Download or read book Inside the Gas Chambers written by Shlomo Venezia and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a unique, eye-witness account of everyday life right at the heart of the Nazi extermination machine. Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first with disbelief, that they had almost certainly been gassed. Given the chance to earn a little extra bread, he agreed to become a ‘Sonderkommando', without realising what this entailed. He soon found himself a member of the ‘special unit' responsible for removing the corpses from the gas chambers and burning their bodies. Dispassionately, he details the grim round of daily tasks, evokes the terror inspired by the man in charge of the crematoria, ‘Angel of Death' Otto Moll, and recounts the attempts made by some of the prisoners to escape, including the revolt of October 1944. It is usual to imagine that none of those who went into the gas chambers at Auschwitz ever emerged to tell their tale - but, as a member of a ‘Sonderkommando', Shlomo Venezia was given this horrific privilege. He knew that, having witnessed the unspeakable, he in turn would probably be eliminated by the SS in case he ever told his tale. He survived: this is his story. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Download or read book The Auschwitz Sonderkommando written by Nicholas Chare and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Last Consolation Vanished written by Zalmen Gradowski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-05-06 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz. On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz obtained explosives and rebelled against their Nazi murderers. It was a desperate uprising that was defeated by the end of the day. More than four hundred prisoners were killed. Filling a gap in history, The Last Consolation Vanished is the first complete English translation and critical edition of one prisoner’s powerful account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in Yiddish and buried in the ashes near Crematorium III. Zalmen Gradowski was in the Sonderkommando (special squad) at Auschwitz, a Jewish prisoner given the unthinkable task of ushering Jewish deportees into the gas chambers, removing their bodies, salvaging any valuables, transporting their corpses to the crematoria, and destroying all evidence of their murders. Sonderkommandos were forcibly recruited by SS soldiers; when they discovered the horror of their assignment, some of them committed suicide or tried to induce the SS to kill them. Despite their impossible situation, many Sonderkommandos chose to resist in two interlaced ways: planning an uprising and testifying. Gradowski did both, by helping to lead a rebellion and by documenting his experiences. Within 120 scrawled notebook pages, his accounts describe the process of the Holocaust, the relentless brutality of the Nazi regime, the assassination of Czech Jews, the relationships among the community of men forced to assist in this nightmare, and the unbearable separation and death of entire families, including his own. Amid daily unimaginable atrocities, he somehow wrote pages that were literary, sometimes even lyrical—hidden where and when one would least expect to find them. The October 7th rebellion was completely crushed and Gradowski was killed in the process, but his testimony lives on. His extraordinary and moving account, accompanied by a foreword and afterword by Philippe Mesnard and Arnold I. Davidson, is a voice speaking to us from the past on behalf of millions who were silenced. Their story must be shared.
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 Testimonies of Resistance written by Nicholas Chare and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sonderkommando—the “special squad” of enslaved Jewish laborers who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau—comprise one of the most fascinating and troubling topics within Holocaust history. As eyewitnesses to and unwilling abettors of the murder of their fellow Jews, they are the object of fierce condemnation even today. Yet it was a group of these seemingly compromised men who carried out the revolt of October 7, 1944, one of the most celebrated acts of Holocaust resistance. This interdisciplinary collection assembles careful investigations into how the Sonderkommando have been represented—by themselves and by others—both during and after the Holocaust.
Download or read book Matters of Testimony written by Nicholas Chare and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando—the “special squads,” composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these “Scrolls of Auschwitz,” which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp’s liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.
Download or read book The Last Consolation Vanished written by Zalmen Gradowski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Last Consolation Vanished is a unique first-person Holocaust account. It is by Zalmen Gradowski, who was one of the Sonderkommandos (special squads) at Auschwitz, a Jew tasked with ushering prisoners into the gas chambers, removing their bodies, salvaging any valuables, and destroying all evidence of their murders. The Sonderkommandos were forcibly recruited by SS men; when they discovered how dreadful the work they were expected to do was, a number of them committed suicide or acted with the aim of being killed by the SS. In spite of their situation, some Sonderkommandos never gave up and attempted to resist in two very interlaced ways: planning an uprising and testifying. Gradowski resisted both ways, and while the rebellion he helped to lead on October 7, 1944, was completely crushed, and Gradowski was murdered in the process, his testimony lives on. Hidden in a metal bottle in the ashes near Crematorium III, Gradowski's two lyrical accounts describe the brutality of the Nazi regime, the process of the assassination of Czech Jews, and the relationship among the men forced to assist in the horrors. But his notebooks are not the detached blow-by-blow series of declarative statements we have come to expect in narratives of this kind. In the midst of daily unimaginable horrors, Gradowski aimed to write beautifully, lyrically, movingly, to create true literature where and when one would least expect to find it. Gradowski wrote in Yiddish, and until now, his full writings have only appeared in French translation. This most exceptional text, accompanied by a preface and postface by Philippe Mesnard and Arnold I. Davidson, will be of enormous value, both in Holocaust scholarship and in continuing the remembrance of the Shoah, for many years to come"--
Download or read book Amidst a Nightmare of Crime written by Jadwiga Bezwińska and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translations of five manuscripts found near the sites of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria, where they had been buried by prisoners tending the gas chambers. Written by eyewitnesses of the mass exterminations, these diaries and notes are unique historical documents.
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 Eyewitness Auschwitz written by Filip Müller and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1999-08-24 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filip Müller came to Auschwitz with one of the earliest transports from Slovakia in April 1942 and began working in the gassing installations and crematoria in May. He was still alive when the gassings ceased in November 1944. He saw millions come and disappear; by sheer luck he survived. Müller is neither a historian nor a psychologist; he is a source—one of the few prisoners who saw the Jewish people die and lived to tell about it. Eyewitness Auschwitz is one of the key documents of the Holocaust.
Download or read book The Holocaust written by Leni Yahil and published by Studies in Jewish History. This book was released on 1990 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers the anti-semitic activities of the Nazis all over the globe, refuting common myths about the Holocaust, including the perception that Jews went peacefully to their deaths.
Download or read book Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp written by Yisrael Gutman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative account of the operation of the Auschwitz death camp.Ò. . . a comprehensive work that is unlikely to be overtaken for many years. This learnedvolume is about as chilling as historiography gets.Ó ÑWalter Laqueur, The New RepublicÒ. . . a vital contribution to Holocaust studies and a bulwark against forgetting.Ó ÑPublishers WeeklyÒRigorously documented, brilliantly written, organized, and edited . . . the most authoritativebook about a place of unsurpassed importance in human history.Ó ÑJohn K. RothÒNever before has knowledge concerning every aspect of Auschwitz . . . been made available in such authority, depth, and comprehensiveness.Ó ÑRichard L. RubensteinLeading scholars from the United States, Israel, Poland, and other European countries provide the first comprehensive account of what took place at the Auschwitz death camp. Principal sections of the book address the institutional history of the camp, the technology and dimensions of the genocide carried out there, the profiles of the perpetrators and the lives of the inmates, underground resistance and escapes, and what the outside world knew about Auschwitz and when.Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
Download or read book The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias Sonderkommando written by Rebecca Fromer and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Representing Auschwitz written by N. Chare and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by leading international scholars takes the Scrolls of Auschwitz as its starting point. These powerful hand-written testimonies, produced within Birkenau, seek to bear witness to mass murder from at its core. The highly literary accounts pose a fundamental challenge to the idea the Holocaust cannot be attested to.
Download or read book Judging Privileged Jews written by Adam Brown and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-05 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nazis’ persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust included the creation of prisoner hierarchies that forced victims to cooperate with their persecutors. Many in the camps and ghettos came to hold so-called “privileged” positions, and their behavior has often been judged as self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood, and often taboo aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on Primo Levi’s concept of the “grey zone,” this study analyzes the passing of moral judgment on “privileged” Jews as represented by writers, such as Raul Hilberg, and in films, including Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Negotiating the problems and potentialities of “representing the unrepresentable,” this book engages with issues that are fundamental to present-day attempts to understand the Holocaust and deeply relevant to reflections on human nature.
Download or read book Auschwitz written by Miklós Nyiszli and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available."
Download or read book Gray Zones written by Jonathan Petropoulos and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few essays about the Holocaust are better known or more important than Primo Levi's reflections on what he called "the gray zone," a reality in which moral ambiguity and compromise were pronounced. In this volume accomplished Holocaust scholars, among them Raul Hilberg, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes, and Lynn Rapaport, explore the terrain that Levi identified. Together they bring a necessary interdisciplinary focus to bear on timely and often controversial topics in cutting-edge Holocaust studies that range from historical analysis to popular culture. While each essay utilizes a particular methodology and argues for its own thesis, the volume as a whole advances the claim that the more we learn about the Holocaust, the more complex that event turns out to be. Only if ambiguities and compromises in the Holocaust and its aftermath are identified, explored, and at times allowed to remain--lest resolution deceive us--will our awareness of the Holocaust and its implications be as full as possible.
