Series Editor: Jürgen Matthäus
A new perspective on Holocaust history
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and AltaMira Press are proud to present this new, groundbreaking series of source volumes that provide a fresh perspective on history using firsthand accounts of the lives of those who suffered through the Holocaust, those who perpetrated it, and those who witnessed it as bystanders. Documenting Life and Destruction combines a wide range of documents from different archival holdings with additional information to enhance the understanding of the events in this crucial period.
Were we dreaming or was it real? Could people really do this to each other? And why, why?
—Excerpt from the diary of Mally Dienemann, a rabbi’s wife in Offenbach, Germany, 1933, in Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume I, 1933–1938
Please join us on Tuesday, October 11, 2011, from 2:00-4:00 PM in the Helena Rubinstein auditorium at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as editor Dr. Alexandra Garbarini (Williams College) and Museum survivor volunteers will present a reading and discussion of the diaries, letters, and other materials gathered in the second volume in the series Jewish Responses to Perseuction, 1933-1946. For more information, please click here.
Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933–1946
Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933–1946 presents documentation that describes the manifestations and meanings of Nazi Germany’s “final solution” from the Jewish perspective. This principal publication in the Documenting Life and Destruction series will consist of five volumes.
The first volume, covering the period 1933–1938, takes us from Hitler’s rise to power through the aftermath of Kristallnacht and vividly reveals the increasing devastation and confusion wrought in Jewish communities in and beyond Germany at the time. It features period photographs and reproductions of original documents with translations and annotation as well as a chronology, glossary, bibliography, and index.
The second volume, which covers the period between 1938 and 1940, brings together a broad range of documents – including diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper articles, reports, Jewish identity cards, and personal photographs – from Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe and beyond Europe’s borders. It illuminates the daily lives of a diverse range of Jews who suffered under Nazism, their coping strategies, and their efforts to assess the implications for the persecution they faced during this period. Volume II begins with Kristallnacht in 1938 and continues through Jewish flight out of Germany, the onset of World War II, the forced relocation of the Jews of Europe eastward, and the formation of Jewish ghettos, particularly in Poland.
“One of the great challenges facing historians of any event or epoch is to recover the perceptions and uncertainties of people for whom what we know as the past was still an unknown and open-ended future. The singular achievement of this volume is to place in the hands of historians, students, and general readers an extraordinary collection of documents that opens up the world of the 1930s as German Jews experienced it in all its urgency, confusion, disorientation, hope, and despair, not as we now make sense of it with the advantage of hindsight.”
—Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on volume I.
“For many years, the bulk of the research that has been done on the Holocaust focused on the actions of the perpetrators: what did they do and how did they do it? In recent years scholars have begun to redress this imbalance. Now their efforts will have a critically important resource on which to draw: the five volume series Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933–1946. Drawing on diaries, letters, organizational archives and a host of other sources it gives the victims a voice that, in too many other works, has been denied to them. While this first volume stands on its own as a book well worth reading, it also promises to become an invaluable aide to scholars, teachers, students, and all others who want to know more about ‘the six million.’ It is long overdue.”
—Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies, Emory University, on volume I.
“This second volume of the series, which covers the period 1938-1940, will be of immense importance both to historians and to general readers alike. As in the preceding volume, the Jewish victims’ reactions to the rapidly expanding Nazi onslaught are contextualized in an exemplary presentation. An admirable addition to an essential initiative.”
—Saul Friedländer, University of California at Los Angeles, on volume II.
Published:
Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume I, 1933–1938
By Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman
AltaMira Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
ISBN: 978-0-7591-1908-6
Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume II, 1938-1940
By Alexandra Garbarini
With Emil Kerenji, Jan Lambertz, and Avinoam Patt
AltaMira Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
ISBN 978-0-7591-2039-6
Forthcoming volumes in the Jewish Responses to Persecution Series include:
Volume III,
1941–1942
Examines Jewish reactions in different countries, including Poland, France, and the United States, to the unfolding implementation of the “final solution” in Europe up to July 1942 when “selections” began in Auschwitz. Attempts at hiding and resistance will form an integral part of the topical range featured in the volume.
Volume IV,
1942–1944
Looks at the “final solution” in full operation throughout German-dominated Europe as the struggle for survival reaches unprecedented intensity, including armed resistance and organized escape attempts.
Volume V,
1944–1946
Covers the fate of those who perished in the last stages of the Holocaust, especially Hungarian Jews, as well as providing details on survival and the reestablishment of Jewish life after liberation in and beyond Displaced Persons camps. Early postwar assessments of Nazi brutality are also covered.
Forthcoming stand–alone volumes in the Documenting Life and Destruction Series:
(working titles)
The Holocaust in Hungary
By Gábor Kádár and László Csösz
Features sources on the causes, stages, and consequences of the destruction of the largest Jewish community left intact in German-dominated Europe in 1944. The volume shows how after the German occupation of Hungary the complete disenfranchisement, plunder, ghettoization, and deportation of the Jews was implemented at an almost unprecedented speed.
Children During the Holocaust
By Patricia Heberer with an introduction
by Nechama Tec
Explores the wide range of experiences of those under the age of 18 who found themselves caught in the war. While the volume will focus on the struggle of victims (Jews, Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, and others) to survive, it will also explore the role of children as bystanders and persecutors.
For more information on this volume, please click here.
The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia
By Wendy Lower
Combines a fascinating account written in the town of Peremyshliany, western Ukraine, in 1942–1943 with a selection of postwar testimonies, and wartime German documentation on the persecution and mass murder of Jews in this under-researched region.
Contact Information:
Jürgen Matthäus, PhD
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW
Washington, DC 20024
E-mail: jmatthaus@ushmm.org
Tel.: 202.314.0378
AltaMira Press
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200
Lanham, MD 20706
www.altamirapress.com
Tel.: (800) 462-6420
