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Throughout the entire world, Auschwitz has become known as the Concentration Camp (KZ) in which the bureaucratic, alarmingly and perfectly organized mass exterminations of human beings found its abysmal culmination. Less well known is the first period of Auschwitz in which this Concentration Camp (KZ) was different from many others because Polish people had to live and die there. This book makes unambiguously clear that Auschwitz remains, in the memory of many Poles, a martyrology of its people. Caps Off . . . is the first ever English translation of Mutzen ab . . ., a report about the experiences in the Punishment Company (SK) of the KZ Auschwitz by the Polish journalist and prisoner Zenon ...
Escaping Hell is the compelling and true story of a heroic young Polish officer who survived the terror of five years in the prisons of Auschwitz and Buchenwald – where violence was meaningless because human life had lost all value. During World War II, Kon Piekarski was a member of the Polish Underground Army, a clandestine resistance movement which operated even inside Auschwitz – organizing spectacular escapes, operating a secret radio network and matching wits with the Gestapo. After Auschwitz, Piekarski became a prisoner of war at Buchenwald and spent time working in a factory where Russian prisoners of war were used for labour. In the face of constant danger, he and his comrades took every possible opportunity to sabotage the German war industry. He was finally transferred to a small camp near the French border, and escaped three months before the end of the war.
When the Allies decided to try German war criminals at the end of World War II they were attempting not only to punish the guilty but also to create a record of what had happened in Europe. This ground-breaking new study shows how Britain and the United States went about inscribing the history of Nazi Germany and the effect their trial and occupation policies had on both long and short term 'memory' in Germany and Britain. Donald Bloxham here examines the actions and trials of German soldiers and policemen, the use of legal evidence, the refractory functions of the courtroom, and Allied political and cultural preconceptions of both 'Germanism' and of German criminality. His evidence shows conclusively that the trials were a failure: the greatest of all 'crimes against humanity' - the 'final solution of the Jewish question' - was largely written out of history in the post-war era and the trials failed to transmit the breadth of German criminality. Finally, with reference to the historiography of the Holocaust, Genocide on Trial illuminates the function of the trials in perpetuating misleading generalizations about the course of the Holocaust and the nature of Nazism.
Hermann Langbein was allowed to know and see extraordinary things forbidden to other Auschwitz inmates. Interned at Auschwitz in 1942 and classified as a non-Jewish political prisoner, he was assigned as clerk to the chief SS physician of the extermination camp complex, which gave him access to documents, conversations, and actions that would have remained unknown to history were it not for his witness and his subsequent research. Also a member of the Auschwitz resistance, Langbein sometimes found himself in a position to influence events, though at his peril. People in Auschwitz is very different from other works on the most infamous of Nazi annihilation centers. Langbein's account is a scrupulously scholarly achievement intertwining his own experiences with quotations from other inmates, SS guards and administrators, civilian industry and military personnel, and official documents. Whether his recounting deals with captors or inmates, Langbein analyzes the events and their context objectively, in an unemotional style, rendering a narrative that is unique in the history of the Holocaust. This monumental book helps us comprehend what has so tenaciously challenged understanding.
In this literary study of memoirs describing at first hand the horrors of German concentration camps, the principal question asked is: How did the survivors find the words to talk about experiences hitherto unknown, even unimaginable? Beyond being a mere analysis of discourse, Narrating the Holocaust reflects the situations in camp that triggered these responses, and shows how the professional authors adapted certain literary genres (e.g. the travel story, the Hassidic tale) to serve as models for communication, while the vast majority who were not trained as writers merely used the form of the report. A comparison between these memoirs and the more frequently discussed camp novel identifies the different narrative strategies by which the two are determined. Most of the 130 texts discussed here were published in German between l934 and the present; some famous Italian, French and Polish texts have also been included for comparison.
Presents a detailed biography of an Italian chemist caught up in the Holocaust whose later books bore testimony to what he'd seen. The book makes use of research, interviews with Levi's friends and relatives, and unpublished texts and testimonies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR