Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland

Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland
Author: Lucjan Dobroszycki
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
Total Pages: 182
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781563244636

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- 1. The Reemergence and Decline of the Jewish Community in Poland, 1944-1947 -- 2. Jewish Communities in Poland -- Map -- Location Index -- 3. The Central Committee of Jews in Poland -- Excerpt from a Report by the Department of Evidence and Statistics -- Samples of Registration Cards -- 4. Numbers of Jewish Survivors in Poland -- 5. Lists of Jewish Children Who Survived

Our Crime Was Being Jewish

Our Crime Was Being Jewish
Author: Anthony S. Pitch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2015-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1632208547

In the shouted words of a woman bound for Auschwitz to a man about to escape from a cattle car, “If you get out, maybe you can tell the story! Who else will tell it?” Our Crime Was Being Jewish contains 576 vivid memories of 358 Holocaust survivors. These are the true, insider stories of victims, told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents and siblings sent to the gas chambers; of starving children beaten for trying to steal a morsel of food; of people who saw their friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured. The recollections are from the start of the war—the home invasions, the Gestapo busts, and the ghettos—as well as the daily hell of the concentration camps and what actually happened inside. Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and this hefty collection of stories told by its survivors is one of the most important books of our time. It was compiled by award-winning author Anthony S. Pitch, who worked with sources such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to get survivors’ stories compiled together and to supplement them with images from the war. These memories must be told and held onto so what happened is documented; so the lives of those who perished are not forgotten—so history does not repeat itself. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

How to Document Victims and Locate Survivors of the Holocaust

How to Document Victims and Locate Survivors of the Holocaust
Author: Gary Mokotoff
Publisher: Teaneck, NJ : Avotaynu
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN:

This brief book has been designed as a handbook for anyone doing research to identify Holocaust victims and find survivors. It serves two purposes for the researcher: it annotates the principal sources worldwide for Holocaust information and explains the rudimentary steps necessary for accessing that material. The author, a noted Jewish genealogist, followed his own advice during a 15-year search for members of his extended family. This publication, the result of that investigation, is written for the beginning researcher. The major difference between this work and other books on the Holocaust is that it focuses on individuals, not events. Much of the information will be useful also to students researching the Holocaust era and those looking for material with which to refute the claims of revisionists. The book notes the various types of documents that contain needed information and tells where they are and how to get them. Mokotoff gives readers advice on the best ways to request data from international sources, points out what types of documents might hold the most relevant information, and lists agencies that deal with survivors. The section on museums, libraries, and other institutions with Holocaust collections will be useful for all types of research. The illustrations of pages from documents are those that Mokotoff obtained for his own research. Appendixes include a current bibliography with books on generic genealogical searching, statistics about Jewish victims, lists of towns that published memorial books to commemorate victims, more than 4,000 European towns for which there is documentation at Yad Vashem in Israel, Holocaust resource centers, and a list of members of the Mokotoff family murdered during the Holocaust. The author's conversational writing style and easy-to-follow directions make this an appropriate handbook for the uninitiated. Public libraries might want to include it in genealogy collections, but it should be made accessible to all patrons interested in Holocaust information.--BL 11/01/1995.

Collect and Record!

Collect and Record!
Author: Laura Jockusch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190259329

This volume tells the largely unknown story of Holocaust survivors who founded Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers in Europe immediately after World War II. Their initiatives collected thousands of Nazi documents along with 20,000 testimonies, 10,000 questionnaires, and large numbers of memoirs, diaries, songs, poems, and artifacts of Jewish victims. They pioneered the development of a Holocaust historiography that used both victim and perpetrator sources to describe the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the everyday life and death of European Jews under the Nazi regime, while placing the experiences of Jews at the center of the story.

Refuge Denied

Refuge Denied
Author: Sarah A. Ogilvie
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2010-03-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299219836

In May of 1939 the Cuban government turned away the Hamburg-America Line’s MS St. Louis, which carried more than 900 hopeful Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Germany. The passengers subsequently sought safe haven in the United States, but were rejected once again, and the St. Louis had to embark on an uncertain return voyage to Europe. Finally, the St. Louis passengers found refuge in four western European countries, but only the 288 passengers sent to England evaded the Nazi grip that closed upon continental Europe a year later. Over the years, the fateful voyage of the St. Louis has come to symbolize U.S. indifference to the plight of European Jewry on the eve of World War II. Although the episode of the St. Louis is well known, the actual fates of the passengers, once they disembarked, slipped into historical obscurity. Prompted by a former passenger’s curiosity, Sarah Ogilvie and Scott Miller of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum set out in 1996 to discover what happened to each of the 937 passengers. Their investigation, spanning nine years and half the globe, took them to unexpected places and produced surprising results. Refuge Denied chronicles the unraveling of the mystery, from Los Angeles to Havana and from New York to Jerusalem. Some of the most memorable stories include the fate of a young toolmaker who survived initial selection at Auschwitz because his glasses had gone flying moments before and a Jewish child whose apprenticeship with a baker in wartime France later translated into the establishment of a successful business in the United States. Unfolding like a compelling detective thriller, Refuge Denied is a must-read for anyone interested in the Holocaust and its impact on the lives of ordinary people.

Bitter Reckoning

Bitter Reckoning
Author: Dan Porat
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674243137

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.

Kindertransport memory quilt

Kindertransport memory quilt
Author: Hanus J. Grosz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2001
Genre: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
ISBN: 9780971202900

"The Kindertransport Quilts are a form of folk art which allows multiple artists, each with their own artistic expression, to produce a work with a unifying theme. Each square expresses its creator's view of the Kindertransport experience: pictures of the past, fears and nightmares, memorials to lost family. They express traumatic childhood experiences, as recalled with the perspective of maturity ... We are grateful to Kirsten Grosz for having produced these quilts, touching and artistic reminders of the Holocaust."--p. 7

The Wonder of Their Voices

The Wonder of Their Voices
Author: Alan Rosen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2010-10-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199780765

Over the last several decades, video testimony with aging Holocaust survivors has brought these witnesses into the limelight. Yet the success of these projects has made it seem that little survivor testimony took place in earlier years. In truth, thousands of survivors began to recount their experience at the earliest opportunity. This book provides the first full-length case study of early postwar Holocaust testimony, focusing on David Boder's 1946 displaced persons interview project. In July 1946, Boder, a psychologist, traveled to Europe to interview victims of the Holocaust who were in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps and what he called "shelter houses." During his nine weeks in Europe, Boder carried out approximately 130 interviews in nine languages and recorded them on a wire recorder. Likely the earliest audio recorded testimony of Holocaust survivors, the interviews are valuable today for the spoken word (that of the DP narrators and of Boder himself) and also for the song sessions and religious services that Boder recorded. Eighty sessions were eventually transcribed into English, most of which were included in a self-published manuscript. Alan Rosen sets Boder's project in the context of the postwar response to displaced persons, sketches the dramatic background of his previous life and work, chronicles in detail the evolving process of interviewing both Jewish and non-Jewish DPs, and examines from several angles the implications for the history of Holocaust testimony. Such early postwar testimony, Rosen avers, deserves to be taken on its own terms rather than to be enfolded into earlier or later schemas of testimony. Moreover, Boder's efforts and the support he was given for them demonstrate that American postwar response to the Holocaust was not universally indifferent but rather often engaged, concerned, and resourceful.