MetaFilter posts tagged with shoah

Women and the Holocaust

Kattullus — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:06:39 -0800

Women and the Holocaust is a site about women's experiences in the Holocaust. It has poetry, testimonials, personal reflections, tributes, essays and more.

Righteous among the Peoples

Skeptic — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:59:58 -0800

In March 1944, Nazi Germany occupied its ally Hungary and immediately began preparing the extermination of Hungary's Jews. A small band of diplomats from neutral countries and the Red Cross put their lives at risk to try to smuggle as many Jews as possible out of Hungary from under Adolf Eichmann's nose. While Raoul Wallenberg remains the best known of these "Righteous among the Nations", there's no doubt that the most intriguing character was Giorgio "Jorge" Perlasca. A fugitive himself, as an Italian national who had refused his allegiance to Mussolini's puppet Salò Republic, Perlasca had found refuge at the Spanish embassy, where he immediately received a Spanish passport as a veteran from the Italian Francoist volunteers of the CTV in the Spanish Civil War, and joined the Spanish chargé d'affaires, Ángel Sanz Briz, in protecting as many Sephardic (and not-so-Sephardic) Jews as possible under a 1924 Spanish decree granting citizenship to these descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. When the Spanish diplomats were withdrawn to Switzerland, Perlasca appointed himself Spanish ambassador and continued Sanz Briz' efforts at enormous personal risk. After the war, he proceeded to retreat into obscurity until rediscovered forty years later.

The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe

anotherpanacea — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:11:22 -0800

Tony Judt's acceptance speech for the 2007 Hannah Arendt Prize: "Let me suggest five difficulties that arise from our contemporary preoccupation with the Shoah, with what every schoolchild now calls 'the Holocaust.'"

“I study dead Jews”

elgilito — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 06:59:59 -0800

"So much for “never again.” So the problem has obviously not disappeared."
Raul Hilberg (1926-2007, NYT obit) explains why he added a chapter on Rwanda to the last edition of The destruction of the European Jews, a work that took him a lifetime and 3 editions to complete, meeting with indifference, then with criticism from those who didn't share his (at the beginning) functionalist view of the Holocaust. Hilberg became involved in other controversies about the Holocaust, but "The Destruction..." remains the "the closest of any work in print to being the Summa of Holocaust studies" (Christopher Browning). Also: Hilberg intervied by Claude Lanzmann in "Shoah" (YT) (previously).

Holocaust Archive Is Going Public

ericb — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 10:14:44 -0800

The largest archive of Nazi prison camp records, which has been closed for 50 years, is going public in May 2007. The International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany consists of 16 miles of files in six nondescript buildings in the German spa town and contains the fullest record of Nazi persecutions in existence. This past April Germany finally agreed to open access to the archive, ending a nasty diplomatic dispute between the United States and Germany.

“Yes, but in my film time is shattered.”

matteo — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 11:10:24 -0800

"I would like to do better, to be better than I am". He's the French New Wave maverick and Academy Award winner (at 26, for his first short) who, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- with considerable personal pain and the admission that "no description, no picture can reveal the true dimension" of what happened in the camps -- made what François Truffaut called "the greatest film ever made", duly censored by French authorities. Four years later he baffled audiences with "the first modern film of sound cinema", shattering the rules of chronology to describe the “anguish of the future”: even if all he ever wanted was "to stop death in its tracks" (French language link), only for one minute. But he is also the unabashed lover of la bande dessinée who learnt English by reading comic books and in the Seventies dreamed (French language link) of making "Spider-Man" into a movie (the Hollywood studios were not convinced), the MGM old-school musical and operetta nut so in love with design that "half of the fashion photography of the past 40 years owes a debt" to him. Now, Alain Resnais' new work, just shown at the Venice Film Festival where his buddy David Lynch was awarded a lifetime achievement Golden Lion, is a French film inspired by an English play with 54 short scenes, music by the X-Files's Mark Snow. (more inside)

"The Holocaust is ultimately a ghost story, and Poles have many reasons to be haunted."

matteo — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 08:25:52 -0800

In 1945-46, some of the (very few) Polish Jews who had survived the Final Solution returned -- sick, poor, wounded -- to Poland. In Elie Wiesel's words, "they had thought all too naively that antisemitism, discredited 6 million times over, had died at Auschwitz with its victims. They were wrong." In 2001 Princeton professor Jan T Gross published the story of the 1941 destruction of the Jewish community at Jedwabne, Poland, and proved how Jews were rounded up, clubbed, drowned, gutted or burned to death not by German forces as previously believed but by mobs of their own non-Jewish neighbors. Now professor Gross tells the story of the Kielce pogrom in his new book, "Fear". Of course, the Kielce butchery took place in 1946 -- more than a year after the end of WWII and defeat of Nazism. More inside.

Full Fathom Nine

matteo — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 09:09:22 -0800

Mahler performances were rare in Vienna in those days because Mahler's city had already been contaminated by the acolytes of Adolf Hitler. By their reckoning, Mahler's music was loathsome — a product of "Jewish decadence." To put Mahler's music on the program was therefore a political act. It was to protest and deny the hateful faith that blazed across the border from Germany. That much I understood quite clearly, even as a boy.
The New Yorker's Alex Ross reprints Hans Fantel's New York Times 1989 essay on Bruno Walter's 1938 performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony -- the last performance of the Vienna Philharmonic before Hitler invaded Austria.

From the Diary of Adam Czerniakow on the Eve of the Deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto, 1942

matteo — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 11:22:29 -0800

"They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands"
On October 4, 1939, a few days after Warsaw's surrender to the Nazis, Adam Czerniaków was made head of the 24 member Judenrat, the Jewish Council (write "Czerniakow" in the linked page's search box) responsible for implementing German orders in the Jewish community (interactive map of the Warsaw ghetto). On July 22, 1942 -- Tisha B'Av, the "saddest day in Jewish history" -- the Judenrat received instructions that all Warsaw Jews were to be deported to the East (exceptions were to be made for Jews working in German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat and their families, and members of the Jewish police force and their families. Czerniaków tried to convince the Germans at least not to deport the Jewish orphans). Czerniaków kept a diary from September 6, 1939, until the day of his death. It was published in 1979 in the English language as the "The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom", edited by one of the most prominent Holocaust scholars, Raul Hilberg. More inside.

Operation Anthropoid

matteo — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 11:34:23 -0800

Operation Anthropoid. In 1942, a group of Czech and Slovak exiles parachuted into their Nazi-occupied homeland and assassinated (hi-res pictures, scroll down) SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Final Solution, the "Butcher of Prague." For the first time since the end of the World War Two, a German museum is offering a close look at "Operation Anthropoid," the codename for the only successful assassination of a member of Adolf Hitler's inner circle.

The Return of Jerry Moses and the Jewish Migration to Shanghai

matteo — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:59:35 -0800

"Ala ZongGoNin! Ala YouTaNin!". Jerry Moses last walked on Gaoyang Road in 1947. It was called Chaoufoong Road then, and it was home to many of the 18,000 European Jewish refugees who had sought refuge from Nazi Germany in Shanghai's Hongkew District (today known as Hongkou) during the run-up to World War II. He casts his gaze at the lane, his brow loosens and he begins to nod. "This is it, this is it," he says softly. "I know this is it." One week into his first visit to Shanghai in almost 60 years, Moses has found his third home in an exile that lasted from 1941 to 1947. He strides into the space, his manner now much closer to that of the 12-year-old boy who had left than the 70-year-old man who has returned. More inside.

Andrzej Munk: Wry Smiles, Suspicious Glances

matteo — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 11:00:57 -0800

Eroica. Film director Andrzej Munk’s tragic death at age thirty-nine might have formed the plot for one of his own darkly sardonic works: a Polish Jew and an active resistance worker during the war, he was returning home from shooting his film Passenger at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1961 when an oncoming truck struck his car. He left behind only four feature films, but his influence was prodigious. As one of the key figures of the postwar “Polish School” of filmmaking, along with Wajda and Kawalerowicz, he helped to shape a vision that broke with the official social realist optimism of Eastern-bloc dogma and cast a skeptical eye on official notions of heroism, nationalism, and life in the Stalinist-occupied state. Mentor to Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski, his influence can be felt even in the films of a later generation of Polish filmmakers — directors like Zanussi and Kieslowski. More inside.

Simon Wiesenthal, 1908-2005

matteo — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 04:22:30 -0800

Goodnight, mr. Wiesenthal

Holocaust Archive

OmieWise — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 06:21:02 -0800

Remember.org is a huge archive of the Shoah. It contains sections on the accounts of survivors and liberators (here is an account by Helen L. of her childhood in Auschwitz, here is Harry Herder's account of liberating Buchenwald, here is Jacques Lipetz account of WWII in Manila, here is part of a history of life in the Warsaw Ghetto), images from the camps and pictures of artwork produced by survivors (here is Mauthausen then and now, here is a picture of a prisoner at Dachau from this extensive archive of historical images, here are some drawings by Jan Komski, an Auschwitz survivor), and an extensive sections of excerpts of books written by survivors. Many of the images and accounts on this website are quite disturbing.

Amelie Nothomb's "Sulphuric Acid"

matteo — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 10:24:53 -0800

Novelist posits Shoah as reality TV show. In her new book titled ’Sulphuric Acid’ published in France, the successful Belgian author Amelie Nothomb describes a “concentration camp reality show”. It's the story of a reality show called “Concentration”. There are ’candidates’ which are arrested in roundups, tattooed and guarded before they are executed one by one following a vote by the spectators.

Singing, Painting and the Holocaust: Interview with Leon Greenman

matteo — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 12:31:47 -0800

you'll then have a grave in the clouds where you won't lie too cramped
"No, no, I never met Paul Celan. This poem is too CLASSIC, too cold, and too difficult to follow. It does nothing to me".
Singing, Painting and the Holocaust: Interview with Leon Greenman, Auschwitz Survivor 98288

.

PenDevil — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 04:23:48 -0800

"...I should like someone to remember that there once lived a person named David Berger"

About Shoah

iffley — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 01:21:18 -0800

I haven't yet spent the nine-and-a-half hours it takes to watch "Shoah" but this sad, floating article makes me want to.