Holocaust Studies in Translation – serie

Everyone Asks What Will Happen to Us traces how Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto wrestled with questions that had troubled them since the occupation began: when will the war end, and what will become of us? In examining the production and spread of knowledge in the Warsaw Ghetto, Maria Ferenc returns the point of view of the victims to its rightful place. She reveals illusions, imagination, and the social reception of a constructed image of events taking place on the other side of the Ghetto walls. Individually and together, ghetto inhabitants created a picture of the outside world shaped by access to information and meanings attributed to news from different places. Yet the true fate of those deported "to the East" defied comprehension for most ghetto inhabitants as they desperately navigated the space between information and rumors. In Everyone Asks What Will Happen to Us, Ferenc illuminates the victims' painstaking efforts to uncover the truth, as well as, paradoxically, their own resistance to the growing body of knowledge about the Holocaust.

Everyone Asks What Will Happen to Us traces how Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto wrestled with questions that had troubled them since the occupation began: when will the war end, and what will become of us? In examining the production and spread of knowledge in the Warsaw Ghetto, Maria Ferenc returns the point of view of the victims to its rightful place. She reveals illusions, imagination, and the social reception of a constructed image of events taking place on the other side of the Ghetto walls. Individually and together, ghetto inhabitants created a picture of the outside world shaped by access to information and meanings attributed to news from different places. Yet the true fate of those deported "to the East" defied comprehension for most ghetto inhabitants as they desperately navigated the space between information and rumors. In Everyone Asks What Will Happen to Us, Ferenc illuminates the victims' painstaking efforts to uncover the truth, as well as, paradoxically, their own resistance to the growing body of knowledge about the Holocaust.

The Forest of Remembrance is the first "biography of a place" to incorporate multiple perspectives of the Nazis and their local supporters murder of 70,000 people on the outskirts of Vilnius, including Jews, members of the Polish underground, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, communists, and Lithuanians who opposed the Nazi regime.Zigmas Vitkus traces the transformation of the site from July 1944 when the first Soviet military units and Jewish partisans set foot on the former mass killing site to the present day. He not only analyzes the evolution of the memorial's content, the changes in its status, and the development of the physical site itself, but he also uncovers the relationship between the memorial's development and the vicissitudes of memory policy. As Vitkus explores the significance of Paneriai, he reveals it as a symbol of the Holocaust for different commemorative cultures: those of Lithuania, Poland, Israel, and Jews in the United States.

Literature of Absence explores the literary representations of wartime atrocities and the Holocaust in Hungary from 1945 to the late 1950s. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, survivor accounts, diverse in genre, perspective, and literary value, came to light as testimonies, novels and short stories, anthologies, and stage plays. These accounts appeared predominantly during the first three postwar years but diminished in frequency thereafter. The absence reinforced a preconception that still persists today, that there was a general silence about the Holocaust in postwar Hungary.Tamás Kisantal resolves this absence with a critical examination of the first survivor testimonies, humor in early Holocaust writings, the notion of the "martyr writer," and the challenges of addressing and representing Hungarian responsibility—not only that of former politicians and leaders, but also that of ordinary people. Ultimately, Literature of Absence examines how the recent past was represented within the framework of anti-Fascist literature and how certain works attempted to transcend these generic and ideological constraints in order to articulate their own approach to the Hungarian Holocaust.