Forging Shoah Memories

Despite an outpouring in recent years of history and cultural criticism related to the Holocaust, Italian women's literary representations and testimonies have not received their proper due. This project fills this gap by analyzing Italian women's writing from a variety of genres, all set against a complex historical backdrop.

Despite an outpouring in recent years of history and cultural criticism related to the Holocaust, Italian women's literary representations and testimonies have not received their proper due. This project fills this gap by analyzing Italian women's writing from a variety of genres, all set against a complex historical backdrop.

In a series of writing workshops at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, survivors who were children or teens during World War II assembled to remember the pivotal moments in which their lives were irreparably changed by the Nazis. These "flares of memory" preserve the voices of over forty Jews from throughout Europe who experienced a history that cannot be forgotten. Ninety-two brief vignettes arranged both chronologically and thematically recreate the disbelief and chaos that ensued as families were separated, political rights were abolished, and synagogues and Jewish businesses were destroyed. Survivors remember the daily humiliation, the quiet heroes among their friends, and the painful abandonment by neighbors as Jews were restricted to ghettos, forced to don yellow stars, and loaded like cattle into trains. Vivid memories of hunger, disease, and a daily existence dependent on cruel luck provide penetrating testimonies to the ruthlessness of the Nazi killing machine, yet they also bear witness to the resilience and fortitude of individual souls bombarded by evil. "I don't think that there will be many readers who will be able to put this book down."--Jerome Chanes, National Foundation for Jewish Culture

This Holocaust memoir began with an album of photographs, one of the few family possessions that survived WWII. After his mother's death the album passed on to Paul Davidovits, who became keenly aware that he was now the only person alive who recognized the people in the photographs, remembered how they were interconnected, knew about their journey through life. Davidovits now tells the stories of the inhabitants of this lost world, guiding us through his own childhood. He evocatively portrays the harrowing and traumatic unfolding of history, but also lingers on poignant moments of love, bravery, generosity and humor. Davidovits' stories are unique and finely honed, and while highly personal, their vivid depiction of survival and the determination of the human spirit - even in the face of barbarity and seemingly insurmountable odds - is universal and will remain relevant to every generation.

Keepers of Memory answers the question of how descendants of Holocaust survivors remember the Holocaust, the event that preceded their birth but has shaped their lives. Through personal stories and in-depth interviews, Rich examines the complicated relationship between history, truth, and memory. Keepers of Memory explores topics that include how stories of survival become stories of either empowerment or trauma for the descending generations, career choice as a form of commemoration, religion, and family life. Ultimately, this work paints a compelling picture of the promises and pitfalls of memory and points to implications for memory and commemoration in the coming generations.

In 1943, against utterly hopeless odds, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up to defy the Nazi horror machine that had set out to exterminate them. One of the leaders of the Jewish Fighting Organization, which led the uprisings, was Yitzhak Zuckerman, known by his underground pseudonym, Antek. Decades later, living in Israel, Antek dictated his memoirs. The Hebrew publication of Those Seven Years: 1939-1946 was a major event in the historiography of the Holocaust, and now Antek's memoirs are available in English. Unlike Holocaust books that focus on the annihilation of European Jews, Antek's account is of the daily struggle to maintain human dignity under the most dreadful conditions. His passionate, involved testimony, which combines detail, authenticity, and gripping immediacy, has unique historical importance. The memoirs situate the ghetto and the resistance in the social and political context that preceded them, when prewar Zionist and Socialist youth movements were gradually forged into what became the first significant armed resistance against the Nazis in all of occupied Europe. Antek also describes the activities of the resistance after the destruction of the ghetto, when 20,000 Jews hid in "Aryan" Warsaw and then participated in illegal immigration to Palestine after the war. The only extensive document by any Jewish resistance leader in Europe, Antek's book is central to understanding ghetto life and underground activities, Jewish resistance under the Nazis, and Polish-Jewish relations during and after the war. This extraordinary work is a fitting monument to the heroism of a people.

As the Holocaust recedes in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the next generation. How should they, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors? And what are the second-generation's responsibilities to its received memories? In this meditation on the long aftermath of atrocity, Eva Hoffman -- a child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbors, but whose entire families perished -- probes these questions through personal reflections, and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological, and moral implications of the second-generation experience. She examines the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted, and the more willful stratagems of collective memory. She traces the "second generation's" trajectory from childhood intimations of horror, through its struggles between allegiance and autonomy, and its complex transactions with children of perpetrators. As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past to the newly problematic present, and urges us to transform potent family stories into a fully informed understanding of a forbidding history.

Originally published in Polish to great acclaim and based on interviews with survivors of the Holocaust in Poland, Holocaust and Memory provides a moving description of their life during the war and the sense they made of it. The book begins by looking at the differences between the wartime experiences of Jews and Poles in occupied Poland, both in terms of Nazi legislation and individual experiences. On the Aryan side of the ghetto wall, Jews could either be helped or blackmailed by Poles. The largest section of the book reconstructs everyday life in the ghetto. The psychological consequences of wartime experiences are explored, including interviews with survivors who stayed on in Poland after the war and were victims of anti-Semitism again in 1968. These discussions bring into question some of the accepted survivor stereotypes found in Holocaust literature. A final chapter looks at the legacy of the Holocaust, the problems of transmitting experience and of the place of the Holocaust in Polish history and culture.