Results by title

Step into Birkenau, Marco Nahon’s unflinching memoir of survival in Auschwitz, where a Greek doctor bears witness to brutality, loss, and endurance—preserving forgotten voices and compelling readers to confront history through one unforgettable, human testimony

Birkenau is a searing firsthand Holocaust memoir by Greek physician Marco Nahon, recounting his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau and survival of one of history’s most lethal extermination camps. Writing soon after liberation, Nahon offers a deeply personal chronicle of Nazi persecution. He recounts the occupation of Greece, the ghettoization of Greek Jews, their transport to German death camps, and the daily horrors of camp life. He documents the dehumanization and destruction of Greek Jews while preserving the memory of those who perished. 

Nahon presents his story episodically, guiding readers through his arrest, transport, forced labor, and survival. He illuminates the historical context of the Holocaust with vivid stories from daily life in the death camps. Rounding out the work are maps, appendices, and Bowman’s introduction, which provides background on Greek Jewry—whose complex story is little known—and describes the progress of the Nazi occupation of Greece and the Balkans.

Nahon, an MD trained in Beirut who lost much of his family, writes with restrained objectivity that heightens the emotional force of his account, while the translation and editorial framing make this early memoir accessible to modern readers. 

This book will resonate with scholars of the Holocaust, students of World War II, and general readers seeking an authentic survivor voice. It is especially valuable for those interested in lesser-known aspects of the genocide, such as the fate of Greek Jewish communities. Both an indispensable historical document and a powerful act of remembrance, it speaks urgently to anyone committed to understanding—and never forgetting—the human realities of genocide.

As a minority group for most of their history, Jews were often marginalized and persecuted. Traces of their lives can be found in the archives of the dominant societies, but only as they intersected with the concerns of those in power. Just as Natalie Zemon Davis, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carlo Ginzburg, and others recovered the voices of the peasants, so, too, scholars of Jewish history and culture have productively mined these reservoirs of evidence to retrieve glimpses of the ordinary lives of Jews. Blood Libels, Hostile Archives explores what can be reclaimed about everyday lives from what can be called “hostile archives”—from archival evidence produced and collected explicitly to manufacture malicious tales and pass them as “facts.” For Jewish history, in some places, these archival sources may be the only remaining records documenting the lives of Jews there.

The book explores two places: Trent, in northern Italy, and Sandomierz, in eastern Poland. Though hundreds of miles away, the towns have many things in common: both had been sites of anti-Jewish libels falsely accusing Jews of killing Christian children, Trent in 1475 and Sandomierz twice—in 1698 and 1710; in both, the instigators of the Jews’ persecution left unique and extensive archives, both towns have physical remnants of these deadly affairs, and, finally, neither town has an existing Jewish population. Yet, centuries later, these anti-Jewish libels have not been relegated to the past; in both towns, their legacies still reverberate today.

Honorable Mention — The International Photography Awards 2024 Book Category

Documentation, through photographs and interviews, of those who survived the unique Nazi ghetto/camp located at Terezín, Czech Republic.

Dennis Carlyle Darling has photographed and interviewed hundreds of Holocaust survivors who spent time at the German transit camp and ghetto at Terezín, a former eighteenth-century military garrison located north of Prague. Many of the prisoners were kept there until they could be transported to Auschwitz or other camps, but unlike German captives elsewhere, they were allowed to participate in creative activities that the Nazis used for propaganda purposes to show the world how well they were treating Jews. Although it was not classified as a “death camp,” more than 33,000 prisoners died at Terezín from hunger, disease, and mistreatment.

In Borrowed Time, Darling reveals Terezín as a place of painful contradictions, through striking and intimate portraits that retrace time and place with his subjects, the last remnants of those who survived the experience. Returning to sites of painful memories with his interview subjects to photograph them, Darling respectfully depicts these survivors and tells their stories.

Growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Orthodox Jewish community, Zalman Newfield was raised in an atmosphere of strict gender segregation, rigorous religious education, and nearly all-consuming ritual practices. Trained to be a Lubavitch emissary, he traveled around the world doing Jewish outreach to help usher in the messianic redemption. However, after exposure to the wider world, he abandoned the faith of his youth.

Brooklyn Odyssey is Newfield’s poignant and hopeful memoir about exiting Orthodoxy. He recounts asserting his individuality and taking the radical step of shaving his beard. Reflective about his upbringing, Newfield is open to and curious about a world beyond Brooklyn while also maintaining his profound bond with his family and Jewish tradition. He writes candidly about his emotional, intellectual, and social experiences in and out of the Lubavitch community.  

From pivotal moments of devastation, including the illness and death of his younger brother and of his revered spiritual leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, to moments of joyful resolve, including the decision to pursue a doctorate and marry a non-Orthodox Jew, Newfield takes readers on his moving and impactful journey.