Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath

Book Description

Few issues have divided Poles and Jews more deeply than the Nazi occupation of Poland during the Second World War and the subsequent slaughter of almost ninety percent of Polish Jewry. Many Jewish historians have argued that, during the occupation, Poles at best displayed indifference to the fate of the Jews and at worst were willing accomplices of the Nazis. Many Polish scholars, however, deny any connection between the prewar culture of antisemitism and the wartime situation. They emphasized that Poles were also victims of the Nazis and, for the most part, tried their best to protect the Jews.

This collection of essays, representing three generations of Polish and Jewish scholars, is the first attempt since the fall of Communism to reassess the existing historiography of Polish-Jewish relations just before, during, and after the Second World War. In the spirit of detached scholarly inquiry, these essays fearlessly challenge commonly held views on both sides of the debates. The authors are committed to analyzing issues fairly and to reaching a mutual understanding.

Customer Reviews:

Better Than Most, But Repeats Common Generalizations.......2004-03-11

This book mixes historical facts and stereotyped generalizations. Owing to space limitations, only a few of the latter can be reviewed. The prewar economic boycotts and numerus clausus at universities are mentioned, but not the fact that Polish Jews, at 10% of the Polish population, owned over 40% of Poland's wealth, and were over-represented at universities. These anti-Jewish policies were, using modern parlance, a form of affirmative action designed to get more Polish gentiles into Jewish-dominated institutions.

Although Poland was only one of two German-occupied nations in which the death penalty was imposed for aiding Jews, certain writers (cited by Zimmerman) have attempted to minimize its significance by disingenuously arguing that it didn't decisively constrain Polish behavior. But concealing an inanimate object (e. g., a gun) is far less risky than hiding a human being! We keep hearing that Poles did not "do enough" to save Jews. But who is to be the judge of this, and on what basis is the judgment to be made? As for Poles having failed a moral test, this additionally implies the uniqueness of Jewish suffering, a view that did not develop until long after WWII. How was the average Pole, trying to survive under the lash of the Germans, realize that his conduct would be subject to an ex post facto moralization? No convincing evidence is presented to support reflexive claims that Poles were disinclined to help Jews owing to prewar attitudes (and church teachings). In fact, the acknowledged anti-Semitic beliefs of many rescuers of Jews argue for the opposite.

Polish inaction towards the Jews is simplistically generalized as indifference. Polish help to Jews, Zegota aside, is characterized as "only individual and unorganized". Yet discussion of Zegota (Pawlikowski) makes it clear that the Germans would only have more easily penetrated a larger underground rescue network. Furthermore, substantially more Polish assistance to Jews would have triggered a correspondingly greater German terror against the Polish population with little net additional saving of Jewish lives. Complaints about the AK (Polish Home Army) lacking a systematic program for aiding fugitive Jews are misunderstandings. It was a clandestine guerrilla organization, devoted to military objectives and, exceptions aside, unable to save individual Jewish (or Polish) lives. Poles outside of the AK wanting to fight procured arms themselves, never waiting for outside assistance or "moral support" [for instance, the Peasant Battalions combating draconian German colonization, and rural Poles of Volhynia thwarting genocidal attacks by the UPA (so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army)]. The AK did not become involved until later.

The usual inaction of Poles and occasional betrayal of Jews is portrayed as a violation that provoked a degree of Jewish pain and anger incapable of being assuaged by the actions of those Poles who did assist Jews. But could not the same be said about Polish reactions to earlier long-term comparable Jewish behaviors? Bearing in mind that loyalty is the expected conduct, the sacrifices of patriotic Polish Jews could not counterbalance the actions of a large fraction of Polish Jews who acted indifferently to Poland's centuries-long struggle for independence, and even supported Poland's enemies. While this book touches on the latter (Lwow 1918, disproportionate Jewish involvement in Communism 1939-1947) it fails to inform the reader about the significant pro-Russian orientation of Polish Jews going far back into the 19th century.

Recurrent charges of Poles turning in or killing fugitive Jews neglect a number of factors, one of which is the latter's significant involvement in the plunder (and sometimes murder) of Polish villagers. Contrary to Krakowski's claims, Jewish (and, for that matter, also gentile) banditry was very real, and subject to Polish counter-action.

The Jedwabne massacre is presented uncritically, along with the citation of some Polish authors who lament "the loss of Polish victimhood and innocence". But are Poland's centuries of tragic history so easily disposed of? And how many tens of Jedwabnes would be needed to rival the number of Jews killed by Horthy's Hungary or Petain's France? Pinchuk objects, on the basis of the fact that Jews were killed indiscriminately, to the notion of Jedwabne being Polish revenge for the recent Jewish-Soviet collaboration. But the Poles sent earlier to horrible slavery and death in Siberia, largely facilitated by Jewish denunciations, were hardly limited to those Poles guilty in Jewish eyes, and included numerous children. Finally, the evidence does not support Gross' storytelling. There were 200-400 Jewish victims, not 1,600. Very likely, the Germans orchestrated this atrocity, with the Poles relegated to a compelled subsidiary role (perhaps 40 Poles, certainly not "half the town"). Who actually torched the barn is unclear.

Perhaps the weakest part of this book is the rather superficial treatment of continued mutual Jewish-Polish prejudices (Gitelman), with no factoring of its extreme asymmetry. When a Pole makes negative comments about Jews, his audience is relatively small and almost always Polish. In contrast, a vast, diverse audience was exposed to the Polonophobic remarks of such prominent Jews as Carole Burnett, Alan Dershowitz, Yitzhak Shamir, Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers), etc. The Polack joke syndrome is mentioned, but not its origin from Jewish comedians. No mention is made of the usual anti-Polish slant of Holocaust-related films. (The Pianist is the exception that proves the rule. Free of Pole-bashing, it was widely criticized by Jewish commentators for this reason). The widely acclaimed educational cartoon Maus has pigs representing Poles, an inexcusable choice, while comparatively innocuous animals (cats, mice, etc.) represent all other nationalities. British scholar Norman Davies was denied tenure at Stanford University, as a result of Jewish pressure, all because of the opinion that he was "too pro-Polish".

The persistence of Polish anti-Semitism is simplistically attributed to the continued presence of negative characterizations of Jews in the Polish language, even though such characterizations, unfortunately, are virtually universal (e. g., the phrase "To Jew someone down" in the English language). Clearly, this book leaves much to be desired.

The Most Important Book that You will Read on this Subject.......2003-04-12

The continuing debate between historians as to how to view the invasion of Poland and the Holocaust is perfectly expressed in this collection of essays. A must read for any historian, or anyone with an interest in the subject.

The Aftermath: Holocaust in the United States and Israel

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What the world learned

The Aftermath: Holocaust in the United States and Israel
Aaron Hass
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation
Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors
A History of the Holocaust (Single Title Social Studies)
Survival In Auschwitz
The Legacy of the Holocaust: Psychohistorical Themes in the Second Generation (Research in Clinical Psychology, No. 12.)

ASIN: 0521574595

Book Description

The Aftermath offers a perspective of how one who has lived with terror for years is able to avoid paralysis and move forward. The Aftermath offers the most comprehensive examination of the psychological impact of the Holocaust on survivors ever undertaken and covers the widest range of topics, including: survivor guilt, the absence of mourning, the psychological characteristics of survivor families, a survivor's view of God, survivors' feelings about Germans as well as their own countrymen of origin, and the survivor's ongoing sense of vulnerability.

Customer Reviews:

What the world learned.......2001-08-05

In a chapter named Vulnerabilities, Aaron Hass quotes an unnamed Holocaust survivor who asks, "What did the world learn from the Holocaust? What the world learned from the Holocaust is that you can kill six million Jews and no one will care."

This comment like many others in this superb book reverberates to the bone.

Hass answers a need not only of the dwindling community of survivors, but of those who, while neither survivors nor children of survivors, are nevertheless heirs to horrific pain--those Jewish children born in the shadow of the Holocaust and dressed by its memories, engulfed by a pervasive sense of loss and the need to reaffirm Jewish life.

"Survivors are people, not a phenomenon," Hass writes. Their feelings endure. Given my own feelings, I suspect that these are echoed by the feelings of the Jewish people, which is only now, after a generation, beginning to comprehend the enormity of what occurred.

"To refer to the Holocaust as 'monstrous, inhuman event' is to miss the point," Hass concludes. "The Holocaust was imposed by men and women on other human beings. 'It was a time when there were people, not only the Germans, but the others too, what wanted to kill all the Jewish people."

Unfortunately, such sentiments are still published broadly in parts of the world, without note, much less consequence. The press considers them just as unimportant now as it did in the 1930s.

Hass writes, "And so most Holocaust survivors believe that it could happen again." I sadly confess, so do I. Alyssa A. Lappen

The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation and Aftermath (Re-Writing Histories.)
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Superb collection for classroom use

The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation and Aftermath (Re-Writing Histories.)
Omer Bartov
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

The Holocaust Reader (Contemporary Debates in Philosophy)

Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories

The Nazi Conscience

Maus : A Survivor's Tale : My Father Bleeds History/Here My Troubles Began/Boxed

The Destruction of the European Jews

ASIN: 0415150361

Book Description

The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath offers a critical and important study of the Holocaust. Complete with an introduction that summarizes the state of the field, this book contains major reinterpretations by leading Holocaust authors (including Levi, Burleigh and Goldhagen, among others) along with key texts on testimony, memory and justice after the catastrophe.

The book challenges conventional interpretations and truths of the Holocaust, whether it has to do with the centrality of anti-Semitism, the importance of economic calculations or the timing of the decision on the "Final Solution."

Three powerful texts provide readers with a close look at the psychology of a perpetrator, the attitude of the bystanders and the fate of the victims. Finally, there is an analysis of survivor's oral testimonies, a deeply revealing discussion on the limits of transmitting the experience of the camps to posterity and a powerful plea for the prosecution of crimes against humanity.

Customer Reviews:

Superb collection for classroom use.......2001-09-10

It would be hard to imagine a better, and certainly a more up-to-date, introduction to the Jewish holocaust and the scholarly controversies it has engendered. Omer Bartov, whose research on the role of the Wehrmacht (German army) in Nazi crimes has helped to shatter many comfortable myths about that key institution, here presents a selection of the best and most searching writings on the holocaust. The selections range from Raul Hilberg's analysis of European anti-Semitism (a reminder that many scholars had isolated this as key to the Nazis' policies long before Daniel Goldhagen made his "discoveries" in "Hitler's Willing Executioners"), to a meditation by Alan Finkielkraut on the Klaus Barbie trial and the notion of "crimes against humanity." Sandwiched in between is a fine overview of the functionalist/intentionalist controversy in holocaust scholarship (the debate over whether the holocaust was primarily the willed result of Hitler and other Nazi ideologues' hatred of the Jews, or an unplanned consequence of war, demographic policy, internecine rivalries, and bureaucratic momentum). Bartov has selected the essays with great sensitivity, and provided brief introductions to place them in scholarly, historical, and human context. A bonus is the inclusion of Primo Levi's unforgettable essay "The Gray Zone," which explores the politically-charged issue of Jews' coerced collaboration with the forces of mass murder. This book is ideal for introductory classes on the holocaust or genocide in general, and as a primer for those who want to find their feet in the scholarly debate, which shows no signs of waning.

Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of Auschwitz (Pastora Goldner Series in Post-Holocaust Studies)

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Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of Auschwitz (Pastora Goldner Series in Post-Holocaust Studies)
David Patterson
Manufacturer: University of Washington Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 029598645X

Book Description

In this book, David Patterson sets out to describe why Jews must live -- but especially think -- in a way that is distinctly Jewish.

For Patterson, the primary responsibility of post-Holocaust Jewish thought is to avoid thinking in the same categories that led to the attempted extermination of the Jewish people. The Nazis, he says, were not anti- Semitic because they were racists; they were racists because they were anti-Semitic, and their anti-Semitism was furthered by a Western ontological tradition that made God irrelevant by placing the thinking ego at the center of being.

If the Jewish people, in their particularity, are "chosen" to attest to the universal "chosenness" of every human being, then each human being is singled out to assume an absolute responsibility to and for all human beings. And that, Patterson says, is why the anti-Semite hates the Jew: because the very presence of the Jew robs him of his ego and serves as a constant reminder that we are all forever in debt, and that redemption is always yet to be. Thus the Nazis, before they killed Jewish bodies, were compelled to murder Jewish souls through the degradations of the Shoah.

But why is the need for a revitalized Jewish thought so urgent today? It is not only because modern Jewish thought, hoping to accommodate itself to rational idealism, is thereby obliged to put itself in league with postmodernists who "preach tolerance for everything except biblically based religion, beginning with Judaism," and who effectively call on Jews, as fellow "citizens of the global village," to disappear. It is also because without the Jewish reality of Jerusalem, there is only the Jewish abstraction of Auschwitz, for in Auschwitz the Jews were murdered not as husbands and wives, parents and children, but as efficiently numbered units. If the Jews, Patterson claims, are not a people set apart by "a Voice that is other than human," then the Holocaust can never be understood as evil rather than simply immoral.

Book Description

France is the only Western European nation home to substantial numbers of survivors of the World War I and World War II genocides. In the Aftermath of Genocide offers a unique comparison of the country’s Armenian and Jewish survivor communities. By demonstrating howâin spite of significant differences between these two populationsâstriking similarities emerge in the ways each responded to genocide, Maud S. Mandel illuminates the impact of the nation-state on ethnic and religious minorities in twentieth-century Europe and provides a valuable theoretical framework for considering issues of transnational identity. Investigating each community’s response to its violent past, Mandel reflects on how shifts in ethnic, religious, and national affiliations were influenced by that group’s recent history. The book examines these issues in the context of France’s long commitment to a politics of integration and homogenizationâa politics geared toward the establishment of equal rights and legal status for all citizens, but not toward the accommodation of cultural diversity.

In the Aftermath of Genocide reveals that Armenian and Jewish survivors rarely sought to shed the obvious symbols of their ethnic and religious identities. Mandel shows that following the 1915 genocide and the Holocaust, these communities, if anything, seemed increasingly willing to mobilize in their own self-defense and thereby call attention to their distinctiveness. Most Armenian and Jewish survivors were neither prepared to give up their minority status nor willing to migrate to their national homelands of Armenia and Israel. In the Aftermath of Genocide suggests that the consolidation of the nation-state system in twentieth-century Europe led survivors of genocide to fashion identities for themselves as ethnic minorities despite the dangers implicit in that status.

The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust

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A personal and scholarly reflection on the Holocaust

The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust
Geoffrey Hartman
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays
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Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution"

ASIN: 0312295685

Book Description

In this series of interlinked essays, Geoffrey Hartman draws upon his pioneering interests in the collection of Holocaust survivor video testimony and his personal experience as a child of the Kindertransport to explore life and culture, meaning and memoryin the aftermath of the Holocaust. Taking up the anguished question of many survivors, Has the world learned anything?, Hartman discusses issues of representation and ethics, relationships between first- and second-generation witnesses to the events, and how artists, scholars, and teachers have represented and transmitted these extreme experiences. How, he asks, do we convert our knowledge about the Holocaust into a thoughtful and potent understanding?

Customer Reviews:

A personal and scholarly reflection on the Holocaust.......1997-12-03

The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust, Geoffrey H. Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 179 pp., $29.95 With The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust, it is Geoffrey H. Hartman's intention to explore the diverse private and public responses to an event which continues to haunt contemporary consciousness. The Holocaust, it is said, erects a ring of fire around itself. It is other-worldly, impenetrable and thus beyond the imaginations of those who were not there. How to write the language of death informs much contemporary critical writing about the Holocaust and Hartman does not deviate from this path. Is there a language to narrate fragmentation, corrosion and corporeality? The question is not so much about how to represent the Holocaust, but rather one of limitations in the composition of this language. Through an exploration of film, art, monuments, historical writing and public memory, Hartman's arguments belong to a wider context where the desire for a critical syntax, a disaster notation and a legitimate representational index encapsulatory of the intent, experience and aftershock of the Holocaust remains of paramount concern. As implied in the title, Hartman is concerned with the shadows and ghosts of the past, those which invade and envelop aspects of personal and collective identities. Each chapter in the book deals with a particular mode of narration or representational practice. Prefacing his investigation of these modes is a reflection on his origins in 'The Longest Shadow'. As a child on the Children's Transports he was brought to England and lived there until sixteen and then went to America. It is here in America that the reader gets a sense of his awakening as a diaspora Jew amid commentary on the increasing public visibility of survivors in the United States in the late 1970's. His involvement as a cofounder of the Video Testimony Project at Yale and thoughts and experiences derived from this are a recurring theme in subsequent chapters. The videotestimony genre is introduced as beyond the domain of historians, intended for education and general public consumption about the Holocaust. The properties of the video testimony are liberating for Hartman, serving to alter the 'victim' status of the survivor and affording an authentic representation unavailable to other modes. While 'The Weight of What Happened' is a brief plea for a reconciliation between Jewish history and Jewish memory, 'Darkness Visible' is a more considered meditation on the dilemmas of remembering the disabling 'black sun' of destruction. Hartman contends that the role of filmmakers and artists-while central to the narration-has to be guarded by historians and regulated with a certain vigilance so as to preclude the repetition of the mocking, self-referential and post-historical relativising tendencies identified, for example, in the films of Syberberg. Insisting on the necessity of representation itself demands that limits be imposed. But is not this a problem of latent censorship? Surely, 'postmodern' interpretations of Hitler far outweigh the similar interpretations of the victims of the Holocaust. In fact pastiche, parody and mythologising tendencies have not yet dramatically influenced the cinematic representations of Jewish experiences in the Holocaust. I think Hartman exaggerates the problem slightly, misapplying a somewhat eclectic cinematic paradigm to mainstream interpretations of Jewish suffering. His rumination on 'Bitburg' is while important, in need of elaboration and a wider perspective inclusive of subsequent events imposing on German national consciousness. Much has happened in Germany since 1985 in terms of public expressions of grief, mourning and commemoration. The fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Jenninger affair, and reunification and its effects have deposited on the German consciousness a memorial imperative that cannot escape the past, however much desired. His chapter on 'Vichy' in contrast, avoids the staleness of 'Bitburg' to offer an introduction to the silences of French collective memory, broken by the pioneering documentation of Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, and made even more topical in the current trial of the bureaucrat of Bordeaux, Maurice Papon. Hartman departs from the public resonances of 'Bitburg' and 'Vichy' to offer a critique of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List in 'The Cinema Animal'. It seems almost necessary now, if not transparently fashionable, for any established commentator on the Holocaust to have used Schindler's List as the example with which to compare and contrast Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. Especially problematic is the trend to situate this film in a dichotomous paradigm of high art/low art practice. Hartman's insistence on the limits of representation is most animated in this chapter. He asserts that the quest for limits is a moral imperative that should avoid reduction to a theological and messianic drama. It is hard to discern if Hartman likes the film. It is apparently transgressive, for it stylistically conveys the magnitude of Nazi evil, and constructs scenarios which reduce the Holocaust experience to discernible stereotyped dualities of good and evil. Hartman's critique of Schindler's List is not especially illuminating. It does not elaborate beyond criminalising the technological gaze which has also facilitated his videotestimony project, and when not deviating into proclaiming the merits of other narrative modes such as literature, rehearses similar criticisms found in initial reviews to the film. Hartman's relegation of Schindler's List on the hierarchy of representational practice contradicts his intentions to avoid a single and dogmatic mode of 'authentic' representation, evidenced through his insertion and elevation, wherever possible, of the advantages of videotestimony. 'Public Memory and its Discontents' illustrates the problems of unnecessary deviation. He examines the relationship between public memory and trauma, giving him a forum to 'speak' on how the media cultivates an insensitivity and alienation that can only be redeemed through an alliance between epistemology and morality. The preachiness of this essay is mitigated by its successor, 'The Book of the Destruction', which Saul Friedländer has called a 'quasi-mystical form of rendition in the vein of a latter-day parable'. Favouring the limits of conceptualisation over the limits of representation, Hartman argues that technology has outstripped the possibility of thinking in terms of a Holocaust morality or representational etiquette. He suggests that it is the critic's role to monitor and separate kitsch from an authentic imagination of evil, a necessary vigilance against the disease of images which apparently afflicts and sanitises perception of the Holocaust. Is truth, Hartman asks, better served by removing limits to representation? The parallel journeys that frame the narrative are partially successful in conveying the trauma that informs private and public responses in contemporary culture. His argument concerning the necessity of erecting and imposing limits on the Holocaust's representation is indeed the more conventional and ethically astute position to adopt. Similarly so is the insistence on the singularity of the event, and a profound sense that the Holocaust cannot be explained, despite the multifarious examples which aspire to enter that epicentre of suffering and illustrate otherwise. I agree that we are only starting to understand the horrendous events from 1933 to 1945, so is it not paradoxical and premature to call for limitations to a post-Holocaust aesthetic when the event itself is just becoming demystified? The collection's narrative cohesion is undermined by the disparate lecture-style format, rendering sections repetitive, while the term 'aftermath' is too ambitious to absorb the excursions into unnecessary terrain. His thought on the limits to representation and conceptualisation rehearses the debates played out in Europe, Israel and North America over past decades while intervening with more personal ill

The Hours After: Letters of Love and Longing in War's Aftermath

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What genuinely wonderful people
Great Read!
Not a bad find...
okay
First hand, personal account of post WW II liberation

The Hours After: Letters of Love and Longing in War's Aftermath
Gerda Weissmann Klein , and Kurt Klein
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Griffin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

Over fifty years ago, Gerda Weissmann was barely alive at the end of a 350-mile death march that took her from a slave labor camp in Germany to the Czech border.On May 7, 1945, the American military stormed the area, and among the first soldiers to approach Gerda was Kurt Klein. A great love had begun.Forced to separate just weeks after liberation and hours after their engagement, Gerda and Kurt began a correspondence that lasted until their reunion and wedding in Paris a year later.Their poignant letters reflect upon the horrors of war and genocide, but above all, upon the rapture and salvation of true love.AUTHORBIO: GERDA WEISSMANN KLEIN and KURT KLEIN lecture frequently and have written extensively about their experiences during the Holocaust. Gerda Weissmann Klein is the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary One Survivor Remembers. Kurt Klein's story was featured in the PBS series America and the Holocaust. The Kleins have been married for more than fifty years and live in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Customer Reviews:

What genuinely wonderful people.......2007-03-25

Ever since discovering Anne Frank back in Junior High School, I've always been interested in books about the Holocaust. I recently finished The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy. It's a very well written and important story about the Holocaust. And when I finished it I wanted to know what happened after the end of the book. What happened after the Jews were liberated? Everything from their previous lives was gone, their homes destroyed their families dead, murdered. What would they do? I hadn't read anything about after liberation.

The Hours After tells the wonderful and uplifting story of what happened to Gerda Weissmann after liberation. The story is revealed to us through letters between Gerda and her fiancé, Kurt Klein, one of the American soldiers who liberated her from a slave-labor camp in Czechoslovakia in May 1945.

At first I didn't care for the format of the book. I felt it had a sometimes awkward rhythm, going back and forth from Gerda's voice to Kurt's but at some point that feeling disappeared and all I could focus on was what would happened next.

I thought their letters to each other were beautiful, especially Kurt's. What a wonderful gift they have in these letters. I also thought that the way the letters were written was interesting, maybe it was the way they translated from German to English but they seemed very old fashioned even for 1945.

I thought it interesting that Gerda said her gushing (about her love and affection for Kurt) and sharing her deepest feelings was impolite. Later she asked to be forgiven for the burden she imposes on him by discussing the loss of her parents and the disappointment she's caused her uncle by not asking his permission to marry. I wonder the origins of such formality? And sometimes I wish there was just an iota of it left in our culture today.

I was moved by the story of Gerda's Grandfather who was exiled to Siberia and how she drew strength from his experience. Gerda is an amazing person, very smart, she never seems to get frustrated by the bureaucrats who make her emigration to the United States so difficult. And when she had the opportunity to exact some justice or revenge (in the case of her landlady and her son) she could only feel empathy for them. What an amazing and compassionate soul!

The process of preparing all of their papers for their marriage and Gerda's emigration to the US was excruciatingly prolonged! Gerda and Kurt communicated primarily by sloooow snail mail that was delivered via go-betweens until April 1946 (with the exception of a few telegrams). How different from our lightning fast communications and overnight deliveries of today.

A wonderful and uplifting story!

Great Read!.......2006-05-30

After I read Gerda's "All But My Life", I absolutely had to read this book. I had to know more! "All But My Life" and "The Hours After" are two of the best books I have ever read.

Not a bad find..........2006-03-13

This book is a very good read. It shows the compassion of love and trust. I am one that enjoys reading letter so this was perfect book for me. This book is comprised of letters written back and forth between the two authors. It is completely nonfiction. It shows the two peoples raw and bare emotions. It does take a while to read. It is not an extremely long book but it takes a good while to read. It is an easy read. The word choices arent difficult and the sentences aren't very complex. This sweet books talks about the way a couple met and lived through post war in Europe. The man was her liberator. She was a victim of the Nazi's cruel treatment. They became good friends while she was being treated in a medical hospital. As their relationship grew it became more loving and caring than anyone could have ever thought possible. They fell in love just as he was going to be sent back home. As this tragic point in the story happens it is counter acted by a wedding proposal and a vow for a marriage and a wonderful life together. As he left Europe, it started the wonderful wait until they could be married in Paris in 1946.

okay.......2004-07-14

I think this was a okay book. It was very boring and kind of dragged. But I do like there love story, it was very touching.

First hand, personal account of post WW II liberation.......2002-02-22

We typically don't write or receive personal letters anymore. That is just one of many reasons why this book, with the different life experiences Kurt and Gerda W. Klein had during the war, is so compelling. Imagine this 25 yr. old U.S. serviceman helping this young woman, who had grown from adolescence to adulthood on a Nazi death march, come to grips with who she is and what's to become of her. The book provides a first hand account and perspective through their letters to eachother, as the hopeful re-building of countries and lives is surrounding them. This is a must read, especially poignant in the tenuous world situation we all find ourselves in, post Sept. 11th. The fact that these two young people married and built a life together is a wonderful love story.

In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II

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In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II
Yosef Grodzinsky
Manufacturer: Common Courage Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge Middle East Studies)
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History
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A Threat from Within: A History of Jewish Opposition to Zionism

ASIN: 156751278X

Book Description

Working from newly unraveled archival material, Grodzinsky tells the touching story of the encounter between Jewish survivors and Zionist envoys, dispatched from Palestine to the camps in order to help in rehabilitation efforts but also with a clear Zionist agenda: Their mission was to bring all the "Surviving Remnant" to Palestine. Survivors were to be "the anvil upon which the revolt against the British [in Palestine] must be forged" (David Ben-Gurion). In 1945, Zionists forcefully prevented the rescue of child survivors; in 1948, they instituted forced conscription to the Israel Defense Force, dwindled by the fighting with the Arabs.

"Written with passion and an obsession for accuracy."-Ariana Melamed, Ha-'Ir, the leading Tel Aviv weekly

Walls Around: The Plunder of Warsaw Jewry during World War II and Its Aftermath

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Walls Around: The Plunder of Warsaw Jewry during World War II and Its Aftermath
Itamar Levin
Manufacturer: Praeger Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Poland | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0275976491

Book Description

On the eve of the Holocaust, Warsaw was the home of the biggest Jewish community in Europe, some 350,000 Jews. They were a third of the city's total population and owned up to 40% of its land. The Nazis systematically seized their property even before the Ghetto was established and rendered the Jews penniless and unable to work. Thus tens of thousands starved to death or died of infectious diseases. As Levin makes clear, the plunder of Jewish property became not only a product of murder, but also a tool of murder. Because Hitler decided only in the Spring of 1941 on the mass murder of the Jews, the Warsaw case demonstrates--at least in retrospect--how the seizure of property killed even before the first gas chambers were built. After the Holocaust, the Communist regime in Poland took advantage of the fact that 90% of the country's Jews had been murdered to nationalize their private and communal property without paying any compensation. The vast majority of this property has never been returned to their lawful owners despite increasing international efforts to bring this about.

Risen from the Ashes: A Story of Jewish Displaced Persons in the Aftermath of World War Ii, Being a Sequel to Survivors (Studies in Judaica and the)

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Risen from the Ashes: A Story of Jewish Displaced Persons in the Aftermath of World War Ii, Being a Sequel to Survivors (Studies in Judaica and the)
Jacob Biber
Manufacturer: Borgo Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0893704725

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