Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons^™

Objects Of Atrocity: Material Culture And The Challenges Of Difficult Histories, Robert M. Ehrenreich, Jane E. Klinger, Gabriel H. Pizzorno, Caroline Sturdy Colls

Purdue University Press Books

The vast majority of people throughout history have left few written traces. That is especially the case for those who were brutally forced from their homes, stripped of their possessions, and swiftly imprisoned, enslaved, or murdered. Objects of Atrocity: Material Culture and the Challenges of Difficult Histories addresses how we return humanity to these people in order to avoid their erasure from history. Academics and practitioners from a variety of disciplines and cross-disciplinary approaches grapple with the challenges and possibilities relating to the collection, conservation, storage, and display of objects in the aftermath of mass atrocities. This collection confronts a …

Trauma Beyond Time: Temporal Constructs In Holocaust Testimonies, Sarah Seiselmyer-Snyder

Purdue University Press Books

Trauma Beyond Time: Temporal Constructs in Holocaust Testimonies challenges our understanding of what it means to be a Holocaust survivor, arguing that the term “post-Holocaust” fundamentally misrepresents survivors’ experiences. Through careful analysis of Holocaust literature and testimony, this book reveals how trauma persists across generations, defying conventional historical timelines. For those who perished, there can be no “after” to the Holocaust—their stories were violently ended. Yet for survivors, the Holocaust didn’t simply conclude in 1945. Their experiences demonstrate how trauma continues to shape lives decades later, making “post-Holocaust” a misleading concept that fails to capture their ongoing reality. Using the …

Shattered Liberation: Sexualized Violence Against Holocaust Survivors, 1943–1946, Nina Paulovicova, Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Joanna Beata Michlic

Purdue University Press Books

Shattered Liberation: Sexualized Violence Against Holocaust Survivors, 1943–1946 challenges the notion of joyous liberation of Holocaust survivors by the Red Army, which is often embedded in popular imagination and collective memory. This is one of the first volumes to shine light on the sexualized violence that some Holocaust survivors endured in the hands of the Soviet Army, partisans, rescuers, and army personnel in filtration camps during the liberation process. By focusing on testimonies and memoirs, this book discusses in detail a wide range of interactions, including sexual violence, rape, forced cohabitation, sex barter, aid, and romance. The book addresses methodological …

A Shattered World: Jews And Israel After October 7, Michael Berenbaum, Gilbert N. Kahn

The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review

October 7, 2023, was a watershed event in contemporary Jewish history. What took place on that date challenged the two most basic assumptions of post-Holocaust Jewish life: that the future security of the Jewish people would be assured by an independent Jewish state backed by an army, and that the freedom for Jews in the Diaspora to live as Jews would be secured by democratic rights and liberties. The pogroms of October 7 and the worldwide explosion of antisemitism that followed—even preceding Israel taking military action against Hamas—challenged both assumptions. The Israel Defense Forces could not prevent a slaughter from …

The Ravine Of Memory: Babyn Yar Between The Holocaust And The Great Patriotic War, Shay A. Pilnik

Purdue University Press Books

The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, making this area one of the most infamous mass murder sites in history. The Ravine of Memory starts when the travesty ends, telling the story of the ravine’s memory and forgetting in Soviet literature and culture—in Russian as well as in Yiddish. This book challenges the prevailing binary conceptions of Babyn Yar as exclusively a Holocaust or a “Great Patriotic War” story. It is neither the exclusive product of Soviet censorship nor individual dissidents. Babyn Yar is …

From Schmelt Camp To “Little Auschwitz”: Blechhammer’S Role In The Holocaust, Susanne Barth

Purdue University Press Books

From Schmelt Camp to “Little Auschwitz”: Blechhammer’s Role in the Holocaust is the first in-depth study of the second largest Auschwitz subcamp, Blechhammer (Blachownia Śląska), and its lesser known yet significant prehistory as a so-called Schmelt camp, a forced labor camp for Jews operating outside the concentration camp system. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents and a wide array of survivor testimonies, the book provides novel findings on Blechhammer’s role in the Holocaust in Eastern Upper Silesia, a formerly Polish territory annexed to Nazi Germany in the fall of 1939, where 120,000 Jews lived.

Established in the spring of 1942 …

The Nazis, The Vatican, And The Jews Of Rome, Patrick J. Gallo

Purdue University Press Books

On October 16, 1943, the Jews of Rome were targeted for arrest and deportation. The Nazis, the Vatican, and the Jews of Rome examines why—and more importantly how—it could have been avoided, featuring new evidence and insight into the Vatican’s involvement. At the time, Rome was within reach of the Allies, but the overwhelming force of the Wehrmacht, Gestapo, and SS in Rome precluded direct confrontation. Moral condemnations would not have worked, nor would direct confrontation by the Italians, Jewish leadership, or even the Vatican.

Gallo underscores the necessity of determining what courses of actions most likely would have spared …

A Summer Of Mass Murder: 1941 Rehearsal For The Hungarian Holocaust, George Eisen

Purdue University Press Books

Most accounts of the Holocaust focus on trainloads of prisoners speeding toward Auschwitz, with its chimneys belching smoke and flames, in the summer of 1944. This book provides a hitherto untold chapter of the Holocaust by exploring a prequel to the gas chambers: the face-to-face mass murder of Jews in Galicia by bullets.

The summer of 1941 ushered in a chain of events that had no precedent in the rapidly unfolding history of World War II and the Holocaust. In six weeks, more than twenty thousand Hungarian Jews were forcefully deported to Galicia and summarily executed. In exploring the fate …

Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities Of Space, Time, And Memory In Twentieth-Century War And Genocide, Volker Benkert, Michael Mayer

Purdue University Press Books

Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities of Space, Time, and Memory in Twentieth-Century War and Genocide investigates interconnections between space and violence throughout the twentieth century, and how such connections informed collective memory. The interdisciplinary volume shows how entangled notions of time and space amplified by memory narratives led to continuities of violence across different conflicts creating “terrortimes” and “terrorscapes” in their wake. The volume examines such continuities of violence with the help of an analytical framework built around different themes. Its first part, spatial and temporal continuities of violence, looks at contested spaces and ideas of national, ethnic, or religious homogeneity that …

Refuge Must Be Given: Eleanor Roosevelt, The Jewish Plight, And The Founding Of Israel, John F. Sears

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Refuge Must Be Given details the evolution of Eleanor Roosevelt from someone who harbored negative impressions of Jews to become a leading Gentile champion of Israel in the United States. The book explores, for the first time, Roosevelt’s partnership with the Quaker leader Clarence Pickett in seeking to admit more refugees into the United States, and her relationship with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who was sympathetic to the victims of Nazi persecution yet defended a visa process that failed both Jewish and non-Jewish refugees.

After the war, as a member of the American delegation to the United Nations, Eleanor …

Beyond Nationalism? Blank Spaces At The Documenta 1955 – The Legacy Of An Exhibition Between Old Europe And New World Order, Mirl Redmann

Artl@s Bulletin

Was the first documenta really beyond nationalism? documenta 1955 has been widely regarded as conciliation for the fascist legacy of the exhibition “Degenerate Art” (1937), and as an attempt to reintegrate Germany into the international arts community. This article employs published and archival sources in order to understand if and how documenta was impacted by the legacy of nationalism in post-fascist Germany. A biographic sketch of Antonio Corpora (1909-2004) shows how the purportedly “universalist” selection criteria employed by documenta erased cultural specificity and solidified nationalist conceptions of center and periphery.

New Perspectives On Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, The Nazi Pogrom In Global Comparison, Wolf Gruner, Steven J. Ross

Purdue University Press Book Previews

On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi leadership unleashed an unprecedented orchestrated wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young Polish Jew, but in reality to force the remaining Jews out of the country. During the pogrom, Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and ordinary Germans murdered more than a hundred Jews (many more committed suicide) and ransacked and destroyed thousands of Jewish institutions, synagogues, shops, and homes. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps.

Volume 17 of the Casden Annual Review includes …

Eva And Otto: Resistance, Refugees, And Love In The Time Of Hitler, Tom Pfister, Kathy Pfister, Peter Pfister

Purdue University Press Books

Eva and Otto is a true story about German opposition and resistance to Hitler as revealed through the early lives of Eva Lewinski Pfister (1910–1991) and Otto Pfister (1900–1985). It is an intimate and epic account of two Germans—Eva born Jewish, Otto born Catholic—who worked with a little-known German political group that resisted and fought against Hitler in Germany before 1933 and then in exile in Paris before the German invasion of France in May 1940. After their improbable escapes from separate internment and imprisonment in Europe, Eva obtained refuge in America in October 1940 where she worked to rescue …