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I Rest My Case
Mark Verstandig
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Mark Verstandig's compelling epic spans pre-Holocaust Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and its post-war reformation in Australia.

His personal story interweaves the vast forces of politics and history with intimate details of the shtetl--from the pre-war intricacies of Galician society and the textures of a traditional Jewish education, to the agonizing contradictions of Polish-Jewish relations and the complexities of post-war Jewish politics.

His account of the displaced persons camps where 'transit Jews' awaited their chance to emigrate is a signifigant contribution to a little-known aspect of post-war history.

With his gift for observation and his acute powers of analysis, Mark Verstandig has achieved the rare feat of telling the story of his people through his own history. Part autobiography, part Holocaust literature, part sociological analysis, I Rest my Case is a fine achievement.
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Images in Spite of All
Four Photographs from Auschwitz
Georges Didi-Huberman
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Of one and a half million surviving photographs related to Nazi concentration camps, only four depict the actual process of mass killing perpetrated at the gas chambers. Images in Spite of All reveals that these rare photos of Auschwitz, taken clandestinely by one of the Jewish prisoners forced to help carry out the atrocities there, were made as a potent act of resistance.
            Available today because they were smuggled out of the camp and into the hands of Polish resistance fighters, the photographs show a group of naked women being herded into the gas chambers and the cremation of corpses that have just been pulled out. Georges Didi-Huberman’s relentless consideration of these harrowing scenes demonstrates how Holocaust testimony can shift from texts and imaginations to irrefutable images that attempt to speak the unspeakable. Including a powerful response to those who have criticized his interest in these images as voyeuristic, Didi-Huberman’s eloquent reflections constitute an invaluable contribution to debates over the representability of the Holocaust and the status of archival photographs in an image-saturated world.
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In Evidence
Poems of the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps
Barbara Helfgott Hyett
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986
In Evidence is a collection of poems in the voices of allied troops who liberated Nazi concentration camps in Europe in the sprong of 1945. Barbara Helfgott Hyett heard poems in the eyewitness testimony of United States soldiers. She has shaped the words of thirty speakers into a songle narrative, a single voice.
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In Her Father's Eyes
A Childhood Extinguished by the Holocaust
Weichherz, Béla
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Translated from the German for the first time, In Her Father's Eyes is the diary of Béla Weichherz, in which he documents the life of his only daughter, Kitty, in prewar Czechoslovakia. Started as a baby book before her birth in 1929, the journal contains frequent entries about the ups and downs of Kitty's childhood, often written in vivid detail. Weichherz included photographs, developmental charts, and Kitty's own drawings to enhance the text. The journal entries stop in early spring 1942, just days before the family's deportation to a Nazi death camp. In its final pages, a recognizable tale of one anonymous life becomes a heartbreaking story about how anti-Semitism and nationalism in Slovakia shattered this normalcy.

In Her Father's Eyes is a moving tale about Jewish life and a father's profound love for his only child. By bridging prewar and wartime periods, the diary also provides a rich context for understanding the history from which the Holocaust emerged.

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In Pursuit of German Memory
History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz
Wulf Kansteiner
Ohio University Press, 2006

The collective memories of Nazism that developed in postwar Germany have helped define a new paradigm of memory politics. From Europe to South Africa and from Latin America to Iraq, scholars have studied the German case to learn how to overcome internal division and regain international recognition.

In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz examines three arenas of German memory politics—professional historiography, national politics, and national public television—that have played key roles in the reinvention of the Nazi past in the last sixty years. Wulf Kansteiner shows that the interpretations of the past proposed by historians, politicians, and television producers reflect political and generational divisions and an extraordinary concern for Germany's image abroad. At the same time, each of these theaters of memory has developed its own dynamics and formats of historical reflection.

Kansteiner’s analysis of the German scene reveals a complex social geography of collective memory. In Pursuit of German Memory underscores the fact that German memories of Nazism, like many other collective memories, combine two seemingly contradictory qualities: They are highly mediated and part of a global exchange of images and story fragments but, at the same time, they can be reproduced only locally, in narrowly circumscribed networks of communication.

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In the Aftermath of Genocide
Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France
Maud S. Mandel
Duke University Press, 2003
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 how—in spite of significant differences between these two populations—striking 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 homogenization—a 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.

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In the Beginning Was the Ghetto
Notebooks from Lodz
Oskar Rosenfeld
Northwestern University Press, 2002
From February 1942 to July 1944, Oskar Rosenfeld served in the statistics department of the Lodz ghetto. A playwright and journalist, he kept his own notes on life and conditions in the ghetto for a fictionalized account he hoped to write one day. Though Rosenfeld eventually perished at Auschwitz, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto projects his voice at last to the wider world.
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In the Shadow of Hitler
Alabama's Jews, the Second World War, and the Holocaust
Dan J. Puckett
University of Alabama Press, 2014
In the Shadow of Hitler chronicles the experiences of Alabama Jews as they worked to overcome their own divisions in order to aid European Jews before, during, and after the Second World War.

In this extensive study of how southern Jews in the United States responded to the Nazi persecution of European Jews, Dan J. Puckett recounts the divisions between Alabama Jews in the early 1930s. As awareness of the horrors of the Holocaust spread, Jews across Alabama from different backgrounds and from Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox traditions worked to bridge their internal divisions in order to mount efforts to save Jewish lives in Europe. Only by leveraging their collective strength were Alabama’s Jews able to sway the opinions of newspaper editors, Christian groups, and the general public as well as lobby local, state, and national political leaders.

Puckett’s comprehensive analysis is enlivened and illustrated by true stories that will fascinate all readers of southern history. One such story concerns the Altneuschule Torah of Prague and describes how the Nazis, during their brutal occupation of Czechoslovakia, confiscated 1,564 Torahs and sacred Judaic objects from communities throughout Bohemia and Moravia as exhibits in a planned museum to the extinct Jewish race. Recovered after the war by the Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust, the Altneuschule Torah was acquired in 1982 by the Orthodox congregation Ahavas Chesed of Mobile. Ahavas Chesed re-consecrated the scroll as an Alabama memorial to Czech Jews who perished in Nazi death camps.

In the Shadow of Hitler illustrates how Alabama’s Jews, in seeking to influence the national and international well-being of Jews, were changed, emerging from the war period with close cultural and religious cooperation that continues today.
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In the Shadow of the Swastika
Hermann Wygoda
University of Illinois Press, 1998
He was known first as a Warsaw ghetto smuggler, then as Comandante Enrico. He traveled under false identity papers and worked at a German border patrol station. Throughout the years of the Holocaust, Hermann Wygoda lived a life of narrow escapes, daring masquerades, and battles that almost defy reason.
 
Unique among Holocaust memoirs, In the Shadow of the Swastika, now in paperback, celebrates the memory of a man who received decorations from three Western powers and who, years later, was honored posthumously by the Italian city he helped to liberate.
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The Inability to Love
Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature
Agnes C. Mueller
Northwestern University Press, 2015

The Inability to Love borrows its title from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s 1967 landmark book The Inability to Mourn, which discussed German society’s lack of psychological reckoning with the Holocaust. Challenging that notion, Agnes Mueller turns to recently published works by prominent contemporary German, non-Jewish writers to examine whether there has been a thorough engagement with German history and memory. She focuses on literature that invokes Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust. Mueller’s aim is to shed light on pressing questions concerning German memories of the past, and on German images of Jews in Germany at a moment that s ideologically and historically fraught.


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Inheriting the Holocaust
A Second-Generation Memoir
Paula S. Fass
Rutgers University Press, 2011
In Inheriting the Holocaust, Paula S. Fass explores her own past as the daughter of Holocaust survivors to reflect on the nature of history and memory. Through her parents' experiences and the stories they recounted, Fass defined her engagement as a historian and used these skills to better understand her parents' lives.

Fass begins her journey through time and relationships when she travels to Poland and locates birth certificates of the murdered siblings she never knew. That journey to recover her family's story provides her with ever more evidence for the perplexing reliability of memory and its winding path toward historical reconstruction. In the end, Fass recovers parts of her family's history only to discover that Poland is rapidly re-imagining the role Jews played in the nation's past.

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Inside a Class Action
The Holocaust and the Swiss Banks
Jane Schapiro
University of Wisconsin Press

    On October 21, 1996, attorney Michael Hausfeld, with a team of lawyers, filed a class-action complaint against Union Bank of Switzerland, Swiss Bank Corporation, and Credit Suisse on behalf of Holocaust victims. The suit accused the banks of, among other things, acting as the chief financiers for Nazi Germany. Hausfeld wanted to use the suit to prove that the banks not only concealed and refused to return millions of dollars in dormant accounts, but that they acted as a conduit for looted assets and slave labor profits. Such behavior, he charged, violated the code of ethics known as customary international law. On August 12, 1998, the plaintiffs and banks reached a $1.25 billion settlement.
    Through interviews with a wide range of people involved in the case and detailed research of documents and court transcripts, Jane Schapiro shows the ways that egos, personalities, and values clash in such a complex and emotionally charged case. Inside a Class Action provides an insider’s view of a major lawsuit from its inception to its conclusion, which will appeal to anyone interested in human rights, reparations, and international law.

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Invisible Walls and To Remember is to Heal
A German Family under the Nuremberg Laws
Ingeborg Hecht
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Ingeborg Hecht's father, a prosperous Jewish attorney, was divorced from his titled German wife in 1933—two years before the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws—and so was deprived of what these laws termed "privileged mixed matrimony." He died in Auschwitz. His two children, called "half-Jews," were stripped of their rights, prevented from earning a living, and forbidden to marry.

In Invisible Walls, Hecht writes of what it was like to live under these circumstances, sharing heartbreaking details of her personal life, including the loss of her daughter's father on the Russian front; the death of her own father after his deportation in 1944; and her fears of perishing coupled with the shame of faring better than most of her family and friends. This new volume adds the first translation of part of Hecht's second book, To Remember is to Heal, a collection of vignettes of encounters and experiences that resulted from the publication of the first.
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It All Began in Nuremberg
Between History and Memory
Rita Thalmann
University of Michigan Press, 2015
It All Began in Nuremberg is a translation of Rita Thalmann’s moving memoir, Tout Commença à Nuremberg, originally published in France in 2004. Thalmann’s memoir represents one of the last voices to witness personally the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. The author, a scholar of significance in France, died on August 18, 2013.

Rita Thalmann was born in Nuremberg in 1926 and lived there until 1933, when anti-Semitic events made life intolerable.  Her father abandoned his successful business and moved the family to Switzerland, where they were unwelcome, and then to France.  After settling in Dijon, Rita attended public school until Jews were no longer allowed to pursue an education.  At age fourteen, she took private lessons in English at the home of her teacher, Henriette Connes, who saved Rita from deportation and death by providing her with false identification papers and passing her to the Free Zone with a group of students going on a field trip. Although Rita and her brother managed to escape to Switzerland during the war, most of her family died in the Holocaust.

After the war, Rita Thalmann was determined to continue her education and participate in the struggle against anti-Semitism and discrimination of all types. She achieved the highest level of university teaching in France while publishing seven books. This memoir relates her personal experience of the historical events she spent most of her adult life researching.
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