Download or read book Pioneers and Partisans written by Anika Walke and published by Oxford Oral History. This book was released on 2015 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thousands of young Jews were orphaned by the Nazi genocide in the German-occupied Soviet Union and struggled for survival on their own. This book weaves together oral histories, video testimonies, and memoirs produced in the former Soviet Union to show how the first generation of Soviet Jews, born after the foundation of the USSR, experienced the Nazi genocide and how they remember it in a context of social change following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The 1930s, a period when the notion interethnic solidarity and social equality were promoted and a partly lived reality, were formative for a cohort of young Jews. Soviet policies of the time established a powerful framework for the ways in which survivors of the genocide understood, survived, and represent their experience of violence and displacement. The book demonstrates that the young Soviet Jews' struggle for survival, and its memory, was shaped by interethnic relationships within the occupied society, German annihilation policy, and Soviet efforts to construct a patriotic unity of the Soviet population. Age and gender were crucial factors for experiencing, surviving, and remembering the Nazi genocide in Soviet territories, an element that Anika Walke emphasizes by investigating the individual and collective efforts to save peoples' lives, in hiding places and partisan formations, and how these efforts were subsequently erased in the construction of the Soviet war portrayal. Pioneers and Partisans demonstrates how the Holocaust unfolded in the German-occupied Soviet territories and how Soviet citizens responded to it. The book does this work through oral histories of atrocities and survival during the German occupation in Minsk and a number of small towns in Eastern Belorussia such as Shchedrin, Slavnoe, Zhlobin, and Shklov. Following particular individuals' stories, framed within the broader historical and cultural context, this book tells of repeated transformations of identity, from Soviet citizen in the prewar years, to a target of genocidal violence during the war, to barely accepted national minority in the postwar Soviet Union.
Download or read book Pioneers and Partisans An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia written by Anika Walke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-13 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nazi regime and local collaborators killed 800,000 Belorussian Jews, many of them parents or relatives of young Jews who survived the war. Thousands of young girls and boys were thus orphaned and struggled for survival on their own. This book is the first systematic account of young Soviet Jews' lives under conditions of Nazi occupation and genocide. These orphans' experiences and memories are rooted in the 1930s, when Soviet policies promoted and sometimes actually created interethnic solidarity and social equality. This experience of interethnic solidarity provided a powerful framework for the ways in which young Jews survived and, several decades after the war, represented their experience of violence and displacement. Through oral histories with several survivors, video testimonies, and memoirs, Anika Walke reveals the crucial roles of age and gender in the ways young Jews survived and remembered the Nazi genocide, and shows how shared experiences of trauma facilitated community building within and beyond national groups. Pioneers and Partisans uncovers the repeated transformations of identity that Soviet Jewish children and adolescents experienced, from Soviet citizens in the prewar years, to a target of genocidal violence during the war, to a barely accepted national minority in the postwar Soviet Union.
Download or read book The Last Ghetto written by Anna Hájková and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terezín, as it was known in Czech, or Theresienstadt as it was known in German, was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for murder in the East. Terezín was the last ghetto to be liberated, one day after the end of World War II. The Last Ghetto is the first in-depth analytical history of a prison society during the Holocaust. Rather than depict the prison society which existed within the ghetto as an exceptional one, unique in kind and not understandable by normal analytical methods, Anna Hájková argues that such prison societies that developed during the Holocaust are best understood as simply other instances of the societies human beings create under normal circumstances. Challenging conventional claims of Holocaust exceptionalism, Hájková insists instead that we ought to view the Holocaust with the same analytical tools as other historical events. The prison society of Terezín produced its own social hierarchies under which seemingly small differences among prisoners (of age, ethnicity, or previous occupation) could determine whether one ultimately lived or died. During the three and a half years of the camp's existence, prisoners created their own culture and habits, bonded, fell in love, and forged new families. Based on extensive archival research in nine languages and on empathetic reading of victim testimonies, The Last Ghetto is a transnational, cultural, social, gender, and organizational history of Terezín, revealing how human society works in extremis and highlighting the key issues of responsibility, agency and its boundaries, and belonging.
Download or read book The Legacies of the Romani Genocide in Europe since 1945 written by Celia Donert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-27 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the legacies of the genocide of Roma in Europe after the end of the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of people labelled as ‘Gypsies’ were persecuted or killed in Nazi Germany and across occupied Europe between 1933 and 1945. In many places, discrimination continued after the war was over. The chapters in this volume ask how these experiences shaped the lives of Romani survivors and their families in eastern and western Europe since 1945. This book will appeal to researchers and students in Modern European History, Romani Studies, and the history of genocide and the Holocaust.
Download or read book Geographies of the Holocaust written by Anne Kelly Knowles and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] pioneering work . . . Shed[s] light on the historic events surrounding the Holocaust from place, space, and environment-oriented perspectives.” —Rudi Hartmann, PhD, Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado This book explores the geographies of the Holocaust at every scale of human experience, from the European continent to the experiences of individual human bodies. Built on six innovative case studies, it brings together historians and geographers to interrogate the places and spaces of the genocide. The cases encompass the landscapes of particular places (the killing zones in the East, deportations from sites in Italy, the camps of Auschwitz, the ghettos of Budapest) and the intimate spaces of bodies on evacuation marches. Geographies of the Holocaust puts forward models and a research agenda for different ways of visualizing and thinking about the Holocaust by examining the spaces and places where it was enacted and experienced. “An excellent collection of scholarship and a model of interdisciplinary collaboration . . . The volume makes a timely contribution to the ongoing emergence of the spatial humanities and will undoubtedly advance scholarly and popular understandings of the Holocaust.” —H-HistGeog “An important work . . . and could be required reading in any number of courses on political geography, GIS, critical theory, biopolitics, genocide, and so forth.” —Journal of Historical Geography “Both students and researchers will find this work to be immensely informative and innovative . . . Essential.” —Choice
Download or read book On the Social History of Persecution written by Christian Gerlach and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-03-06 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multi-disciplinary volume is one of the few collections about social change covering various cases of mass violence and genocide. In life under persecution, social relations and social structures were not absent and not simply replaced by an ethno-racial order. The studies in this book show the influence of social structures like gender, age and class on life under persecution. Exploring practices in family and labor relations and of collective action, they counter claims of an atomization of society or total uprootedness of victims. Despite being exposed to poverty and want and under the permanent threat of political violence, persecuted people tried to develop their own agency. Case studies are about the Jewish and Armenian persecutions, Rwanda, the war of decolonization in Mozambique and civilian refuges in Belarus during World War II. The authors are a mix of experienced scholars and young researchers.
Download or read book Rethinking Oral History and Tradition written by Nepia Mahuika and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indigenous peoples have our own ways of defining oral history. For many, oral sources are shaped and disseminated in multiple forms that are more culturally textured than just standard interview recordings. For others, indigenous oral histories are not merely fanciful or puerile myths or traditions, but are viable and valid historical accounts that are crucial to native identities and the relationships between individual and collective narratives. This book challenges popular definitions of oral history that have displaced and confined indigenous oral accounts as merely oral tradition. It stands alongside other marginalized community voices that highlight the importance of feminist, Black, and gay oral history perspectives, and is the first text dedicated to a specific indigenous articulation of the field. Drawing on a Maori indigenous case study set in Aotearoa New Zealand, this book advocates a rethinking of the discipline, encouraging a broader conception of the way we do oral history, how we might define its form, and how its politics might move beyond a subsuming democratization to include nuanced decolonial possibilities.
Download or read book Rethinking Oral History and Tradition written by Nepia Mahuika and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For many indigenous peoples, oral history is a living intergenerational phenomenon that is crucial to the transmission of our languages, cultural knowledge, politics, and identities. Indigenous oral histories are not merely traditions, myths, chants or superstitions, but are valid historical accounts passed on vocally in various forms, forums, and practices. Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective provides a specific native and tribal account of the meaning, form, politics and practice of oral history. It is a rethinking and critique of the popular and powerful ideas that now populate and define the fields of oral history and tradition, which have in the process displaced indigenous perspectives. This book, drawing on indigenous voices, explores the overlaps and differences between the studies of oral history and oral tradition, and urges scholars in both disciplines to revisit the way their fields think about orality, oral history methods, transmission, narrative, power, ethics, oral history theories and politics. Indigenous knowledge and experience holds important contributions that have the potential to expand and develop robust academic thinking in the study of both oral history and tradition.--
Download or read book Oral History and the Environment written by Stephen M. Sloan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As uncontrolled development forces crises in the natural world, deep and long-standing human connections with the earth are changing. Understanding these shifting relationships is essential to framing our responses to issues of industrial development, population growth, and climate change. The use of oral history methodology in environmental research acknowledges and subjectively defines these human connections to the natural world enriching our understanding of both what the earth means to us as well as what the earth needs from us to find balance once again. Oral History and the Environment: Global Perspectives on Climate, Connection, and Catastrophe is the first book to provide a global perspective on the use of oral history in environmental research. It presents excerpts from interviews with environmental activists, victims of environmental catastrophe, and those whose life experience gives them special insights into the natural world; combined with commentary by oral historians who have been exploring how these commentaries can be used to better understand our relationship with the natural world. In this anthology, oral histories with farmers, wildlife rescue volunteers, activists, environmental disaster survivors, elders, water system managers, indigenous voices, tribal trustees, wilderness rangers, reindeer herders, fishers, and foresters, help readers understand a wide range of issues related to our relationship with the environment. These stories and expert analysis touch on a wide range of topics including drought, chemical leaks, oil spills, nuclear disaster, indigenous control of resources, natural resource management, wilderness, and environmental protest"--
Download or read book Jewish Child Soldiers in the Bloodlands of Europe written by David M. Rosen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-03 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the experiences of Jewish children who were members of armed partisan groups in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust. It describes and analyze the role of children as activists, agents, and decision makers in a situation of extraordinary danger and stress. The children in this book were hunted like prey and ran for their lives. They survived by fleeing into the forest and swamps of Eastern Europe and joining anti-German partisan groups. The vast majority of these children were teenagers between ages 11 and 18, although some were younger. They were, by any definition, child soldiers, and that is the reason they lived to tell their tales. The book will be of interest to general and academic audiences. There is also great interest in children and childhood across disciplines of history and the social sciences. It is likely to spark considerable debate and interest, since its argument runs counter to the generally accepted wisdom that child soldiers must first and foremost be seen as victims of their recruiters. The argument of this book is that time, place, and context play a key role in our understanding of children’s involvement in war and that in some contexts children under arms must be seen as exercising an inherent right of self-defense.
Download or read book Jewish Men and the Holocaust Sexuality Emotions Masculinity written by Florian Zabransky and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-10-21 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Holocaust, amid death and violence, Jewish men were not mere powerless victims. Linking gender studies with a history of sexuality and emotions will highlight intimate agency, power struggles, negotiations of relationships, social dynamics, and representations of masculinities. Considering the agency and vulnerability will further convey intimate choices, the representation of masculine ideals, intimate violence, and the expression of various emotions such as honour and love. As research on the Holocaust often links women with sexuality or portrays women as gendered beings, it is crucial to excavate the intimate, hidden lives of Jewish men and their specific intimate experiences as men. The analysis not only demonstrates how Jewish men remember and make sense of their experiences, but also how they chose to form the narrative and how they represented their ordeal in four chapters, namely ghettos, concentration camps, Jewish resistance in the countryside, and finally, DP camps in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The consideration of these four spaces allows a nuanced, innovative understanding of the intimate history of Jewish men during the Holocaust, i.e. how some men established male dominated structures and established intimate strategies to find solace and pleasure.
Download or read book The Rescue Turn and the Politics of Holocaust Memory written by Natalia Aleksiun and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many of the essays focus on recent developments, they shed light on the evolution of this phenomenon since 1945.
Download or read book Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age written by Anika Walke and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection that “eloquently examines the numerous forms of movement from and across Central, Eastern Europe and Russia from a historical perspective” (Comparative Literature Studies). Combining methodological and theoretical approaches to migration and mobility studies with detailed analyses of historical, cultural, or social phenomena, the works collected here provide an interdisciplinary perspective on how migrations and mobility altered identities and affected images of the “other.” From walkways to railroads to airports, the history of travel provides a context for considering the people and events that have shaped Central and Eastern Europe and Russia.
Download or read book Wartime Relations written by Maren Röger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Second World War, all contact between German soldiers and Polish women – considered an ‘inferior race’ – was officially banned. Sexual encounters frequently took place, however. Some were consensual, while others were characterised by brutal violence, and women often sold their bodies as a means of survival. The army and SS constructed purpose-built brothels for their soldiers, but also banned and frequently punished loving relationships. In Wartime Relations, Historian Maren Röger gives a powerful account of these encounters and describes the actions of the army and the SS in regulating relations between soldiers and civilian women. Röger provides new and important insights into everyday life during the occupation, Nazi racial policy, and the fates of the women involved.
Download or read book Ghosts of War written by Franziska Exeler and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process? In Ghosts of War, Franziska Exeler examines people's wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. After the Red Army reestablished control over Belarus, one question shaped encounters between the returning Soviet authorities and those who had lived under Nazi rule, between soldiers and family members, reevacuees and colleagues, Holocaust survivors and their neighbors: What did you do during the war? Ghosts of War analyzes the prosecution and punishment of Soviet citizens accused of wartime collaboration with the Nazis and shows how individuals sought justice, revenge, or assistance from neighbors and courts. The book uncovers the many absences, silences, and conflicts that were never resolved, as well as the truths that could only be spoken in private, yet it also investigates the extent to which individuals accommodated, contested, and reshaped official Soviet war memory. The result is a gripping examination of how efforts at coming to terms with the past played out within, and at times through, a dictatorship.
Download or read book Blood and Ruins written by Richard Overy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 1041 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Monumental… [A] vast and detailed study that is surely the finest single-volume history of World War II. Richard Overy has given us a powerful reminder of the horror of war and the threat posed by dictators with dreams of empire.” – The Wall Street Journal A thought-provoking and original reassessment of World War II, from Britain’s leading military historian A New York Times bestseller Richard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. As one of Britain’s most decorated and respected World War II historians, he argues that this was the “last imperial war,” with almost a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, which reached its peak in the territorial ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires. Overy also argues for a more global perspective on the war, one that looks broader than the typical focus on military conflict between the Allied and Axis states. Above all, Overy explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked the war and its protracted aftermath—which extended far beyond 1945. Blood and Ruins is a masterpiece, a new and definitive look at the ultimate struggle over the future of the global order, which will compel us to view the war in novel and unfamiliar ways. Thought-provoking, original and challenging, Blood and Ruins sets out to understand the war anew.
Download or read book The Voice of the Past written by Paul Thompson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oral history gives history back to the people in their own words. And in giving a past, it also helps them towards a future of their own making. Oral history and life stories help to create a truer picture of the past and the changing present, documenting the lives and feelings of all kinds of people, many otherwise hidden from history. It explores personal and family relationships and uncovers the secret cultures of work. It connects public and private experience, and it highlights the experiences of migrating between cultures. At the same time it can bring courage to the old, meaning to communities, and contact between generations. Sometimes it can offer a path for healing divided communities and those with traumatic memories. Without it the history and sociology of our time would be poor and narrow. In this fourth edition of his pioneering work, fully revised with Joanna Bornat, Paul Thompson challenges the accepted myths of historical scholarship. He discusses the reliability of oral evidence in comparison with other sources and considers the social context of its development. He looks at the relationship between memory, the self and identity. He traces oral history through its own past and weighs up the recent achievements of a movement which has become international, with notably strong developments in North America, Europe, Australia, Latin America, South Africa and the Far East, despite resistance from more conservative academics. This new edition combines the classic text of The Voice of the Past with many new sections, including especially the worldwide development of different forms of oral history and the parallel memory boom, as well as discussions of theory in oral history and of memory, trauma and reconciliation. It offers a deep social and historical interpretation along with succinct practical advice on designing and carrying out a project, The Voice of the Past remains an invaluable tool for anyone setting out to use oral history and life stories to construct a more authentic and balanced record of the past and the present.
