From Concentration Camp to Campus

From Concentration Camp to Campus
Author: Allan W. Austin
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 025209042X

In the aftermath of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the systematic exile and incarceration of thousands of Japanese Americans, the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council was born. Created to facilitate the movement of Japanese American college students from concentration camps to colleges away from the West Coast, this privately organized and funded agency helped more than 4,000 incarcerated students pursue higher education at more than 600 schools during WWII. Austin argues that the resettled students transformed the attempts at assimilation to create their own meanings and suit their own purposes, and succeeded in reintegrating themselves into the wider American society without sacrificing their connections to community and their Japanese cultural heritage.

A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps

A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps
Author: Barbara Rylko-Bauer
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2014-02-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0806145862

Jadwiga Lenartowicz Rylko, known as Jadzia (Yah′-jah), was a young Polish Catholic physician in Lódz at the start of World War II. Suspected of resistance activities, she was arrested in January 1944. For the next fifteen months, she endured three Nazi concentration camps and a forty-two-day death march, spending part of this time working as a prisoner-doctor to Jewish slave laborers. A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps follows Jadzia from her childhood and medical training, through her wartime experiences, to her struggles to create a new life in the postwar world. Jadzia’s daughter, anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer, constructs an intimate ethnography that weaves a personal family narrative against a twentieth-century historical backdrop. As Rylko-Bauer travels back in time with her mother, we learn of the particular hardships that female concentration camp prisoners faced. The struggle continued after the war as Jadzia attempted to rebuild her life, first as a refugee doctor in Germany and later as an immigrant to the United States. Like many postwar immigrants, Jadzia had high hopes of making new connections and continuing her career. Unable to surmount personal, economic, and social obstacles to medical licensure, however, she had to settle for work as a nurse’s aide. As a contribution to accounts of wartime experiences, Jadzia’s story stands out for its sensitivity to the complexities of the Polish memory of war. Built upon both historical research and conversations between mother and daughter, the story combines Jadzia’s voice and Rylko-Bauer’s own journey of rediscovering her family’s past. The result is a powerful narrative about struggle, survival, displacement, and memory, augmenting our understanding of a horrific period in human history and the struggle of Polish immigrants in its aftermath.

Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp

Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp
Author: Helga Weiss
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2013-04-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393089746

A New York Times Bestseller "A sacred reminder of what so many millions suffered, and only a few survived." —Adam Kirsch, New Republic In 1939, Helga Weiss was a young Jewish schoolgirl in Prague. As she endured the first waves of the Nazi invasion, she began to document her experiences in a diary. During her internment at the concentration camp of Terezín, Helga’s uncle hid her diary in a brick wall. Of the 15,000 children brought to Terezín and deported to Auschwitz, there were only one hundred survivors. Helga was one of them. Miraculously, she was able to recover her diary from its hiding place after the war. These pages reveal Helga’s powerful story through her own words and illustrations. Includes a special interview with Helga by translator Neil Bermel.

From Concentration Camp to Campus

From Concentration Camp to Campus
Author: Allan W. Austin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 676
Release: 2001
Genre: Japanese Americans
ISBN:

The East Coast of the United States. The Council also worked with colleges and receiving communities, encouraging them to participate in its program and to provide warm welcomes to Japanese American students. Approximately 4,000 Japanese American students participated in the Council's program. This was a substantial portion of the college-aged cohort of the mainland Japanese American population. Although different agencies had different goals for student resettlement, some Council members and the resettled students cooperated in promoting what we now call multiculturalism. While the War Relocation Authority and even some on the Council hoped to force assimilation through geographic dispersal, the students constructed their own meanings for their resettlement experiences. The history of the Council and the students it helped, in charting the meaning of higher education as well as life away from the West Coast for Japanese American college students, thus highlights the prevailing racism of the American home front during the Second World War as well as efforts to overcome it.

After the Girls Club

After the Girls Club
Author: Carole Bell Ford
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2010-06-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0739146084

After World War II the Girls Club of Brooklyn, New York, became home and safe haven to a small group of young women, orphaned in the Holocaust, whose stories represent the experiences of tens of thousands of child survivors. This book follows them from childhood to the present as they, contrary to early predictions, built new and successful lives in America. In old age the women, once again, are defying bleak expectations.

The Blessed Abyss

The Blessed Abyss
Author: Nanda Herbermann
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2000-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814337686

One woman’s memories of her deportation to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women in July 1941. On February 4, 1941, Nanda Herbermann, a German Catholic writer and editor, was arrested by the Gestapo in Münster, Germany. Accused of collaboration with the Catholic movement, Herbermann was deported to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women in July 1941 and later released upon direct orders from Heinrich Himmler on March 19, 1943. Although she was instructed by the Gestapo not to reveal information about the camp, Herbermann soon began to record her memories of her experiences. The Blessed Abyss was originally published in German under the imprint of the Allied occupation forces in 1946, and it now appears in English for the first time. Hester Baer and Elizabeth Baer include an extensive introduction that situates Herbermann's work within current debates about gender and the Holocaust and provides historical and biographical information about Herbermann, Ravensbrück, and the Third Reich.

Hell Before Their Very Eyes

Hell Before Their Very Eyes
Author: John C. McManus
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2015-11-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421417669

The life-altering experiences of the American soldiers who liberated three Nazi concentration camps. On April 4, 1945, United States Army units from the 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division seized Ohrdruf, the first of many Nazi concentration camps to be liberated in Germany. In the weeks that followed, as more camps were discovered, thousands of soldiers came face to face with the monstrous reality of Hitler’s Germany. These men discovered the very depths of human-imposed cruelty and depravity: railroad cars stacked with emaciated, lifeless bodies; ovens full of incinerated human remains; warehouses filled with stolen shoes, clothes, luggage, and even eyeglasses; prison yards littered with implements of torture and dead bodies; and—perhaps most disturbing of all—the half-dead survivors of the camps. For the American soldiers of all ranks who witnessed such powerful evidence of Nazi crimes, the experience was life altering. Almost all were haunted for the rest of their lives by what they had seen, horrified that humans from ostensibly civilized societies were capable of such crimes. Military historian John C. McManus sheds new light on this often-overlooked aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on a rich blend of archival sources and thousands of firsthand accounts—including unit journals, interviews, oral histories, memoirs, diaries, letters, and published recollections—Hell Before Their Very Eyes focuses on the experiences of the soldiers who liberated Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, and Dachau and their determination to bear witness to this horrific history.

From a World Apart

From a World Apart
Author: Francine Christophe
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780803264021

After her father was taken prisoner by German officials, the author and her mother were arrested as they escaped to Paris, and endured cruel treatment in Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

And The Month Was May

And The Month Was May
Author: Lillian Berliner
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2009
Genre: Holocaust survivors
ISBN: 1440140847

A personal epic of scope and sincerity, And The Month Was May traces the life of Lillian Berliner, from her childhood in Hungary, to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, to her eventual liberation and resettlement in New York. Rendering with equal candor the searing cruelty of the camps, and the flourishing of life thereafter, Berliner has produced a memoir that embraces hope even as it looks unflinchingly at horror. Central to the telling is Berliner's voice, springing from the page to evoke the characters, settings, and inner motivations of her life in stunning detail. It is a story that affirms the resilience and infinite potential of the human spirit.

Auschwitz and After

Auschwitz and After
Author: Charlotte Delbo
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2014-09-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300190778

Written by a member of the French resistance who became an important literary figure in postwar France, this moving memoir of life and death in Auschwitz and the postwar experiences of women survivors has become a key text for Holocaust studies classes. This second edition includes an updated and expanded introduction and new bibliography by Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer. “Delbo’s exquisite and unflinching account of life and death under Nazi atrocity grows fiercer and richer with time. The superb new introduction by Lawrence L. Langer illuminates the subtlety and complexity of Delbo’s meditation on memory, time, culpability, and survival, in the context of what Langer calls the ‘afterdeath’ of the Holocaust. Delbo’s powerful trilogy belongs on every bookshelf.”—Sara R. Horowitz, York University Winner of the 1995 American Literary Translators Association Award