
Now part of the eponymous HBO docuseries written and directed by Raoul Peck, “Exterminate All the Brutes” is a brilliant intellectual history of Europe’s genocidal colonization of Africa—and the terrible myths and lies that it spawned “A book of stunning range and near genius. . . . The catastrophic consequences of European imperialism are made palpable in the personal progress of the author, a late-twentieth-century pilgrim in Africa. Lindqvist’s astonishing connections across time and cultures, combined with a marvelous economy of prose, leave the reader appalled, reflective, and grateful.” —David Levering Lewis “Exterminate All the Brutes,” Sven Lindqvist’s widely acclaimed masterpiece, is a searching examination of Europe’s dark history in Africa and the origins of genocide. Using Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as his point of departure, the award-winning Swedish author takes us on a haunting tour through the colonial past, interwoven with a modern-day travelogue. Retracing the steps of European explorers, missionaries, politicians, and historians in Africa from the late eighteenth century onward, “Exterminate All the Brutes” exposes the roots of genocide in Africa through Lindqvist’s own journey through the Saharan desert. As he shows, fantasies not merely of white superiority but of actual extermination—“cleansing” the earth of the so-called lesser races—deeply informed the colonialism and racist ideology that ultimately culminated in Europe’s own Holocaust. Conquerors’ stories are the ones that inform the self-mythology of the West—whereas the lives and stories of those displaced, enslaved, or killed are too often ignored and forgotten. “Exterminate All the Brutes” forces a crucial reckoning with a past that still echoes in our collective psyche—a reckoning that compels us to acknowledge the exploitation and brutality at the heart of our modern, globalized society. As Adam Hochschild has written, “Lindqvist’s work leaves you changed.”
An extraordinary biography that spans global events from the Holocaust to the Cold War, the Free Speech Movement to the women's movement, international incidents to hyper-local political battles.
George David Schwab's life began as a cosseted child leading a charmed and comfortable life in the 1930s. He recreates his childhood in pre-war Latvia, giving it vivid life in detailed memories of an extended, accomplished, and adventurous family of aunts, uncles, cousins and delightful descriptions of outings, with a child's view of the joy of cafes, tennis clubs, and swimming in the bracing waters of the Baltic Sea. The 1940s brought World War II and Soviet occupation of Latvia followed by the Nazis. George relates his and the family's terror and grief when his father, a well-known gastroenterologist, is murdered by the Nazis. He, his mother, a musician, and his older brother are shipped with other Latvian Jews to German concentration and work camps in cattle cars. George gives a sheltered child's view of his experiences: separation, death, despair, cold and hunger-with one constant: terror. Reunited with his mother at the end of the war, they emigrate to the United States of America where relatives welcome them. Reestablishing their lives, they visit relatives, George attends high school, lifeguards at Coney Island, develops a deepening awareness of Jewish culture and what it means to be Jewish, becomes involved with the Stern Gang, and begins his studies at City College of New York. Academic intrigue and politics swirl around his graduate studies at Columbia-culminating in the rejection of his Ph.D. thesis on the controversial German constitutional lawyer and political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Ultimately, George triumphs academically with his second dissertation on neutral countries and nuclear weapons. Marriage, fatherhood (triplet boys), family life, disproportionate in-law issues, career, association with Hans Morgenthau and the National Committee on American Foreign Policy fill the years. In the early 1980s, after the death of Morgenthau, George takes over the intellectual leadership of the National Committee. He recounts the Committee's influence and involvement with many diplomatic initiatives; a major triumph is the brokering of peace in Northern Ireland. Finally, after many years, George capitulates to Elie Wiesel's insistence that it is his duty to write his memoirs. Odyssey of a Child Survivor: From Latvia through the Camps to the United Statesis George David Schwab's moving witness and testimony to the Holocaust, and his renewed life after the horrors he endured.
An award-winning historian presents an emotional history of Jewish refugees biding their time in Portugal as they attempt to escape Nazi Europe This riveting book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee life, Kaplan highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness. An emotional history of fleeing, this book probes how specific locations touched refugees’ inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation.
The Holocaust and World War II: In History and In Memory is a thematic volume of nineteen articles based on papers presented at the 9th Middle Tennessee State University International Holocaust Studies Conference in October, 2009. It focuses on the connection between World War II and the Holocaust as it was lived as well as how it is remembered, commemorated and taught. It is interdisciplinary in terms of subject and content, and it explores a variety of methodological approaches to the topic, including historical analysis, pedagogy, oral testimony, literary criticism and museology. The volume features three articles written by the conference’s featured speakers. Two of them were authored by the keynote speaker, internationally acclaimed historian Gerhard L. Weinberg. Arguably the world’s foremost authority on WWII, Weinberg is the author of A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II and several other prize-winning books. He contributes “World War II: A Brief History” and an article titled “Roosevelt, Truman and the Holocaust” that evaluates the difficult decisions concerning the Holocaust made by two American presidents. The second featured speaker, Raffael Scheck, author of Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940, contributes an article titled “Racial Hatred: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940” to this volume. Scheck’s essay places the experiences of these black French African prisoners of war into the broader context of the treatment of black people by the Nazis. The remaining sixteen articles, contributed by prominent scholars from North America, Europe and Asia, represent a broad spectrum of disciplines, methodological approaches, and points of view concerning the Holocaust and the Second World War. The editors believe this anthology will be both an important acquisition for libraries and a useful tool for scholars, teachers, researchers and general readers interested in the World War II era as well as in the Holocaust.