Holocaust History and Historiography

Postmodernism argues that historical reality is constructed by historians and the written documents they study, and that historical truth is shaped by and reflects the perspective of the historian. Conclusions are subjective and postmodernism encourage suspicion of hierarchy and claims to essential universal truths. Historians can never completely replicate or reconstruct the past, hence the need for deconstructionism. 1

הצורך לתעד ולספר את קורות השואה מצא לו אפיקים שונים, המהווים בסיס לחקר התקופה ולשימור זיכרונה. שני המאמרים שלהלן עוסקים בסוג ייחודי של כתיבת זיכרונות מתקופת השואה, שטרם נחקר. מדובר ברבנים (או למדנים) ניצולי שואה, אשר העלו את זיכרונותיהם והגותם על השואה לא כיצירה בפני עצמה, אלא כמבוא לספר קודש שכתבו (חידושי תורה, ספרי הלכה, דרוש, מחשבה ופרשנות). המבוא כתוב בזיקה אל הספר, אך גם עומד בפני עצמו.
המאמר סוקר גם את מסד הנתונים שהפיקה המכללה ירושלים העוסק במבואות כטקסטים לחקר השואה.

A chronology of all measures introduced by the National Socialist municipal administration and other perpetrator agencies against the Berlin Jews. The day by day chronicle, based on many hitherto unknown sources, provides the reader with a detailed and graphic picture of how the exclusion of the Jews from all spheres of public life unfolded over time and who was responsible for it. The introduction discusses the overlooked importance of local institutions for the radicalization of the persecution in the capital of the Third Reich, yet also touches upon the reactions and resistance of the Jews.

"… we should remember that our definitions are abstractions from reality, and reality is much more complicated than our definitions can be, and rather than trying to fit reality into the abstraction, we should adapt definitions to reality." 1 HOLOCAUST WHAT, WHO, WHY, WHEN, WHERE? A global ideological and political process to create a racist world ruled by the 'Aryan' race The Holocaust was the global, ideological, "systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder" 2 of millions of innocent civilians for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, between 1933 and 1945, by Hitler's Nazi Germany and its collaborators, in the Nazi attempt to "reorganize humanity along racial lines," 3 and create a utopian racist and exclusive world dominated by the "Aryan" master race-a new world order. "Nazi-German racist ideology," Nazism, National Socialism, an exclusive, racist, fascist, and totalitarian ideology, "based on a racist vision of the world, was the main driving force" 4 5 behind the Holocaust. In 1945, "by war's end, {World War II} approximately six million Jews and millions of others {targeted for racial, ethnic, national, political, ideological and behavioral reasons: political and religious dissidents, members of the Clergy, Afro-Germans, Roma-Sinti/Gypsies, the physically and mentally challenged, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, some of the Slavic peoples-Poles, Russians, Soviet prisoners of war, Afro-American and Jewish prisoners of war and others} had perished in the Holocaust." 6 "More than one million of the victims were children." 7 Holocaust is a Greek word meaning "sacrifice by fire"-a sacrifice burnt entirely on the altar. This word was chosen because the bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria and open fires.

The unconstrained, ideological drive to murder every Jew distinguishes the Holocaust from prior and later ethnocide and mass murder. Op-ed Dr. Alex Grobman 01.02.22 23:39 To the Nazis, they were a satanic force that supposedly ruled the world through their control of Wall Street and the communist regime in the Soviet Union. A sophisticated individual would probably have recognized the inconsistency of this logic as well as the false assertion that Jews are a separate race. Yet, however simplistic, for the common German, and later for the rest of Europe, this absurd claim served as a useful rationalization. Sadly, there are people throughout the world who still subscribe to this and like myths. Believing in all sorts of pseudoscientific and racial nonsense, the Nazis saw the Jews as a cancer, a dangerous virus, a bacillus that, if left unchecked, would allow the Jews to dominate the world completely. [1] In 1942, Hitler told Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, that "The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world, the battle in which we are engaged today is one of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by [Louis] Pasteur and [Robert] Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jews. We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew. Everything has a cause, nothing comes by chance." [2]

A selection of 37  poems in Yiddish, collected in 6 chapters, edited by Dorit Rubinstein:
העניעלע (Henie)
די ברוינע מגפֿה  (The Brown Plague)
פֿון יענע טעג (About Those Days)
דרײַ געשרייען (Three Screams)
קינות (Lamentations)
די גלאָקן פֿון פּערפּיניאַן (The Bells of Perpignan)

Developing the professional competencies of future teachers is one of the main tasks of the faculties of education. The framework of the expected qualifications for ensuring the quality of education and professional development of teachers is determined by General Competencies for Teaching Profession in Turkey. Field teacher candidates are also required to acquire competencies specific to the field in the preparation phase of the profession. The field education knowledge competency of the History Teacher Special Field Competencies in Turkey includes the ability to associate the history course with the environment. One of the performance indicators of this competence is "organizing educational trips (to libraries, archives, museums and historical places, etc.) within the framework of the social activities regulation" The purpose of this study is to provide history teacher candidates with a performance indicator for organizing educational trips to out-ofschool learning areas in History Teacher Special Field Competencies. The study group of this research, which is designed according to action research, one of the qualitative research methods, consists of 72 history teacher candidates studying in the Pedagogical Formation Certificate Program at the Faculty of Education of a state university. The data of the research were obtained using a semi-structured interview form. Within the scope of the research, firstly, history teacher candidates were given education on out-of-school history education in the special teaching methods course. Afterwards, Anne Frank-A History For Today Exhibition was visited and the teaching designs and views of the history teacher candidates on how to use this history exhibition in their lessons were examined. According to the results of the research, it was observed that the education given to increase the proficiency of history teacher candidates for out-of-school history teaching was effective and, in this context, they were able to use the exhibition they visited in the history lessons they designed. In addition, historical thinking skills such as historical empathy, historical analysis and interpretation, historical comprehension and values such as respect for differences, respect for human rights and democracy, and tolerance are among the results of the research.

Book review in Dutch ("Ion Antonescu en de Roemeense geschiedenis") of monograph by Larry L. Watts, Romanian Cassandra: Ion Antonescu and the Struggle for Reform, 1916-1941.  Boulder/New York: East European Monographs/Columbia University Press, 1993. 390p. ISBN: 0-88033-255-7.

In response to Kristallnacht, the world was _not_ silent.  On the contrary, outrage and condemnation were widely expressed in newspapers and government statements.  It didn't matter.  I suggest that "one can argue that speaking out – at least from the safe distance of a newspaper or government office – can serve as a diversion from meaningful action. Condemnation, especially moralistic condemnation, easily fosters the illusion of “doing something.” After which, with clean conscience, one can return to not doing anything."

"If the international Finance-Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the peoples of the earth once again into a world war, the result will be ...the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." Hitler's speech to the Reichstag, January 30, 1939.

"Europe" as defined by Hitler himself, was "the European nations and their overseas possessions," inclusive of "French Morocco," "French Algeria," "French Tunisia" - "French North Africa" also called "France" (see maps 1, 2, 3), and Italian Libya/Italy N. Africa (Libya)." The Jews of European North Africa, in Vichy-North Africa and in Italian Libya/North Africa were part of "the Jews of Europe" that the Nazi regime wanted to annihilate in its "Final Solution to the Jewish question in Europe."

This unpublished paper (20 pages, 6,400 words in the text + 45 footnotes) was presented in an abridged version as a lecture at the international conference 'The Nations of Europe Facing the Holocaust', Session V: West European Countries under Occupation (Moderator: Dr. Marcin Urynowicz). This paper includes references to the most recent relevant research literature on this topic.
The conference was organized by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), Historical Research Office, December 6–8, 2017, in Warsaw.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Prof. Andrzej Żbikowski, Prof. Antony Polonsky.

Due to (international) political controversy, which ignited shortly after conclusion of the conference, the collected articles will not be published in an edited volume.

"If the international Finance-Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the peoples of the earth once again into a world war, the result will be ...the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." Hitler's speech to the Reichstag, January 30, 1939. "Europe" as defined by Hitler himself, was "the European nations and their overseas possessions," inclusive of "French Algeria" and its French departments," the French protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia" - also called "France" (see maps 1, 2, 3), and Italian Libya/Italy N. Africa (Libya)."
France: Metropolitan France and its overseas territories/possessions (territoires d’outre-mer); officially the French Republic (French: République française) is a sovereign country in Western Europe that includes several overseas regions and territories. Metropolitan France and Overseas France together form what is officially called the French Republic.

Metropolitan France (French: France métropolitaine or la Métropole – as used by General de Gaulle in 1941) is the part of France located in continental Europe. It is also referred to as "continental France, "mainland France" (as used by Renée Poznanski, expert on the Shoah in France), or as the French mainland.

La France d'outre-mer, or l'Outre-mer (Overseas France) is the collective name for French territories outside 'mainland France.' Because of its proximity to mainland France, French North Africa was considered "le prolongement de la France" and "an extension of Europe."

Stella's Secret is the inspirational memoir of how a young girl and her mother survive the Lodz ghetto and the death camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Bergen Belsen, and rebuild their lives in Israel and America. The reader listens to Stella’s stunning simplicity of expression, her use of Polish and Yiddish phrases, her humor, her all-so-frequent grammatical errors – and is charmed. Despite the horrors, the story is consistently uplifting and positive, and is suitable for younger readers. Recommended by the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center. It is a story that only Stella Yollin can tell, and it can only be told in Stella’s sweet and incomparable way.

מאמר מבוא למהדורה העברית של ספרו המונומנטאלי של ראול הילברג, ובו תיאור תולדות המחבר והספר, תוך שימת דגש על מסכת יחסיו עם יד ושם
Hilberg, "The Destruction of the European Jews", and Yad Vashem: an introduction to the 2012 Hebrew (definitive) edition of Hilberg's monumental study, with a history of the author, the book and especially his realtions with Yad Vashem since the 1950s

One of Art Spiegelman’s motivations for using animal forms for the characters in the two volumes of Maus was to depict the dehumanization of the Jews during the Holocaust and as well the inhuman behavior of the Nazis and people of other nations. There is another side to this dehumanization in Maus that we will explore, namely what Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) call “becoming animal,” which is a mode of social and personal transformation undergone for the sake of survival and vitality and obtained through adaptation and mutation. D&G use Spinoza’s account of bodily composition and affective alteration to explain how threatening influences can push people and their groups into a temporary state of anonymity. While under this mode of indeterminacy, new arrangements and compositions may freely form and dissipate, which allows them to effectively survive, evade, and subvert the intruding powers. D&G further elaborate these notions of “becoming-animal” and the formation of anonymous “packs” by utilizing their concept of the “machinic assemblage,” whose parts reconfigure in order to disrupt or “minorize” the machinery of the larger system. This minorization operates as well on the level of language, where the minor group works within the major language system to undermine their oppressor’s regime of signs and values. Maus for example adopts the visually metaphoric language that presented the Jewish people in rodent form, as seen for instance in the Nazi propaganda documentary The Eternal Jew (Fritz Hippler, Der Ewige Jude, 1940), which depicts the Jews as rats infesting the entire world. But by shifting to mice and by drawing the Nazis as cats, Spiegelman evades the fixed meanings of the major visual language and introduces very different connotations and interpretations. Yet, one criticism of Spiegelman’s use of animal forms is that it sanitizes the horrors of the Holocaust and falsifies them by rendering them cute and harmless. I reply by including Maus under what D&G call a “minor genre,” in this case a particular kind of minor documentary. Filmed documentaries are rarely objective and unbiased, as we have seen already with the propaganda film The Eternal Jew’s distortions and misrepresentations. And Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985), instead of presenting any archival footage of the Holocaust, merely interviews survivors, witnesses and former Nazi SS officers to “document” the subjective realities internal to the events. Maus as well is based on the recorded interviews of a Holocaust survivor, but instead of providing objective depictions of the visual horrors in his experiences, it instead documents the existential experience of losing cultural and personal identity. And the horrors of this particular element of the events are more effectively and faithfully documented using animal forms.

This pioneering project gathers data from research studies, historical information, testimonies and documents dealing with more than 1,100 ghettos throughout mainly Eastern Europe. It reflects the differences between each ghetto and reveals the radical changes in Jewish communal and individual life. The entries include the location, wartime name and geographical coordinates of each ghetto; and, for the larger ghettos, informational sections on the following: Pre-World War II; Soviet occupation; German (Nazi) occupation; ghetto setup; ghetto institutions and internal life; murder, terror and killing operations of ghetto inhabitants; underground and resistance; and number of survivors at liberation. Finalist of the 2010 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Holocaust Studies, and selected for the Booklist/RBB Editors’ Choice: Reference Sources Awards.

אנציקלופדיה זו היא הניסיון הראשון לקבץ את המידע ההיסטורי על הגטאות שבהם רוכזו
היהודים באזורי הכיבוש של גרמניה הנאצית ובעלות בריתה באירופה בתקופת השואה ומהם
גורשו רובם אל מותם, ולהגישו באופן שיטתי לחוקרים ולמתעניינים. המידע המובא כאן מבוסס
על עדויות שנאספו, על פרסומים קודמים, על מפעלי מחקר קודמים של יד ושם ועל מגוון מחקרים
שנעשו בישראל ובעולם ועסקו בנושא מנקודות מבט שונות.
בדיונו על הגטאות בימי השואה מציין דן מכמן במבוא ההיסטורי, כי שלטונות הרייך
השלישי לא הגדירו מעולם את המונח גטו בהגדרה משלהם. עבודתנו התבססה אפוא על הגדרת
עבודה רחבה ביותר למונח זה, שלא הושתתה על עיון תאורטי מקדים במונח, ואף לא על הדרך
שבה השתמשו בו הנאצים. במילים אחרות, לא הגדרנו "גטאות" דווקא את המקומות שהנאצים
כינו בשם זה בפקודותיהם, כפי שהן משתקפות בתיעוד הגרמני, אלא בחרנו לגבש את ההגדרה
באופן פנומנולוגי, כלומר מתוך עיון מתמיד בחומר ההיסטורי – סיפור תולדות היהודים במגוון
רחב של מקומות יישוב באזורי הכיבוש הנאצי – ובניסיון לאפיין באמצעותו את היסודות
המהותיים של התופעה.

A considerable number of first-generation Holocaust researchers were Polish Jews: Philip Friedman, Isaiah Trunk, Józef Kermisz, Nachman Blumental, Rachel Auerbach, Michał Borwicz, Joseph Wulf, Szymon Datner, Artur Eisenbach, Tatjana Berenstein and Bernard Mark, to name just a few. Most of them left Poland in the late 1940s and early 1950s and resettled in the United States, France, Israel or West Berlin. Others continued their work in Poland. They all made important contributions to the documentation and research of the German mass murder of European Jews and many to the legal processing of this too. What connects them is the institution at they began their work, known then as Churbn-forshung1: the Central Jewish Historical Commission (CJHC) in Poland, from which the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI) was formed in October 1947. The chapter describes the origin of and the scientific
work and documentation carried out by the Commission and Institute, as well as its contribution to the prosecution and punishment of Nazi perpetrators against the background of the political situation in communist post-war Poland, particularly the Jewish community there.

In 1946, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss, the longest serving commander of Auschwitz concentration camp, is awaiting trial in a Polish prison. Albert, a young and successful Polish investigation judge, is appointed to interrogate Hoss and get a perfect confession out of him. The encounter between the two men will unveil the frightening routine and banalization of evil that took place in the camp.
By introducing the use of Zyklon B in Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss carried out the most efficient mass killing process ever known, which claimed the lives of approximately 1.1 million people. The film is based on the memoirs Hoss wrote before his execution.

The famous writer Grigoriy Kanovich in his article entitled "The Second Escape," wrote that after the first escape from imminent death, which was the escape from the IX Fort, Alex Faitelson, with his book "Unconquered" dedicated to the struggle of the Jews of Lithuania against the Nazi occupiers, made a second escape.
“There is no doubt that Faitelson has built a memorial to the bravest of the brave, the Maccabees of the twentieth century. He did all he could to ensure that not one of them will be forgotten and nothing will be forgotten ...
Figuratively speaking, having written his most important book, written out of his own sufferings, he completed the second escape of his life - an escape from that hell known as the repression of memory.
And together with him, this escape was carried out by all those who appear in the pages of the book - those still alive, and those who passed away on to the next world, those who were at one with him in thought and deed, opponents and enemies, all those whom he describes in detail or only in passing (in words kind or unkind) in his unique and full work, deserving laurels."

Front page, table of contents and introductory article to an edited volume of a conference at Yad Vashem in December 2010.  Includes an introductory article by the editor: 'Beyond "Righteous Among the Nations" and "Altruism": On Rescuers and Rescue Activities During the Shoah

Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in November 1944, was the first place where the word "genocide" appeared in print.
Raphael Lemkin coined the new word "genocide" in 1943 (see the book's preface, dated November 15, 1943) both as a continuation of his 1933 Madrid Proposal and as part of his analysis of German occupation policies in Europe. In this 670 page book, Axis Rule, Lemkin introduced and directly addressed the question of genocide in 16 pages of Chapter IX entitled "Genocide" (below).
Lemkin uses the word genocide broadly, not only to describe policies of outright extermination against Jews and Gypsies, but for less immediate Nazi goals as well. In Lemkin's analysis Nazi Germany had undertaken a policy for the demographic restructuring of the European continent. Therefore he also used the word genocide to describe a "coordinated plan of different actions" intended to promote such goals as an increase in the birthrate of the "Aryan" population, the physical destruction of the Slavic population over a period of years, and policies to bring about the destruction of the "culture, language, national feelings, religion" and separate economic existence (but not physical existence) of non-German "Aryan" nations thought to be "linked by blood" to Germany.
In recent years the word "genocide" has most often been used to refer to the destruction of groups within a single country ("domestic genocide"). In Axis Rule, however, the word applies to occupation polices conducted across an entire continent. Policies within Germany are addressed only to the extent that these policies impacted Austria, and those parts of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, the Memel Territory and Poland formally incorporated into Germany.

De Ratones y Héroes, debe ser leído para contemplar con la debida distancia la som­bra narrativa de Maus sobre la producción imaginaria contemporánea. En el hilo secre­to que anuda los campos de concentración con el campamento de refugiados de Sabra y Chatila de Vals con Bashir, el campo se con­vierte en un umbral invisible del documental y la ficción contemporáneos, incluso en sus versiones más frívolas: desde las alambradas de Gorazde y Palestina, en la franja de Gaza, de Joe Sacco o de las películas de Rithy Panh y Joshua Oppenheimer hasta la velada me­táfora que anida en la prisión de la serie The Walking Dead, en la isla de la serie televisiva Perdidos o en la Zona Fantasma en la que son confinados los héroes Marvel de Civil War constituyen retornos incómodos de ese nin­guna parte en el que el individuo puede ser excluido, asesinado y profanado.
Estas palabras de Iván Pintor están extraídas de su prólogo en “De Ratones y Héroes” y describen perfectamente lo que se puede encontrar en este libro. Un recorrido por la memoria, no sólo de los supervivientes del Holocausto y de sus descendientes, sino también de todos aquellos elementos que configuran el imaginario de una obra tan fascinante como Maus. De Ratones y Héroes es el texto elegido por Ediciones Marmotilla para su salida al mercado, no sólo por su calidad, sino porque su autora, Raquel Crisóstomo, hace un recorrido por todas las influencias que conducen a la elaboración de una historia como Maus, desde un punto de vista absolutamente interdisciplinar relacionando el trabajo de Spiegelman no sólo con la memoria del Holocausto, sino con todas aquellos elementos que llevan a la configuración de esa obra maestra, desde los clásicos del cómic, hasta la propaganda bélica y el cine de animación. Una publicación, en definitiva, imprescindible para profundizar en el imaginario de Maus.