Ave Maria In Auschwitz

Felicia Weingarten has saved poetic expressions of her life for us in this collection of short stories from WWII Poland and her experiences of surviving the Lodz ghetto and four concentration camps during the Holocaust. The stories are powerful not so much in how they speak to our minds but how they tear into our hearts. We are drawn into Felicias life vicariously at first, as though a stranger watching from the sidelines. But as each story unfolds, oftentimes with a twist at the end, we are suddenly faced with our own humanity, our own survival, our own actions and our own conscience as human beings. We are led into the darkness holding hands with an innocent, yet hopeful and courageous teenager; we emerge as reflective, perhaps even changed people, because of our human experience shared with Felicia. These are stories that transcend time and place and challenge us to be people of integrity, hope and commitment.

This is a story based on historical facts. During World War I, there was a prisoner-of-war camp in western Japan called Bando. It was the only POW camp in the world where the captors and captives, as well as the residents in surrounding areas, developed friendships. A German POW named Klaus Berger, who belonged to the music troupe, discovered the significant role music plays in times of conflicts. A few decades later, the Nazi regime took advantage of music in the most horrific way, making it one of the saddest uses of music in the history of mankind. Klaus volunteers to go to Auschwitz in an attempt to save Hannah, a Jewish violinist placed in the camp orchestra. One violin has been through both wars to witness the joyous, and then the tragic, history where music was involved. Present day in Japan, the violin now belongs to Asuka, who knows only peaceful times. She learned the history of the violin, and despite of the tremendous sadness she felt, little by little she begins to think about what she wants to do with her future. The book was published in Japan and has been translated into Vietnamese. It is a masterpiece of the 21st century that has made impressions on readers both young and old. It was selected as one of the assigned books for the 2014 National Book Report Contest for high school students. It was also the 2016 winner of Sakura Medal in Japanese Middle School & High School Books division, voted by the students from international schools across Japan, as one of their favorite books.

The book contains a wealthy collection of actual quotes from the Second World War concentration camps prisoners and their approach to life at that time through music. The Orchestra consisted from three independent prisoners' orchestras that played on the territory of Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Second Word War. The book represents their structure, mechanism of working and experiences of musicians.

The purpose of my book is to share with you and the word the tragic events which I witnessed and lived through. My experience constitutes and an unusual testimony which should not be forgotten but studied by future generations, to learn the ultimate truth about Auschwitz. I write this book to tell about my experience and what I witnessed. However, I still remember vividly, the smoke coming from the chimneys of the crematoria, the stench of burning human bodies, the hard work in rain and snow, hunger and horrendous fatigue, diseases, lice, fleas, bugs and bloody dysentery. I am the Holocaust survivor who remembers vividly the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.

Religion After Auschwitz is a philosophical approach to the notion of revelation. Following such authors as A. Dulles, R. Swinburne, or K. Ward, Balazs Mezei investigates some of the main problems of revelation and connects them to the general problem of religion today. Religion is considered in the perspective of the age "after Auschwitz", an expression coined by Hans Jonas and further elaborated by J. B. Metz. Mezei develops the insights of these philosophers and investigates various aspects of religion and revelation "after Auschwitz": contemporary theistic philosophy, phenomenology, art, mysticism, and the question of university education today. A fascinating amalgam of subjects and approaches, Religion and Revelation After Auschwitz is an important contribution to contemporary discussions on the possibility of Catholic philosophy.

A son chronicles his Jewish mother’s real-life efforts to save as many young women as possible from the Auschwitz gas chambers during World War II. Arrested in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz, Elsa survived because she had the “opportunity” to join the women’s orchestra. But Elsa kept her story a secret, even from her own family. Indeed, her son would only discover what had happened to his mother many years later, after gradually unearthing her unbelievable story following her premature death, without ever having revealed her secret to anyone . . . Jean-Jacques Felstein was determined to reconstruct Elsa’s life in Birkenau, and would go in search of other orchestra survivors in Germany, Belgium, Poland, Israel, and the United States. The recollections of Hélène, first violin, Violette, third violin, Anita, a cellist, and other musicians, allowed him to rediscover his twenty-year-old mother, lost in the heart of hell. The story unfolds in two intersecting stages: one, contemporary, is that of the investigation, the other is that of Auschwitz and its unimaginable daily life, as told by the musicians. They describe the recitals on which their very survival depended, the incessant rehearsals, the departure in the mornings for the forced labourers to the rhythm of the instruments, the Sunday concerts, and how Mengele pointed out the pieces in the repertoire he wished to listen to in between “selections.” In this remarkable book, Jean-Jacques Felstein follows in his mother’s footsteps and by telling her story, attempts to free her, and himself, from the pain that had been hidden in their family for so long.

Throughout the book, Marcus brings a variety of perspectives to bear on the question of how Italian filmmakers are confronting the Holocaust, and why now given the sparse output of Holocaust films produced in Italy from 1945 to the early 1990s.

The inspirational true story of an Allied POW appointed Kapellmeister to the Nazis in Auschwitz. When called up to fight in yet another World War, Drum Major Jackson promised his beloved wife Mabel that he would return to lead his band and play for her once more. In May 1940, he was captured at Dunkirk and interned in several German forced labour camps throughout Poland. Two years later he was transferred to Auschwitz IV, part of the notorious concentration camp complex where it is not widely known held Allied POWs. When his captors appointed Jackson their ‘Kapellmeister’ (man in charge of music), he seized the opportunity to provide entertainment for his fellow prisoners at rehearsals, and cover for escapees during concerts. Finally liberated in May 1945, malnourished and gravely ill, Jackson carried his secret war diary—an incredible exposé on five years of life and death in Nazi concentration camps. THE MUSIC MAKER OF AUSCHWITZ IV, based on Jackson’s diary, is written by his granddaughter. It is a thrilling testament to the resilience one man found in the darkest of times through his two greatest loves—music and the woman who waited for him.