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Presents stories of women who lived and suffered alongside Liana Millu during months in a concentration camp, describing their struggle to overcome violence and tragedy
Includes 204 photos, plans and maps illustrating The Holocaust Arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 for involvement in the resistance, the author spent three years in Birkenau. Severyna Szmaglewska (1916-1992) began writing this book immediately after escaping from an evacuation transport in January 1945, and it is the first account of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and an eloquent and important analysis of the individual experience of modern war. It was ready for print before the end of 1945, after several months of feverish work. In February 1946 the International Tribunal in Nuremberg included it in the material making up the charges against the Nazi perpetrators, and called upon the author to give testimony. Since 1945, Smoke over Birkenau has been reprinted frequently and widely translated. Critics, and three generations of readers, praised it for truthfulness, accuracy, and lasting literary merit: as memories of war-time genocide fade with the passage of time, Szmaglewska’s readers are able to stay in touch with extremes of experience which must never be forgotten. “Smoke over Birkenau is not a book about death or hatred,” one critic wrote. “It is a powerful act of the will to live and a profession of the noblest humanism. The victorious idea of life is woven through every page. Maintaining, cultivating, and instilling in oneself the imperative: You must endure! You must live! – a plan carried out unswervingly despite everything.”-Print ed.
An Italian-Jewish journalist and schoolteacher who joined the 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 Liana during her months there. They are stories of violence and tragedy, but also of resistance, of dreaming in the middle of a nightmare, and of the endurance of the human spirit.
In this moving memoir, a young Polish Jew chronicles his life under the Nazis. In the vain hope of protecting himself and his family, Calel Perechodnik made the wrenching decision to become a ghetto policeman in a small town near Warsaw. The true tragedy of his choice becomes clear when during the Aktion he must witness his own wife and child forced to board a train to the Treblinka extermination camp. Filled with loathing for the Germans, the Poles, his Jewish brethren, and himself, Perechodnik fled the ghetto to shelter with a Polish woman in Warsaw. In the course of 105 terror-filled days in hiding, he poured out his poignant story. Written while Nazi boots pounded the streets of the neighborhood and while his tortured memory was painfully fresh, this memoir has a rare immediacy and raw power. Shortly before his death in 1944, he entrusted the precious diary to a Polish friend. The document was eventually deposited in the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem. Left nearly forgotten for half a century, it was finally published in Poland in 1993. We owe a great debt to historian Frank Fox for bringing us this sensitive translation, which reminds us anew of the power and truth of historical memory.
Following her acclaimed Ruined by Reading, Lynne Sharon Schwartz moves from the world of books to the broader world outside, tracing the solitary self as it's shaped and defined by connections large and small. These essays move through a landscape of varied encounters that blossom into self-discovery for the reader as well as the writer. Once again, we find ourselves illuminated by Schwartz's relentless, sometimes hopeful, and always fiercely intelligent gaze.
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ENGLISH a timeless tribute to one of the world’s most marginalized peoples and the riveting tale of one boy’s journey to manhood Sweeping us into the world of the roma as fascism gathers force and the Holocaust looms on the horizon, The Color of Smoke is a thoroughly absorbing story that abounds in unforgettable characters. There is the adolescent narrator, torn between his people and a society that both entices him and rejects him. From his rise in school to his first sexual encounters, from hunger to police harassment, he treads a precarious path--one marked by moments of beauty and poignancy along with bawdiness, violence, and high adventure. And we come to know a people bound as much by a rich moral fabric as by the land and by the horses they love. By an author who himself came of age in a Romani settlement during World War II, The Color of Smoke is a must read for anyone seeking a stunningly new, authoritative window onto the lives of the dispossessed--with haunting implications for today.Magisterial in scope and yet intensely personal, it combines beautiful prose with profound reflections on the human condition as only great literature can. From the Trade Paperback edition.
"For Nazi Germany, the ghetto was a conceptual tool used to facilitate social and political exclusion and further their anti-Jewish campaign. For the Jews who lived in them, the ghetto became the center of their lives--even though they were also sites of immense suffering. Combining thorough historical research with an interdisciplinary analysis of the relationship between space and violence, Violent Space provides a unique insight into the history and the socio-spatial topography of the Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Warsaw (1939-1943). Using rare archival materials and firsthand accounts, many of which have never been translated into English, Anja Nowak traces out the trauma that the space of the ghetto inflicted on its Jewish inhabitants, and how it alienated, disoriented, and harmed them. While the physical ghetto--its buildings, boundaries, and streets--has been reabsorbed and redefined by modern-day Warsaw's urban structure, Violent Space shows us that its presence still lingers in the narratives of those who were forced into this first phase of the Holocaust"--
This book analyzes Holocaust poetry, war poetry, working-class poetry, and 9/11 poetry as forms of testimony. Rowland argues that testamentary poetry requires a different approach to traditional ways of dealing with poems due to the pressure of the metatext (the original, traumatic events), the poems’ demands for the hyper-attentiveness of the reader, and a paradox of identification that often draws the reader towards identifying with the poet’s experience, but then reminds them of its sublimity. He engages with the work of a diverse range of twentieth-century authors and across the literature of several countries, even uncovering new archival material. The study ends with an analysis of the poetry of 9/11, engaging with the idea that it typifies a new era of testimony where global, secondary witnesses react to a proliferation of media images. This book ranges across the literature of several countries, cultures, and historical events in order to stress the large variety of contexts in which poetry has functioned productively as a form of testimony, and to note the importance of the availability of translations to the formation of literary canons.
