After The Holocaust The Bells Still Ring

This memoir is a fascinating portrait of mother and child who miraculously survive two concentration camps, then, after the war, battle demons of the past, societal rejection, disbelief, and invalidation as they struggle to reenter the world of the living. It is the tale of how one newly takes on the world, having lived in the midst of corpses strewn about in the scores of thousands, and how one can possibly resume life in the aftermath of such experiences. It is the story of the child who decides, upon growing up, that the only career that makes sense for him in light of these years of horror is to become someone sensitive to the deepest flaws of humanity, a teacher of God's role in history amidst the traditions that attempt to understand it—and to become a rabbi. Readers will not emerge unscathed from this searing work, written by a distinguished, Boston-based rabbi and academic.

Nearly eighty years have passed since the Holocaust. There have been hundreds of memoirs, histories and novels written about it, yet many fear that this important event may fall into oblivion. As Holocaust survivors pass away, their legacy of suffering, tenacity and courage could be forgotten. It is up to each generation to commemorate the victims, preserve their life stories and hopefully help prevent such catastrophes. These were my main motivations in writing this book, Holocaust Memories, which includes reviews of memoirs, histories, biographies, novels and films about the Holocaust. It was difficult to choose among the multitude of books on the subject that deserve our attention. I made my selections based partly on the works that are considered to be the most important on the subject; partly on wishing to offer some historical background about the Holocaust in different countries and regions that were occupied by or allied themselves with Nazi Germany, and partly on my personal preferences, interests and knowledge. The Nazis targeted European Jews as their main victims, so my book focuses primarily on them. At the same time, since the Nazis also targeted other groups they considered dangerous and inferior, I also review books about the sufferings of the Gypsies, the Poles and other groups that fell victim to the Nazi regimes. In the last part, I review books that discuss other genocides and crimes against humanity, including the Stalinist mass purges, the Cambodian massacres by the Pol Pot regime and the Rwandan genocide. I want to emphasize that history can, indeed, repeat itself, even if in different forms and contexts. Just as the Jews of Europe were not the only targets of genocide, Fascist regimes were not its only perpetrators.

Ruth Klüger (1931 – 2020) passed away on October 5, 2020 in the U.S. Born in Vienna and deported to Theresienstadt, she survived Auschwitz and the Shoah together with her mother. After living in Germany for a short time after the War, she immigrated to New York. She was educated in the U.S. and received degrees in English literature as well as her Ph.D. in German literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She taught at several American universities. She has numerous scholarly publications to her credit, mostly in the fields of German and Austrian literary history. She is also recognized as a poet in her own right, an essayist, and a feminist critic. She returned to Europe, where she was a guest professor in Göttingen and Vienna. Her memoir, entitled weiter leben (1992), which she translated and revised in an English parallel-text as Still Alive, was a major bestseller and highly regarded autobiographical account of a Holocaust survivor. It was subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages. It has also generated a vigorous critical discussion in its own right. Ruth Klüger received numerous prestigious literary prizes and other distinctions. The present volume, The Legacy of Ruth Klüger and the End of the Auschwitz Century, aims to honor her memory by assessing critically her writings and career. Taking her biography and writings as points of departure, the volume includes contributions in fields and from perspectives which her writings helped to bring into focus acutely. In the table of contents are listed the following contributions: Sander L. Gilman, "Poetry and Naming in Ruth Klüger’s Works and Life"; Heinrich Detering, "’Spannung’: Remarks on a Stylistic Principle in Ruth Klüger’s Writing"; Stephan Braese, "Speaking with Germans. Ruth Klüger and the ‘Restitution of Speech between Germans and Jews’"; Irène Heidelberger-Leonard, "Writing Auschwitz: Jean Améry, Imre Kertész, and Ruth Klüger"; Ulrike Offenberg, "Ruth Klüger and the Jewish Tradition on Women Saying Kaddish; Mark H. Gelber, "Ruth Klüger, Judaism, and Zionism: An American Perspective"; Monica Tempian, "Children’s Voices in the Poetry of the Shoah"; Daniel Reynolds, "Ruth Klüger and the Problem of Holocaust Tourism"; Vera Schwarcz, "A China Angle on Memory and Ghosts in the Poetry of Ruth Klüger."

2017 Wiener Library Ernst Fraenkel Prize (WLEFP) Finalist The majority of European Jewish children alive in 1939 were murdered during the Holocaust. Of 1.5 million children, only an estimated 150,000 survived. In the aftermath of the Shoah, efforts by American Jews brought several thousand of these child survivors to the United States. In Child Survivors of the Holocaust, historian Beth B. Cohen weaves together survivor testimonies and archival documents to bring their story to light. She reveals that even as child survivors were resettled and “saved,” they struggled to adapt to new lives as members of adoptive families, previously unknown American Jewish kin networks, or their own survivor relatives. Nonetheless, the youngsters moved ahead. As Cohen demonstrates, the experiences both during and after the war shadowed their lives and relationships through adulthood, yet an identity as “survivors” eluded them for decades. Now, as the last living link to the Holocaust, the voices of Child Survivors are finally being heard.

Following decades of silence about the involvement of doctors, medical researchers and other health professionals in the Holocaust and other National Socialist (Nazi) crimes, scholars in recent years have produced a growing body of research that reveals the pervasive extent of that complicity. This interdisciplinary collection of studies presents documentation of the critical role medicine played in realizing the policies of Hitler’s regime. It traces the history of Nazi medicine from its roots in the racial theories of the 1920s, through its manifestations during the Nazi period, on to legacies and continuities from the postwar years to the present.

This book presents a selection of the newest research on themes amplified by the sixth annual Beyond Camps and Forced Labour conference on the post-Holocaust period, including ‘displaced persons’, reception and resettlement, exiles and refugees, trials and justice, reparation and restitution, and memory and testimony. The chapters highlight new, transnational approaches and findings based on underused and newly opened archives, including compensation files of the British government; on historical actors often on the periphery within English-language historiography, including Romanian and Hungarian survivors; and new approaches such as the spatial history of Drancy, as well as geographies that have undergone less scrutiny, for example, Tehran, Chile, Mexico and Cyprus. This volume represents the vibrant and varied state of research on the aftermath of the Holocaust.

This book offers an extensive introduction and 13 diverse essays on how World War II, the Holocaust, and their aftermath affected Jewish families and Jewish communities, with an especially close look at the roles played by women, youth, and children. Focusing on Eastern and Central Europe, themes explored include: how Jewish parents handled the Nazi threat; rescue and resistance within the Jewish family unit; the transformation of gender roles under duress; youth's wartime and early postwar experiences; postwar reconstruction of the Jewish family; rehabilitation of Jewish children and youth; and the role of Zionism in shaping the present and future of young survivors. Relying on newly available archival material and novel research in the areas of families, youth, rescue, resistance, gender, and memory, this volume will be an indispensable guide to current work on the familial and social history of the Holocaust.

A Group Analytic Approach to Understanding Mass Violence makes an analytic examination of the enactment of genocide by Nazi Germany during World War II to explore how mass and state-sponsored violence can arise within societies and how the false beliefs that are used to justify such actions are propagated within society. Bennett Roth makes use of Bion’s concept of ‘Hallucinosis’ to describe the formation of false group beliefs that lead to murderous violence. Drawing on both group analysis and psychoanalysis, Roth explores in relation to genocide: how people form and identify with groups the role of family groups how conflict can arise and be managed how violence can arise and be justified by false beliefs how we can best understand these dysfunctional group dynamics to avoid such violence. A Group Analytic Approach to Understanding Mass Violence will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and group analysts seeking to understand the role of false beliefs in their patients and society more generally. It will also be of interest to students and scholars of Holocaust studies programs or anyone seeking to understand the perpetration of genocide in the past and present.