scholarly journals Diana Dumitru, Peasants’ perceptions of Jewish life in interwar Bessarabia and how this became interwoven into the Holocaust

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 131-148

This article analyzes the imagery shared by interwar Bessarabian peasants about their Jewish neighbours and traces the role that this imagery played in determining gentiles’ attitudes or behaviour during the summer of 1941. It is built on a vast array of sources, including, over three hundred testimonies of Jewish survivors, and archival materials studied at the National Archives of the Republic of Moldova and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. During the start of the war, civilians had brief interregnum allowing them to act on their own, unrestrained by local authorities. At this time, robberies in Jewish towns and villages occurred on an unprecedented scale across the region, with open involvement of numerous groups of civilians; sometimes these robberies were accompanied by assaults and murders. This paper argues that the plunder of Bessarabian Jewry was something more complex than war banditry.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Duindam

Why do we attach so much value to sites of Holocaust memory, if all we ever encounter are fragments of a past that can never be fully comprehended? David Duindam examines how the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of nearly 50,000 Jews, fell into disrepair after World War II before it became the first Holocaust memorial museum of the Netherlands. Fragments of the Holocaust: The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg as a Site of Memory combines a detailed historical study of the postwar period of this site with a critical analysis of its contemporary presentation by placing it within international debates concerning memory, emotionally fraught heritage and museum studies. A case is made for the continued importance of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and other comparable sites, arguing that these will remain important in the future as indexical fragments where new generations can engage with the memory of the Holocaust on a personal and affective level.


The article describes visitors’ interpretation and understanding of the narrative about the Holocaust in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Visitors comments were the material for the analysis, used methodology was discourse analysis. Different discourses were singled out in visitors’ comments. Differences between visitors’ comments given in different years were ascertained. Age differences and differences among narratives of various groups of the Museum visitors were shown. It can be concluded that the Museum fulfills various functions. Besides being a place of commemoration, it accomplishes its educational function and serves as a source of information about the Holocaust.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Webber ◽  
Chris Schwarz ◽  
Jason Francisco

This chapter talks about the people who are creating and maintaining projects that memorialize both the Jewish life that existed in Polish Galicia for centuries and the enormity of the Holocaust during which it was destroyed. It discloses the public acknowledgment of the Jewish heritage that has been ongoing since Poland regained its democratic freedom in 1989, which led to the revival of Jewish life. It also describes the main Holocaust memorial in Kraków, which is comprised of symbolic abandoned chairs scattered through an entire city to highlight the Jewish absence. The chapter mentions non-Jewish Poles who have become aware of the past in Poland that included Jews and Jewish culture. It details post-Holocaust Poland in the 1970s that was severely restricted and in danger of facing extinction as 90 percent of Holocaust survivors had emigrated.


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