Holocaust City

Drawing from the ideas of critical geography and based on extensive archival research, Cole brilliantly reconstructs the formation of the Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust, focusing primarily on the ghetto in Budapest, Hungary--one of the largest created during the war, but rarely examined. Cole maps the city illustrating how spaces--cafes, theaters, bars, bathhouses--became divided in two. Throughout the book, Cole discusses how the creation of this Jewish ghetto, just like the others being built across occupied Europe, tells us a great deal about the nature of Nazism, what life was like under Nazi-occupation, and the role the ghetto actually played in the Final Solution.

Drawing from the ideas of critical geography and based on extensive archival research, Cole brilliantly reconstructs the formation of the Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust, focusing primarily on the ghetto in Budapest, Hungary--one of the largest created during the war, but rarely examined. Cole maps the city illustrating how spaces--cafes, theaters, bars, bathhouses--became divided in two. Throughout the book, Cole discusses how the creation of this Jewish ghetto, just like the others being built across occupied Europe, tells us a great deal about the nature of Nazism, what life was like under Nazi-occupation, and the role the ghetto actually played in the Final Solution.

Under the Third Reich, Nazi Germany undertook an unprecedented effort to refashion the city of Łódź. Home to prewar Poland’s second most populous Jewish community, this was to become a German city of enchantment—a modern, clean, and orderly showcase of urban planning and the arts. Central to the undertaking, however, was a crime of unparalleled dimension: the ghettoization, exploitation, and ultimate annihilation of the city’s entire Jewish population. Ghettostadt is the terrifying examination of the Jewish ghetto’s place in the Nazi worldview. Exploring ghetto life in its broadest context, it deftly maneuvers between the perspectives and actions of Łódź’s beleaguered Jewish community, the Germans who oversaw and administered the ghetto’s affairs, and the “ordinary” inhabitants of the once Polish city. Gordon Horwitz reveals patterns of exchange, interactions, and interdependence within the city that are stunning in their extent and intimacy. He shows how the Nazis, exercising unbounded force and deception, exploited Jewish institutional traditions, social divisions, faith in rationality, and hope for survival to achieve their wider goal of Jewish elimination from the city and the world. With unusual narrative force, the work brings to light the crushing moral dilemmas facing one of the most significant Jewish communities of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, while simultaneously exploring the ideological underpinnings and cultural, economic, and social realities within which the Holocaust took shape and flourished. This lucid, powerful, and harrowing account of the daily life of the “new” German city, both within and beyond the ghetto of Łódź, is an extraordinary revelation of the making of the Holocaust.

Reconstructs the formation of the Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust, focusing primarily on the ghetto in Budapest, Hungary - one of the largest created during the war, but rarely examined and tells us a great deal about the nature of Nazism.

The Holocaust is the gravest crime in recorded history. In order to try and better understand the true significance of the Holocaust, as well as its scale and magnitude, millions of people each year now travel to the former camps, ghettos and other settings for the atrocities. The Holocaust Sites of Europe offers the first comprehensive guide to these sites, including much practical information as well as the historical context. This book is an indispensable guide for anyone seeking to add another layer to their understanding of the Holocaust by visiting these important sites for themselves. It provide a survey of all the major Holocaust sites in Europe, from Belgium and Belarus to Serbia and Ukraine: not only does it discuss the notorious concentration and death camps, such as Auschwitz and Ravensbruck, but also less well known examples, like Sered' in Slovakia, together with detailed descriptions of massacre sites, as well as the ghettos, 'Euthanasia' centres and Roma and Sinti sites which witnessed similar crimes. Throughout the book there is also extensive insight into the many museums and memorials which commemorate the Holocaust. The Holocaust Sites of Europe is a thoughtful and fitting guide to some of the most traumatic sites in Europe and will be an invaluable companion for those who wish to honour the victims and understand more about their fate.

Poles, Germans, and the Jews themselves were largely unaware, they formed what can aptly be called a secret city. Paulsson challenges many established assumptions. He shows that despite appalling difficulties and dangers, many of these Jews survived; that the much-reviled German, Polish, and Jewish policemen, as well as Jewish converts and their families, were key in helping Jews escape; that though many more Poles helped than harmed the Jews, most stayed neutral; and that escape and hiding happened

The poignant story of Holocaust survivors who returned to their hometown in Poland and tried to pick up the pieces of a shattered world. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the lives of Polish Jews were marked by violence and emigration. But some of those who had survived the Nazi genocide returned to their hometowns and tried to start their lives anew. Lukasz Krzyzanowski recounts the story of this largely forgotten group of Holocaust survivors. Focusing on Radom, an industrial city about sixty miles south of Warsaw, he tells the story of what happened throughout provincial Poland as returnees faced new struggles along with massive political, social, and legal change. Non-Jewish locals mostly viewed the survivors with contempt and hostility. Many Jews left immediately, escaping anti-Semitic violence inflicted by new communist authorities and ordinary Poles. Those who stayed created a small, isolated community. Amid the devastation of Poland, recurring violence, and bureaucratic hurdles, they tried to start over. They attempted to rebuild local Jewish life, recover their homes and workplaces, and reclaim property appropriated by non-Jewish Poles or the state. At times they turned on their own. Krzyzanowski recounts stories of Jewish gangs bent on depriving returnees of their prewar possessions and of survivors shunned for their wartime conduct. The experiences of returning Jews provide important insights into the dynamics of post-genocide recovery. Drawing on a rare collection of documents—including the postwar Radom Jewish Committee records, which were discovered by the secret police in 1974—Ghost Citizens is the moving story of Holocaust survivors and their struggle to restore their lives in a place that was no longer home.

This book is the second in a series of studies published under the auspices of the Institute for Holocaust Studies of the Graduate School and U niver sity Center of The City University of New York. Like the first book, it is an outgrowth of the lectures and special studies sponsored by the institute during the 1981-82 and 1982-83 academic years. This volume is divided into five parts. Part I, Ethics and the Holocaust, contains a pioneering investigation of one of the most neglected areas in Holocaust studies. Francine Klagsbrun, a well-known writer and popular lecturer, provides an erudite overview of the value of life in Jewish thought and tradition. With full understanding of the talmudic scholars' position on Jewish ethics and using concrete examples of the life-and death dilemmas that confronted many Jews in their concentration camp experiences, Klagsbrun provides dramatic evidence of the triumph of moral and ethical principles over the forces of evil during the Holocaust, this darkest period in Jewish history. The next two chapters, grouped under the heading The Allies and the Holocaust, deal with the failure of the Western Allies to respond to the desperate needs of the persecuted Jews of Europe during the Second World War. The first is by Professor Bela Vago, an authority on the Holocaust and East Central European history at the University of Haifa.