A Warsaw Diary 1939 1945

A story of one of the few survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and of an underground existence in the non-Jewish part of the city during the Second World War. Based entirely on the author's original diary, rediscovered twenty years after the war, Michael Zylberberg tells of the ghetto uprising and the Polish uprising of General Bor-Komorowski; of the moral conflicts of the Poles who helped the Jews and those who betrayed them. There is valuable historical detail never before revealed, as in the chapters on the educationalist and martyr, Janusz Korczak and tales of the author's last-minute escapes and desperate games of bluff, when he posed as a Catholic and a Polish Officer.

Winner, 2015 USC Book Award in Literary and Cultural Studies, for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies The Ethics of Witnessing investigates the reactions of five important Polish diaristswriters—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek—during the period when the Nazis persecuted and murdered Warsaw’s Jewish population. The responses to the Holocaust of these prominent prewar authors extended from insistence on empathic interaction with victims to resentful detachment from Jewish suffering. Whereas some defied the dehumanization of the Jews and endeavored to maintain intersubjective relationships with the victims they attempted to rescue, others selfdeceptively evaded the Jewish plight. The Ethics of Witnessing examines the extent to which ideologies of humanism and nationalism informed the diarists’ perceptions, proposing that the reality of the Final Solution exposed the limits of both orientations and ultimately destroyed the ethical landscape shaped by the Enlightenment tradition, which promised the equality and fellowship of all human beings.

Adam Czerniakow was a Polish Jew who killed himself on July 23, 1942—on the face of it not an uncommon occurrence in those times. But there is more to the story than the tragic death of one man among so many millions. Czerniakow was for almost three years the chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat—a Jew, devoted to his people, who served as the Nazi-sponsored “mayor” of the Warsaw Ghetto. His personal dealings with the German authorities bring to this daily record of events a depth of knowledge, accuracy of detail, and panorama of view that was possible to no other participant in the epic prelude to the final doom of the largest captive Jewish community in Eastern Europe. This secret journal is not only the testimony of an unbearable personal burden but the documentary of the Ghetto’s terminal agony. It is the most important diary to emerge from the Holocaust.

Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.

A history of how anti-Semitism evolved into the Holocaust in Germany: “If any book can tell what Hitlerism was like, this is it” (Alfred Kazin). Lucy Dawidowicz’s groundbreaking The War Against the Jews inspired waves of both acclaim and controversy upon its release in 1975. Dawidowicz argues that genocide was, to the Nazis, as central a war goal as conquering Europe, and was made possible by a combination of political, social, and technological factors. She explores the full history of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” from the rise of anti-Semitism to the creation of Jewish ghettos to the brutal tactics of mass murder employed by the Nazis. Written with devastating detail, The War Against the Jews is the definitive and comprehensive book on one of history’s darkest chapters.