Holocaust Survivor Diaspora(s)

2021 ◽  
pp. 455-485
Author(s):  
Laura Jockusch ◽  
Avinoam J. Patt

This chapter discusses the evolution of “Holocaust survivor diasporas” in the aftermath of World War II by examining how the experience of survival under Nazi occupation created a distinct and shared identity for those who would emerge from the war. In the early postwar period, survivors formed transnational networks on the basis of shared wartime experience, common geographical origin, and shared political agendas that were far more specific than the more general category of “Holocaust survivors” that would develop later, in the last decades of the twentieth century. Survivors and the distinct organizations they formed came to play a prominent role in both defining the categories of “Holocaust” and “survivor” and in shaping subsequent efforts at Holocaust education and memorialization.

2021 ◽  
pp. 161189442110177
Author(s):  
Laura Hobson Faure

This article focuses on France as a refuge for unaccompanied Central European Jewish children on the eve of World War II. Contrary to the United Kingdom, which accepted 10,000 Jewish children through Kindertransport, only 350-450 children entered France. This article utilizes children’s diaries and organizational records to question how children perceived and recorded their displacement and resettlement in France, a country that would soon be at war, and then occupied, by Nazi Germany. By questioning how these events filtered into and transformed children’s lives, I argue that the shifting political environment led to profound transformations in these children’s daily lives long before their very existence was threatened by Nazi–Vichy deportation measures. Most children were cared for in collective children’s homes in the Paris region in which left-oriented educators established children’s republics. Yet the outbreak of war triggered a series of events in the homes that led to changes in pedagogical methods and new arrivals (and thus new conflicts). The Nazi occupation of France led to the children’s displacement to the Southern zone, their dispersal into new homes, and the reconfiguration of their networks. This analysis of children’s contemporaneous sources and the conditions under which they were produced places new emphasis on the epistemology of Kindertransport sources and thus contributes to larger theoretical discussions in Holocaust and Childhood studies on children’s testimony.


Knygotyra ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 210-235
Author(s):  
Jana Dreimane

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] The aim of the research is to find out the influence of the Nazi regime on preservation of historical book collections, which were established in Jewish societies, schools, religious organizations and private houses in Latvia until the first Soviet occupation (1940/1941). At the beginning, libraries of Jewish associations and other institutions were expropriated by the Soviet power, which started the elimination of Jewish books and periodicals published in the independent Republic of Latvia. The massive destruction of Jewish literature collections was carried out by Nazi occupation authorities (1941-1944/45), proclaiming Jews and Judaism as their main “enemies”. However, digitized archives of Nazi organizations (mainly documents of the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce) shows that a small part of the Latvian Jewish book collections was preserved for research purposes and after the Second World War scattered in different countries. Analysis of archival documents will clarify the Nazi strategy for Latvian Jewish book collections. It will be determined which book values survived the war and what their further fate in the second half of the 1940s was.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Lorne D. Bruce

This article undertakes a historical survey of university and college library developments in Canada between 1945 and 1960. It examines contemporary accounts in relation to library architecture, the acquisition and organization of collections, administrative library structures and staffing, services for faculty and students, and efforts by librarians to realize professional standing. A national review of academic libraries and librarianship expands our knowledge beyond the typical themes applied to this era: "growth" and "progress." The architectural redefinition of libraries, the impetus to establish research collections, the maturation of academic librarianship, and the increasing complexity of library operations were prominent features in the postwar period. The gradual evolution of academic libraries towards more-uniform organizational purposes and structures on a national basis following World War II can be considered a period of “midcentury modernization” that preceded the more memorable and better documented decades of the 1960s and later.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-281
Author(s):  
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

AbstractSince the turn of the millennium, major political figures around the world have been routinely compared to Adolf Hitler. These comparisons have increasingly been investigated by scholars, who have sought to explain their origins and assess their legitimacy. This article sheds light on this ongoing debate by examining an earlier, but strikingly similar, discussion that transpired during the Nazi era itself. Whereas commentators today argue about whether Hitler should be used as a historical analogy, observers in the 1930s and 1940s debated which historical analogies should be used to explain Hitler. During this period, Anglophone and German writers identified a diverse group of historical villains who, they believed, explained the Nazi threat. The figures spanned a wide range of tyrants, revolutionaries, and conquerors. But, by the end of World War II, the revelation of the Nazis' unprecedented crimes exposed these analogies as insufficient and led many commentators to flee from secular history to religious mythology. In the process, they identified Hitler as Western civilization's new archetype of evil and turned him into a hegemonic analogy for the postwar period. By explaining how earlier analogies struggled to make sense of Hitler, we can better understand whether Hitler analogies today are helping or hindering our effort to understand contemporary political challenges.


Author(s):  
Nobuko Anan

This chapter examines mother-child love linked to love for the nation within two Japanese plays. In Rio Kishida’s Thread Hell (1984), a pre–World War II silk factory represents the Japanese Empire, where a mother and her daughter are manipulated by the nation. However, they eventually challenge this symbolic realm that forces women to sustain the national lineage through their reproductive function. In Hideki Noda’s MIWA (2015), a homosexual transvestite’s relationship with his mother in the postwar period is depicted. As resistance to heteronormative ideas about family, and the nation as its extension, he commits matricide, but this leads to his melancholia as he cannot fully give up his desire to belong to a “normal” family and nation. These plays explore the ways individuals develop a critical relation to the nation by reconfiguring their love for their mother.


2004 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-57
Author(s):  
Patricia Clarke

There have been several anecdotal accounts of the literary scene in Brisbane during World War II and numerous references in more general works. In 2000,Queensland Reviewpublished some reminiscences of writers Estelle Runcie Pinney, Don Munro, Val Vallis and David Rowbotham, under the title ‘Writing in Brisbane during the Second World War’. Some of the more important general works include Judith Wright's ‘Brisbane in Wartime’, Lynne Strahan's history ofMeanjinand Judith Armstrong's biographical work on the Christesens,The Christesen Romance. My interest in this subject arose from editing Judith Wright's autobiography,Half a Lifetime, published in 1999, and recently in editing, with her daughter, letters between Judith Wright and Jack McKinney which were mainly written in Brisbane in the later years of the war and the immediate postwar period. Initially my purpose was to gather information to elucidate people or events mentioned in these writings, but my interest widened to embrace more general information about the period. My research led me to the conclusion thatMeanjinand its editor Clem Christesen were catalysts for many of the literary activities in Brisbane during World War II, not just among resident Australians, but among troops temporarily stationed in Brisbane — particularly Americans, whom Christesen cultivated and published. This article records a few glimpses of literary life in Brisbane, and incidentally in the rest of the country, during a period described by Patrick Buckridge as never having been researched ‘in enough detail’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 81 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 182-187
Author(s):  
Hélio A.G. Teive ◽  
Fernando Tensini ◽  
Francisco M.B. Germiniani ◽  
Carlos Henrique F. Camargo ◽  
Olivier Walusinski

The authors describe the construction of a statue in honor of Professor Charcot, the father of modern neurology, in Paris in 1898, 5 years after his death. The Nazi invaders destroyed the statue, which was erected near the entrance to the Salpêtrière hospital with the support of his disciples and the international neurological community, in 1942 during World War II. An international campaign is now needed to rebuild the statue of this great neurologist.


Author(s):  
Margaret A. Simons

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Simone de Beauvoir's post-World War II political engagement. The key to Beauvoir's post-World War II political engagement is, of course, her experience of the war itself—an experience recounted in her Wartime Diary (2009) and in The Blood of Others (1945), a novel set in the French Resistance and written during the Nazi Occupation. Although Beauvoir escaped the worst horrors of the war—on the front lines or in the concentration camps—she lost friends murdered by the Nazis and found her own life profoundly changed. Indeed, the Occupation that began in June 1940 confronted her with the realization that freedom, which she had assumed to be a metaphysical given, was contingent upon an economic and political situation that she had previously ignored.


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