Holocaust in History and Literature

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The story of a Catholic war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who risked his life and went bankrupt in order to save more than 1,000 Jews from certain death in concentration camps. He employed Jews in his crockery factory manufacturing goods for the German army. At the same time he tries to stay solvent with the help of a Jewish accountant and negotiates business with a vicious Nazi commandant who enjoys shooting Jews as target practice from the balcony of his villa that overlooks the prison camp he commands.

Students at Whitwell Middle School in rural Tennessee attempt to collect 6 million paper clips as part of a school project on the Holocaust.

During World War II an Italian Jewish man uses his vivid imagination to convince his son they're playing a game at a concentration camp in order to keep his son's spirits up.

A Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, Judith Meisel, discusses her experiences during World War II.

Beginning with the Nazi invasion of Poland, we are led step-by-step through the deportations, life in the ghetto, the formation of a resistance organization and finally the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Utilizes archival film footage, authentic still photographs, and actual testimony of survivors.

Tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss between two boys living in Nazi-occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true comaraderie, until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer-director Louis Malle's own childhood, the film is an observed tale of courage, cowardice and tragic awakening.

Video version of a dance work originally created for the stage, about a Jewish immigrant in Canada and his memories of losing his family in the Holocaust.

This documentary delves into never before seen archival footage and documents to investigate how much the Allies knew about the mass murder of Europe's Jews during World War II and why they did not do more to stop it. What the allies knew examines the immigration policy, top secret documents, personal prejudice and government policies that resulted in the deaths of millions.

Nazi Medicine: In the Shadow of the Reich studies the step-by-step process that led the German medical profession down an unethical road to genocide. It graphically documents the racial theories and eugenics principles that set the stage for the doctors' participation in sterilization and euthanasia, the selections at the death camps, as well as inhuman and unethical human experimentation. The Cross and the Star finds disheartening echoes of anti-Semitism in the otherwise profound, lyrical Gospel of St. John, the sermons of St. Augustine, the writings of Martin Luther and in the voices of the Crusaders and the Spanish Inquisitors - all of which may have helped sow the ideological seeds that developed into Nazism.

By 14 he had written five novels and penned a diary about the Nazi occupation of Prague. By 16 he had produced 170 drawings and paintings, edited an underground magazine in the Jewish ghetto, written numerous short stories and had walked to the gas chamber at Auschwitz. Slight and stoop-shouldered, filled with intellectual curiosity but prone to mischief, Petr Ginz read voraciously, wrote constantly, developed cryptographs to record BBC broadcasts, built exploding toy cannons to frighten his classmates, and drew and painted a world full of adventure and exotic locations. In his novel, an allegory about Hitler, Petr wrote and illustrated the story of a giant robotic creature that is used by the government to terrorize the people. He ends the book with the warning: "Is it not possible that a new monster may appear on the surface of this earth, worse than this one-a monster that ... will torture mankind in a terrible manner." Through Petr's artwork, novels, short stories and magazine articles, interwoven with fantastical animation, this unconventional documentary portrait reveals his journey from precocious child to young adult, from innocence to the painful awareness of inhumanity, from gifted artist and writer to prodigy. Although Petr's life ended at Auschwitz, it is not a story of tragedy but celebration-a testament to how a boy's wonder and creative expression represent the best of what makes us human.

Images of the Holocaust and antifascism offers a unique perspective on an all-too familiar topic, intertwining the themes of German/Jewish relations, anti-Nazi resistance and the Holocaust. As soon as WWII ended, (East) German directors began addressing the horrific legacy of the Nazis in a wide range of films produced between 1946 and 1988.

Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and fog (nuit et brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps' quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage. With Night and fog, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of man's violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again.

The first German feature film to explicitly address the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, Marriage in the shadows called on Germans to accept collective responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. Stylistically, the production, in which many former Ufa artists were involved, blends classic melodrama in the Ufa style with documentary glimpses into life in Berlin under the Nazis. Shown in all four sectors of occupied Berlin and across Germany, the initial release of the film reached 10 million viewers. It premiered in the US at New York's Little Met Theater on September 16, 1948.

In his bittersweet comedy loaded with human quirks and nuance, Jacob invents news reports to bolster the spirits of the other Jews living in his Polish ghetto under Nazi occupation. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1977, the story was remade in Hollywood starring Robin Williams in 1999. In a Polish ghetto in 1944, Jacob Heym is summoned to the police station. While there, Jacob overhears on the radio that "the Russians are twenty kilometers from Bezanika. " The next day he tells this to a despondent friend who is about to commit suicide, and the news renews his hope in salvation. As no one would believe the true story, Jacob pretends to have a radio; as no one in the ghetto is allowed to have a radio, however, all are eager to hear news from the outside world and constantly ask Jacob for updates on the advance of the Soviets. Jacob creates fictional reports to help alleviate the unbearable hopelessness of those around him; but his lies cannot stop the machinery that brings death to all the ghetto inhabitants.

The first German film devoted to life and death in a concentration camp tells the story of organized resistance by political prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp. When one of the prisoners smuggles a child into a camp, the men are faced with the question of how many lives may be endangered in order to save the life of the child. Based on a true story

Based on the records of the Nuremberg trial of the chemical giant IG Farben; a story about the collaboration between international corporations and Nazi scientists, whose research contributed to the death of millions. Musical score by Hanns Eisler, electronic sound by Oskar Sala (Hitchcock's The Birds) and script by Friedrich Wolf. The chemist Dr. Hans Scholz lives through a tortuous political transformation and maturation process. Eventually, he adopts political neutrality and closes his eyes to the fact that the poison being produced in his factory is being used in the extermination camps. Standing before the judges at the Nuremberg trials, he must face the fact that he is implicated in the deaths of millions in the gas chambers of the concentration camps.

Hitler's plan to eliminate an entire race of people may have succeeded if not for the Dutch resistance. They were ordinary people willing to risk their lives and the lives of their family to shelter and save Dutch Jews.

"Hitler had no children, but what about Goering, Himmler and Frank? Hitler's children introduces us to the descendants of these infamous men. Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank and godson of Hitler, has spent his adult life vehemently speaking out against his father and the Nazi regime. And Bettina Goering, grand-niece of Hitler's second in command, Hermann Goering, lives in voluntary exile in Santa Fe. These, and many others, discuss how they have coped with the fact that their last names are equated with terror and genocide

A mature novel that is a fictionalized treatment of the life of the German industrialist who saved the lives of many Jews during World War II. Schindler's List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers. Working with the actual testimony of Schindler's Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity.

On the Brink of the Precipice, the first volume of the trilogy "The Tree of Life," describes the lives of the novel s ten protagonists in the Lodz Ghetto before the outbreak of World War II. Chava Rosenfarb, herself a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, draws on her own history to create realistic characters who struggle daily to retain a sense of humanity and dignity despite the physical and psychological effects of ghetto life. Although the novel depicts horrendous experiences, the light of faith in the human spirit shines through this novel s every page. Winner of the 1972 J. J. Segal Prize and the 1979 Manger Prize for Yiddish Literature"

This volume describes the lives of the novels protagonists in the Lodz Ghetto at the beginning of World War II. Chava Rosenfarb, herself a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, draws on her own history to create realistic characters who struggle daily to retain a sense of humanity and dignity despite the physical and psychological effects of ghetto life. Although horrendous experiences are depicted, the light of faith in the human spirit shines through this novels every page.

The Tree of Life is a chronicle of life in the Lodz ghetto during the Second World War, written by someone who actually experienced the events she describes.

Winner, 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature One of Publishers Weekly's Fifty Best Books of 1992 Fateless is a moving and disturbing novel about a Hungarian Jewish boy’s experiences in German concentration camps and his attempts to reconcile himself to those experiences after the war. Upon his return to his native Budapest still clad in his striped prison clothes, fourteen-year-old George Koves senses the indifference, even hostility, of people on the street. His former neighbors and friends urge him to put the ordeal out of his mind, while a sympathetic journalist refers to the camps as "the lowest circle of hell." The boy can relate to neither cliche and is left to ponder the meaning of his experience alone. George's response to his experience is curiously ambivalent. In the camps he tries to adjust to his ever-worsening situation by imputing human motives to his inhumane captors. By imposing his logic--that of a bright, sensitive, though in many ways ordinary teenager - he maintains a precarious semblance of normalcy. Once freed, he must contend with the "banality of evil" to which he has become accustomed: when asked why he uses words like "naturally," "undeniably," and "without question" to describe the most horrendous of experiences, he responds, "In the concentration camp it was natural." Without emotional or spiritual ties to his Jewish heritage and rejected by his country, he ultimately comes to the conclusion that neither his Hungarianness nor his Jewishness was really at the heart of his fate: rather, there are only "given situations, and within these, further givens."

Named a New York Times Notable Book Winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. Winner of the Anne Frank Prize. These shattering stories describe the lives of ordinary people as they are compelled to do the unimaginable: a couple who must decide what to do with their five-year-old daughter as the Gestapo come to march them out of town; a wife whose safety depends on her acquiescence in her husband's love affair; a girl who must pay a grim price for an Aryan identity card.

At first, Mennonites Esther and Gerhard Claassen and their sons (in the Hitler Youth) are hopeful about the New Germany. Because Hitler's cause seems noble, they and other German Mennonites have allowed their traditional commitment to peace to weaken. But soon cold fear clutches Esther Claassen's heart. Now the swastika, the Black Spider over Tiegenhof, with its awful powers, threatens her family. As the evil mounts, Doctor Rosenbaum asks them to shelter his Jewish daughter Ruth in their farm community. But a betrayal within the household spells horror for Ruth. Will she survive? Will any of them?

Molly, a sassy Australian waitress, is haunted by the ghost of a murdered Polish Jew. The two young women's stories, each a compelling page-turner, combine teasingly in one as End of the Night Girl explores the shadow cast by the Holocaust across decades, continents and cultures.

For the first time, a Dear America story is being told in two parts -- complete in one volume Julie Weiss's world is suddenly torn apart by a war that will forever change the face of humanity. Her life as a privileged Jewish girl quickly becomes one of humiliation and terror. In part two, Julie has left Nazi Austria for New York, where she begins a new life with her extended family who she has never met.

A Jewish refugee who escaped Hitler's Holocaust and is living in New York with his second wife faces a dilemma when he discovers that his first wife is still alive.

Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a registrar of madness,a a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. Sorry for all and sore at heart,a he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. Sammler who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings - good life is one in which a person does what is required of him.a To know and to meet the terms of the contract was as true a life as one could live. At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: moral, urbane, sublimely humane.

The author relates the tremendous obstacles involved in the rescue of European Jews who were being secretly and illegally transported to Palestine on the ship "Hilda" to escape destruction by the Nazis.

Run, Boy, Run is the extraordinary account of one boy’s survival of the Holocaust. Srulik is only eight years old when he finds himself all alone in the Warsaw ghetto. He escapes into the countryside where he spends the ensuing years hiding in the forest, dependent on the sympathies and generosity of the poor farmers in the surrounding area. Despite the seemingly insurmountable odds, several chases, captures, attempted executions, and even the loss of his arm, Srulik miraculously survives.

During World War II a Jewish boy is left on his own for months in a ruined house in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he must learn all the tricks of survival under constantly life-threatening conditions.

A Life in Hiding When the German army occupied Holland, Annie de Leeuw was eight years old. Because she was Jewish, the occupation put her in grave danger-she knew that to stay alive she would have to hide. Fortunately, a Gentile family, the Oostervelds, offered to help. For two years they hid Annie and her sister, Sini, in the cramped upstairs room of their farmhouse. Most people thought the war wouldn't last long. But for Annie and Sini -- separated from their family and confined to one tiny room -- the war seemed to go on forever. In the part of the marketplace where flowers had been sold twice a week-tulips in the spring, roses in the summer-stood German tanks and German soldiers. Annie de Leeuw was eight years old in 1940 when the Germans attacked Holland and marched into the town of Winterswijk where she lived. Annie was ten when, because she was Jewish and in great danger of being cap-tured by the invaders, she and her sister Sini had to leave their father, mother, and older sister Rachel to go into hiding in the upstairs room of a remote farmhouse. Johanna de Leeuw Reiss has written a remarkably fresh and moving account of her own experiences as a young girl during World War II. Like many adults she was innocent of the German plans for Jews, and she might have gone to a labor camp as scores of families did. "It won't be for long and the Germans have told us we'll be treated well," those families said. "What can happen?" They did not know, and they could not imagine.... But millions of Jews found out. Mrs. Reiss's picture of the Oosterveld family with whom she lived, and of Annie and Sini, reflects a deep spirit of optimism, a faith in the ingenuity, backbone, and even humor with which ordinary human beings meet extraordinary challenges. In the steady, matter-of-fact, day-by-day courage they all showed lies a profound strength that transcends the horrors of the long and frightening war. Here is a memorable book, one that will be read and reread for years to come. 1973 Newbery Honor Book Notable Children's Books of 1971–1975 (ALA) Best Books of 1972 (SLJ) Outstanding Children's Books of 1972 (NYT) 1973 Jane Addams Award Honor Book Children's Books of 1972 (Library of Congress) The Buxtehude Bulla Prize 1976 (German Award for Outstanding Children's Book Promoting Peace) 1972 Jewish Book Council Children's Book Award