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12 books about Auschwitz (Concentration camp)
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Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979
Jonathan Huener
Ohio University Press, 2003
Library of Congress D805.5.A96H84 2003 | Dewey Decimal 940.531853858

Winner of the 2004 AAASS Orbis Book Prize

Few places in the world carry as heavy a burden of history as Auschwitz. Recognized and remembered as the most prominent site of Nazi crimes, Auschwitz has had tremendous symbolic weight in the postwar world.

Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration is a history of the Auschwitz memorial site in the years of the Polish People’s Republic. Since 1945, Auschwitz has functioned as a memorial and museum. Its monuments, exhibitions, and public spaces have attracted politicians, pilgrims, and countless participants in public demonstrations and commemorative events.

Jonathan Huener’s study begins with the liberation of the camp and traces the history of the State Museum at Auschwitz from its origins immediately after the war until the 1980s, analyzing the landscape, exhibitions, and public events at the site.

Based on extensive research and illustrated with archival photographs, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration accounts for the development and durability of a Polish commemorative idiom at Auschwitz. Emphasis on Polish national “martyrdom” at Auschwitz, neglect of the Shoah as the most prominent element of the camp’s history, political instrumentalization of the grounds and exhibitions—these were some of the more controversial aspects of the camp’s postwar landscape.

Professor Huener locates these and other public manifestations of memory at Auschwitz in the broad scope of Polish history, in the specific context of postwar Polish politics and culture, and against the background of Polish-Jewish relations. Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration will be of interest to scholars, students, and general readers of the history of modern Poland and the Holocaust.

Expand Description

Birkenau, The Camp Of Death
Marco Nahon
University of Alabama Press, 1989
Library of Congress D805.P7N3413 1989 | Dewey Decimal 940.547243094386

The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland
Geneviève Zubrzycki
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Library of Congress DK4121.Z83 2006 | Dewey Decimal 320.540943809049

In the summer and fall of 1998, ultranationalist Polish Catholics erected hundreds of crosses outside Auschwitz, setting off a fierce debate that pitted Catholics and Jews against one another. While this controversy had ramifications that extended well beyond Poland’s borders, Geneviève Zubrzycki sees it as a particularly crucial moment in the development of post-Communist Poland’s statehood and its changing relationship to Catholicism.

In The Crosses of Auschwitz, Zubrzycki skillfully demonstrates how this episode crystallized latent social conflicts regarding the significance of Catholicism in defining “Polishness” and the role of anti-Semitism in the construction of a new Polish identity. Since the fall of Communism, the binding that has held Polish identity and Catholicism together has begun to erode, creating unease among ultranationalists. Within their construction of Polish identity also exists pride in the Polish people’s long history of suffering. For the ultranationalists, then, the crosses at Auschwitz were not only symbols of their ethno-Catholic vision, but also an attempt to lay claim to what they perceived was a Jewish monopoly over martyrdom.

This gripping account of the emotional and aesthetic aspects of the scene of the crosses at Auschwitz offers profound insights into what Polishness is today and what it may become.

Expand Description

Days and Memory
Charlotte Delbo
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Library of Congress PQ2664.E5117M413 2001 | Dewey Decimal 848.91409

In Auschwitz, memory meant life: remembering the humanity extinguished by the death camps and hoping to survive to tell what had been endured. Charlotte Delbo, a non-Jew sent to Auschwitz for being a member of the French resistance movement, recalls the poems, vignettes, and meditations that fed her companions' spirits, interweaving her experiences with the sufferings of others and depicting dignity and decency in the face of inhumanity.
Expand Description

The Holocaust as Culture
Imre Kertész
Seagull Books, 2012
Library of Congress D804.3.K4713 2011 | Dewey Decimal 894.511334

Hungarian Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is presented here speaks specifically to this relationship between the personal and the historical.  
 
In The Holocaust as Culture,Kertész recalls his childhood in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and as a writer living under the so-called soft dictatorship of communist Hungary. Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting history, and how this challenges ideas of self. 
 
The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper, the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as the vessels of this memory.
Expand Description

The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando
Rebecca Fromer
University of Alabama Press, 1993
Library of Congress D805.P7B424 1993 | Dewey Decimal 940.5318

"Beautifully written...a welcome addition to the study of human degradation in the Nazi concentration camps. What makes this book especially important is that it is the eyewitness story of Daniel Bennahmias, who was a member of the Sonderkommando--people relegated to the most horrible duty of any concentration camp inmates, that of removing freshly gassed bodies from the gas chambers at Auschwitz, where four gas chambers often exterminated 10,000 people per day." --International Society for Yad Vashem "The horrors that a young Sephardic Jew named Daniel Bennahmias was forced to endure seem incomprehensible...his story and the saga of the others in the special command have long been shrouded in mystery. The work of the Sonderkommando was a closely guarded secret." --Jewish Bulletin
Expand Description

A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz: History, Memory, and the Politics of Survival
Tuvia Friling
Brandeis University Press, 2014
Library of Congress DS134.72.G75F7513 2014 | Dewey Decimal 940.5318092

Eliezer Gruenbaum (1908–1948) was a Polish Jew denounced for serving as a Kapo while interned at Auschwitz. He was the communist son of Itzhak Gruenbaum, the most prominent secular leader of interwar Polish Jewry who later became the chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee during the Holocaust and Israel’s first minister of the interior. In light of the father’s high placement in both Polish and Israeli politics, the denunciation of the younger Gruenbaum and his suspicious death during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war add intrigue to a controversy that really centers on the question of what constitutes—and how do we evaluate—moral behavior in Auschwitz. Gruenbaum—a Jewish Kapo, a communist, an anti-Zionist, a secularist, and the son of a polarizing Zionist leader—became a symbol exploited by opponents of the movements to which he was linked. Sorting through this Rashomon-like story within the cultural and political contexts in which Gruenbaum operated, Friling illuminates key debates that rent the Jewish community in Europe and Israel from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Expand Description

Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death
Otto Dov Kulka
Harvard University Press, 2013
Library of Congress D804.3. K79 2013 | Dewey Decimal 940.5318

In a life dedicated to studying and writing about Nazism and the Holocaust, Otto Dov Kulka has set to one side his experiences as a child inmate at Auschwitz. Breaking years of silence, Kulka brings together the personal and historical in a devastating, at times poetic, account of the concentration camps and the private mythology he constructed.
Expand Description

Medallions
Zofia Nalkowska
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Library of Congress PG7158.N34M3413 2000 | Dewey Decimal 940.53174386

Considered a masterpiece of antifascist world literature, Medallions stands as the culmination of Nalkowska's literary style, a style the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz once described as "the iron capital of her art and one of the very few exportables in our national literature." More than mere historical record, Medallions offers the reader startling immediacy, the repetition of an event as it persists in the testimonial present, in the scars on the consciousness and conscience of individuals.
Expand Description

Music of Another World
Szymon Laks
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Library of Congress D805.P7L34313 2000 | Dewey Decimal 940.5318

Compassionate yet detached, ironic yet pitilessly honest, Szymon Laks, the kapellmeister of the Auschwitz orchestra, presents a disturbing description of a phenomenon seldom mentioned in the literature of the Holocaust: the presence of music among the crematoria. His story is a testament to the human spirit and to music itself, the beauty of which Laks and others honored even as the lives of so many were destroyed.
Expand Description

Screening Auschwitz: Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage and the Politics of Commemoration
Marek Haltof
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Library of Congress PN1997.O68H35 2018 | Dewey Decimal 791.4372

Screening Auschwitz examines the classic Polish Holocaust film The Last Stage (Ostatni etap), directed by the Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska (1907–1998). Released in 1948, The Last Stage was a pioneering work and the first narrative film to portray the Nazi concentration and extermination camp complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Marek Haltof’s fascinating book offers English-speaking readers a wealth of new materials, mostly from original Polish sources obtained through extensive archival research.

With its powerful dramatization of the camp experience, The Last Stage established several quasi-documentary themes easily discernible in later film narratives of the Shoah: dark, realistic images of the camp, a passionate moral appeal, and clear divisions between victims and perpetrators. Jakubowska’s film introduced images that are now archetypal—for example, morning and evening roll calls on the Appelplatz, the arrival of transport trains at Birkenau, the separation of families upon arrival, and tracking shots over the belongings left behind by those who were gassed. These and other images are taken up by a number of subsequent American films, including George Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Alan Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice (1982), and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993).

Haltof discusses the unusual circumstances that surrounded the film's production on location at Auschwitz-Birkenau and summarizes critical debates surrounding the film’s release. The book offers much of interest to film historians and readers interested in the Holocaust.
Expand Description

Seed of Sarah: MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR
Judith Magyar Isaacson
University of Illinois Press, 1990
Library of Congress DS135.H92K376 1991 | Dewey Decimal 940.5318094386

This gripping and highly acclaimed account of a young woman's experience in concentration camps now includes a final chapter, "A Time to Forgive?" detailing the author's trips back to her former forced labor camp in Germany.
Expand Description

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12 books about Auschwitz (Concentration camp)
Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979
Jonathan Huener
Ohio University Press, 2003

Winner of the 2004 AAASS Orbis Book Prize

Few places in the world carry as heavy a burden of history as Auschwitz. Recognized and remembered as the most prominent site of Nazi crimes, Auschwitz has had tremendous symbolic weight in the postwar world.

Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration is a history of the Auschwitz memorial site in the years of the Polish People’s Republic. Since 1945, Auschwitz has functioned as a memorial and museum. Its monuments, exhibitions, and public spaces have attracted politicians, pilgrims, and countless participants in public demonstrations and commemorative events.

Jonathan Huener’s study begins with the liberation of the camp and traces the history of the State Museum at Auschwitz from its origins immediately after the war until the 1980s, analyzing the landscape, exhibitions, and public events at the site.

Based on extensive research and illustrated with archival photographs, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration accounts for the development and durability of a Polish commemorative idiom at Auschwitz. Emphasis on Polish national “martyrdom” at Auschwitz, neglect of the Shoah as the most prominent element of the camp’s history, political instrumentalization of the grounds and exhibitions—these were some of the more controversial aspects of the camp’s postwar landscape.

Professor Huener locates these and other public manifestations of memory at Auschwitz in the broad scope of Polish history, in the specific context of postwar Polish politics and culture, and against the background of Polish-Jewish relations. Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration will be of interest to scholars, students, and general readers of the history of modern Poland and the Holocaust.

[more]

Birkenau, The Camp Of Death
Marco Nahon
University of Alabama Press, 1989

The Crosses of Auschwitz
Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland
Geneviève Zubrzycki
University of Chicago Press, 2006

In the summer and fall of 1998, ultranationalist Polish Catholics erected hundreds of crosses outside Auschwitz, setting off a fierce debate that pitted Catholics and Jews against one another. While this controversy had ramifications that extended well beyond Poland’s borders, Geneviève Zubrzycki sees it as a particularly crucial moment in the development of post-Communist Poland’s statehood and its changing relationship to Catholicism.

In The Crosses of Auschwitz, Zubrzycki skillfully demonstrates how this episode crystallized latent social conflicts regarding the significance of Catholicism in defining “Polishness” and the role of anti-Semitism in the construction of a new Polish identity. Since the fall of Communism, the binding that has held Polish identity and Catholicism together has begun to erode, creating unease among ultranationalists. Within their construction of Polish identity also exists pride in the Polish people’s long history of suffering. For the ultranationalists, then, the crosses at Auschwitz were not only symbols of their ethno-Catholic vision, but also an attempt to lay claim to what they perceived was a Jewish monopoly over martyrdom.

This gripping account of the emotional and aesthetic aspects of the scene of the crosses at Auschwitz offers profound insights into what Polishness is today and what it may become.

[more]

Days and Memory
Charlotte Delbo
Northwestern University Press, 2001
In Auschwitz, memory meant life: remembering the humanity extinguished by the death camps and hoping to survive to tell what had been endured. Charlotte Delbo, a non-Jew sent to Auschwitz for being a member of the French resistance movement, recalls the poems, vignettes, and meditations that fed her companions' spirits, interweaving her experiences with the sufferings of others and depicting dignity and decency in the face of inhumanity.
[more]

The Holocaust as Culture
Imre Kertész
Seagull Books, 2012
Hungarian Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is presented here speaks specifically to this relationship between the personal and the historical.  
 
In The Holocaust as Culture,Kertész recalls his childhood in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and as a writer living under the so-called soft dictatorship of communist Hungary. Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting history, and how this challenges ideas of self. 
 
The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper, the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as the vessels of this memory.
[more]

The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando
Rebecca Fromer
University of Alabama Press, 1993
"Beautifully written...a welcome addition to the study of human degradation in the Nazi concentration camps. What makes this book especially important is that it is the eyewitness story of Daniel Bennahmias, who was a member of the Sonderkommando--people relegated to the most horrible duty of any concentration camp inmates, that of removing freshly gassed bodies from the gas chambers at Auschwitz, where four gas chambers often exterminated 10,000 people per day." --International Society for Yad Vashem "The horrors that a young Sephardic Jew named Daniel Bennahmias was forced to endure seem incomprehensible...his story and the saga of the others in the special command have long been shrouded in mystery. The work of the Sonderkommando was a closely guarded secret." --Jewish Bulletin
[more]

A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz
History, Memory, and the Politics of Survival
Tuvia Friling
Brandeis University Press, 2014
Eliezer Gruenbaum (1908–1948) was a Polish Jew denounced for serving as a Kapo while interned at Auschwitz. He was the communist son of Itzhak Gruenbaum, the most prominent secular leader of interwar Polish Jewry who later became the chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee during the Holocaust and Israel’s first minister of the interior. In light of the father’s high placement in both Polish and Israeli politics, the denunciation of the younger Gruenbaum and his suspicious death during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war add intrigue to a controversy that really centers on the question of what constitutes—and how do we evaluate—moral behavior in Auschwitz. Gruenbaum—a Jewish Kapo, a communist, an anti-Zionist, a secularist, and the son of a polarizing Zionist leader—became a symbol exploited by opponents of the movements to which he was linked. Sorting through this Rashomon-like story within the cultural and political contexts in which Gruenbaum operated, Friling illuminates key debates that rent the Jewish community in Europe and Israel from the 1930s to the 1960s.
[more]

Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death
Otto Dov Kulka
Harvard University Press, 2013
In a life dedicated to studying and writing about Nazism and the Holocaust, Otto Dov Kulka has set to one side his experiences as a child inmate at Auschwitz. Breaking years of silence, Kulka brings together the personal and historical in a devastating, at times poetic, account of the concentration camps and the private mythology he constructed.
[more]

Medallions
Zofia Nalkowska
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Considered a masterpiece of antifascist world literature, Medallions stands as the culmination of Nalkowska's literary style, a style the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz once described as "the iron capital of her art and one of the very few exportables in our national literature." More than mere historical record, Medallions offers the reader startling immediacy, the repetition of an event as it persists in the testimonial present, in the scars on the consciousness and conscience of individuals.
[more]

Music of Another World
Szymon Laks
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Compassionate yet detached, ironic yet pitilessly honest, Szymon Laks, the kapellmeister of the Auschwitz orchestra, presents a disturbing description of a phenomenon seldom mentioned in the literature of the Holocaust: the presence of music among the crematoria. His story is a testament to the human spirit and to music itself, the beauty of which Laks and others honored even as the lives of so many were destroyed.
[more]

Screening Auschwitz
Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage and the Politics of Commemoration
Marek Haltof
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Screening Auschwitz examines the classic Polish Holocaust film The Last Stage (Ostatni etap), directed by the Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska (1907–1998). Released in 1948, The Last Stage was a pioneering work and the first narrative film to portray the Nazi concentration and extermination camp complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Marek Haltof’s fascinating book offers English-speaking readers a wealth of new materials, mostly from original Polish sources obtained through extensive archival research.

With its powerful dramatization of the camp experience, The Last Stage established several quasi-documentary themes easily discernible in later film narratives of the Shoah: dark, realistic images of the camp, a passionate moral appeal, and clear divisions between victims and perpetrators. Jakubowska’s film introduced images that are now archetypal—for example, morning and evening roll calls on the Appelplatz, the arrival of transport trains at Birkenau, the separation of families upon arrival, and tracking shots over the belongings left behind by those who were gassed. These and other images are taken up by a number of subsequent American films, including George Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Alan Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice (1982), and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993).

Haltof discusses the unusual circumstances that surrounded the film's production on location at Auschwitz-Birkenau and summarizes critical debates surrounding the film’s release. The book offers much of interest to film historians and readers interested in the Holocaust.
[more]

Seed of Sarah
MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR
Judith Magyar Isaacson
University of Illinois Press, 1990
This gripping and highly acclaimed account of a young woman's experience in concentration camps now includes a final chapter, "A Time to Forgive?" detailing the author's trips back to her former forced labor camp in Germany.
[more]




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