Grades: 9 - 12
Introduction
From the earliest beginnings of Jewish history, the story of Isaac’s sacrifice has been an important element in this history and a focal point in Jewish identity. The universal power of the story is equally manifest in the spread of the monotheistic religions, for which this biblical story - in its various versions - is the bedrock of belief. It is not surprising, therefore, that poets, with their literary insights, have produced much work inspired by this story... Continue reading
In the Holocaust museum of Yad Vashem, there is a big screen near the end depicting the celebrations and jubilation across the whole of Europe after the Germans surrendered at the beginning of May 1945. One can view Stalin presiding over a huge military parade at the Kremlin, De Gaulle driving in a motorcade towards the Eiffel Tower and snatches of Churchill and Montgomery joining in the general revelry.
The pointed irony of this screen is that after more than 200 years of integrated contact... Continue reading
The Lodz ghetto by all accounts embodied one of the worst cases of human suffering in an enclosed virtual prison for an extended period of time. It was the longest standing ghetto, from 1940 until its final denouement in the autumn of 1944. The fact of its total isolation from the rest of the city multiplied the effect of the near-total lack of all necessities for maintaining life.Within this reality, we find the human spirit reacting in every possible variant from paralyzing depression to the... Continue reading
Introduction
Itamar Yaos-Kest was born in 1934 in Sarvash, Hungary as Peter Kest and after the Germans invaded in March 1944, he began his childhood Holocaust trauma as a boy of ten years old. Fortunately, he was surrounded by his family right through the terrible camp conditions of Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany and against all probability, both parents and the two children survived more than six months in the camp. On scraps of paper his parents procured for him, he began writing his... Continue reading
Two poets on opposite sides of one great divide,With angles of vision that must surely collide,Who will live and who will dieWho will write and who will be denied?
This article will focus on two famous poets who, after the German occupation of Warsaw, found themselves on separate sides of the wall dividing the Jewish ghetto from the Aryan part of the city.1 Wladislaw Szlengel, a Jewish writer, became one of the best-known Jewish poets during the difficult days of the ghetto’s... Continue reading
Three Quotes: A Philosophical Note on the TitleWe preface the following essay on solidarity during the Holocaust with the three quotes below in order to highlight the stark contrast between the extreme difficulties of survival and the historical examples of fortitude that follow. Continue reading
The memory of the Holocaust has been invaluably enriched by poets who have provided us with a window into a period that is very difficult to comprehend. Numerous Holocaust-related anthologies have been published in many languages in recent years, and these are an excellent educational resource.It has been said that what the historian achieves in a book, the poet presents in ten or twenty lines. Poetry can say more in less, and certainly can say it more succinctly. When a poem works, a truth has... Continue reading
One of the problems of teaching the Holocaust is the unprecedented behavior of humanity during the Second World War and finding a believable way of presenting it. It is a difficult task to convey realities from that era to pupils and students seventy years removed from the atrocities. This article will suggest ways of presenting aspects of the Holocaust that combine different approaches to enable cognitive contact with a difficult subject.
Interdisciplinary education is basically the... Continue reading
In most of the history written on the Second World War, North Africa assumes secondary importance as compared with the main arenas of Europe and the Pacific War. In general, British interests in maintaining free access to the Suez Canal in Egypt and French or Italian colonial interests across the top of Africa fade in importance against the massive confrontation ignited by conflicting German–Soviet aspirations in Europe.However, the theater of North Africa was intensely felt by the armies... Continue reading
In 1791, after the French Revolution, Jews in France were emancipated and granted full citizenship. This was the first time in history, that Jews had been given such equality. Even after the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s, French Jewry remained convinced that their place as equals in society would ultimately keep them safe from antisemitism that existed in other European countries. Unfortunately, this was not the case.As is pointed out later in this article, the motto of “liberty,... Continue reading
This exclusive interview was published in our newsletter Teaching the Legacy (December, 2008). Mrs. Ron discusses her experiences and memories surrounding Kristallnacht, the expulsion to Zbaszyn, and her childhood in Germany. Continue reading
Please introduce yourself and give us a brief overview of your life.
My name you know is Dukie Gelber. I’m from Holland originally. I’m nearly 77 and I have been under German occupation for five years. In 1940 they invaded Holland and I’ve been 2 years in German concentration camps. About half a year in Westerbork which was the main transition camp concentration camp in Holland, [from] which about 109,000 Dutch Jews went to the east. Somewhere around 5,000 came back after the war. And I... Continue reading
Introduction
Professor Walter Zwi Bacharach is Professor Emeritus of General History at Bar-Ilan University. He was born in Hanau, Germany in 1928. In 1938, he escaped with his family to Holland, where they were captured in 1942. He was sent to Westerbork transit camp, then to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. He survived a death march and was liberated by U.S. forces. He immigrated to Palestine in 1946, lives in Tel-Aviv, and is married with children... Continue reading
Suite FrançaiseIrene NemirovskyVintage, 2007431 pages
This book was written during the first years of the Second World War but was published only in 2004 in the original French, and in 2006 in an English translation. The circumstances surrounding the writing of Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky and the personal story involved in its delayed publication by her daughter some sixty years later are as fascinating and heart-wrenching as the book itself.
Nemirovsky was born in Kiev and grew... Continue reading
The Pillar of SaltAlbert MemmiBeacon Press, 1992342 Pages
More than fifty years ago, Albert Memmi published The Pillar of Salt, which is a thinly disguised autobiography of the first two decades of his life. This early work of Memmi’s, first published in French in 1953, is an engaging presentation of dissonances that the boy Alexandre Mordekhai Bennillouche had to work through en route to becoming Doctor Albert Memmi, Doctor of Philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris.
The author was born in... Continue reading
The LostDaniel MendelsohnHaperCollins, 2008512 pages
So many books have been published on the Holocaust over the last sixty-five years. Histories, survivors’ memoirs, diaries of victims, children’s books, and many more have been published in an unending effort to decipher this dark period in the history of mankind.
The subtitle of this book, A Search for Six of Six Million, informs us immediately that a personal search will be at the heart of the material. The author is in fact the person... Continue reading
The Journal of Helene BerrHelene BerrWeinstein Books, 2008294 pages
Helene Berr was twenty-one years old when she started to keep a diary. The year was 1942, two years into the German occupation of France. She had grown up in a well-to-do Jewish family with strong ties to Parisian society and some elements of Jewish identity. Immersed in the busy, intellectual pursuits of Sorbonne student life, world events interrupted and with the occupation, an inexorable negative progression was begun which... Continue reading
FatelessImre KertészNorthwestern University Press, 1992191 pages
This book review begins on a philosophical note occasioned by the title of the book. The title – Fateless1 – is a lexical construct that is not listed in most English dictionaries but it follows the form of a descriptive word, an adjective. So, the author of Fateless, Imre Kertesz, has in his thinly veiled memoir of his own Holocaust experiences, chosen to give his book an intriguing title that appears to contradict the... Continue reading
Alone in BerlinHans FalladaPenguin Books, 2009568 Pages
The twelve years spanning 1933 till 1945 are the dark years of Nazi domination in Germany and vast stretches of conquered Europe. For the purposes of this book review, this period can be divided into the six years before the war, until 1939,1 and the six years of the Second World War from 1939 to 1945. The book under review presents us with a powerful canvas of the war years in Germany and specifically in Berlin. The biographical... Continue reading
New Yad Vashem website redirection
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The Yad Vashem website had recently undergone a major upgrade!
The less good news:
The page you are looking for has apparently been moved.
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