Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust

Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust
Author: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Publisher:
Total Pages: 24
Release: 1993
Genre: Holocaust survivors
ISBN:

This pamphlet is intended to assist educators who are preparing to teach Holocaust studies and related subjects.

Holocaust Testimonies

Holocaust Testimonies
Author: Lawrence L. Langer
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 1993-01-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300173710

Annotation This important and original book is the first sustained analysis of the unique ways in which oral testimony of survivors contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust. Langer argues that it is necessary to deromanticize the survival experience and that to burden it with accolades about the "indomitable human spirit" is to slight its painful complexity and ambivalence.

Testimony from the Nazi Camps

Testimony from the Nazi Camps
Author: Margaret-Anne Hutton
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2005
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780415349338

This book focuses on a little-known corpus of testimonial accounts published by French women deported to Nazi camps, and will be of interest to those studying modern French literature, women's studies and the Holocaust.

William & Rosalie

William & Rosalie
Author: William Schiff
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 157441237X

"William & Rosalie" is the gripping and heartfelt account of two young Jewish people from Poland who survived six different German slave and concentration camps throughout the Holocaust.

Matters of Testimony

Matters of Testimony
Author: Nicholas Chare
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2015-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782389997

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.

Forgotten Voices of The Holocaust

Forgotten Voices of The Holocaust
Author: Lyn Smith
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2010-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1409003590

Following the success of Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Lyn Smith visits the oral accounts preserved in the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, to reveal the sheer complexity and horror of one of human history's darkest hours. The great majority of Holocaust survivors suffered considerable physical and psychological wounds, yet even in this dark time of human history, tales of faith, love and courage can be found. As well as revealing the story of the Holocaust as directly experienced by victims, these testimonies also illustrate how, even enduring the most harsh conditions, degrading treatment and suffering massive family losses, hope, the will to survive, and the human spirit still shine through.

The Last Consolation Vanished

The Last Consolation Vanished
Author: Zalmen Gradowski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2022-11-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 022666032X

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.

Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp

Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp
Author: Christopher R. Browning
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2011-01-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393079430

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award "An important, revealing story, exceptionally well told." —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Employing the rich testimony of almost three hundred survivors of the slave-labor camps of Starachowice, Poland, Christopher R. Browning draws the experiences of the Jewish prisoners, the Nazi authorities, and the neighboring Poles together into a chilling history of a little-known dimension of the Holocaust. Combining harrowing detail and insightful analysis on the Starachowice camps and their role in the Holocaust, Browning’s history is indispensable scholarship and an unforgettable story of survival.

Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps

Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps
Author: Leona Toker
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2019-08-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0253043549

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.

The Liberation of the Camps

The Liberation of the Camps
Author: Dan Stone
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2015-05-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300216033

A moving, deeply researched account of survivors’ experiences of liberation from Nazi death camps and the long, difficult years that followed When tortured inmates of Hitler’s concentration and extermination camps were liberated in 1944 and 1945, the horror of the atrocities came fully to light. It was easy for others to imagine the joyful relief of freed prisoners, yet for those who had survived the unimaginable, the experience of liberation was a slow, grueling journey back to life. In this unprecedented inquiry into the days, months, and years following the arrival of Allied forces at the Nazi camps, a foremost historian of the Holocaust draws on archival sources and especially on eyewitness testimonies to reveal the complex challenges liberated victims faced and the daunting tasks their liberators undertook to help them reclaim their shattered lives. Historian Dan Stone focuses on the survivors—their feelings of guilt, exhaustion, fear, shame for having survived, and devastating grief for lost family members; their immense medical problems; and their later demands to be released from Displaced Persons camps and resettled in countries of their own choosing. Stone also tracks the efforts of British, American, Canadian, and Russian liberators as they contended with survivors’ immediate needs, then grappled with longer-term issues that shaped the postwar world and ushered in the first chill of the Cold War years ahead.