Debórah Dwork - Böcker

'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 Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp in September 1944. He presented the album to a fellow prisoner, twenty-one-year-old Marianka Zadikow. Over the next several months, as the Nazis pressed forward with mass deportations from Terezin to Auschwitz, Marianka began to collect inscriptions and sketches from her fellow inmates.Marianka Zadikow's album, 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.Facing-page translations render the book's many 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 Holocaust scholar Deborah Dwork tells the story of the Terezin camp and how Marianka and her family fared while imprisoned there. The array of voices and the glimpses into individual lives that "The Terezin Album" affords make it an arresting reminder of the sustaining power of care, community, and hope amid darkness.

“The little children had little parents in the [twins’] block [in Auschwitz]. For example, I was a little mama for twins, two girls named Evichka and Hanka…My sister was the mother for Hanka and I was the mother for Evichka…Evichka told me that she got a mother and a father, but that they had gone away on transport. The twins were four years old. I said to her, ‘I will be your mother.’ She said, ‘But you are only sixteen years old; it doesn’t matter?’ I said, ‘No, it doesn’t matter because it is more important that we are together and that we are not alone. You have a mother and I have a daughter.’” —Magda Magda Somogyi Many books have been written about the experiences of Jews in Nazi Europe. None, however, has focused on the persecution of the most vulnerable members of the Jewish community—its children. This powerful and moving book by Deborah Dwork relates the history of these children for the first time.  The book is based on hundreds of oral histories conducted with survivors who were children in the Holocaust, in Europe and North America, an extraordinary range of primary documentation uncovered by the author (including diaries, letters, photographs and family albums), and archival records. Drawing on these sources, Dwork reveals the feelings, daily activities, and perceptions of Jewish children who lived and died in the shadow of the Holocaust. She reconstructs and analyzes the many different experiences the children faced. In the early years of Nazi domination they lived at home, increasingly opposed by rising anti-Semitism. Later some went into hiding while others attempted to live openly on gentile papers. As time passed, increasing numbers were forced into transit camps, ghettos, and death and slave labor camps. Although nearly ninety percent of the Jewish children in Nazi Europe were murdered, we learn in this history not of their deaths but of the circumstances of their lives.  Children with a Star is a major new contribution to the history of Europe during the Nazi era. It explains from a different perspective how European society functioned during the wary years, how the German noose tightened, and how the Jewish victims and their gentile neighbors responded. It expands the definition of resistance by examining the history of the people—primarily women—who helped Jewish children during the war. By focusing on children, it strips away rationalizations that the victims of Nazism somehow “allowed or “deserved” their punishment. And by examining the experience of children and thereby laying bare how society functions at its most fundamental level, it not only provides a unique understanding of the Holocaust but a new theoretical approach to the study of history.

No symbol of the Holocaust is more profound than Auschwitz. Yet the sheer, crushing number of murders—over 1,200,000—the overwhelming scale of the crime, and the vast, abandoned site of ruined chimneys and rusting barbed wire isolate Auschwitz from us. How could an ordinary town become a site of such terror? Why was this particular town chosen? Who conceived, created, and constructed the camp? This unprecedented history reveals how an unremarkable Polish village was transformed into a killing field. Using architectural designs and planning documents recently discovered in Poland and Russia and over 200 illustrations, Auschwitz tells how this town became the epicenter of the Final Solution. A National Jewish Book Award winner.

Unrivaled in reach and scope, Holocaust illuminates the long march of events, from the Middle Ages to the modern era, which led to this great atrocity. It is a story of all Europe, of Nazis and their allies, the experience of wartime occupation, the suffering and strategies of marked victims, the failure of international rescue, and the success of individual rescuers. It alone in Holocaust literature negotiates the chasm between the two histories, that of the perpetrators and of the victims and their families, shining new light on German actions and Jewish reactions.No other book in any language has so embraced this multifaceted story. Holocaust uniquely makes use of oral histories recorded by the authors over fifteen years across Europe and the United States, as well as never-before-analyzed archival documents, letters, and diaries; it contains in addition seventy-five illustrations and sixteen original maps, each accompanied by an extended caption. This book is an original analysis of a defining event.

As persecution, war, and deportation savaged their communities, Jews tried to flee Nazi Europe through both legal and clandestine routes. In this riveting tale of Jewish refugees during and after the Nazi era, Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt thread together official papers and personal accounts to weave the history of refugees’ lives into the history of the Holocaust.