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Title: Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp
Author: Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, editors
Auschwitz, the largest and most lethal of the Nazi death camps, functioned as three distinct camps in one: a killing center, a concentration camp, and a series of slave labor camps. Over a million people, ninety percent of whom were Jews, were murdered there. This volume presents the first comprehensive account of what occurred at Auschwitz, featuring contributions from leading scholars in Europe and the United States. Key sections of the book cover the institutional history of the camp, the technology and scale of the genocide, profiles of the perpetrators and the experiences of the inmates, underground resistance and escapes, and the extent of the outside world’s knowledge about Auschwitz and when they knew it. This authoritative portrait of the camp is essential for anyone seeking to understand the significance of Auschwitz and the Holocaust.
Title: Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present
Author: Deborah Dwork & Robert Jan van Pelt
This masterpiece of exquisite knowledge and nuanced storytelling explains how Auschwitz, an unremarkable village before the war, came to be known as Germany’s most deadly extermination facility. In addition to blueprints and documents discovered in town and state archives, the authors use hundreds of architectural plans for the camp that the Germans in their haste forgot to destroy to demonstrate how the town of Auschwitz and the camp of the same name served as the focal point of Himmler’s ambitious project to reclaim the German legacy of Frederick the Great and the Teutonic Knights in Nazi-ruled Poland. By examining the connections between the town’s 700-year history and the camp’s five-year evolution, they provide a fresh perspective on the beginnings and growth of Auschwitz’s death camps. The writing incorporates verballization of survivors, memoirs, depositions and diaries.
Title: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: the Operation Reinhard Death Camps
Author: Yitzhak Arad
Under the cover name Operation Reinhard, about 1.5 million Jews were gassed in Poland’s three detention camps between 1942 and 1943. Less than 200 people made it out alive. This is the story’s initial telling. The book chronicles the history of the camps from their establishment in 1941 until their dismantling in 1943 using official archives and testimonials that were previously disregarded. He explains the design of the camps, the extermination procedure, and the behaviors of the Ukrainian guards and SS members. The book tells the story of the prisoners’ underground operations, revolts, escapes, and daily struggles to survive for those who were not given the option to die instantly. The horror that transpired during Operation Reinhard is attested to in the book.
Title: Death Comes in Yellow: Skarzysko-Kamienna Slave Labor Camp
Author: Felicja Karay
In order to shed light on all facets of the hundreds of camps in Poland founded during German occupation as part of a European-wide system of forced labor, Death Comes in Yellow tells the narrative of one slave labor camp. This book’s first section examines the camp’s exterior history. Studying the inner workings of the camp, the second section takes a very different approach, analyzing prisoner society and providing a poignant account of each prisoner’s battle for survival. At least 25,000 Jews were interned in the Skazysko camp; the majority did not survive to witness its release. The documentation of this historical study of the camp adds much to our comprehension of the labor camps underr National-Socialist rule.
Title: Two Weeks in May 1945: Sandbostel Concentration Camp and the Friends Ambulance Unit
Author: Clifford Barnard
From Nazi concentration camp to modern day Kosovo; has the world changed in fifty years? Clifford Barnard was a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit working in the relief of Sandbostel camp in north-west Germany in 1945. This is the first significant work in English on Sandbostel and an important contribution to the history of Quaker war relief work. The author’s account of this harrowing work draws not only on memories and contemporary letters, diaries and reports, but also includes correspondence, fifty years on, with German women helpers who were forced to come to terms with the work of their compatriots. This book gives some hope for how we can all learn, and will make the reader ask questions about how we might react today.
Title: The Kingdom of Auschwitz
Author: Otto Friedrich
In this powerful and harrowing book, Otto Friedrich chronicles the history of Auschwitz from its foundation in 1940 to the end of the war. He explores its origins and rationale, and the application of modern technology in the destruction of life as, for example, in the invention of the gas chambers. Drawing on personal testimonies, he describes the brutalities of daily life suffered by the inmates in the camp and enforced by the camp commandant and SS guards. Auschwitz was a world unlike any other, created and governed according to the principles of absolute evil. Yet Auschwitz also demonstrated clearly that in every group great heroism and self-sacrifice were possible.
Title: The Ghetto Fights
Author: Marek Edelman
The Nazis herded Warsaw’s Jews in to the Ghetto from where they were transported to extermination camps. Appallingly, the Jewish Ghetto administration rejected resistance and Jewish police helped load the trucks. But not all went passively. This is an account, first published in 1945, of the great struggle of 1941-3, written by one of the leading members of the Jewish resistance organisation, the ZOB. It is an heroic shout against racism and antisemitism that still resonates half a century later. With an introduction by John Rose and two appendices of reports from the Jewish workers’ underground movement in 1943.
Title: Hitler’s Gift: The Story of Theresienstadt
Author: George E. Berkley
As the shadow of Nazism spread over Europe, a small town in Czechoslovakia suddenly became the continent’s outstanding outpost of learning and culture. Here, inside an area nine blocks long and five wide, were many of Europe’s more distinguished composers and conductors, statesmen and soldiers and scientists and scholars, and other celebrities. These prominent people shared one common characteristic: all were Jews who had failed to flee the Nazi menace in time. Because of their stature and connections, they, and other groups of Jews, were given an ‘entire city’ in which to establish the first all-Jewish community of modern times. The ‘city’ was Theresienstadt, and the Nazis described it as the Führer’s ‘gift’ to the Jews. But as the author shows, this was a fabricated community behind whose façade death and destruction was rampant. In researching his book, he reviewed archives, memoirs, and testimonies, interviewed survivors and travelled to Israel, Vienna, Prague, and Theresienstadt.
Video Title: A Generation (12)
The first in Andrzej Wajda’s unplanned war trilogy, made in 1954. Wajda, who fought for the Resistance during World War II, offers a strikingly unsentimental appraisal of heroism in this tale of a cocky Polish youth who decides to fight the Nazis after he falls for a pretty Resistance leader. Barely out of their teens, he and his brash friends approach their first mission – to help escapees during the Warsaw ghetto uprising – like a game of ‘cops and robbers’. Inevitably the game turns deadly and the innocence of a generation is lost under the gruelling conditions of war.
83 minutes