Fragments of the Holocaust

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Duindam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Museum Studies ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
World War ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
Memorial Museum ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
A Site

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.

scholarly journals ‘Broadcast to mark Holocaust Memorial Day’: Mass-mediated Holocaust commemoration on British television and radio

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (5) ◽  
pp. 505-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E Richardson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Radio Broadcast

This article examines the various programmes that British television and radio broadcast to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, between 2002 and 2016. Adopting a content analytic methodology, I quantified the broadcast schedules of 15 successive Holocaust Memorial Days, as recorded in archived copies of the Radio Times. My analysis reveals significant variations in mass-mediated Holocaust commemoration. Principally, I found a decrease in programming, despite a significant increase in the number of television channels; a tendency towards ‘anniversarism’ in the form and frequency of broadcast programmes; a stress on Auschwitz, as metonym of the Holocaust, and on survivors, children and music; and that commercial channels were significantly more likely to broadcast documentaries (and repeats) than the BBC’s more varied and original outputs. These variations appear to be the result of three interlinked factors: First, a sense that the audience had grown weary of World War II commemoration, following saturation broadcasting of anniversaries in 2004 to 2005; changes in the management and programming priorities of key broadcasters, particularly the BBC; and that Holocaust Memorial Day has not yet become an established day for broadcasters in the nation’s commemorative calendar.

The Holocaust in Hungary: A Critical Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Randolph L Braham ◽  
Paul Hanebrink
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Revisionism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Christian Nation

Abstract Randolph L. Braham, the authority on the Holocaust in Hungary, spoke out forcefully against the historical revisionism of the Fidesz government in Hungary. Historians and publicists close to that leadership equate the occupation of Hungary by its World War II German ally with its occupation by the Red Army and subsequent decades of Soviet domination. Implying that the Hungarian people suffered at the hands of the Germans just as did the Jews, these writers set forth a nationalist narrative that casts Hungary as a victimized “Christian” nation. Braham submitted this synthetic article shortly before he died in 2018. An introduction by Paul Hanebrink sets Braham’s work in its biographical, political, and historical contexts.

Norman J.W. Goda, Barbara McDonald Stewart, Severin Hochberg, and Richard Breitman (eds.), To the Gates of Jerusalem: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1945–1947. Bloomington and Washington, D.C.: Indiana University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2015. 297 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Truman Administration ◽  
Final Report ◽  
World War ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Anglo American

This chapter reviews the book To the Gates of Jerusalem: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1945–1947 (2015), edited by Norman J.W. Goda, Barbara McDonald Stewart, Severin Hochberg, and Richard Breitman. To the Gates of Jerusalem examines the origins, deliberations, and final report of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry Regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine. The committee, of which U.S. diplomat James G. McDonald was a member, was created in November 1945 by the British Labour government and the Truman administration to address the humanitarian problem faced after World War II by Jews who survived the Holocaust. The diaries deal solely with this humanitarian plight and discuss only British and American policies. They reflect McDonald’s staunch support for the cause of the Holocaust survivors.

Yellow Star, Red Star

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jelena Subotic
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
The European Union ◽  
World War ◽  
East European ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Strategies

This book asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled—ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated—throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, the book shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism. This book presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. It demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As the book concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.

Making History Visible

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-46
Author(s):  
Sarah Phillips Casteel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
Memorial Museum ◽  
Field Of Vision ◽  
Camp System ◽  
Wartime Experience

While interned by the Nazis in Belgium and Bavaria during World War II, the little-known Surinamese artist Josef Nassy (1904–76) created a series of paintings and drawings documenting his experiences and those of other black prisoners. Nassy’s artworks uniquely register the presence of Caribbean, African, and African American prisoners in the Nazi camp system. While the Nassy Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cannot render transparent a wartime experience that has gone largely unrecorded, it illustrates how shifting from a textual to a visual lens can enable an unremembered history to enter our field of vision, thereby generating an alternative wartime narrative. After tracing Nassy’s family history in Suriname and the conditions of his European incarceration, this essay discusses two paintings that demonstrate the significance of visual art in the context of black civilian internment—for both the artist-prisoner and the researcher.

Painted Memories

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
mayer kirshenblatt ◽  
barbara kirshenblatt-gimblett
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Daily Diet ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Yom Kippur ◽  
Root Vegetables

Mayer Kirshenblatt remembers in words and paintings the daily diet of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. Born in 1916 in Opatóów (Apt in Yiddish), a small Polish city, this self-taught artist describes and paints how women bought chickens from the peasants and brought them to the shoykhet (ritual slaughterer), where they plucked the feathers; the custom of shlogn kapores (transferring one's sins to a chicken) before Yom Kippur; and the role of herring and root vegetables in the diet, especially during the winter. Mayer describes how his family planted and harvested potatoes on leased land, stored them in a root cellar, and the variety of dishes prepared from this important staple, as well as how to make a kratsborsht or scratch borsht from the milt (semen sack) of a herring. In the course of a forty-year conversation with his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who also interviewed Mayer's mother, a picture emerges of the daily, weekly, seasonal, and holiday cuisine of Jews who lived in southeastern Poland before World War II.

“The heart above the ruins”: Miriam Waddington’s Poetry, the Spanish Civil War, and Jewish Canadian Literature

1969 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Canadian Literature ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Subject ◽  
War Consequences

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.

Atskaņotājmākslas attīstība Liepājā un Otrā pasaules kara ietekme uz mūziķu likteņiem

2021 ◽  
pp. 338-351
Author(s):  
Vēsma Lēvalde
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
World War ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Soviet Union

The article is a cultural-historical study and a part of the project Uniting History, which aims to discover the multicultural aspect of performing art in pre-war Liepaja and summarize key facts about the history of the Liepāja Symphony Orchestra. The study also seeks to identify the performing artists whose life was associated with Liepāja and who were repressed between 1941 and 1945, because of aggression by both the Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany. Until now, the cultural life of this period in Liepāja has been studied in a fragmentary way, and materials are scattered in various archives. There are inaccurate and even contradictory testimonies of events of that time. The study marks both the cultural and historical situation of the 1920s and the 1930s in Liepāja and tracks the fates of several artists in the period between 1939 and 1945. On the eve of World War II, Liepāja has an active cultural life, especially in theatre and music. Liepāja City Drama and Opera is in operation staging both dramatic performances, operas, and ballet, employing an orchestra. The symphony orchestra also operated at the Liepāja Philharmonic, where musicians were recruited every season according to the principles of contemporary festival orchestras. Liepāja Folk Conservatory (music school) had also formed an orchestra of students and teachers. Guest concerts were held regularly. A characteristic feature of performing arts in Liepaja was its multicultural character – musicians of different nationalities with experience from different schools of the world were encountered there. World War II not only disrupted the balance in society, but it also had a very concrete and tragic impact on the fates of the people, including the performing artists. Many were killed, many repressed and placed in prisons and camps, and many went to exile to the West. Others were forced to either co-operate with the occupation forces or give up their identity and, consequently, their career as an artist. Nevertheless, some artists risked their lives to save others.

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