Download or read book A Jewish Boyhood in Poland written by Norman Salsitz and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kolbuszowa is gone now. Before World War II it was a thriving, small Polish town of 4,000 people, half Polish Catholics, half Jews, where family and the traditional ways of life were strong. It was the town where Norman Salsitz was born, in 1920, the last of nine children. It was the town that he helped to destroy, forced by the Nazis in 1941 to assist in the brick-by-brick destruction of the Jewish ghetto in which his family lived. Salsitz was subsequently sent to a German work camp, but escaped into the woods to live and later tell his story of Kolbuszowa to Richard Skolnik. Salsitz speaks to us both as an exceptional witness to everyday events in the town and as a shrewd observer of the broader landscape. Colorful details bring the people, the customs, and habits, both religious and secular, back to life.

Download or read book A Promise at Sobib r written by Philip “Fiszel” Bialowitz and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Promise at Sobibór is the story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi gas chambers. Between April 1942 and October 1943, about 250,000 Jews from European countries and the Soviet Union were sent to the Nazi death camp at Sobibór in occupied Poland. Sobibór was not a transit camp or work camp: its sole purpose was efficient mass murder. On October 14, 1943, approximately half of the 650 or so prisoners still alive at Sobibór undertook a daring and precisely planned revolt, killing SS officers and fleeing through minefields and machine-gun fire into the surrounding forests, farms, and towns. Only about forty-two of them, including Fiszel, are known to have survived to the end of the war. Philip (Fiszel) Bialowitz, now an American citizen, tells his eyewitness story here in the real-time perspective of his own boyhood, from his childhood before the war and his internment in the brutal Izbica ghetto to his harrowing six months at Sobibór—including his involvement in the revolt and desperate mass escape—and his rescue by courageous Polish farmers. He also recounts the challenges of life following the war as a teenaged displaced person, and his eventual efforts as a witness to the truth of the Holocaust. In 1943 the heroic leaders of the revolt at Sobibór, Sasha Perchersky and Leon Feldhendler, implored fellow prisoners to promise that anyone who survived would tell the story of Sobibór: not just of the horrific atrocities committed there, but of the courage and humanity of those who fought back. Bialowitz has kept that promise. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association for School Libraries Best Books for High Schools, selected by the American Association for School Libraries Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association

Download or read book The Life of Jews in Poland Before the Holocaust written by Ben-Zion Gold and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hell is other people," Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote in No Exit . The fantastic tragicomedy Madah-Sartre brings him back from the dead to confront the strange and awful truth of that statement. As the story begins, Sartre and his consort in intellect and love, Simone de Beauvoir, are on their way to the funeral of Tahar Djaout, an Algerian poet and journalist slain in 1993.

Download or read book Polish Americans and Their History written by John J Bukowczyk and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2017-03-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This rich collection brings together the work of eight leading scholars to examine the history of Polish-American workers, women, families, and politics.

Download or read book Anti Jewish Violence in Poland 1914 1920 written by William W. Hagen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widespread anti-Jewish pogroms accompanied the rebirth of Polish statehood out of World War I and Polish–Soviet War. William W. Hagen offers the pogroms' first scholarly account, revealing how they served as brutal stagings by ordinary people of scenarios dramatizing popular anti-Jewish fears and resentments. While scholarship on modern anti-Semitism has stressed its ideological inspiration ('print anti-Semitism'), this study shows that anti-Jewish violence by perpetrators among civilians and soldiers expressed magic-infused anxieties and longings for redemption from present threats and suffering ('folk anti-Semitism'). Illustrated with contemporary photographs and constructed from extensive, newly discovered archival sources from three continents, this is an innovative work in east European history. Using extensive first-person testimonies, it reveals gaps - but also correspondences - between popular attitudes and those of the political elite. The pogroms raged against the conscious will of new Poland's governors whilst Christians high and low sometimes sought, even successfully, to block them.

Download or read book Remembering a Vanished World written by Theodore S. Hamerow and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memoirs of a Jew born in 1920 in Warsaw; in 1930 he and his parents emigrated to the USA. Ch. 5 (pp. 115-143), "On the Edge of the Volcano, " contains, inter alia, recollections of and reflections on antisemitism in Poland in the 1920s.

Download or read book Dance with Death written by Jaroslaw Piekalkiewicz and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than seventy-five years have passed since the Holocaust and the terrors visited by German Nazis on occupied Europe. Yet this history continues to be the subject of research, debate, and controversy. One particularly delicate issue is the question of whether non-Jews did all they could to help Jews during the war. In this book, Jarosław Piekałkiewicz examines this issue in detail as it relates to Poland—the country that experienced the harshest German occupation and was slated for permanent incorporation into the German Reich. He examines all the different factors influencing the capacity and willingness of Poles to save Jews and documents the efforts made to save them despite these impediments. Unlike other books on the subject, Piekałkiewicz chooses to start with a chapter on the thousand-year-long history of Jews in Poland. This allows readers to understand why one-third of the world’s Jews lived in Poland before WWII and to learn about their rich and diverse culture. Equally clear are the dark clouds that gathered before the war in the form of fascism and antisemitism expanding in Poland and elsewhere in Europe. Piekałkiewicz is a political scientist who participated in the Polish Resistance as a teenager along with other members of his family. This combination of academic rigor and personal experience gives readers a more realistic understanding than usually available of resistance under German occupation and amid the Holocaust. He provides a detailed understanding of German occupation of Poland and the operations of the Polish Underground and goes on to describe efforts by Poles from many walks of life to save Jews. The text is interspersed with his vivid personal testimonies of surviving and fighting in occupied Poland. At the same time, the author does not shrink from revealing the dark side of the German occupation: fear, envy, greed, demoralization, and collaboration with the Germans to betray Jews, the Poles who hid them, resistance members, and even personal enemies. This book provides readers with the basic elements to understand Polish-Jewish relations during WWII as well as what is probably the last testimony that will ever be published of a former resistance fighter.

Download or read book Needle in the Bone written by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2013 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The courage for making a new life.

Download or read book Reconstructing a National Identity written by Marsha L. Rozenblit and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the impact of war and political crisis on the national identity of Jews, both in the multinational Habsburg monarchy and in the new nation-states that replaced it at the end of World War I. Jews enthusiastically supported the Austrian war effort because it allowed them to assert their Austrian loyalties and Jewish solidarity at the same time. They faced a grave crisis of identity when the multinational state collapsed and they lived in nation-states mostly uncomfortable with ethnic minorities. This book raises important questions about Jewish identity and about the general nature of ethnic and national identity.

Download or read book Global Jewish Foodways written by Hasia R. Diner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the Jewish people has been a history of migration. Although Jews invariably brought with them their traditional ideas about food during these migrations, just as invariably they engaged with the foods they encountered in their new environments. Their culinary habits changed as a result of both these migrations and the new political and social realities they encountered. The stories in this volume examine the sometimes bewildering kaleidoscope of food experiences generated by new social contacts, trade, political revolutions, wars, and migrations, both voluntary and compelled. This panoramic history of Jewish food highlights its breadth and depth on a global scale from Renaissance Italy to the post-World War II era in Israel, Argentina, and the United States and critically examines the impact of food on Jewish lives and on the complex set of laws, practices, and procedures that constitutes the Jewish dietary system and regulates what can be eaten, when, how, and with whom. Global Jewish Foodways offers a fresh perspective on how historical changes through migration, settlement, and accommodation transformed Jewish food and customs.

Download or read book Hungering for America written by Hasia R. DINER and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Millions of immigrants were drawn to American shores, not by the mythic streets paved with gold, but rather by its tables heaped with food. How they experienced the realities of America’s abundant food—its meat and white bread, its butter and cheese, fruits and vegetables, coffee and beer—reflected their earlier deprivations and shaped their ethnic practices in the new land. Hungering for America tells the stories of three distinctive groups and their unique culinary dramas. Italian immigrants transformed the food of their upper classes and of sacred days into a generic “Italian” food that inspired community pride and cohesion. Irish immigrants, in contrast, loath to mimic the foodways of the Protestant British elite, diminished food as a marker of ethnicity. And East European Jews, who venerated food as the vital center around which family and religious practice gathered, found that dietary restrictions jarred with America’s boundless choices. These tales, of immigrants in their old worlds and in the new, demonstrate the role of hunger in driving migration and the significance of food in cementing ethnic identity and community. Hasia Diner confirms the well-worn adage, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”

Download or read book The Light of Learning written by Glenn Dynner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The available sources on Hasidic society at the turn of the twentieth century create an impression of discontented Jewish youth and panicked parents, but not inexorable crisis and decline. Though the First World War and post-war pogroms further destabilized Hasidic society, they inadvertently created opportunities for the reinvention and revitalization of traditionalist education. The challenges of the early twentieth century would prove more galvanizing than demoralizing for certain visionary, reform-minded Hasidic leaders"--

Download or read book My Boyhood War written by Bohdan Hryniewicz and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bohdan Hryniewicz was only 8 when war broke out and 13 when it ended. In those years he saw more than most men would in 10 lifetimes; and his recall is extraordinary. He cites three days as defining this period: the saddest, 19 September 1939 as Russian tanks rolled into his home town of Wilno; the happiest, August 1 1944, when the Polish flag flew once again from the highest building in Warsaw; the most bitter, October 3 that year, when his commanding officer forbade him to join the other members of his battalion as they entered a prisoner of war camp. The Warsaw Uprising lasted 63 days and was the largest single military effort by any resistance movement in the war. Throughout, Bohdan was the personal runner of lieutenant Nalecz, CO of the battalion of the same name. Betrayed by Stalin, all the Poles were expelled to camps after surrender and the city dynamited. Bohdan is probably the last witness to this tragedy.

Download or read book Poland and the Holocaust in the Polish American Press 1926 1945 written by Magdalena Kubow and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contrary to the common notion that news regarding the unfolding Holocaust was unavailable or unreliable, news from Europe was often communicated to North American Poles through the Polish-language press. This work engages with the origins debate and demonstrates that the Polish-language press covered seminal issues during the interwar years, the war, and the Holocaust extensively on their front and main story pages, and were extremely responsive, professional, and vocal in their journalism. From Polish-Jewish relations, to the cause of the Second World War and subsequently the development of genocide-related policy, North American Poles, had a different perspective from mainstream society on the causes and effects of what was happening. New research for this book examines attitudes toward Jews prior to and during the Holocaust, and how information on such attitudes was disseminated. It utilizes selected Polish newspapers of the period 1926-1945, predominantly the Republika-Gornik, as well as survivor testimony.

Download or read book Totally Unofficial written by Raphael Lemkin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-24 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the never-before-published autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, who immigrated to the U.S. during World War II and made it his life's work to fight genocide, a term he coined, with the might of the U.N. Genocide Convention.

Download or read book Three Homelands written by Norman Salsitz and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Told with the inimitable flair of a born storyteller, these stories recall the lost world of small-town Polish Jewry before the Holocaust and the subsequent odyssey of one boy's struggle to stay alive in the face of catastrophe. Brimming with the authenticity and humanity of personal experience, these memoirs are at once persuasive, moving, and universal in appeal. Packed with rarely divulged details of daily life during the Holocaust, the book provides significant insights into human nature and the roles played by chance and purpose in staying alive. It is a route of dizzying change. First, author Salsitz, an orthodox Jew, becomes a slave laborer. Then he becomes an escapee, then a partisan. In the ultimate irony, he passes as a non-Jew, working in Polish security after the war. In America, Salsitz finds that the very traits that saw him through the war enabled him to prosper in his adopted land.

Download or read book I m No Hero written by Henry Friedman and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Friedman was robbed of his adolescence by the monstrous evil that annihilated millions of European Jews and changed forever the lives of those who survived. When the Nazis overran their home town near the Polish-Ukrainian border, the Friedman family was saved by Ukrainian Christians who had worked at their farm. Henry, his mother, his younger brother, and a young schoolteacher—who had been hired by his father when Jews were forbidden to attend school—were hidden in a loft over the animal stalls at a neighbor’s farm; his father hid in another hayloft half a mile away. When the family was liberated by the Russians after eighteen months in hiding, Henry, at age fifteen, was emaciated and too weak to walk. The Friedmans eventually made their way to a displaced persons camp in Austria where Henry learned quickly to wheel and deal, seducing women of various ages and nationalities and mastering the intricacies of dealing in the black market. In I’m No Hero, he confronts with unblinking honesty the pain, the shame, and the bizarre comedy of his passage to adulthood. The family came to Seattle in 1949, where Henry Friedman has made his home ever since. In 1988 he returned with his wife to Brody and Suchowola, where he succeeded in finding Julia Symchuk, who, as a young girl, had warned his father that the Gestapo was looking for him, and whose family had hidden the Friedmans in their loft. The following year he was able to bring Julia to Seattle for a triumphal visit, where she was honored in many ways, although, as Friedman writes, “in her own country she had never been honored with anything except hard work.” Like many other survivors, Henry Friedman has found it difficult to confront his past. Like others, too, he has felt the obligation to bear witness. Now retired, he devotes much of his time to telling his story, which he believes is a message of hope, to thousands of schoolchildren throughout the Pacific Northwest. He has received national recognition for his role in establishing the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and as a founder of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center.