Holocaust and Memory"The book is the product of a protracted, laborious and scrupulous research and draws on a most extensive and varied assembly of documents. But the archival evidence, factual accounts and even personal narratives would have remained remote, dry and cold if not for the author's remarkable gift of empathy. Barbara Engelking gives the witnesses of the Holocaust a voice which readers of this book will understand....Under her pen memories come alive again."--from the Foreword by Zygmunt BaumanOriginally published in Polish to great acclaim and based on interviews with survivors of the Holocaust in Poland, Holocaust and Memory provides a moving description of their life during the war and the sense they made of it. The book begins by looking at the differences between the wartime experiences of Jews and Poles in occupied Poland, both in terms of Nazi legislation and individual experiences. On the Aryan side of the ghetto wall, Jews could either be helped or blackmailed by Poles. The largest section of the book reconstructs everyday life in the ghetto. The psychological consequences of wartime experiences are explored, including interviews with survivors who stayed on in Poland after the war and were victims of anti-Semitism again in 1968. These discussions bring into question some of the accepted survivor stereotypes found in Holocaust literature. A final chapter looks at the legacy of the Holocaust, the problems of transmitting experience and of the place of the Holocaust in Polish history and culture. |
Contents
1 | |
20 | |
2 Daily Life in the Ghetto | 81 |
3 Why Did It Happen? | 215 |
4 The Psychological Consequences of Holocaust Experiences | 243 |
5 The Legacy of the Holocaust | 304 |
331 | |
341 | |
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Common terms and phrases
action Adam Czerniaków Adina antisemitism Aryan side Auschwitz became behaviour believe bread chance of survival concentration camps corpses cultural death deportation difficult Editor's note emotions everyday everything example existence extermination fact fate father fear feeling Germans greasy-palmers guilt Hannah Arendt happened hiding Holocaust survivors human hunger individual inhabitants Interview 35 Irena Janusz Korczak Jerzy Jewish Judenrat kind knew Korczak Krystyna Żywulska later Leszno living Łódź ghetto Małgorzata memoirs memory moral mother Nazis Nazism normal occupation organized parents passivity perhaps person Poland Poles and Jews Polish possible prewar Primo Levi prisoners problems psychological question ration remember rumours Ryszard Sakowska sense situation social society someone starvation Stefan street suffering talk terrible things thought took totalitarianism Treblinka typhus Umschlagplatz understand Uprising victims Victor Frankl Warsaw ghetto Warsaw Uprising wartime experiences wrote złotys