Download or read book From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg written by Abraham Sutzkever and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-10-06 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1944, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was airlifted to Moscow from the forest where he had spent the winter among partisan fighters. There he was encouraged by Ilya Ehrenburg, the most famous Soviet Jewish writer of his day, to write a memoir of his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. Now, seventy-five years after it appeared in Yiddish in 1946, Justin Cammy provides a full English translation of one of the earliest published memoirs of the destruction of the city known throughout the Jewish world as the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Based on his own experiences, his conversations with survivors, and his consultation with materials hidden in the ghetto and recovered after the liberation of his hometown, Sutzkever’s memoir rests at the intersection of postwar Holocaust literature and history. He grappled with the responsibility to produce a document that would indict the perpetrators and provide an account of both the horrors and the resilience of Jewish life under Nazi rule. Cammy bases his translation on the two extant versions of the full text of the memoir and includes Sutzkever’s diary notes and full testimony at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Fascinating reminiscences of leading Soviet Yiddish cultural figures Sutzkever encountered during his time in Moscow – Ehrenburg, Yiddish modernist poet Peretz Markish, and director of the State Yiddish Theatre Shloyme Mikhoels – reveal the constraints of the political environment in which the memoir was composed. Both shocking and moving in its intensity, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg returns readers to a moment when the scale of the Holocaust was first coming into focus, through the eyes of one survivor who attempted to make sense of daily life, resistance, and death in the ghetto. A Yiddish Book Center Translation

Download or read book Stronger Than Iron written by M. Balberyszki and published by Gefen Publishing House Ltd. This book was released on 2010 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Destruction of Vilna Jewry 1941-1945: An Eyewitness Account.

Download or read book The Book Smugglers written by David E. Fishman and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts—first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets—by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion—including the readiness to risk one’s life—to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author’s interviews with several of the story’s participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, “The Jerusalem of Lithuania.” The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi “expert” on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city’s great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed “the Paper Brigade,” and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group’s worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto’s secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet “liberation” of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved—only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR. Thoroughly researched by the foremost scholar of the Vilna Ghetto—a writer of exceptional daring, style, and reach—The Book Smugglers is an epic story of human heroism, a little-known tale from the blackest days of the war.

Download or read book The Fiddle Rose written by Abraham Sutzkever and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps written by Leona Toker and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary scholar examines survival narratives from Russian and German concentration camps, shedding new light on testimony in the face of evil. In this illuminating study, Leona Toker demonstrates how Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, especially how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker’s analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as how each text documents the writer’s experience in a form where fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony. Toker also views these texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprún, illuminate the discussion. Toker also provides context for references to potentially obscure historical events and shows how they form new meaning in the text.

Download or read book The Full Pomegranate written by Avrom Sutzkever and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translations of selected poems by the Yiddish writer, covering the entire breadth of his career. Yiddish writer Avrom Sutzkever (1913–2010) was described by the New York Times as “the greatest poet of the Holocaust.” Born in present-day Belarus, Sutzkever spent his childhood as a war refugee in Siberia, returned to Poland to participate in the interwar flourishing of Yiddish culture, was confined to the Vilna ghetto during the Nazi occupation, escaped to join the Jewish partisans, and settled in the new state of Israel after the war. Personal and political, mystical and national, his body of work, including more than two dozen volumes of poetry, several of stories, and a memoir, demonstrated the ways in which Yiddish creativity simultaneously balanced the imperatives of mourning and revival after the Holocaust. In The Full Pomegranate, Richard J. Fein selects and translates some of Sutzkever’s best poems covering the full breadth of his career. Fein’s translations appear alongside the original Yiddish, while an introduction by Justin Cammy situates Sutzkever in both historical and literary context. “Richard Fein is among the best translators of Yiddish poetry into English—the best now, and, for that matter, among the best ever. He has a deep, inward sense of Yiddish poems, both intuitive and analytic, and a patient tenacity in burrowing into them. He also has what is still rarer, a beautifully fine ear for diction and rhythm; the translations are alive on the page, every word is necessary, every cadence has its music. “The poems of Avrom Sutzkever were a challenge to him; he writes, candidly, ‘they wanted me to find new powers in my English.’ There is a special, precious audacity in accepting such a challenge, and Fein has indeed found the new powers the poems demanded.” — Lawrence Rosenwald, Wellesley College PRAISE FOR THE FULL POMEGRANATE “Avrom Sutzkever has no more loving translator than fellow poet Richard Fein. Even those who think they ‘do not understand poetry’ will be inspired by the poet who bore witness to the most dramatic points of modern Jewish experience and could transmit their power. Strength and spirit fuse in Sutzkever, wit and insight, moral confidence and grace. Our thanks to the translator and to Justin Cammy’s introduction for bringing this Jewish cultural landmark to English readers.” — Ruth R. Wisse, author of No Joke: Making Jewish Humor “Richard Fein’s translations strive for the impossible acrobatics of Sutzkever’s writing, from the rare alchemy of his striking metaphors to a postwar longing for poetic redemption in the face of destruction. To capture just an echo of Sutzkever’s singular voice would be an achievement. This collection, simultaneously careful and daring in its choices, amplifies that echo to the maximum that the English language would allow.” — Saul Noam Zaritt, Harvard University “In dialogue with Avrom Sutzkever, Richard Fein offers us a vibrant selection of the poet’s works in a beautiful facing-page translation. Sutzkever’s superbly inventive Yiddish imagery and wordcraft inspired Fein, the poet-translator, to dynamically engage both Yiddish and English, with remarkable and moving results.” — Ellen Kellman, Brandeis University

Download or read book In the Midst of Civilized Europe written by Jeffrey Veidlinger and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD * SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE “The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.” —Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.

Download or read book The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry written by Vasily Grossman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 1266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewryis a collection of eyewitness testimonies, letters, diaries, affidavits, and other documents on the activities of the Nazis against Jews in the camps, ghettoes, and towns of Eastern Europe. Arguably, the only apt comparism is to The Gulag Archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This definitive edition of The Black Book, including for the first time materials omitted from previous editions, is a major addition to the literature on the Holocaust. It will be of particular interest to students, teachers, and scholars of the Holocaust and those interested in the history of Europe. By the end of 1942, 1.4 million Jews had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen that followed the German army eastward; by the end of the war, nearly two million had been murdered in Russia and Eastern Europe. Of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, about one-third fell in the territories of the USSR. The single most important text documenting that slaughter is The Black Book, compiled by two renowned Russian authors Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman. Until now, The Black Book was only available in English in truncated editions. Because of its profound significance, this new and definitive English translation of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry is a major literary and intellectual event. From the time of the outbreak of the war, Ehrenburg and Grossman collected the eyewitness testimonies that went into The Black Book. As early as 1943 they were planning its publication; the first edition appeared in 1944. During the years immediately after the war, Grossman assisted Ehrenburg in compiling additional materials for a second edition, which appeared in 1946 (in English as well as Russian). Since the fall of the Soviet regime, Irina Ehrenburg, the daughter of Ilya Ehrenburg, has recovered the lost portions of the manuscript sent to Yad Vashem. The texts recove

Download or read book Sutzkever written by Abraham Sutzkever and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Through Zackary Sholem Berger's translations, Sutzkever Essential Prose brings to light for English readers the largely unknown prose of a seminal Yiddish poet. In these works, Avrom Sutzkever blurs the lines between fiction, memoir, and poetry; between real and imagined; between memory and metaphor. He offers haunting scenes drawn from a vast imagination and from the unique life he lived--his youth in Siberia and Vilna, his trauma as a partisan and a survivor, and his post-war life as a Yiddish poet in Israel."--

Download or read book Documents on the Holocaust written by Yits?a? Arad and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These 213 documents on the theory, planning, and execution of, and reaction and resistance to, the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jews date from the 1920s through the closing days of World War II and focus on the experience of eastern Europe. The crystallization of the principles of Nazi anti-Semitism, the policies of the Third Reich toward the Jews, the period of segregation and enclosed ghettos, and the stages through which the 'final solution' were implemented are some of the topics covered. Other documents shed light on Jewish public activities and the organization of the Underground and Jewish self-defense. Many of the documents of Jewish origin were not published previously. This comprehensive collection is essential for understanding the history of the Holocaust. Yitzhak Arad has written numerous books, including The Pictorial History of the Holocaust. Israel Gutman is a coeditor of Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Abraham Margaliot taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Introducer Steven T. Katz is a professor of religion and the director of the Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University.

Download or read book The Witness House written by Christiane Kohl and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autumn 1945 saw the start of the Nuremberg trials, in which high ranking representatives of the Nazi government were called to account for their war crimes. In a curious yet fascinating twist, witnesses for the prosecution and the defense were housed together in a villa on the outskirts of town. In this so-called Witness House, perpetrators and victims confronted each other in a microcosm that reflected the events of the high court. Presiding over the affair was the beautiful Countess Ingeborg Kálnoky (a woman so blond and enticing that she was described as a Jean Harlowe look-alike) who took great pride in her ability to keep the household civil and the communal dinners pleasant. A comedy of manners arose among the guests as the urge to continue battle was checked by a sudden and uncomfortable return to civilized life. The trial atmosphere extends to the small group in the villa. Agitated victims confront and avoid perpetrators and sympathizers, and high-ranking officers in the German armed forces struggle to keep their composure. This highly explosive mixture is seasoned with vivid, often humorous, anecdotes of those who had basked in the glory of the inner circles of power. Christiane Kohl focuses on the guilty, the sympathizers, the undecided, and those who always manage to make themselves fit in. The Witness House reveals the social structures that allowed a cruel and unjust regime to flourish and serves as a symbol of the blurred boundaries between accuser and accused that would come to form the basis of postwar Germany.

Download or read book The Avengers written by Rich Cohen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-10-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Riveting, poignant and uplifting, The Avengers is a powerful exploration of resistance and revenge, of courage and dedication, and an inside look at some of the intrepid individuals who fought against the Holocaust and the nazi occupation of Europe. Rich Cohen, author of the acclaimed Tough Jews, again narrates a little-known episode of Jewish history, this time altering what we thought we knew about the Holocaust. Abba Kovner, Vitka Kempner, Ruzka Korczak-comrades, lovers, friends. In the Lithuanian ghetto of Vilna, they were the heart of a breathtakingly courageous underground movement, and when the ghetto was liquidated, they fled to the forests and joined other partisans in continued sabotage and resistance.

Download or read book I L Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture written by Ruth R. Wisse and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), the father of modern Yiddish literature, was a master storyteller and social critic who advocated a radical shift from religious observance to secular Jewish culture. Wisse explores Peretz’s writings in relation to his ideology, which sought to create a strong Jewish identity separate from the trappings of religion.

Download or read book Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg written by Francine Hirsch and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nuremberg Trials (IMT), most notable for their aim to bring perpetrators of Nazi war crimes to justice in the wake of World War II, paved the way for global conversations about genocide, justice, and human rights that continue to this day. As Francine Hirsch reveals in this new history of the trials, a central part of the story has been ignored or forgotten: the critical role the Soviet Union played in making them happen in the first place. While there were practical reasons for this omission--until recently, critical Soviet documents about Nuremberg were buried in the former Soviet archives, and even Russian researchers had limited access--Hirsch shows that there were political reasons as well. The Soviet Union was regarded by its wartime Allies not just as a fellow victor but a rival, and it was not in the interests of the Western powers to highlight the Soviet contribution to postwar justice. Stalin's Show Trials of the 1930s had both provided a model for Nuremberg and made a mockery of it, undermining any pretense of fairness and justice. Further complicating matters was the fact that the Soviets had allied with the Nazis before being invaded by them. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 hung over the courtroom, as did the fact that the everyone knew that the Soviet prosecution had presented the court with falsified evidence about the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, attempting to pin one of their own major war crimes on the Nazis. For lead American prosecutor Robert Jackson and his colleagues, focusing too much on the Soviet role in the trials threatened the overall credibility of the IMT and possibly even the collective memory of the war. Soviet Justice at Nuremberg illuminates the ironies of Stalin's henchmen presiding in moral judgment over the Nazis. In effect, the Nazis had learned mass-suppression and mass-murder techniques from the Soviets, their former allies, and now the latter were judging them for crimes they had themselves committed. Yet the Soviets had borne the brunt of the fighting--and the losses--in World War II, and this gave them undeniable authority. Moreover, Soviet jurists were the first to conceive of a legal framework for viewing war as a crime, and without that framework the IMT would have had no basis. In short, there would be no denying their place at the tribunal, nor their determination to make the most of it. Illuminating the shifting relationships between the four countries involved (the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R.) Hirsch's book shows how each was not just facing off against the Nazi defendants, but against each other and offers a new history of Nuremberg.

Download or read book Free as a Jew written by Ruth R. Wisse and published by Wicked Son. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First came parents with the good sense to flee Europe in 1940 and the good fortune to reach the land of freedom. Their daughter, Ruth, grew up in the shadow of genocide—but in tandem with the birth of Israel, which remained her lodestar. She learned that although Jewishness is biologically transmitted, democracy is not, and both require intensive, intelligent transmission through education in each and every generation. They need adults with the confidence to teach their importance. Ruth tried to take on that challenge as dangers to freedom mounted and shifted sides on the political spectrum. At the high point of her teaching at Harvard University, she witnessed the unraveling of standards of honesty and truth until the academy she left was no longer the one she had entered.

Download or read book To Look a Nazi in the Eye written by Kathy Kacer and published by Second Story Press. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of nineteen-year-old Jordana Lebowitz’s time at the trial of Oskar Groening, known as the "bookkeeper of Auschwitz", a man charged with being complicit in the deaths of more than 300,000 Jews. A granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Jordana was still not prepared for what she would see and hear. Listening to Groening’s testimony and to the Holocaust survivors who came to testify against him, Jordana felt the weight of being witness to history – a history that we need to remember now more than ever.

Download or read book The Polish Underground and the Jews 1939 1945 written by Joshua D. Zimmerman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.