"And I Burned with Shame:" the Testimony of Ona Šimaitė, Righteous Among the Nations

Author: Julija Šukys
Publisher: Wallstein Verlag
ISBN: 9783835302976
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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"And I Burned with Shame:" the Testimony of Ona Šimaitė, Righteous Among the Nations

Author: Julija Šukys
Publisher: Wallstein Verlag
ISBN: 9783835302976
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description


The Book Smugglers

The Book Smugglers PDF Author: David E. Fishman
Publisher: University Press of New England
ISBN: 1512601268
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts-first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets-by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion-including the readiness to risk one's life-to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author's interviews with several of the story's participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi "expert" on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city's great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed "the Paper Brigade," and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group's worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto's secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet "liberation" of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved-only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR. Thoroughly researched by the foremost scholar of the Vilna Ghetto-a writer of exceptional daring, style, and reach-The Book Smugglers is an epic story of human heroism, a little-known tale from the blackest days of the war.

A Companion to the Holocaust

A Companion to the Holocaust PDF Author: Simone Gigliotti
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118970527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
Provides a cutting-edge, nuanced, and multi-disciplinary picture of the Holocaust from local, transnational, continental, and global perspectives Holocaust Studies is a dynamic field that encompasses discussions on human behavior, extremity, and moral action. A diverse range of disciplines – history, philosophy, literature, social psychology, anthropology, geography, amongst others – continue to make important contributions to its scholarship. A Companion to the Holocaust provides exciting commentaries on current and emerging debates and identifies new connections for research. The text incorporates new language, geographies, and approaches to address the precursors of the Holocaust and examine its global consequences. A team of international contributors provides insightful and sophisticated analyses of current trends in Holocaust research that go far beyond common conceptions of the Holocaust’s causes, unfolding and impact. Scholars draw on their original research to interpret current, agenda-setting historical and historiographical debates on the Holocaust. Six broad sections cover wide-ranging topics such as new debates about Nazi perpetrators, arguments about the causes and places of persecution of Jews in Germany and Europe, and Jewish and non-Jewish responses to it, the use of forced labor in the German war economy, representations of the Holocaust witness, and many others. A masterful framing chapter sets the direction and tone of each section’s themes. Comprising over thirty essays, this important addition to Holocaust studies: Offers a remarkable compendium of systematic, comparative, and precise analyses Covers areas and topics not included in any other companion of its type Examines the ongoing cultural, social, and political legacies of the Holocaust Includes discussions on non-European and non-Western geographies, inter-ethnic tensions, and violence A Companion to the Holocaust is an essential resource for students and scholars of European, German, genocide, colonial and Jewish history, as well as those in the general humanities.

Epistolophilia

Epistolophilia PDF Author: Julija Sukys
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803240309
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
The librarian walks the streets of her beloved Paris. An old lady with a limp and an accent, she is invisible to most. Certainly no one recognizes her as the warrior and revolutionary she was, when again and again she slipped into the Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Vilnius to carry food, clothes, medicine, money, and counterfeit documents to its prisoners. Often she left with letters to deliver, manuscripts to hide, and even sedated children swathed in sacks. In 1944 she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured for twelve days, and deported to Dachau. Through Epistolophilia, Julija Šukys follows the letters and journals—the “life-writing”—of this woman, Ona Šimaitė (1894–1970). A treasurer of words, Šimaitė carefully collected, preserved, and archived the written record of her life, including thousands of letters, scores of diaries, articles, and press clippings. Journeying through these words, Šukys negotiates with the ghost of Šimaitė, beckoning back to life this quiet and worldly heroine—a giant of Holocaust history (one of Yad Vashem’s honored “Righteous Among the Nations”) and yet so little known. The result is at once a mediated self-portrait and a measured perspective on a remarkable life. It reveals the meaning of life-writing, how women write their lives publicly and privately, and how their words attach them—and us—to life.

A Survivor Named Trauma

A Survivor Named Trauma PDF Author: Myra Sklarew
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 143847721X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Combines personal accounts with insights from psychology to understand the continuing impact of Holocaust trauma in Lithuania. A Survivor Named Trauma examines the nature of trauma and memory as they relate to the Holocaust in Lithuania. How do we behave under threat? How do we remember extreme danger? How do subsequent generations deal with their histories—whether as descendants of perpetrators or victims, of those who rescued others or were witnesses to genocide? Or those who were separated from their families in early childhood and do not know their origins? Myra Sklarew’s study draws on interviews with survivors, witnesses, rescuers, and collaborators, as well as descendants and family members, gathered over a twenty-five-year period in Lithuania. Returning to the land of her ancestors, Sklarew found a country still deeply affected by the Nazi Holocaust and decades of Soviet domination. Interdisciplinary in nature, this book will appeal to readers interested in neuroscience and neuropsychology, Holocaust studies, Jewish history, and personal memoir. “This is an extraordinary work. The result of several decades of labor, rooted in both scientific and humanistic learning and research, it is a transformative book that speaks equally to our current situation and to the past.” — Michael C. Steinlauf, author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust

The Search for Major Plagge

The Search for Major Plagge PDF Author: Michael Good
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 9780823224401
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
On April 11, 2005, in Jerusalem, Karl Plagge will be named a ôRighteous Among the Nationsö hero by the State of Israel. He joins Oskar Schindler and some 380 other similarly honored Germans who protected and saved Jews during the Holocaust. Karl Plagge's story is of a unique kind of courage-that of a German army officer who subverted the system of death to save the lives of some 250 Jews in Vilna, Lithuania. One of those he saved was Michael Good's mother. Haunted by his mother's stories of the mysterious officer who commanded her slave labor camp, Michael Good resolved to find out all he could about the enigmatic ôMajor Plagge.ö For five years, he wrote hundreds of letters and scoured the Internet to recover, in one hard-earned bit of evidence after another, information about the man whose moral choices saved hundreds of lives. This unforgettable book is the first portrait of a modest man who simply refused to play by the rules. Interviewing camp survivors, opening German files untouched for more than fifty years, and translating newly discovered letters, Good weaves an amazing tale. An engineer from Darmstadt, Plagge joined, and then left, the Nazi Party. In Vilna, in whose teeming ghetto tens of thousands of Jews faced extermination, he found himself in charge of a camp where military vehicles were repaired. Time after time, he saved Jews from prison, SS death squads, and the ghetto by issuing them work permits as ôindispensableö laborers essential to the war effort. Karl Plagge never considered himself a hero, describing himself as a fellow traveler for not doing more to fight the regime. He said that he saved Jews-and others- because ôI thought it was my duty.ö This book also reminds us of the many ways human beings can resist evil. ôThere are always some people,ö Pearl Good said of the man who saved her life when he didn't have to, ôwho decide that the horror is not to be.ö

Things We Couldn't Say

Things We Couldn't Say PDF Author: Diet Eman
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802847478
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Diary entries that Diet and Hein logged during the war as well as excerpts from personal letters that passed between the two young lovers detail their thoughts and emotions during those years.

The Holocaust

The Holocaust PDF Author: Martin Gilbert
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780805003482
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 980

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Book Description
Sets the scene with a brief history of anti-Semitism prior to Hitler, and documents the horrors of the Holocaust from 1933 onward, in an incisive, interpretive account of the genocide of World War II.

The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania

The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania PDF Author: Herman Kruk
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300044941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 806

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Book Description
The widely scattered pages of the diaries, collected here for the first time, have been meticulously deciphered, translated, and annotated for this volume.".

Painted in Words

Painted in Words PDF Author: Samuel S Bak
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253010136
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
At my first sight of a painting by Samuel Bak, I had the keen sense that he was telling me stories with his brush. Now that at long last he has written this book, I find it no wonder that he has painted with his pen.... Among the tens and hundreds of books I have read about the pre-Shoah and post-Shoah period... Bak’s book is unique. Despite being suffused with a sense of loss, horror, degradation, and death, it is ultimately a sanguine, funny book, full of the love of life, rocking with an almost cathartic joy. At times I found myself bursting out laughing... a marvelous ode, a colorful hymn to the forces of life, love, creation, and the joys of the senses. —From the Foreword by Amos Oz In Painted in Words internationally renowned artist Samuel Bak sets aside his brushes to narrate the stories of his life—as a child in Nazi-occupied Vilna, as a youth in European refugee camps, and as a maturing artist in Israel, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. With gentle humor, the child prodigy of the faraway past and the accomplished artist of today engage in a spirited dialogue from which emerges a self-portrait of "The Artist as a Young—and middle-aged and aging—Survivor." The brilliance, vision, and virtuosity that Bak brings to his painting are equally in evidence in his writing. This deeply touching work is an important contribution to Holocaust literature and art history.