BiblioVault - Books about Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)

The Terezín Album of Mariánka Zadikow

Annotated by Debórah Dwork

University of Chicago Press, 2008

“With simple means, without any ‘title,’ this book should in distant times always be in your memory.”

An imprisoned bookbinder wrote these words in a small blank book that he had secretly crafted from pilfered materials at the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp in September 1944. He presented the album to a fellow prisoner, twenty-one-year-old Marianka Zadików. Over the next several months, as the Nazis pressed forward with mass deportations from Terezín to Auschwitz, Marianka began to collect inscriptions and sketches from her fellow inmates.

Marianka Zadików’salbum, presented here in a facsimile edition, is a poignant document from the last months of the Holocaust. The words and images inscribed here—by children and grandparents, factory workers and farmhands, professionals and intellectuals, musicians and artists—reflect both joy and trepidation. They include passages of remembered verse, lovingly executed drawings, and hurried farewells on the eve of transport to Auschwitz. The great German-Jewish scholar Rabbi Leo Baeck, one of the elders of the camp, offers Marianka an inscription about Jewish self-discovery, and participants in Terezín’s now-famous musical performances fill several pages with musical annotation.

Facing-page translations render the book’s multitude of languages into English, while historical and biographical notes give details, where known, of the fates of those whose words are recorded here. An introduction by acclaimed Holocaust scholar Debórah Dwork tells the story of the Terezín camp and how Marianka and her family fared while imprisoned there.

The array of voices and the glimpses into individual lives afforded us by The Terezín Album make it an arresting reminder of the sustaining power of care, community, and hope amid darkness.

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The Theatre of the Holocaust, Volume 1

Four Plays

Edited and with and introduction by Robert Skloot

University of Wisconsin Press, 1982

This volume contains these four plays:

Resort 76 by Shimon Wincelberg
Will the relentless oppression of the starving workers in a ghetto factory destroy their faith in God? Their love of life? Their ability to resist? If a cat is more valuable than a human being, have hope and goodness been eliminated from the world? A moving and terrifying melodrama.

Throne of Straw by Harold and Edith Lieberman
Through the career of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Lodz, Poland Judenrat, we come to understand the horror of “choiceless choice,” of how giving up some to save others was the worst nightmare for those who sought the responsibilities of ghetto leadership. An epic play with music and song.

The Cannibals by George Tabori
The children of murder victims assemble to enact ritually the destruction of their fathers in the presence of two survivors. As the sons become their fathers, the most profound ethical questions of the Holocaust are raised concerning the limits of humanity in a world of absolute evil. A daring tragicomedy.

Who Will Carry the Word? by Charlotte Delbo (translated by Cynthia Haft)
In the austere, degraded setting of a concentration camp, twenty-two French women attempt to keep their sanity and hope as, one by one, they fall victim to the Nazi terror. Will anyone believe the story of the survivors? A poetic drama of resistance and witness.

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The Theatre of the Holocaust, Volume 2

Six Plays

Edited and with and introduction by Robert Skloot

University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

This second volume of The Theatre of the Holocaust, when combined with the first, represents the most significant and comprehensive international collection of plays on the Holocaust. Since the appearance of Volume 1 in 1982, theatre and Holocaust studies have undergone astonishing transformations. In Volume 2, Skloot presents six plays acknowleding the most recent theatrical forms in our post-modern age.

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They Were Just People

Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust

Bill Tammeus & Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn

University of Missouri Press, 2009

Hitler’s attempt to murder all of Europe’s Jews almost succeeded. One reason it fell short of its nefarious goal was the work of brave non-Jews who sheltered their fellow citizens. In most countries under German control, those who rescued Jews risked imprisonment and death. In Poland, home to more Jews than any other country at the start of World War II and location of six German-built death camps, the punishment was immediate execution.

This book tells the stories of Polish Holocaust survivors and their rescuers. The authors traveled extensively in the United States and Poland to interview some of the few remaining participants before their generation is gone. Tammeus and Cukierkorn unfold many stories that have never before been made public: gripping narratives of Jews who survived against all odds and courageous non-Jews who risked their own lives to provide shelter.

These are harrowing accounts of survival and bravery. Maria Devinki lived for more than two years under the floors of barns. Felix Zandman sought refuge from Anna Puchalska for a night, but she pledged to hide him for the whole war if necessary—and eventually hid several Jews for seventeen months in a pit dug beneath her house. And when teenage brothers Zygie and Sol Allweiss hid behind hay bales in the Dudzik family’s barn one day when the Germans came, they were alarmed to learn the soldiers weren’t there searching for Jews, but to seize hay. But Zofia Dudzik successfully distracted them, and she and her husband insisted the boys stay despite the danger to their own family.

Through some twenty stories like these, Tammeus and Cukierkorn show that even in an atmosphere of unimaginable malevolence, individuals can decide to act in civilized ways. Some rescuers had antisemitic feelings but acted because they knew and liked individual Jews. In many cases, the rescuers were simply helping friends or business associates. The accounts include the perspectives of men and women, city and rural residents, clergy and laypersons—even children who witnessed their parents’ efforts.

These stories show that assistance from non-Jews was crucial, but also that Jews needed ingenuity, sometimes money, and most often what some survivors called simple good luck. Sixty years later, they invite each of us to ask what we might do today if we were at risk—or were asked to risk our lives to save others.

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Third-Generation Holocaust Representation

Trauma, History, and Memory

Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger

Northwestern University Press, 2017

Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger show that Holocaust literary representation has continued to flourish well into the twenty-first century—gaining increased momentum even as its perspective shifts, as a third generation adds its voice to the chorus of post-Holocaust writers. In negotiating the complex thematic imperatives and narrative conceits of the literature of third-generation writers, this bold new work examines those structures, tropes, patterns, ironies, disjunctions, and overall tensions that produce a literature that laments unrecoverable loss for a generation removed spatially and temporally from the extended trauma of the Holocaust. Aarons and Berger address evolving notions of “postmemory”; the intergenerational and ongoing transmission of trauma; issues of Jewish cultural identity; inherited memory; the psychological tensions of post-Holocaust Jewish identity; the characteristic tropes of memory and the personalized narrative voice; issues of generational dislocation and anxiety; the recurrent antagonisms of assimilation and historical alienation; the imaginative re-creation and reconstruction of the past; and the future of Holocaust memory and representation.

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This Cannot Happen Here

Integration and Jewish Resistance in the Netherlands, 1940-1945

Ben Braber

Amsterdam University Press, 2013

This sweeping work is the first comprehensive English-language study of Jewish resistance in the Netherlands during World War II.

Adopting a comparative approach, Ben Braber explores the situation of Jews in the Netherlands against the backdrop of their experiences in other Western European countries. Charting the occurrences of Jewish resistance, he pays particular attention to the ways in which the integration of Jews into Dutch society influenced their responses to German persecution. Braber’s incisive analyses shed new light on Dutch and Jewish history, pointing the way toward future paths of inquiry.

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To Tell At Last

Survival under False Identity, 1941-45

Blanca Rosenberg

University of Illinois Press, 1993

      "Searing. . . . With
        an even hand and understated prose, Ms. Rosenberg, now a New York City
        psychotherapist, bravely depicts Nazi carnage in chilling detail."
        -- Susan Shapiro, New York Times Book Review
      "[A] harrowing account
        of intrigue and danger with all the elements of a war movie adventure."
        -- Miriam Rinn, The Forward
      This memoir of how a Jewish
        woman survived Nazi Germany by passing as an Aryan was selected as the
        best book on Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Literature by the Israeli
        committee of the Egit Grants.

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Trap with a Green Fence

Survival in Treblinka

Richard Glazar

Northwestern University Press, 1995

Trap with a Green Fence is Richard Glazar's memoir of deportation, escape, and survival. In economical prose, Glazar weaves a description of Treblinka and its operations into his evocation of himself and his fellow prisoners as denizens of an underworld. Glazar gives us compelling images of these horrors in a tone that remains thoughtful but sober, affecting but simple.

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Traumatic Realism

The Demands of Holocaust Representation

Michael Rothberg

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

The Tree of Life, Book One

On the Brink of the Precipice, 1939

Chava Rosenfarb

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

On the Brink of the Precipice, the first volume of the trilogy The Tree of Life, describes the lives of the novel’s ten protagonists in the Lodz Ghetto before the outbreak of World War II. Chava Rosenfarb, herself a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, draws on her own history to create realistic characters who struggle daily to retain a sense of humanity and dignity despite the physical and psychological effects of ghetto life. Although the novel depicts horrendous experiences, the light of faith in the human spirit shines through this novel’s every page.

Winner of the 1972 J. J. Segal Prize and the 1979 Manger Prize for Yiddish Literature

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The Tree of Life, Book Three

The Cattle Cars Are Waiting, 1942–1944

Chava Rosenfarb

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

The third volume in this powerful trilogy, The Cattle Cars Are Waiting follows the tragic fate of the inhabitants of the ghetto. Chava Rosenfarb, herself a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, draws on her own history to create characters who struggle daily to retain a sense of humanity and dignity despite the physical and psychological effects of ghetto life. Although the novel depicts horrendous experiences, the light of faith in the human spirit shines through every page.

Winner, Georges Bugnet Award for Best Novel, Writers Guild of Alberta

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The Tree of Life, Book Two

From the Depths I Call You, 1940–1942

Chava Rosenfarb

University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

This volume describes the lives of the novel’s protagonists in the Lodz Ghetto at the beginning of World War II. Chava Rosenfarb, herself a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, draws on her own history to create realistic characters who struggle daily to retain a sense of humanity and dignity despite the physical and psychological effects of ghetto life. Although horrendous experiences are depicted, the light of faith in the human spirit shines through this novel’s every page.

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