Primary Sources on Nazism and the Holocaust: The Holocaust

"A taut, terse Holocaust narrative that is all the more powerful for its ironic reserve." -- Kirkus Reviews

A group of musicians try to survive in a German concentration camp during World War II.

From 1942 to 1944, twelve thousand children passed through the Theresienstadt internment camp, near Prague, on their way to Auschwitz. Only a few hundred of them survived the war. In The Girls of Room 28, ten of these children, mothers, and grandmothers today in their seventies, tell us how they did it.

This book is the first to bring together analyses of the full range of post-war testimony given by survivors of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando were slave labourers in the gas chambers and crematoria, forced to process and dispose of the bodies of those who were murdered. Moving from testimonies produced within the event, the Scrolls of Auschwitz and the Sonderkommando photographs, to testimonies given at trials and for video archives, and to the paintings of David Olère and the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, this book demonstrates the importance of their witnessing in the post-war memory of the Holocaust, and provides vital new insights into the questions of representation, memory, gender, and the Shoah.

In an authoritative, fully-documented study, Dr. Cohen, a Dutch physician who was himself a prisoner at Auschwitz, has produced a remarkably dispassionate account of life in the German concentration camps. His great contribution lies in his analysis of the mentality of the prisoners and the SS. Basing his conclusions on his own experiences as well as on books and articles by many other inmates, Dr. Cohen attempts to answer two questions: what enabled the prisoners to withstand the horrible treatment and what caused the SS men to perpetrate the monstrous acts of barbarity?

Fifty years after the war Dagmar Ostermann, a former prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Hans Wilhelm Muinch, former Nazi and SS physician, talk face to face. In this rare interview Muinch–the only SS member acquitted during the 1947 Cracow war crimes trial refers to himself as a "victim," claiming that because he had to follow orders he was "no less a victim than his prisoners."

In 1941, the fortress city of Terezin, outside Prague, was ostensibly converted into model ghetto, where Jews could temporarily reside before being sent to a more permanent settlement. In reality it was a way station to Auschwitz. When young Gonda Redlich was deported to Terezin in December of 1941, the elders selected him to be in charge of the youth welfare department. He kept a diary during his imprisonment, chronicling the fear and desperation of life in the ghetto, the attempts people made to create a cultural and social life, and the disease, death, rumors, and hopes that were part of daily existence. Before his own deportation to Auschwitz, with his wife and son, in 1944, he concealed his diary in an attic, where it remained until discovered by Czech workers in 1967.

This collection brings together revealing primary documents on the crucial origins of the Nazi concentration camp system in the prewar years between 1933 and 1939, which have been overlooked thus far. Many of the documents are unpublished and have been translated into English for the first time. These documents provide insight into the camps from multiple perspectives, including those of prisoners, Nazi officials, and foreign observers, and shed light on the complex relationship between terror, state, and society in the Third Reich.

In 1941 Berek Jakubowicz (now Benjamin Jacobs) was deported from his Polish village and remained a prisoner of the Reich until the final days of the war. His possession of a few dental tools and rudimentary skills saved his life. Jacobs helped assemble V1 and V2 rockets in Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau; spent a year and a half in Auschwitz, where he was forced to remove gold teeth from corpses; and survived the RAF attack on three ocean liners turned prison camps in the Bay of Lubeck. This is his story.

Twelve-year-old Michael Kraus began keeping a diary while he was still living at home in the Czech city of Nachód but continued writing while a prisoner at Theresienstadt (Terezín). When he was shipped with other prisoners to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, all of his writings were confiscated and destroyed. After his liberation and while convalescing, he began to draw and make notes again about his experiences in Theresienstadt, in Auschwitz, the first death march out of Mauthausen, and its satellite camps, in Melk and Gunskirchen. The present edition makes this memoir, originally written in Czech and significant for having been written so close to the author's liberation, widely available to English readers for the first time. It also reproduces pages from the original booklets that show how the teenage Kraus illustrated his memories with pencil drawings that both complement and extend his story, giving readers a sense of its character as an unusual and important historical document.

From 1942 to 1944, a group of thirteen-to-fifteen-year-old Jewish boys secretly produced a weekly magazine called Vedem (In the Lead) at the model concentration camp, Theresienstadt ("Terezín" in Czech). The writers, artists, and editors put together the issues and copied them by hand behind the blackout shades of their cellblock, which they affectionately called the "Republic of Shkid." Although the material was saved by one of the handful of boys who survived the Holocaust, it was suppressed for fifty years in Czechoslovakia until 1995, when these works were published simultaneously in English, Czech, and German. Vedem provides a poignant glimpse into the world of boys torn from their comfortable childhoods and separated from their families, ultimately to perish in the Nazi death machine.

Twenty women prisoners' accounts of the Auschwitz inferno presenting the female experience in the camps. This title deals with general issues that were common to all inmates, as well as with gender-specific problems such as how they lived, how they managed to survive, and what were the main problems they had to confront in their struggle for existence. Included are eyewitness accounts of the pseudo-medical activities and personnel, and of the resistance groups within the camp.

Few men have endured the debasement, hunger, torture, & illness that tested the body & spirit of Thaddeus Stabholz, a physician whose personal story of the Holocaust makes up this rivetting memoir. This is his description of passage through his own "seven hells" –the Warsaw Ghetto, Treblinka, Maidanek, Birkenau, Sachsenhausen, Dachau XI, & Dachau IV.

Norbert Troller's memoir recounts his two years in Theresienstadt from early 1942 until September 1944, when he was deported to Auschwitz after the Nazis discovered he and other artists were smuggling out drawings that revealed the horrors of Theresienstadt. Miraculously preserved by his friends, Troller's drawings and watercolors of life inside Theresienstadt add a compelling dimension to his story and are published here for the first time.

Fifteen thousand children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp. Fewer than 100 survived. In these poems and pictures drawn by the young inmates, we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their hopes and fears, their courage and optimism. 60 color illustrations.

Analyzing the earliest debates over the memory of Nazi camps, the author makes an important contribution to the study of their origin, reducing the existing asymmetry in our knowledge on the relevant phenomena in Western and Eastern Europe. This is all the more important as the Poles and Polish Jews, whose involvement in the disputes over memory she describes, were the most important group of survivors and eyewitnesses of the camps and so the genuine group of memory. The vast number and variety of sources used in this work create a fascinating picture of a multifaceted, rich, vivid, and at times heated debate conducted in Poland in the late 1940s.

That a Jew living in Nazi Berlin survived the Holocaust at all is surprising. That he was a homosexual and a teenage leader in the resistance and yet survived is amazing. But that he endured the ongoing horror with an open heart, with love and without vitriol, and has written about it so beautifully is truly miraculous. This is Gad Beck's story.

This fascinating tapestry of four interwoven voices documents the experiences of each member of an Italian Jewish family during World War II. The polyphonic voice of the narrative communicates with wrenching vividness the Neppi Modonas' pain and strength, and at the same time, through Cohen's mediating consciousness, provides insights into being a Jew in a post-Holocaust world.

In this disturbing but inspirational account of her experiences of the Holocaust, Lucille Eichengreen relates her journey as a young Jewish girl through Nazi Germany and Poland – including internment in the camps at Auschwitz, Neuengamme, and Bergen-Belsen.

Now available in English, here is the award-winning and internationally acclaimed testament of a Jewish woman who was taken to Auschwitz while several months pregnant, where she was forced to confront perhaps the most agonizing choice ever imposed upon any woman, upon any human being, so that both she and her newborn infant should not die in a Nazi "medical" experiment personally conducted by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. And just as vividly, Ruth Elias recounts the aftermath of her imprisonment, and the difficult path to a new life in a new land: Israel, where new challenges, new obstacles awaited.

In 1921, Françoise Frenkel--a Jewish woman from Poland--fulfills a dream. She opens La Maison du Livre, Berlin's first French bookshop, attracting artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets. The shop becomes a haven for intellectual exchange as Nazi ideology begins to poison the culturally rich city. In 1935, the scene continues to darken. First come the new bureaucratic hurdles, followed by frequent police visits and book confiscations. Published quietly in 1945, then rediscovered nearly sixty years later in an attic, A Bookshop in Berlin is a remarkable story of survival and resilience, of human cruelty and human spirit.

Jana Renée Friesová was fifteen when she was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Czech ghetto town of Terezín (Theresienstadt). Her memoir unfolds before us the poignantly familiar picture of a young girl who, even under the most abominable circumstances, engages in intense adolescent friendships, worries with her companions over her looks, and falls in love.

"First published in France in 1984, 'A Survivor' documents the daily struggle of an ordinary man to live through the wrenching hell of the Nazi death camps of World War II. In this simple diary of everyday events, Garbarz relives the horror and barbarism that he witnessed--the forced labor, near starvation, terrible beatings-–helplessly watching the deaths of friends."

The Holocaust Memoir Digest consists of detailed summaries of the published memoirs of Holocaust survivors. For some survivors, the need to write and record their eyewitness accounts began as soon as the war ended; for others, it is their advancing years that have created the impetus to publish their personal testimonies.

In this collection Freda Hodge retrieves early voices of Holocaust survivors. Men, women and children relate experiences of deportation and ghettoisation, forced labour camps and death camps, death marches and liberation. Carefully selected and painstakingly translated, these survivor accounts were first published between 1946 and 1948 in the Yiddish journal Fun Letzten Khurben (From the Last Destruction) in postwar Germany, by refugees waiting in Displaced Person camps, in the American zone of occupation, for the arrival of travel documents and visas.

Marione Ingram grew up in Hamburg, Germany, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She was German. She was Jewish. She was a survivor. In this stirring account of World War II through the eyes of a child, the author's eloquent narrative elicits compassion from readers.

The author recounts his experiences hiding in Nazi-occupied Netherlands and surviving two years at Auschwitz, and describes changes in his life after his liberation.

An Italian-Jewish journalist and schoolteacher who joined the Italian partisans in 1943, Liana Millu was arrested in 1944 and deported to Birkenau. The astonishing stories in this book tell of the women who lived and suffered alongside her.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Halina Nelken was a precocious fifteen-year-old, living a middle-class life in Krakow. Like other girls her age, she recorded her personal observations and feelings in a diary. As conditions in Krakow deteriorated and her family was forced into the Jewish ghetto, she continued to write, eventually smuggling her diary out with a Catholic friend. This remarkable book tells the story of Nelken's experiences in the ghetto and later in eight Nazi concentration camps, including Plaszow, Auschwitz, and Ravensbröck. Her diary entries, written between 1938 and 1943, form the core of the volume and are supplemented by recollections written shortly after the war, and by later commentaries and explanatory notes which she added in the mid-1980s.

In 1946, Russian-born American psychologist David P. Boder interviewed 109 victims of Nazi persecution–the majority of them Jews–in "Displaced Persons" camps across Europe. The thirty-six accounts collected here possess an immediacy and authenticity that might otherwise be questioned in memoirs penned long after the events they detail. These interviews encompass survivors from Poland, Lithuania, Germany, France, Slovakia, and Hungary, ranging in age from their early teens to their seventies.

A Holocaust survivor chronicles the chain of events that kept him alive, providing first-hand accounts of Hitler's rise to power, Kristallnacht, and confinement in various concentration camps.

"This chilling memoir effectively reminds us of the inhumanity with which people treated their fellow humans.'' - Library Journal

Lilka Trzcinska was fourteen years old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. The Labyrinth of Dangerous Hours is the memoir of a survivor. Lilka Trzcinska-Croydon narrates her adolescence and that of her sisters and brother in a way that binds poetry and history together seamlessly.

April 7, 1944 -- Alarm sirens announce the escape of two Slovak prisoners from a heavily-guarded camp in Nazi Germany. The escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, succeed and flee more than one hundred miles to give the first graphic and exact descriptions of the operations at Auschwitz, which up to that point had only been heard about as unverifiable rumours. Their report, first punished in Swiss and then in the western press, made the reality of Nazi annihilation camps explicit and unequivocal to Pope Pius XII, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A Holocaust survivor tells how luck and determination kept him alive, from his association with a Jewish smuggler to his own escape from a death march at the war's end.

Published in English for the first time, Refugee Conversations is a delightful work that reveals Brecht as a master of comic satire. Written swiftly in the opening years of the Second World War, the dialogues have an urgent contemporary relevance to a Europe once again witnessing populations on the move.

"Class of '31" is a beautifully written memoir from Walter Jessel, a German Jew determined to answer the question that haunted him since emigrating to the United States in 1938: "Would the people of other nations, if they were placed in the same position as the German during the Hitler regime, behave in the same manner?" Born in 1913 in Frankfurt, Jessel led an extraordinary twentieth-century life on three continents. In 1945, Jessel returned to Germany as an American soldier and sought out his former classmates, hoping to understand how they survived, or thrived, in Nazi Germany.

The unlikely refuge of Shanghai, the only city in the world that did not require a visa, was buffeted by the struggle between European imperialism, Japanese aggression, and Chinese nationalism. Ernest G. Heppner's compelling testimony is a brilliant account of this little-known haven.

Odyssey of Exile paints a sensitive a compelling portrait of German-Jewish women who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Arriving in South America, they faced haunting memories of the terror they had escaped and the challenge of adjusting to Brazil's patriarchal culture, unstable economy, and tropical climate. Nine educated women from the German middle class are the focus of this volume. Katherine Morris places their memoirs in historical context, offering rare glimpses into personal histories.

On a fateful day in May 1941, in Nazi-occupied Strasbourg, seventeen-year- old Pierre Seel was summoned by the Gestapo. This was the beginning of his journey through the horrors of a concentration camp. For nearly forty years, Seel kept this secret in order to hide his homosexuality. Eventually he decided to speak out, bearing witness to an aspect of the Holocaust rarely seen.

This book takes the reader through Dr. Włodzimierz Szer's childhood in Yiddish prewar Warsaw, adolescence and imprisonment in wartime Russia, to the brutal reality of immediate postwar Poland, and the years of the socialist regime. Although largely autobiographical, the book provides a historically and intellectually compelling analysis of the social and political situation in Poland and Soviet Russia from the early 1930s to 1967.

Crossing Over tells the story of a group of Austrian and German Jews who fled their homelands for America between 1938 and 1941, during Hitler's rise to power and before the implementation of the final solution. This book is a unique examination of the support groups immigrants establish to help them through the transition to a new society, as well as a rich collection of tales of people who lived through the persecution and fear in pre-World War II Europe.