front cover of Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979
Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979
Jonathan Huener
Ohio University Press, 2003

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]

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

front cover of Charlotte Delbo
Charlotte Delbo
A Life Reclaimed
Ghislaine Dunant, Translated by Kathryn M. Lachman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
In 1943, Charlotte Delbo and 229 other women were deported to a station with no name, which they later learned was Auschwitz. Arrested for resisting the Nazi occupation of Paris, Delbo was sent to the camps, enduring both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück for twenty-seven months. There, she, her fellow deportees, and millions of others were subjected to slave labor and nearly succumbed to typhus, dysentery, and hunger. She sustained herself by reciting Molière and resolved to someday write a book about herself and her fellow deportees, a stunning work called None of Us Will Return. After the camps, Delbo devoted her life to the art of writing and the duty of witnessing, fiercely advocating for the power of the arts to testify against despotism and tyranny.

Ghislaine Dunant's unforgettable biography of Delbo, La vie retrouvée (2016), captivated French readers and was awarded the Prix Femina. Now translated into English for the first time, Charlotte Delbo: A Life Reclaimed depicts Delbo's lifelong battles as a working-class woman, as a survivor, as a leftist who broke from the Communist Party, and most of all, as a writer whose words compelled others to see.
[more]

front cover of The Crosses of Auschwitz
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]

front cover of Days and Memory
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.

This definitive translation is by Delbo's close friend, the author and theater critic Rosette Lamont, an expert on the works of Ionesco and Beckett. Lamont wrote that Delbo was, like Beckett, "a minimalist of infinite pain, a voice of conscience."
[more]

front cover of The Holocaust as Culture
The Holocaust as Culture
Imre Kertész
Seagull Books, 2011
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]

front cover of The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando
The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando
Rebecca Fromer
University of Alabama Press, 1993
A poignant reminder of the ways enslaved Jews and others were forced to destroy their families and fellow prisoners

In The Holocaust Odyssey, Rebecca Fromer leads us through the experiences of Danny Bennahmias, a Greek Jew of Italian citizenship whose forced labor as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz included the disentangling of hundreds of thousands of gassed men, women, and children. The book is the result of a diligent collaboration. As it unfolds, it becomes a poignant reminder of the manner in which enslaved Jews and others were forced to destroy their families and fellow prisoners. It is a story of human decency, the spark of which remains against all odds.
 
[more]

front cover of A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz
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]

front cover of Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death
Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death
Reflections on Memory and Imagination
Otto Dov Kulka
Harvard University Press, 2013

Historian Otto Dov Kulka has dedicated his life to studying and writing about Nazism and the Holocaust. Until now he has always set to one side his personal 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 one man constructed around his experiences.

Auschwitz is for the author a vast repository of images, memories, and reveries: “the Metropolis of Death” over which rules the immutable Law of Death. Between 1991 and 2001, Kulka made audio recordings of these memories as they welled up, and in Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death he sifts through these fragments, attempting to make sense of them. He describes the Family Camp’s children’s choir in which he and others performed “Ode to Joy” within yards of the crematoria, his final, indelible parting from his mother when the camp was liquidated, and the “black stains” along the roadside during the winter death march. Amidst so much death Kulka finds moments of haunting, almost unbearable beauty (for beauty, too, Kulka says, is an inescapable law).

As the author maps his interior world, readers gain a new sense of what it was to experience the Shoah from inside the camps—both at the time, and long afterward. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death is a unique and powerful experiment in how one man has tried to understand his past, and our shared history.

[more]

front cover of The Last Consolation Vanished
The Last Consolation Vanished
The Testimony of a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz
Zalmen Gradowski
University of Chicago Press, 2022
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.
[more]

front cover of Medallions
Medallions
Zofia Nalkowska
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Medallions is a collection of eight documentary stories originally published in Poland in 1946 that recount Nazi war crimes under the German occupation of the country. The author, Zofia Nalkowska, was a member of a special committee for the investigation of Nazi crimes in Poland, and the stories reflect facts she learned from victims and witnesses to atrocities inflicted on Polish civilians.

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]

front cover of Music of Another World
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]

front cover of Screening Auschwitz
Screening Auschwitz
Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage and the Politics of Commemoration
Marek Haltof
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Winner of The 2019 Waclaw Lednicki Humanities Award

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]

front cover of Seed of Sarah
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]

front cover of Vendulka
Vendulka
Flight to Freedom
Ondrej Kundra
Karolinum Press, 2021
So many lives were cut short by the Holocaust, many with no trace to leave behind for future generations to remember. Vendulka tells the story of a single scrap of remembrance—a candid photograph taken in the midst of this unspeakable tragedy—and that artifact’s amazing aftermath.

Famed Czech photographer Jan Lukas snapped an offhand portrait of twelve-year-old Vendulka Vogl in March 1943. A friend of the Vogls, Lukas was saying goodbye to the family, who were soon to leave Prague for a concentration camp. The photograph almost didn’t see the light of day—Lukas knew that if the Nazis found it on him, he could wind up in the camps as well—but the image was eventually developed and came to symbolize the Holocaust and humanize its victims. Seventy years after this famous picture was taken, investigative journalist Ondřej Kundra discovered that, despite all odds, Vendulka Vogl had survived the camps of Terezín, Auschwitz, and Christianstadt, and was in fact still alive and living in the United States. Kundra persuaded her to tell the remarkable story surrounding the photograph: her survival, her later decision to flee the Communist regime for America, and how she later reconnected with Jan Lukas, maintaining a lifelong friendship.

Vogl’s thrillingly moving story, Kundra’s sharp and engaging writing, and Lukas’s striking photography all combine to make Vendulka an inspiring investigation into the horrors of totalitarianism and the redemptive beauty of friendship.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter