Jackie Metzger

The Sacrifice of Isaac as a Motif in Holocaust Poetry

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... Read more

Poetry At Liberation

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... Read more

Coping With Reality: Two Teenage Poets in the Lodz Ghetto

A Survivor Recovers the Boy He Was

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... Read more

Two Poets and a Dividing Wall

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... Read more

Jewish Solidarity in the Holocaust: The Individual and the Community

Commemoration and Poetry

Interdisciplinary Education

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... Read more

The Jews of North Africa

From Democracy to Deportation: The Jews of France from the Revolution to the Holocaust

The Third Reich: Classical Music and the Nazi Leadership, 1933-1945

The Third Reich and the Theft of a Musical Legacy

Excerpts from an Interview with Nina Springer-Aharoni, Curator of Films and Photos in the Yad Vashem Museum

Interview with Miriam Ron, Witness to the Events of Kristallnacht

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. Read more

Interview with Dr. Michal Unger, Historian

Interview with Dukie Gelber, Survivor from Holland 

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... Read more

Interview with Davor Bakovic, Son of Yugoslav Partisan and Second-Generation Link to Muslim Righteous Among the Nations

Interview with Walter Zwi Bacharach, Professor Emeritus of General History

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... Read more

Interview with Eliezer Ayalon, Holocaust Survivor

Suite Française - Irene Nemirovsky

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... Read more

The Pillar of Salt - Albert Memmi

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... Read more

The Lost - Daniel Mendelsohn

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... Read more

The Journal of Helene Berr - Helene Berr

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... Read more

Fateless - Imre Kertész

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... Read more

Alone in Berlin - Hans Fallada

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... Read more