Download or read book A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz written by Tuvia Friling and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eliezer Gruenbaum (1908Ð1948) was a Polish Jew denounced for serving as a Kapo while interned at Auschwitz. He was the communist son of Itzhak Gruenbaum, the most prominent secular leader of interwar Polish Jewry who later became the chairman of the Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee during the Holocaust and Israel's first minister of the interior. In light of the father's high placement in both Polish and Israeli politics, the denunciation of the younger Gruenbaum and his suspicious death during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war add intrigue to a controversy that really centers on the question of what constitutesÑand how do we evaluateÑmoral behavior in Auschwitz. GruenbaumÑa Jewish Kapo, a communist, an anti-Zionist, a secularist, and the son of a polarizing Zionist leaderÑbecame a symbol exploited by opponents of the movements to which he was linked. Sorting through this Rashomon-like story within the cultural and political contexts in which Gruenbaum operated, Friling illuminates key debates that rent the Jewish community in Europe and Israel from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Download or read book Kapo written by Aleksander Tisma and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A devastating novel about the attrocities of WWII, and the unspeakable things people did to survive, by one of Yugoslavia's great literary voices. Lamian is a survivor, but a survivor of a very special kind. He was a Kapo, a prisoner who served as a camp guard in order to save himself. But has Lamian saved himself? The war over, he resumes life in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, works in a land-surveying office, rents a room, eats as many hot potatoes as he likes, not even bothering to salt them—the quantity is what matters. If only he could stop looking over his shoulder and flinching on the street in the fear that some stranger will step forward, smack his face, and say in a loud voice, “Here’s one!” If only he could stop worrying about Helena Lifka, who turned out to be a Yugoslav, and Jewish too; one of the women he made come naked into the toolshed where he hid the gold, and sit on his lap in exchange for bread and butter and a little warm milk. She could turn up any day, an old woman now, and point an accusing finger. In this masterful novel, Aleksandar Tišma shows step by step how fear can turn an ordinary human being into a monster.
Download or read book Bitter Reckoning written by Dan Porat and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in 1950, the state of Israel prosecuted and jailed dozens of Holocaust survivors who had served as camp kapos or ghetto police under the Nazis. At last comes the first full account of the kapo trials, based on records newly declassified after forty years. In December 1945, a Polish-born commuter on a Tel Aviv bus recognized a fellow rider as the former head of a town council the Nazis had established to manage the Jews. When he denounced the man as a collaborator, the rider leapt off the bus, pursued by passengers intent on beating him to death. Five years later, to address ongoing tensions within Holocaust survivor communities, the State of Israel instituted the criminal prosecution of Jews who had served as ghetto administrators or kapos in concentration camps. Dan Porat brings to light more than three dozen little-known trials, held over the following two decades, of survivors charged with Nazi collaboration. Scouring police investigation files and trial records, he found accounts of Jewish policemen and camp functionaries who harassed, beat, robbed, and even murdered their brethren. But as the trials exposed the tragic experiences of the kapos, over time the courts and the public shifted from seeing them as evil collaborators to victims themselves, and the fervor to prosecute them abated. Porat shows how these trials changed Israel’s understanding of the Holocaust and explores how the suppression of the trial records—long classified by the state—affected history and memory. Sensitive to the devastating options confronting those who chose to collaborate, yet rigorous in its analysis, Bitter Reckoning invites us to rethink our ideas of complicity and justice and to consider what it means to be a victim in extraordinary circumstances.
Download or read book KL written by Nikolaus Wachsmann and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise in the spring of 1945.
Download or read book Bitter Reckoning written by Dan Porat and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digging into newly declassified archives, Dan Porat unearths the story of Jews prosecuted by the State of Israel for Nazi collaboration. Over time courts and the public came to see Jewish ghetto administrators or kapos as tragic figures. Rigorous yet humane, Porat invites us to rethink ideas about victimhood, justice, and collective memory.
Download or read book We Wept Without Tears written by Gideon Greif and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "Sonderkommando of "Auschwitz-Birkenau consisted primarily of Jewish prisoners forced by the Germans to facilitate the mass extermination. Though never involved in the killing itself, they were compelled to be "members of staff" of the Nazi death-factory. This book, translated for the first time into English from its original Hebrew, consists of interviews with the very few surviving men who witnessed at first hand the unparalleled horror of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Some of these men had never spoken of their experiences before.
Download or read book Nazi Concentration Camp Overseers written by Ian Baxter and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nazis’ vast concentration camp network and, later, the ‘Final Solution’ programme made heavy demands on the SS whose responsibility it was. The use of ‘overseers’ minimised costs and enabled the camps to run with fewer SS personnel. As this well researched book describes, there were three principal groups of ‘helpers’: Sonderkommandos, Kapos and Trawniki. The Sonderkommandos’ duties included unloading Jews from trains, collecting their possessions and allocating work details. Under SS supervision, they also ran the gas chambers and crematoria. The Kapos oversaw the Sonderkommandos. Many were originally prisoner functionaries recruited from violent criminal gangs and had a well-deserved reputation for brutality. The third group, known as Trawniki or Trawnikimänner, were Central and Eastern European collaborators recruited from Russian POW camps. While some served in a military capacity, others played an instrumental role in the Holocaust programme, rounding up and transporting Jews from the ghettos to the concentration camps. The graphic images and text of this Images of War series work demonstrate that the ‘overseer’ system was extensive and effective as its members competed without scruple to maintain the favour of their SS masters while pitting victim against victim.
Download or read book Survival In Auschwitz written by Primo Levi and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1996 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A work by the Italian-Jewish writer, Primo Levi. It describes his arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945.
Download or read book The Dressmakers of Auschwitz written by Lucy Adlington and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful chronicle of the women who used their sewing skills to survive the Holocaust, stitching beautiful clothes at an extraordinary fashion workshop created within one of the most notorious WWII death camps. At the height of the Holocaust twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp—mainly Jewish women and girls—were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers. This fashion workshop—called the Upper Tailoring Studio—was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant’s wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz, and for ladies from Nazi Berlin’s upper crust. Drawing on diverse sources—including interviews with the last surviving seamstress—The Dressmakers of Auschwitz follows the fates of these brave women. Their bonds of family and friendship not only helped them endure persecution, but also to play their part in camp resistance. Weaving the dressmakers’ remarkable experiences within the context of Nazi policies for plunder and exploitation, historian Lucy Adlington exposes the greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy of the Third Reich and offers a fresh look at a little-known chapter of World War II and the Holocaust.
Download or read book Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories written by Tadeusz Borowski and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most complete English-language collection of the prose of Tadeusz Borowski, the most challenging chronicler of Auschwitz, with a foreword by Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny In 1943, the twenty-year-old Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski was arrested and deported to Auschwitz as a political prisoner. What he experienced in the camp left him convinced that no one who survived Auschwitz was innocent. All were complicit; the camp regime depended on this. Borowski’s tales present the horrors of the camp as reflections of basic human nature and impulse, stripped of the artificial boundaries of culture and custom. Inside the camp, the strongest of the prisoners form uneasy alliances with their captors and one another, watching unflinchingly as the weak scrabble and struggle against their inevitable fate. In the last analysis, suffering is never ennobling and goodness is tantamount to suicide. Bringing together for the first time in English Borowski’s major writings and many previously uncollected works, this is the most complete collection of stories in a new, authoritative translation, with a substantial foreword by Timothy Snyder that speaks to its enduring relevance.
Download or read book The Private Lives of the Auschwitz SS written by Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau (Oświęcim). and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Giants written by Yehuda Koren and published by . This book was released on 2013-12-18 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this account of the Ovitz family, seven of whose ten members were dwarves, readers bear witness to the terrible irony of the Ovitzs' fate: being burdened with dwarfism helped them to endure the Holocaust. Through research and interviews with the youngest Ovitz daughter, Perla, the troupe's last surviving member, and other relatives, the authors weave the tale of a beloved and successful family of performers who were famous entertainers in Central Europe until the Nazis deported them to Auschwitz in May 1944.
Download or read book Jewish Histories of the Holocaust written by Norman J.W. Goda and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many years, histories of the Holocaust focused on its perpetrators, and only recently have more scholars begun to consider in detail the experiences of victims and survivors, as well as the documents they left behind. This volume contains new research from internationally established scholars. It provides an introduction to and overview of Jewish narratives of the Holocaust. The essays include new considerations of sources ranging from diaries and oral testimony to the hidden Oyneg Shabbes archive of the Warsaw Ghetto; arguments regarding Jewish narratives and how they fit into the larger fields of Holocaust and Genocide studies; and new assessments of Jewish responses to mass murder ranging from ghetto leadership to resistance and memory.
Download or read book Night written by Elie Wiesel and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel Born in Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's seminal work.
Download or read book The Tattooist of Auschwitz written by Heather Morris and published by Bonnier Zaffre Ltd.. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The incredible story of the Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist and the woman he loved. Lale Sokolov is well-dressed, a charmer, a ladies' man. He is also a Jew. On the first transport of men from Slovakia to Auschwitz in 1942, Lale immediately stands out to his fellow prisoners. In the camp, he is looked up to, looked out for, and put to work in the privileged position of Tatowierer - the tattooist - to mark his fellow prisoners, forever. One of them is a young woman, Gita, who steals his heart at first glance. His life given new purpose, Lale does his best through the struggle and suffering to use his position for good. This story, full of beauty and hope, is based on years of interviews author Heather Morris conducted with real-life Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov. It is heart-wrenching, illuminating, and unforgettable. 'Morris climbs into the dark miasma of war and emerges with an extraordinary tale of the power of love' - Leah Kaminsky
Download or read book One Long Night written by Andrea Pitzer and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Masterly" -- The New Yorker A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of the Year A groundbreaking, haunting, and profoundly moving history of modernity's greatest tragedy: concentration camps For over 100 years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on Earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and the savage practicality with which governments have employed them. Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have broken our own solemn promise of "never again." In this harrowing work based on archival records and interviews during travel to four continents, Andrea Pitzer reveals for the first time the chronological and geopolitical history of concentration camps. Beginning with 1890s Cuba, she pinpoints concentration camps around the world and across decades. From the Philippines and Southern Africa in the early twentieth century to the Soviet Gulag and detention camps in China and North Korea during the Cold War, camp systems have been used as tools for civilian relocation and political repression. Often justified as a measure to protect a nation, or even the interned groups themselves, camps have instead served as brutal and dehumanizing sites that have claimed the lives of millions. Drawing from exclusive testimony, landmark historical scholarship, and stunning research, Andrea Pitzer unearths the roots of this appalling phenomenon, exploring and exposing the staggering toll of the camps: our greatest atrocities, the extraordinary survivors, and even the intimate, quiet moments that have also been part of camp life during the past century.
Download or read book The Drowned and the Saved written by Primo Levi and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his final book before his death, Primo Levi returns once more to his time at Auschwitz in a moving meditation on memory, resiliency, and the struggle to comprehend unimaginable tragedy. Drawing on history, philosophy, and his own personal experiences, Levi asks if we have already begun to forget about the Holocaust. His last book before his death, Levi returns to the subject that would define his reputation as a writer and a witness. Levi breaks his book into eight essays, ranging from topics like the unreliability of memory to how violence twists both the victim and the victimizer. He shares how difficult it is for him to tell his experiences with his children and friends. He also debunks the myth that most of the Germans were in the dark about the Final Solution or that Jews never attempted to escape the camps. As the Holocaust recedes into the past and fewer and fewer survivors are left to tell their stories, The Drowned and the Saved is a vital first-person testament. Along with Elie Wiesel and Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi is remembered as one of the most powerful and perceptive writers on the Holocaust and the Jewish experience during World War II. This is an essential book both for students and literary readers. Reading Primo Levi is a lesson in the resiliency of the human spirit.
