The
Holocaust Center maintains an extensive lending library which we hope to soon
have available online.Resources available to borrow include books, teaching resources, videos/dvds, posters, and more. To request an item, please email info@wsherc.org.
New arrivals and highlights for Summer 2008:
DVDS
“I’m Still Here: Real
Diaries of Young People Who Lived During the Holocaust.” SISU & MTV. 2005.
48 mins. (DVD)
Age 12 and up. The diaries come to life through the voices of some of
today’s most talented young actors. Photos, text and drawings from the diaries
and archival films are skillfully woven with original footage of remnants of a
Jewish ghetto, and the powerful journey is intensified through the unobtrusive,
evocative music of Grammy Award® nominee Moby.
http://sisuent.com/ISH.html.
BOOKS
Allert, Tilman. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. Trans.
Jefferson Chase. NY: Metropolitan Books, 2008.
From Publishers Weekly - In this brief, insightful book, German
sociologist Allert writes penetratingly about the gesture familiar around the
world. Working like a preservationist on a minute canvas, he shows readers the
cascade of meanings that rush through everyday greetings in general. But
Allert's keen eye is trained on Germany, and he provides a wonderful depiction
of regional, class and gender-specific greetings, from the kissed hand to the
low, scraping bow. All of these were supplanted by the Hitler salute. Hitler was
the suprahuman being in whom Germans invested their hopes, which they reaffirmed
every time they raised their arms and shouted the Führer's name. As the salute
penetrated every sphere of social life, it made Nazism omnipresent and Germans a
unified community. It also affirmed authority for the ruler as well as over the
ruled. Allert draws fruitfully on memoirs and letters. Readers encounter Germans
who joyfully raised their arms to the Führer and also those who went to any
length to avoid the gesture and sometimes paid dearly for their opposition to
the Nazis. Allert's book shows how much can be gained from a close study of the
daily rituals we barely think about yet are packed with meaning. (Apr. 1)
Donated by Miriam Greenbaum.
Aly, Gotz. Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943.
Trans. Ann Millin. NY: Metropolitan Books, 2007.
From Publishers Weekly - Aly (Hitler's Beneficiaries)
ingeniously reconstructs the life and death of a German-Jewish girl in this
impressive piece of detective work. After being awarded the Marion Samuel Prize
(established by the German Remembrance Foundation to commemorate the million
Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust), Aly decided to learn as much as
he could about Samuel and her family. With the help of ads and a speech, both
published in German newspapers, he got in touch with individuals who knew the
family, was able to find a few surviving relatives and pieced together a
narrative from these scant sources. Soon after the family's business was
ransacked in 1935, Samuel and her parents left their small town and moved to
Berlin, where they lived until they were sent to Auschwitz. Illustrating
civilian complicity in their fate, Aly notes a letter from the Samuels' former
landlord, asking the authorities for rent that went unpaid after the Samuels
were deported. Aly's account puts a face on the tragedy of the Holocaust. (Jan.)
Donated by Miriam Greenbaum in memory of Gail Elad.
Browning, Christopher. Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. NY:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Focuses on the controversial issues in current holocaust scholarship. How did
Nazi Jewish policy evolve during the first years of the war? When did the Nazi
regime cross the historic watershed from population expulsion and decimation to
total and systematic extermination? How did Nazi authorities attempt to
reconcile policies of expulsion and extermination with the wartime urge to
exploit Jewish labor...and others. Donated by David and Linda Stahl.
Durland DeSaix, Deborah, and Karen Gray Ruelle, Eds.
Hidden on the Mountain: Stories of Children Sheltered from the Nazis in Le
Chambon.
NY: Holiday House, 2007.
A Protestant stronghold whose people had once been persecuted for their
religious beliefs, the community of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon sheltered several
thousand Jews, many of them children. This book tells the poignant true stories
of some of the children who were hidden there and pays tribute to the courageous
people of Le Chambon.
Fest, Joachim. Plotting Hitler's Death: the Story of the German Resistance.
NY: Metropolitan Books, 1996.
From Publishers Weekly - Prodigious research and a commonsensical tone
distinguish this compelling survey of the German resistance. Fest (Adolf Hitler,
etc.) challenges the idea of "everyday resistance" in Nazi Germany, which has
often been extended to include adolescent rebellion, antisocial behavior and the
telling of jokes about Nazi bigshots. Any attempt to give ordinary people a
consequent role in resisting National Socialism founders, he contends, on the
realities of a totalitarian system, which can be challenged effectively only by
those with the protection and influence to shield themselves as they draw
conclusions and make plans. Fest focuses on the men and women whose rejection of
Nazism culminated in the July 20, 1944, attempt on Hitler's life. Carl
Goerdeler, Claus von Stauffenberg and most of their counterparts were slow to
accept the need to act until well into the war. The author insists that the
resisters were more than simple opportunists seeking to escape a sinking ship,
however. Their growing awareness of Nazi atrocities, he explains, generated a
corresponding sense that Germany was under the rule of a criminal regime.
Opposition became a moral imperative regardless of its practical chances for
success. While the resisters had no head for conspiracy and no coherent concept
of Germany's future, they did accurately perceive their essential task: to
remove Hitler, at whatever cost. Though they failed, Fest makes a convincing
case that they nevertheless established an enduring moral standard not only for
Germany but for the world. Donated by David and Linda Stahl.
Grimbert, Philippe. Memory: A Novel. Trans. Polly McLean. NY: Simon
& Schuster, 2007.
Twenty years after his mother and father jumped to their deaths from a balcony,
Philippe Grimbert has written a gripping novel about the hidden memories that
dominated their lives...Growing up in Postwar Paris as the sickly only child of
glamorous athletic parents, the narrator invents for himself a make-believe
older brother, stronger and more brilliant than he could ever be. It is only
when the boy begins talking to an old family friend that he comes to realize
that his imaginary sibling had a real predecessor: a half brother whose death in
the concentration camps is part of a buried family secret that he was intended
never to uncover.
Donated by Miriam Greenbaum in memory of Selma Waldman.
Humbert, Agnes. Resistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in
Occupied France. Trans. Barbara Mellor. NY: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Agnes Humbert was an art historian in Paris during the German occupation in
1940. Hubert was stirred to action by the atrocities she witnessed. In an act of
astonishing bravery, she joined forces with several colleagues to form an
organized resistance. Humbert’s group was betrayed to the Gestapo. Humbert
describes her time in prison, her deportation to Germany, where for more than 2
years she endured a string of brutal labor camps. Originally published in France
in 1946, the book was soon forgotten and is now translated into English for the
first time. Donated by David and Linda Stahl.
Jeffreys, Diarmuid. Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the
Making of Hitler’s War Machine. Advance Readers Addition. NY: Metropolitan
Books, 2008.
How had one of the world’s leading companies – whose scientists had
won Nobel Prizes, pioneered aspirin and a host of other essential drugs, and
whose expertise in everything from artificial fuel and rubber to fertilizer and
explosives was the envy of the world – fallen from the heights of such success
to become Hitler’s creature, directly involved in the Holocaust with their
experimental IG Monowitz plant at Auschwitz. Donated by David and Linda
Stahl.
Kinman, Diane. Franca's Story: Survival in World War II Italy. Mercer
Island: Wimer Publishing, 2005.
The onset of war shatters Franca Mercati’s privileged childhood in Florence,
devastates her artistocratic family, and threatens the Italian way of life.
Kinman writes the story of her friend and neighbor. Donated by David and
Linda Stahl.
MacMillan, Ian. Village of a Million Spirits: A Novel of the Treblinka
Uprising. NY: Penguin books, 1999.
On August 2, 1943, prisoners of the Treblinka concentration camp, armed with
stolen guns and grenades, attacked their guards, set fire to the factory of
death, and fled into the neighboring forest. Of the 600 prisoners who escaped in
the desperate revolt, only 40 lived. But their survival insured that the truth
about the horrors they had witnessed would reach the outside world. With
breathtaking intensity, the uprising is narrated in the voices of people both
inside the camp and in the surrounding countryside...This is a fictionalized
account. Donated by David and Linda Stahl.
Masuda, Minoru. Letters from the 442nd: The World War II Correspondence of a
Japanese American Medic. Eds. Dianne Bridgman, and Hana Masuda. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2008.
Minoru Masuda was born and raised in Seattle. In 1939 he earned a master's
degree in pharmacology and married Hana Koriyama. Two years later the Japanese
struck Pearl Harbor, and Min and Hana were imprisoned along with thousands of
other Japanese Americans. When the Army recruited in the relocation camp, Masuda
chose to serve in the 442nd. In April 1944 the unit was shipped overseas. They
fought in Italy and in France, where they liberated Bruyeres and rescued a "lost
battalion" that had been cut off by the Germans. This book is a collection of
lively letters Masuda wrote to wife describing his daily activities and the
people he encountered.
Pasternak,
Alfred. Inhuman Research: Medical Experiments in German Concentration Camps.
Hungary: Akademiai Kiado, 2006.
Being a survivor of the Holocaust and a medical school professor, the
author felt a moral obligation to work on the subject. After discussing the
nazification of German medicine, he documents the various experiments followed
by their ethical evaluation. Finally he presents the name and biographical data
of the doctors actively involved in the experiments, and also photos of the main
perpetrators.
Porter, Anna. Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of
the Holocaust. NY: Walker & Company, 2007.
A controversial figure. A hero or a Nazi collaborator? Directly
responsible for liberating 1,684 Jews on a train from Hungary to Switzerland in
1944 and by the war’s end he had preserved some 100,000 more lives by bargaining
with the Nazis. Based on interviews with those who were on his train, and those
who were denied a place, as well as documents and correspondence. Kasztner was
assassinated by right-wing activists in Tel Aviv on March 4, 1957. Donated
by the JT News.
Shneiderman, S.L., Editor. The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the
Warsaw Ghetto. Trans. Norbert Guterman & Sylvia Glass. Oxford: One World,
2006.
First published immediately after the war in 1945. After 60 years, it
is now republished for a worldwide audience. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939,
Mary Berg had just turned 15. From that time until her arrival in the US in
March 1944, Mary kept a detailed personal diary, recording her years in the
Warsaw Ghetto, detention in Pawiak prison, intnernment in Occupied France, and
finally, her journey to freedom aboard a mercy ship hired by the American
government. Donated by the JT News.
Strickland, Eycke. Eyes are Watching, Ears are
Listening: Growing up in Nazi Germany 1933-1946. NY: iUniverse, 2007.
Local author. Memoir.
For more information, suggestions for specific resources, or to request an item,
please contact us -
info@wsherc.org or 206-441-5747.
There is no charge to borrow materials, but a deposit or credit card number will
be required to check out dvds/videos.
The borrower is responsible for replacing all missing and/or damaged items.
