Witnessing the Holocaust presents the autobiographical writings, including diaries and autobiographical fiction, of six Holocaust survivors who lived through and chronicled the Nazi genocide. Drawing extensively on the works of Victor Klemperer, Ruth Kluger, Michal Glowinski, Primo Levi, Imre Kertész and Béla Zsolt, this books conveys, with vivid detail, the persecution of the Jews from the beginning of the Third Reich until its very end. It gives us a sense both of what the Holocaust meant to the wider community swept up in the horrors and what it was like for the individual to weather one of the most shocking events in history. Survivors and witnesses disappear, and history, not memory, becomes the instrument for recalling the past. Judith M. Hughes secures a place for narratives by those who experienced the Holocaust in person. This compelling text is a vital read for all students of the Holocaust and Holocaust memory.

The Dutch in Wartime: Survivors Remember is a series of books with wartime memories of Dutch immigrants to North America, who survived the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands. In Book 3, Witnessing the Holocaust, sixteen writers tell us how Dutch Jews were dragged from their homes to be murdered in Nazi death camps. We read first-hand accounts of friends disappearing, of betrayal and its dreadful consequences and of the torment of life in Nazi concentration camps. Designed and written to be easily accessible to readers of all ages and backgrounds, this book contains intimate memories of the victims of the worst crime ever committed.

Witnessing comes in as many forms as the trauma that gives birth to it. The Holocaust, undeniably one of the greatest traumatic events in recent human history, still resonates into the twenty-first century. The echoes that haunt those who survived continue to reach their children and others who did not share the experience directly. In what ways is this massive trauma processed and understood, both for survivors and future generations? The answer, as deftly illustrated by Nancy Goodman and Marilyn Meyers, lies in the power of witnessing: the act of acknowledging that trauma took place, coupled with the desire to share that knowledge with others to build a space in which to reveal, confront, and symbolize it. As the contributors to this book demonstrate, testimonial writing and memoir, artwork, poetry, documentary, theater, and even the simple recollection of a memory are ways that honor and serve as forms of witnessing. Each chapter is a fusion of narrative and metaphor that exists as evidence of the living mind that emerges amid the dead spaces produced by mass trauma, creating a revelatory, transformational space for the terror of knowing and the possibility for affirmation of hope, courage, and endurance in the face of almost unspeakable evil. Additionally, the power of witnessing is extended from the Holocaust to contemporary instances of mass trauma and to psychoanalytic treatments, proving its efficacy in the dyadic relationship of everyday practice for both patient and analyst. The Holocaust is not an easy subject to approach, but the intimate and personal stories included here add up to an act of witnessing in and of itself, combining the past and the present and placing the trauma in the realm of knowing, sharing, and understanding. Contributors: Harriet Basseches, Elsa Blum, Bridget Conley-Zilkic, Paula Ellman, Susan Elmendorf, George Halasz, Geoffrey Hartman, Renee Hartman, Elaine Neumann Kulp-Shabad, Dori Laub, Clemens Loew, Gail Humphries Mardirosian, Margit Meissner, Henri Parens, Arlene Kramer Richards, Arnold Richards, Sophia Richman, Katalin Roth, Nina Shapiro-Perl, Myra Sklarew, Ervin Staub.

Winner, 2015 USC Book Award in Literary and Cultural Studies, for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies The Ethics of Witnessing investigates the reactions of five important Polish diaristswriters—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek—during the period when the Nazis persecuted and murdered Warsaw’s Jewish population. The responses to the Holocaust of these prominent prewar authors extended from insistence on empathic interaction with victims to resentful detachment from Jewish suffering. Whereas some defied the dehumanization of the Jews and endeavored to maintain intersubjective relationships with the victims they attempted to rescue, others selfdeceptively evaded the Jewish plight. The Ethics of Witnessing examines the extent to which ideologies of humanism and nationalism informed the diarists’ perceptions, proposing that the reality of the Final Solution exposed the limits of both orientations and ultimately destroyed the ethical landscape shaped by the Enlightenment tradition, which promised the equality and fellowship of all human beings.

Survivor testimonies and philosophical responses to the Holocaust, testifying to the tenacity and self-renewal of the human spirit. Essays from the 1989 Scholar's Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches.

Analyzing action at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, this first ethnography of the site offers a fresh approach to studying the memorial and memory work as potential civic engagement of visitors with themselves and others rather than with history itself.

An intriguing analysis of how place constructs memory and how memory constructs place, Remembering the Holocaust shows how visiting sites such as Auschwitz shapes the transfer of Holocaust memory from one generation to the next. Through the discussion of a range of memoirs and novels, including Landscapes of Memory by Ruth Kluger, Too Many Men by Lily Brett, The War After by Anne Karpf and Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, Remembering the Holocaust reveals the pivotal yet complicated role of place in each generation's writing about the Holocaust. This book provides an insightful and nuanced investigation of the effect of the Holocaust upon families, from survivors of the genocide to members of the second and even third generations of families involved. By deploying an innovative combination of generational and literary study of Holocaust survivor families focussed on place, Remembering the Holocaust makes an important contribution to the field of Holocaust Studies that will be of interest to scholars and anyone interested in Holocaust remembrance.

Fantasies of Witnessing explores how and why those deeply interested in the Holocaust, yet with no direct, familial connection to it, endeavor to experience it vicariously through sites or texts designed to make it "real" for nonwitnesses. Gary Weissman argues that far from overwhelming nonwitnesses with its magnitude of horror, the Holocaust threatens to feel distant and unreal. A prevailing rhetoric of "secondary" memory and trauma, he contends, and efforts to portray the Holocaust as an immediate and personal experience, are responses to an encroaching sense of unreality: "In America, we are haunted not by the traumatic impact of the Holocaust, but by its absence. When we take an interest in the Holocaust, we are not overcoming a fearful aversion to its horror, but endeavoring to actually feel the horror of what otherwise eludes us."Weissman focuses on specific attempts to locate the Holocaust: in the person of Elie Wiesel, the most renowned survivor, and his classic memoir Night; in videotaped survivor stories and Lawrence L. Langer's celebrated book Holocaust Testimonies; and in the films Shoah and Schindler's List. These representations, he explains, constitute a movement away from the view popularized by Wiesel, that those who did not live through the Holocaust will never be able to grasp its horror, and toward re-creating the Holocaust as an "experience" nonwitnesses may put themselves through. "It is only by acknowledging the desire that gives shape to such representations, and by exploring their place in the ongoing contest over who really 'knows' the Holocaust and feels its horror, that we can arrive at a more candid assessment of our current and future relationships to the Holocaust," he says.

Witnessing the Disaster examines how histories, films, stories and novels, memorials and museums, and survivor testimonies involve problems of witnessing: how do those who survived, and those who lived long after the Holocaust, make clear to us what happened? How can we distinguish between more and less authentic accounts? Are histories more adequate descriptors of the horror than narrative? Does the susceptibility of survivor accounts to faulty memory and the vestiges of trauma make them any more or less useful as instruments of witness? And how do we authenticate their accuracy without giving those who deny the Holocaust a small but dangerous foothold? These essayists aim to move past the notion that the Holocaust as an event defies representation. They look at specific cases of Holocaust representation and consider their effect, their structure, their authenticity, and the kind of knowledge they produce. Taken together they consider the tension between history and memory, the vexed problem of eyewitness testimony and its status as evidence, and the ethical imperatives of Holocaust representation.

"Disciplining the Holocaust examines critics' efforts to defend a rigorous and morally appropriate image of the Holocaust. Rather than limiting herself to polemics about the "proper" approach to traumatic history, Karyn Ball explores recent trends in intellectual history that govern a contemporary ethics of scholarship about the Holocaust. She examines the scholarly reception of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, the debates culminating in Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Lyotard's response to negations of testimony about the gas chambers, psychoanalytically informed frameworks for the critical study of traumatic history, and a conference on feminist approaches to the Holocaust and genocide. Ball's book bridges the gap between psychoanalysis and Foucault's understanding of disciplinary power in order to highlight the social implications of traumatic history."--BOOK JACKET.