Dov Levin and Zvie A. Brown, The Story of an Underground: The Resistance of the Jews in Kovno in the Second World War, trans. Jessica Setbon. Jerusalem: Gefen, 2014. 496 pp.

This chapter reviews the book The Story of an Underground: The Resistance of the Jews in Kovno in the Second World War (2014), by Dov Levin and Zvie A. Brown, translated by Jessica Setbon. The Story of an Underground is about the Jews of Kovno (Kaunas) who founded an underground movement during the Holocaust. The armed underground developed a plan to escape to the forests and join the partisans. The ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944. Many of the remaining Jews were sent to the Stutthof and Dachau concentration camps. The book highlights the dilemmas of Jewish armed resistance such as difficulties in obtaining weapons and training, some of the failures of the resistance, and some of the positive aspects of those who thought differently from members of the armed resistance.

2017 ◽  
pp. 197-210
Author(s):  
Dagmar Kročanová

The article discusses several Slovak plays with the theme of the Holocaust; namely Ticho (Silence) by Juraj Váh, Holokaust (Holocaust) by Viliam Klimáček, and Rabínka (The Woman Rabbi) by Anna Grusková. It also briefly refers to Návrat do života (Return to Life) and Antigona a tí druhí (Antigone and Those Others) by Peter Karvaš, both mediating traumas from concentration camps. Two plays (Ticho and Návrat do života) were written and staged immediately after the Second World War. Karvaš’s Antigona is a rare occurrence of the theme in Slovak drama during the Communism (in the early 1960s), whereas Klimáček’s and Grusková’s plays are recent, both staged in 2012. The article focuses on several aspects of these five plays: on dramatic characters representing “victims”, “witnesses” and “culprits” (Panas, quoted in Gawliński 2007: 19); on references about and/or representation of the Holocaust in dramatic texts; and on the type of the conflict(s) in the plays. It also mentions specific approaches of respective authors when dealing with the theme of the Holocaust, as well as with the relevance of their reflection of the theme for Slovak society in respective periods.


Author(s):  
Robert Szuchta

MORE than three and a half million Jews lived in Poland before the Second World War, constituting the country’s second largest minority. Most of them did not survive the Holocaust. After the war and throughout the communist period, students in Polish schools seldom explored Poland’s multi-ethnic traditions in the past and the destruction of the Jewish community in the years 1939–45. The Polish educational system promptly subsumed the Jewish victims of the Holocaust under the total number of six million Polish citizens killed during the war. In history lessons the Holocaust was treated as a peripheral phenomenon, often depicted as a part of the struggle and martyrology of the Polish nation. The authors of history textbooks discussed the fate of the Jews only within the framework of Polish national history. Chapter headings stressed the Polish ethnic character of the wartime struggle and suffering: ‘Polish National Struggle for Freedom’; ‘Poles Fight to Regain their Freedom’; ‘Polish Nation Resisted the Occupier’; ‘Polish Struggle for Freedom in 1939–1944’; ‘Nazi Extermination Policy towards the Polish Nation’; ‘Polish Lands during the Second World War’; and ‘The Situation of the Polish Nation after the Loss of Independence’. For several generations of graduates of the Polish school system, this contextualization impaired understanding of the fate of the Jews during the war—both Polish citizens and Jews from other countries who were deported to Nazi-occupied Poland and murdered in death camps, ghettos, and concentration camps....


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 00007
Author(s):  
B Dewi Puspitaningrum ◽  
Airin Miranda

<p class="Keyword">Nazi Germany used Endlösung to persecute Jews during the Second World War, leading them to the Holocaust, known as “death”. During the German occupation in France, the status of the Jews was applied. Polonski reacted to the situation by establishing a Zionist resistance, Jewish Army, in January 1942. Their first visions were to create a state of Israel and save the Jews as much as they could. Although the members of the group are not numerous, they represented Israel and played an important role in the rescue of the Jews in France, also in Europe. Using descriptive methods and three aspects of historical research, this article shows that the Jewish Army has played an important role in safeguarding Jewish children, smuggling smugglers, physical education and the safeguarding of Jews in other countries. In order to realize their visions, collaborations with other Jewish resistances and the French army itself were often created. With the feeling of belonging to France, they finally extended their vision to the liberation of France in 1945 by joining the French Forces of the Interior and allied troops.</p>


2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862199758
Author(s):  
Eloise Florence

This article investigates the possibilities for experiential encounters with ruins in Berlin to complicate the dominant articulations of the cultural memory of Allied bombing attacks on German cities during the Second World War. Building on works that seek to disrupt normative models of cultural memory of the bombings, and entangling them with existing literature that uses new materialism to engage the sensorial nature of memory site-encounters, I examine my own fieldwork visits the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof—a former train station—as an entanglement of both. Specifically, I investigate how encountering Anhalter through this entangled method allows the site to emerge as haunted. Encountering Anhalter as haunted might complicate the linear temporality that underpins enduring the narrative that the Allies’ actions during the war were completely ethical because they are largely framed as a response to— ergo following—the Holocaust.


1969 ◽  
Vol 9 (104) ◽  
pp. 646-647

Twenty-five years after the second World War, the International Committee of the Red Cross is still dealing with claims for compensation from people living in certain Central European countries who were victims of pseudo-medical experiments in German concentration camps.


Author(s):  
Ivan Matkovskyy

The history of relations of the Sheptytskyj family and the Jewish people reaches back to those remote times when the representatives of the Sheptytskyi lineage held high and honorable secular and clerical posts, and the Jews, either upon invitation of King Danylo of Halych or King Casimir the Great, began to build up their own world in Halychyna. Throughout the whole life of Metropolitan Sheptytskyi and Blessed Martyr Klymentii, a thread of cooperation with the Jews is traceable. It should be noted that heroic deeds of the Sheptytskyi Brothers to save Jews during the Second World War were not purely circumstantial: they were preceded by a long-standing deep relationship with representatives of Jewish culture. In addition, the sense of responsibility of the Spiritual Pastor, as advocated by the Brothers, extended to all people of different religions and genesis with no exception. The world-view principles of Metropolitan Sheptytskyi are important for us in order to understand what was going on in the then society in attitude to the Jews. Also, of importance is the influence of the Metropolitan on Kasymyr Sheptytskyi, later Fr. Klymentii, because the Archbishop was not only his Brother, but also a church authority and the leader. And if from under the Metropolitan Sheptytskyi’s pen letters and pastorals were published, they were directives, instructions, edifications and explanations for the faithful and the clergy, and not at all, the products of His own reflections or personal experiences, which Archbishop Andrey wanted to share with the faithful. On the grounds of the available archive materials, an effort to reconstruct the chief moments of those relations was undertaken, aiming among others, to illustrate the fact that the saving of Jews during the Holocaust was not incidental, nor with any underlying reasons behind, but a natural manifestation of a good Christian tradition of «Love thy Neighbor», to which the Sheptytskyj were faithful. Keywords: Andrey Sheptytskyi, the Blessed Hieromartyr Klymentii Sheptytskyi, Jews, the Holocaust, Galicia, Righteous Among the Nations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirella D’Ascenzo

This contribution explores the historical and educational context in Italy after the Second World War, focusing on the pedagogical and educational innovation of the Movimento di Cooperazione Educativa (Educational Cooperation Movement, MCE), founded to promote the techniques of Freinet, and in particular Bruno Ciari, teacher, politician and driving force behind national school renewal in Italy. Using printed sources and archives from the period, the paper looks at the social and pedagogical experiment developed by Bruno Ciari between 1966 and 1970 and promoted in the city of Bologna through «Pedagogic Februaries»; these involved a series of events, conferences and training initiatives, organised with the cooperation of key universities, targeting teachers and families in order to develop an innovative, shared school culture. From the egodocuments of a preschool teacher who worked with Bruno Ciari in the city of Bologna, we enter the heart of the renewal of teaching practices, highlighting the tormented process of change in the teaching profession, in favour of a school that would be a true alternative to the traditional model and open to the democratic demands of all society. 


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