THE WORLD WAR TWO GROUP discussion
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Books & Discussion on the Holocaust
Yes. But I wasn't interested in them until I was an adult. Now I can't get enough.
I'm afraid that's a common problem with many of us, never finding what our grand parents or parents had to say of interest till you finally realise that they were part of history. By the time you understand this the story tellers have passed on but hopefully leaving us with some written words of their experiences.
Helen wrote: "Yes. But I wasn't interested in them until I was an adult. Now I can't get enough."Helen did any of their recollections - I'm not sure it would be right to say memoirs - go to the Yad Vashem centre.
I've put the centre's link here should other members wish to explore the resources and information http://www.yadvashem.org/
Hi, Geevee--I think someone came to speak to my grandmother, it might have been Yad Vashem. The farmers who hid them were honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Gentiles. Thanks for the link! I will certainly check it out!
Thanks for the link Geevee and Helen that was pretty good to hear that the farmers who hid your grandparents were honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Gentiles.
Just found this new title which looks quite interesting and offers an account of Jewish history before the Holocaust:
by Bernard WassersteinDescription:
On the Eve is the portrait of a world on the eve of its destruction. Bernard Wasserstein’s original and provocative book presents a new and disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught.
Wasserstein shows how the harsh political and social realities of the age devastated the private lives of individuals and families. He demonstrates that, by 1939, the Jews faced an existential crisis that was as much the result of internal decay as of external attack.
From Vilna (the “Jerusalem of Lithuania”) to Salonica with its Judeo-Espagnol-speaking stevedores and singers of Salonica, and from the Soviet Jewish “homeland” of Birobidzhan to Amsterdam (the “Jerusalem of the west”), the book explores the mindsets of wealthy bankers and far-left revolutionaries, of ultra-orthodox yeshiva bokhers and militant atheists, of cultural revivalists and radical assimilationists.
Describing the predicament of the Jews in a continent suffused with anti-Semitism, Wasserstein’s focus is squarely on the Jews themselves rather than their persecutors. His aim, he writes, is to “breathe life into dry bones.” Based on vast research, written with compassion and empathy, and enlivened by dry wit, On the Eve paints a vivid and shocking picture of Europe’s Jews in their final hour.
message 58:
by
Geevee, Assisting Moderator British & Commonwealth Forces
(last edited May 16, 2012 12:13PM)
(new)
Hi Rick, Ian Thomson has written a positive review for the Independent newspaper. He helped me to decide to order it: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...
Sounds amazing. Thanks for letting me know.
This looks an interesting book:And the Policeman Smiled by Barry Turner
Description
From 1938 over 10,000 Jewish and Catholic children were helped to escape from Nazi Europe. The children were bundled onto trains and set off across Germany and Holland to the ferries which took them to England.
This book traces the story of the Kindertransporte and those who helped organize the exodus.
The book is based on previously unpublished records and extensive interviews and describes the often painful adjustments of the young refugees to a strange country and the often lonely life of billeting, fostering, evacuation and even deportation.
Sounds like another good book Geevee, thanks for posting the information.
Geevee wrote: "Hi Rick, Ian Thomson has written a positive review for the Independent newspaper. He helped me to decide to order it: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent......"Thanks for the link to the review Geevee, very helpful.
I great book I just finished looks at the Hungarian Jews plight and one mans effort to save as many as he could. This book is also written by one of our members:
byAlex Kershaw
Thanks for the post Michael, always nice to see a good book brought to the attention of the group.
Michael wrote: "I great book I just finished looks at the Hungarian Jews plight and one mans effort to save as many as he could. This book is also written by one of our members:[bookcover:The Envoy: The Epic Res..."
Good to hear. I have that book on the TBR pile on my floor.
Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened & Why Do They Say It?This is an interesting book as it addresses the groups and their arguements for denying the various aspects of the holocaust.
Description
Denying History takes an in-depth look at those claiming the Holocaust never happened, exploring their motivations. While many dismiss Holocaust deniers as antisemitic neo-Nazis not deserving response, historians Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman have immersed themselves in their minds & culture. They've interviewed deniers, read their literature, monitored their Web sites, attended their conferences, debated them, even traveled thru Europe to conduct research at the extermination camps. Uncovering a complex social movement, the authors go deeper than ever before in not only trying to understand deniers' motives, but also refuting their points. In the process, they show how one can be certain the Holocaust happened &, for that matter, how one confirms any historical event.
Just found this new release:
by Greg DawsonDescription:
When people think of the Holocaust, they think of Auschwitz, Dachau; and when they think of justice for this terrible chapter in history, they think of Nuremberg. Not of Russia or the Ukraine, and certainly not of a city called Kharkov. But in reality, the first war-crimes trial against the Nazis was in this idyllic, peaceful Ukrainian city, which is fitting, because it is also where the Holocaust actually began.
Revealing a lost chapter in Holocaust historiography, Judgment Before Nuremberg tells the story of Dawson 's journey to this place, to the scene of the crime, and the discovery of the trial which began the tortuous process of avenging the murder of his grandparents, his great-grandparents, and tens of thousands of fellow Ukrainians consumed at the dawn of the Shoah, a moment and crime now largely cloaked in darkness.
Eighteen months before the end of World War II two full years before the opening statement by the prosecution at Nuremberg three Nazi officers and a Ukrainian collaborator were tried and convicted of war crimes and hanged in Kharkov 's public square. The trial is symbolic of the larger omission of the Ukraine from the popular history of the Holocaust another deep irony, as most of the first of the six million perished in the Ukraine long before Hitler and his lieutenants even decided on the formalities of the Final Solution.
Just found this book:
by Lucjan DobroszyckiDescription: A devastating, day-by-day record of life in the second-largest Jewish ghetto Nazi Europe a community that was reduced from 163,177 people in 1941 to 877 by 1944. Compiled by inhabitants of the ghetto and illustrated with more than seventy haunting photographs, the Chronicle is a document unparalleled among writings on the Holocaust.
Put it on my TBR-list, but honestly, don't know if I want or can read it.
Looks like another excellent account, thanks for posting the details Morgiana.
I recently have read the book, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy, and I liked this book alot. There are so many holocaust books, and I have had to do many papers in College on the subject from different aspects, that this book was a new insight on the views from the eyes of a child
I just read that, too. I agree, it was stunning.
Just to hear it from a childs perspective and he survived and to read what he does now. It blew me away...
Yes. It was very moving and very powerful. The slow degradation of his community, the way they were dehumanized little by little, the unspeakable horrors, the random, unpredictable kindness...it's devastating.
For anyone interested in the Holocaust, this is a compelling read. Chaim Melcer, who grew up in a sleepy little backwoods farm town called Sobibor, happened to be there on the day that German soldiers unloaded timber and rolls of barbed wire at the train station, and wondered what they were going to be building.
He describes the relations between Jews and their Polish neighbors before the war, and how they were transformed once the Germans arrived. He describes the hopeless, helpless feeling that descended on the Jews as they realized their fate. He describes the sight of German soldiers, running through the streets of the Wlodawa ghetto, rounding up and shooting innocent civilians--including small children. He describes the terrible cries coming from the cattle cars as they pulled into the Sobibor train station. He describes, in devastating detail, what it was like to be inside one of those cattle cars on the way to Sobibor--and the Jews in that part of Poland knew exactly what awaited them there--and what it was like to say goodbye to your family, forever.
There are heart-stopping escapes. Once, he leaps from the top of a moving train as it moves towards the concentration camp. Another time, captured and lined up against a wall to be shot, he jumps through an adjacent window as the soldiers open fire.
This is certainly an important historical document, full of description and detail. But this is also a story of survival. And, as Mr. Melcer testifies again and again, survival is a combination of savvy, drive, miracles and courage.
Thanks Helen a ver interesting looking book. I will add to the TBR
Great post Helen, thanks for the information on what sounds like an excellent account.
A expensive book though.
Yeah, you're right. I just checked, it's $37.00 to order a PDF. Still, it's pretty extraordinary.
Most if not all my reading of the holocaust is embedded in chapters of books dealing with WW2. The difficultly I have is the informational saturation point of too much information. I can't imagine the shear terroir, the sadness, loss of hope, loss of loved ones, children, parents, sisters, brothers, girlfriends, boyfriends. The brutality of the killings, others having to watch. Add to this the physical aches and pains resulting in lack of food, lack of sleep, and injuries. And this doesn't even take into account those poor souls who survived with no home, no country, no source of income to live on.
Very valid point David, reading some of these books can be emotionally draining. I find that these accounts make me very angry that these crimes were committed.
You're right, David. You covered every point. It is certainly difficult to read. My family lived through it, I've actually visited Auschwitz and Majdanek, and I still find it almost impossible to believe. That people were capable of doing those things to other people is still incomprehensible.
As unbelievable as the holocaust was. It happens each day with women having abortions. And just like Nazi Germany we rationalize the practice of abortion as being acceptable. So what has anyone learned from the holocaust?
Hi David, this group is to discuss the history of WW2 and not current political or religious issues in our respective countries.
'Aussie Rick' wrote: "Hi David, this group is to discuss the history of WW2 and not current political or religious issues in our respective countries."
Here is a new release that may interest some of the readers here:
by Mary FulbrookDescription:
The Silesian town of Bedzin lies a mere twenty-five miles from Auschwitz; through the linked ghettos of Bedzin and its neighbouring town, some 85,000 Jews passed on their way to slave labour or the gas chambers. The principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, Udo Klausa, was a happily married family man. He was also responsible for implementing Nazi policies towards the Jews in his area - inhumane processes that were the precursors of genocide. Yet he later claimed, like so many other Germans after the war, that he had 'known nothing about it'; and that he had personally tried to save a Jew before he himself managed to leave for military service. A Small Town Near Auschwitz re-creates Udo Klausa's story. Using a wealth of personal letters, memoirs, testimonies, interviews and other sources, Mary Fulbrook pieces together his role in the unfolding stigmatization and degradation of the Jews under his authoritiy, as well as the heroic attempts at resistance on the part of some of the victims of Nazi racial policies in this area. She also gives us a fascinating insight into the inner conflicts of a Nazi functionary who, throughout, considered himself a 'decent' man. And she explores the conflicting memories and evasions of his life after the war. But the book is much more than a portrayal of an individual man. Udo Klausa's case is so important because it is in many ways so typical. Behind Klausa's story is the larger story of how countless local functionaries across the Third Reich facilitated the murderous plans of a relatively small number among the Nazi elite - and of how those plans could never have been realized, on the same scale, without the diligent cooperation of these generally very ordinary administrators. As Fulbrook shows, men like Klausa 'knew' and yet mostly suppressed this knowledge, performing their day jobs without apparent recognition of their own role in the system, or any sense of personal wrongdoing or remorse - either before or after 1945. This account is no ordinary historical reconstruction. For Fulbrook did not discover Udo Klausa amongst the archives. She has known the Klausa family all her life. She had no inkling of her subject's true role in the Third Reich until a few years ago, a discovery that led directly to this inescapably personal professional history.
Good find Rick added to the ole TBR.
I've just finished watching a TV documentary (National Geographic) titled Nazi Death Squads which covered some of the operations of the SS-Einsatzgruppen in Russia. One of the presenters was Richard Rhodes, author of Masters of Death, while another was Father Patrick Desbois who wrote a book titled; The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, which looks like a book well worth checking out and a title which Helen mentioned before as being a very moving account.
by Richard Rhodes
by Patrick DesboisDescription:
In this heart-wrenching book, Father Patrick Desbois documents the daunting task of identifying and examining all the sites where Jews were exterminated by Nazi mobile units in the Ukraine in WWII. Using innovative methodology, interviews, and ballistic evidence, he has determined the location of many mass gravesites with the goal of providing proper burials for the victims of the forgotten Ukrainian Holocaust. Compiling new archival material and many eye-witness accounts, Desbois has put together the first definitive account of one of history's bloodiest chapters.
Reviews:
"Father Patrick Desbois is a French Catholic priest who, virtually single-handedly, has undertaken the task of excavating the history of previously undocumented Jewish victims of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union, including an estimated 1.5 million people who were murdered in Ukraine." - Wall Street Journal
"Part memoir, part prosecutorial brief, The Holocaust by Bullets tells a compelling story in which a priest unconnected by heritage or history is so moved by an injustice he sets out to right a daunting wrong…One might think Holocaust history has been exhausted, but Desbois breaks real news about how an emerging democracy in the New Europe still hasn’t emerged from World War II. We have witnessed a decade of forensic excavations documenting genocides in Guatemala, Bosnia and Rwanda, but only now are these same tools being used to find the murdered Jews of Ukraine, thanks in large part to Desbois." – The Miami Herald
"Father Desbois is a generation too late to save lives. Instead, he has saved memory and history." - Wall Street Journal
"One of the most moving, troubling and insightful books on the Holocaust, or for that matter any other subject, that I have ever read." - Eugene J. Fischer, The Catholic Review
"Using a diverse team consisting of a researcher, photographer, interpreter, and ballistics expert, Desbois endeavored to uncover these burial sites and the brutal stories behind them. He uses ample testimony from those who may have witnessed key parts of this brutal process, and he makes some surprising discoveries. The narrative flows because Desbois has such a passion for his subject; he writes simply and well, so that even readers with little initial understanding will learn a lot. The result is an outstanding contribution to Holocaust literature, uncovering new dimensions of the tragedy, and should be on the shelves of even the smallest library. Highly recommended." - Library Journal, starred review
"An important addition to studies of the Shoah, agonizing to read and utterly necessary." - Kirkus Reviews
"In Jewish tradition the greatest category of acts one can perform are those of 'loving kindness,' including taking care of the sick, welcoming the stranger, and sheltering the needy. The most treasured of these acts is taking care of the dead because, unlike the others, it cannot be reciprocated. Jewish tradition posits that it is then that the individual most closely emulates God’s kindness to humans, which also cannot be reciprocated. Father Patrick Desbois has performed this act of loving kindness not for one person but for hundreds of thousands of people who were murdered in cold blood. He has done so despite the fact that many people would have preferred this story never to be uncovered and others doubted that it ever could be done. His contribution to history and to human memory, as chronicled in this important book, is immeasurable." - Deborah E. Lipstadt, Ph.D. author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier
"In this very personal and affecting account of his gradual discovery of the events of the Holocaust in the Ukraine Patrick Desbois, a French priest, gives us a widened perspective of the extraordinarily complex manipulation of the local population by the Nazis, who forcibly requisitioned Ukrainian citizens of all ages to assist in the killings. In village after village, more than 60 years after the horrific events, the inhabitants, many of whom had been children at the time, came forward to bear witness. From the many interviews in the text, it is clear that the personal trauma of forced involvement in the mass executions has never diminished. And indeed, the stories of what they saw takes one's breath away. This is a significant addition to the history of the Holocaust that sheds new light on events in the Nazi occupied areas of the former USSR." - Lynn H. Nicholas, author of Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web and The Rape of Europa: Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War
"Prompted by compassion and intellectual curiosity, Father Desbois revisited the graves of a million and a half Ukrainian Jews, who were murdered during the German occupation. Combining archival sources and ballistic evidence with the voices of Ukrainian eyewitnesses, Father Desbois delivers a complete, harrowing account of what happened. This book is a triumph of historical exploration, deeply moving and profoundly disturbing." - Nechama Tec, Holocaust Scholar, University of Connecticut in Stamford, and author of the National Jewish Book Award-winning: Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust and of Defiance: The Bielski Partisans
"Father Patrick Desbois gives a horrifying account of dimensions of the Holocaust until now undocumented. His Catholic faith, experiences of his own family, the support of the French bishops and the research capacities of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are enabling him to carry out a work of discovery, of healing and reconciliation. This book is a striking contribution to Christian-Jewish relations. We owe him a debt of enormous proportions." - Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I. Archbishop of Chicago
"[Desbois] is a human bridge between the modern Jewish world and the Catholic Church and a major conduit through which the Holocaust will be remembered." - The Christian Science Monitor
"[T]his modest Roman Catholic priest from Paris, without using much more than his calm voice and Roman collar, has shattered the silence surrounding a largely untold chapter of the Holocaust when Nazis killed 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine from 1941 to 1944." - The Chicago Tribune
I'm a writer. As a matter of fact, I write about this era, combining fiction with elements of my parents' WWII experiences. I've heard horror stories about the Holocaust since I was little, and I still can't bring myself to read this particular book.
I must confess that its a tough book to read due to it's content but it would be more so for those who have a link to the Holocaust.
currently I am reading this book:
by Miklós Nyiszli and I cannot finish this thought:
could this man considered as guilty or not?
Because he had to participate in these 'experiments' in KZ Auschwitz - against his will and his every sense, he has done it for the simple survival - don't finished the book yet, but these are my thoughts during reading.
Any opinion about this?
Good question Morgiana and I will be interested to see what responses you get back from members here.....
I feel it makes clear in the book that he did what he had to do to survive. His actions had no direct link to anyone being killed. It would have happened regardless of his decision.
'Aussie Rick' wrote: "I must confess that its a tough book to read due to it's content but it would be more so for those who have a link to the Holocaust."It is a very good book . Watching the TV programme you mentioned I actually felt physically ill...which is I hope the reaction of most people.
Though it covers Soviet crimes as well as the Holocaust, Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands is essential reading on the subject.Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalinhttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/...
It is not without controversy:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfr...
A talk by the author:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7CQi8...
I second the recommendation of Bloodlands. It is a very disturbing read, but at the same time it is a must read for anyone interested in WW II in the East.
Michael wrote: "I feel it makes clear in the book that he did what he had to do to survive. His actions had no direct link to anyone being killed. It would have happened regardless of his decision."Michael, ok, I need to read this book to the end, I think this was what I'd ask of myself when I'd put into a same situation as this man was.
THE WORLD WAR TWO GROUP
Books mentioned in this topic
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (other topics)The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (other topics)
The Unspeakable: Breaking my Family's Silence surrounding the Holocaust (other topics)
Something Beautiful Happened: A Story of Survival and Courage in the Face of Evil (other topics)
If This is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Jonathan Freedland (other topics)Nicola Hanefeld (other topics)
Yvette Manessis Corporon (other topics)
Sarah Helm (other topics)
Sarah Helm (other topics)
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Sobibor must bring chills to many people when they hear it. It's nice to hear that some people tried to protect others from persecution and death.
I suppose your mother and her friends had many interesting but also sad stories to tell.