Auschwitz: A History

Product Information

Alice☆~ wrote: "I think number 197 needs to be removed as I read it a few years ago and don't recall anything about the holocaust in it but then I do have a poor memory. How much does the politics that still bedevils this whole area of historical enquiry interfere with your work? Does it constrain you in any way? Is it something that you’re constantly dealing with, or is it an inevitable part of the work and something that you’re happy to embrace? That’s an intriguing point you make about the interest in survivors’ memoirs and survivors’ testimony only taking off in the 1970s. What was it that changed around that time? We remember this—probably quite rightly—as an almost uniquely horrific crime in human history, and yet in the immediate aftermath of the war, it doesn’t seem to have registered in the way that one would have expected it to . . . Few names in any language prompt a sense of horror as does “Auschwitz.” When a person says “Auschwitz,” they rarely have to explain the reference; a chain of associations, images, and feelings—all of them dreadful—are borne with its utterance. Rarely does a word inflict such sharp, immediate, and lingering effects on listeners. There was no one in the German Reich in the 1930s who did not know that the Jews were being humiliated, ousted from their professions, ousted from their homes. After Kristallnacht in 1938 it was impossible for Jews to make a life in Germany anymore. And then to just reduce everything to the gas chambers of Auschwitz just seems to me so patently absurd.

Auschwitz: The Shocking True Story of the I Escaped from Auschwitz: The Shocking True Story of the

Hope Is the Last to Die: A Coming of Age Under Nazi Terror : A Classic of Holocaust Literature (Hardcover) Yes. It’s an interesting contrast to Delbo. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He spent very little time in Auschwitz; in fact, he was in Theresienstadt, the supposed ‘model ghetto’ for the Red Cross inspection. Then he was deported to Auschwitz where he spent only a short period of time because he was selected for labour. He spent most of the rest of the war in a sub-camp of Dachau in Bavaria. She had to sell sexual favours as a young woman would have to do, and she was fortunate that one old Nazi that she actually managed to stay with was syphilitic and impotent, and therefore unable to avail himself of what she had on offer, but liked having her around. There were ruses she and many others used, with stories about lost papers, about being bombed out, taking on false identities. I think what’s interesting about her account is also that she’s a clever woman. She subsequently goes on to be a distinguished academic in East Germany. Her son, Hermann Simon, got her to record her testimony late in her life. He took down a very long interview with her and wrote it up, and it came out in an extraordinarily articulate way. He said he barely needed to edit it to produce the book.A towering book by a towering figure, theorist and critic, Arendt’s most famous work chronicles Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Famous for the coining of the phrase “the banality of evil,” which refers to the moral and emotional detachment Eichmann displayed, this book is so much more: a dense, exploratory treatise on the nature of humanity. Five Chimneys byOlga Lengyel Told with a fairytale-like lyricism, this is a fable of family and redemption set against the horrors of the Holocaust. A poor woodcutter and his wife lived in a forest. Despite their poverty and the war raging around them, the wife prays that they will be blessed with a child. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

Books About the Holocaust That Changed My Life - BOOK RIOT The Books About the Holocaust That Changed My Life - BOOK RIOT

I want to begin to confront these questions, in light of constant concern about how little Americans understand of the Nazi genocide, by offering a list of books, 9 of them, written by survivors—Jews and non-Jews, men and women—about their hellish time in the Auschwitz complex. Exemplifying the imperative to witness, these works are much less familiar to audiences in the United States and may contribute to a more substantive historical knowledge of the Third Reich’s crimes. What were the sort of compromises that he made that perhaps led to his survival? I know one of the books that didn’t make your shortlist was Filip Müller’s Eyewitness Auschwitz. He actually helped to run the gas chambers. Frankl obviously wasn’t doing that, but does he talk about the moral compromises within the prisoner community that went on in a fight to survive? Let’s move on to sociologist Gerhard Durlacher’s The Search: The Birkenau Boys. He was a child during Auschwitz and wrote this book in the 1980s. It’s a search for the other boys who were taken there with him, right?

Smoke Over Birkenau 

When German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously said that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he meant that there was no way aesthetics—or art—could live up to the barbarism of the Holocaust. Maybe he was right. But here are 10 lesser-known texts that can, at the very least, increase our understanding—and our empathy. Badenheim 1939by Aharon Appelfeld