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This extraordinary compilation of photos, maps, and explanatory text is one of the most unique and informative reference works on the Holocaust. The rare photographs – some never released before – and concise history combine to be the most effective and disturbing account of this period in print today. After outlining the antisemitic and racist sentiment present in Eastern Europe since the Middle Ages, Dr. Yitzhak Arad discusses the foundations for Hitler’s twisted beliefs. Then, Arad clearly recounts the escalation of Hitler’s ideas. Many of the book’s more than four hundred photographs were taken at a time when such photography was against the law in Germany and its occupied lands. Collected from Yad Vashem Archives and from private collections, the photographs provide haunting proof of the systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis as well as bringing to life the brave resistance efforts and the hopes for a new life.

Includes the memoirs of five young women. For some among them, their paths crossed during the Holocaust, whether in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, or elsewhere, although they did not know it at the time. Each woman tells the story of her own survival and the fate of her family, from Poland, Transnistria, Czech Silesia, prison in the Soviet Union, Slovakia and other countries, to liberation.Isabelle Choko-Sztrauch-Galewska,”My First Life”: The memoir vividly describes Isabelle’s life as an adolescent in the Lodz ghetto and then her survival in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. In the camps, she stayed close to her mother, but her mother died in her hands in Belsen sholtry before liberation. Isabelle recovered from typhus and pleurisy in Sweden and later moved to France to live with her uncle, the only survivor of the family.

“I have a feeling that I’m writing for the last time. There is an Aktion in town. I’m not allowed to go out and I’m going crazy, imprisoned in my own house… For a few days, something’s in the air… The town is breathlessly waiting in anticipation, and this anticipation is the worst of all. I wish it would end already! This is torment; this is hell. I try to escape from these thoughts, of the next day, but they keep haunting me like nagging flies. If only I could say, it’s over, you only die once… But I can’t, because despite all these atrocities I want to live, and wait for the following day. That means waiting for Auschwitz or labor camp. I must not think about this so now I’ll start writing about private matters.” (February 20, 1943)And so, descriptions of alarming moments are intertwined with private and banal thoughts in the notebook of 14-year-old Rutka Laskier from Będzin, which documented her life during a few months in 1943. The outside world slowly closed down on her, but these few sheets of paper – some 60 handwritten pages in a notebook – reflect the entire universe of an adolescent Jewish girl in the shadow of death. Initial buds of womanhood, first loves, deceptions, friendships, jealousy and disputes are recorded in detail in the midst of deportations, fear, horror and death. These provide not only a moving, humane and historical testimony of Rutka’s life and death, but also represent that of tens of thousands of adolescent boys and girls during the Holocaust.“…its arresting combination of detail… has drawn comparisons to the celebrated diary of Anne Frank.”

Yad Vashem – The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority – was established in 1953 by a law that set up a central institution dedicated to the study and commemoration of the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews and mandated its location in Jerusalem. In 1957 a first building opened, and over the years a series of institutional spaces and memorials, gardens, and artworks were added. This culminated in spring of 2005 with the inauguration of a major new centerpiece, a museum of Holocaust history and ancillary structures, designed by Moshe Safdie. This book explores how architecture copes with commemoration and discusses the work of one of today’s leading architects.

Dilemmas, silence, active rescue, and passivity are words often associated with Pius XII. “Critics” emphasize the wartime Pope’s failure to condemn Nazism, while “defenders” maintain that Vatican neutrality facilitated rescue activities by the faithful. This publication, which consists of the oral presentations of scholars gathered at Yad Vashem in March 2009 for a groundbreaking international workshop, attempts to present the current state of research on Pius XII and the Holocaust, based on new documentation.

This unique narrative of escape combines the immediacy of postwar memoirs with the bittersweet perspective of age. The determined young Weinstein, one of the very few to escape from Treblinka, avoided death many times: in a labor camp, from a bunker and from informers – Poles, Ukrainians, Germans and Russians. The author credits his mother, whom he saw being taken away, with saving him once again when she appeared in a vision to an undecided rescuer, and convinced her not to inform on her son. The author found his father and after the war they immigrated to the USA. “Holocaust survivor Eddie Weinstein shares his story on a regular basis in order to educate children about the horrors of what happened during World War II… Throughout the Holocaust, Weinstein’s determination to survive remained strong as he found ways to hide from the Nazis and make it through the many difficulties he faced.”

This novella written by Otto Weiss (1898-1944), a Czech Jew, is a unique literary work and historical testimony. The novella was composed in Terezín as a surprise birthday present for his wife, Irena, and was produced with the conspiratorial artistic assistance of his young daughter Helga. Before his deportation to Auschwitz in October 1944, Otto Weiss gave the novella to a relative remaining in the ghetto, who hid it in the Magdeburg barracks. And God Saw That It Was Bad relates the experiences of God, who comes down to Terezín incognito, in human form, as Aaaron Gottesmann, in order to examine the situation personally. God finds his encounter with the reality of this ghetto most disturbing, and through him the author exposes the truth of life in Terezín. The result is a rare, unique literary document from the Holocaust. Weiss was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944. His wife and daughter survived and retrieved the book. Foreword and original illustrations are by the author’s daughter, artist, Helga Weissova-Hoškova; Afterword and explanatory notes by historian Ruth Bondy.

Chasia Bornstein-Bielicka grew up in Grodno, Poland, part of a typical Jewish family, absorbing both Jewish and universal values. During the German occupation of Poland, Chasia enlisted in the combat resistance and was sent to Białystok on its behalf. There, masquerading as a simple Polish girl, she became a liaison with the partisans, moving ammunition, medicines, food and information to the Białystok forests. Together with other women colleagues, she also gathered intelligence about the positioning of German forces, enabling the Red Army to eventually conquer Białystok without loss. When the war ended, Chasia was chosen to represent Hashomer Hatzair in Poland at the movement’s first post-Holocaust convention in France. She then embarked on a new chapter in her life: opening the first children’s home of the Koordynacja for the Redemption of Jewish Children in Liberated Poland. For a year and a half, Chasia migrated with the children along the route of the Bricha to Germany, France, and then on the clandestine immigrants’ ship Theodor Herzl to Israel.

Chełmno, a small pastoral village in Poland, was transformed by the Nazis into the first extermination camp where mass killings took place in facilities using gas – a method that was replicated in other extermination camps as part of the Nazi program for the Final Solution. The first comprehensive study about the Chełmno death camp, this book fills a lacuna in recounting the history of the Holocaust. Based on German and Jewish documents and trial records, the author describes the Jewish communities that predated the Holocaust in this region, the deportations to the camp, the extermination methods practiced there, and the Nazis’ efforts to obscure the traces of the mass murder that they had committed in this location. Among the issues discussed: the Jews of the Warthegau; establishment of the camp and first transports; continuation of transports from the Lodz ghetto; liquidation of the outlying communities of the Warthegau; the respite and the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto; looting of victims’ property; the final months; Chelmno and the trials of Nazi war criminals. “This is a unique research study in the history of the Holocaust. This is the story of the Chelmno extermination camp, where Jews were first gassed to death… few people know what happened inside this camp. Dr. Krakowski, former head of the Yad Vashem Archives, brings the reader face to face with the cruel reality… This is one of the most serious and important books documenting and commenting on the horrors of the Nazis based on reliable primary sources.” [Prof. Zvi Bacharach, Ma’ariv].

“It is difficult for us to agree that because of financial limitations, Jewish children will not be able to return to their people. That was undoubtedly the last wish of the parents who were martyred – that their children should return to Judaism.” [Members of the presidium of the Zionist Koordynacja for the Redemption of Children]These words express the feelings of the Jewish activists in Poland after the Holocaust. Sholtry after the liberation of Poland from Nazi occupation, several Jewish organizations were created in order to locate Jewish children who had been hidden during the war by Polish Christians, so as transfer them to Jewish children’s homes.Gafny’s book deals with questions posed by these operations: Why did several organizations come into being for the same purpose? What were the relations among them? What was the nature of the operations of each body? What were the reactions of the Polish rescuers? How did Polish courts view the removal of the children to Jewish orphanages? What was the attitude of the Church? How did the children themselves react? Many moving personal stories of the children are interwoven in the book.

A comprehensive, authoritative and reliable one-volume reference text. It features eight essays on the history of the Holocaust and its antecedents, coverage of such topics as the history of European Jewry, Jewish contributions to European culture, and the rise of antisemitism and Nazism; followed by more than 650 entries on significant aspects of the Holocaust, including people, cities and countries, camps, resistance movements, political actions and outcomes; American Jewry and the Holocaust; Holocaust denial; films on the Holocaust; the Holocaust in Music; Nazi propaganda, youth movements; Holocaust museums and memorials; and more. With more than 300 black-and-white photographs from the Yad Vashem Archives. Winner of Best Specialist Reference Work of the Year Award – Reference Reviews UK. “Recommended for Grades 9 and up, it is a useful and insightful history. The eight introductory essays provide some uncommon information and are essential reading for anyone interested in the topic… Because of its broad scope and accessibility, this book will fill a gap in many collections.” [Marcia W. Posner, School Library Journal] “This encyclopedia is user-friendly, authoritative… fair-minded and nonpartisan… Many of the approximately 300 illustrations have never been published together… The pictures alone are worth having this book in your library.” [The Jerusalem Post]

Lithuania ranks among the countries with the largest percentage of Jewish Holocaust victims. Of the approximately quarter of a million Jews who lived within its borders at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, only some eight thousand were fortunate enough to see the end of the Nazi occupation. The Jews who lived in the Lithuanian provinces were totally annihilated during the first few months of the war. The intensity of these massacres was unprecedented – the obliteration of entire communities in the inhuman, unimaginable, face-to-face murder of utterly helpless people, including the old, women, children and infants. This book gives an account of the annihilation of these communities, relying on rich documentary evidence of the survivors, selected from Leyb Koniuchovsky’s collection at Yad Vashem. It provides a complete picture of the humiliation, stigmatization, isolation, slave labor and suffering in the ghettos before the Jews were put to death. It describes the massive participation of the Lithuanians in the persecution and murder, and reveals the extent to which conditions in the Lithuanian provinces affected the dynamics of the Final Solution.

The historical significance of the Nuremberg Trials is widely acknowledged, and it is equally agreed by most people today that the murder of European Jewry was the greatest crime committed by the Third Reich. So why wasn’t it a central issue in any of the thirteen trials conducted by the International Military Tribunal in Germany between 1945 and 1949? This book addresses this and related questions discussing the place of the Holocaust and its coverage by the media in the post war trials of Nazi criminals conducted in various European countries. Selected articles: The Didactic Trial: Filtering History and Memory into the Courtroom (Lawrence Douglas); Coverage of the Bergen-Belsen Trial and the Auschwitz Trial in the NWDR/NDR: The Reports of Axel Eggebrecht (Inge Marszolek); Hitler’s Unwilling Executioners? The Representation of the Holocaust through the Bielefeld Białystok Trial of 1965–1967 (Katrin Stoll).

In recent years scholars and researchers have turned their attention to the attitudes of “ordinary men [and women]” during the period of the persecution of the Jews in occupied Europe. This comprehensive work addresses the disturbing question of how people reacted when their neighbors were ostracized, humiliated, deported and later murdered. On the basis of new archival material the authors also discuss the attitudes and actions—or lack of actions—of those who had an official status, or were active in the underground. The studies present the varying and complex situations that pertained in Europe reaching from states allied to Nazi Germany, such as Slovakia and Romania, to countries like France with a relatively autonomous population; also included are countries like Ukraine and Lithuania, whose nationalist movements viewed the Third Reich as the major factor that would aid them in achieving independence.

The Encyclopedia represents the fruit of more than three decades of labor at Yad Vashem. Based on a thirty-volume encyclopedia published only in Hebrew, this accessible edition recreates in illustrations and prose the distinctive culture lost during the Holocaust and makes this invaluable resource available in English for the first time. Features more than 6,500 communities profiled; 600 photographs and illustrations; 17 pages of maps; chronology; glossary; complete bibliography; index of communities; index of personalities. An ideal resource for genealogists. The Encyclopedia received the 2001 Reference Book Award from the Research and Special Libraries Division of the Association of Jewish Libraries. “One of the most important literary projects in English on the history of the Jewish people..” [Itamar Levin, Globes] “This three volume set is a required acquisition for libraries and anyone interested in Jewish studies.” [Publishers Weekly] “..superb translation project… this extraordinary history of a people chronicles the lives, habits and customs of more than 6,500 thriving communities. Based on more than 30 years of research, it involves the work of 80 international contributors and includes more than 600 black and white photographs and 17 pages of maps. The pictorial supplement of scenes from the Holocaust reminds us of a world gone awry.” [Brian Coutts and Tamara McConnell, Library Journal] “An outstanding tribute to the vanished communities… a valuable resource for students, scholars, genealogists and anyone interested in modern history.” [Chicago Booklist]

The photographic album of Radom and the nearby community of Szydłowiec is the work of an unknown German photographer who documented the scenes and events he had witnessed during his stay in this region, and later added short captions to the photos – the street scenes; the Jewish cemetery; the figures of the women, children and men; the suffering and the poverty of the Jews; and the exceptional and shocking scenes of the Jewish victims’ deportation as well as the looting of the property. This publication is a powerful photographic document that presents the end of two Jewish communities and reflects the fate of many other Jewish towns and villages in Poland.

This pioneering project gathers data from research studies, historical information, testimonies and documents dealing with more than 1,100 ghettos throughout mainly Eastern Europe. It reflects the differences between each ghetto and reveals the radical changes in Jewish communal and individual life. Those changes are examined from various perspectives of daily life, coping strategies and the different forms of resistance. The entries include the location, wartime name and geographical coordinates of each ghetto, no matter what its size or duration; and, for the larger ghettos, informational sections on the following: Pre-World War II;‎ Soviet occupation; German (Nazi) occupation; ghetto setup; ghetto institutions and internal life; murder, terror and killing operations of ghetto inhabitants; underground and resistance; and number of survivors at liberation.

The album was drawn by Czech artist Bedrich Fritta as a present for his son Thomas, on his third birthday. Illustrations for the toddler show a child sucking his thumb, using the potty, at the table, playing games and other activities, until we remember that this was not reality, but rather a gift of optimism. Fritta was head of the Theresienstadt ghetto’s technical department, where Jewish artists imprisoned in the ghetto were forced to work for the Germans, drawing plans and preparing propaganda illustrations by day. However, they clandestinely documented the grim ghetto life whenever possible and concealed the drawings. Of his family, only Tommy survived the war, and was adopted by Leo Haas and his wife Erna, who also recovered the manuscript from its hiding place. Tommy has won Special Honorable Mention for illustration of a children’s book from the Israel Museum – Ruth Youth Wing Ben-Itzhak Award.

This is a unique account of the Holocaust and its aftermath by a Jewish Yugoslav army chaplain, based on his wartime diary. The author, PhD, rabbi and Army officer in World War II, spent four years in Germany among Yugoslavian Jewish officers who were prisoners of war. With distinct literary skill, he paints a broad scene of those days and delineates fine-tooled descriptions of the atmosphere engulfing the captive Jewish officers, Bergen-Belsen after the liberation and the dreams and struggles of the camp survivors.