Book Reviews
Dr. Gideon Greif
Books, books, books …. New books pop up on our
bookshelves like mushrooms after the rain, until it becomes impossible for us to
keep up with the rich selection available.
This edition is intended for the public that is interested in Holocaust-related books. It recommends a selection of new books that have been published
in Israel and around the world. The reviews present books that deserve
exposure because of their high quality or uniqueness, and which might otherwise
remain obscure.
We welcome your responses, and invite you to suggest books for review, and
also to address questions about books that deal with different aspects of the
Holocaust.
Israel Gutman, ed. The
Encyclopedia of the Righteous among the Nations- Rescuers of Jews During the
Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem)
“Even in the darkest period of the Nazi occupation, a few lights still flickered
in the shape of the Righteous among the Nations. They represent the best of humankind,
brotherhood, justice and tolerance….In Jerusalem, Yad Vashem commemorates those
who risked their lives, who regarded nothing but the dictates of their own heart
and conscience, and who saved Jews.” Jacques Chirac, President of the Republic
of France.
The concept of “Righteous among the Nations” is based on a Rabbinic precept whereby one
who saves one life is considered to have saved an entire world. How did this
idea manifest itself during the Holocaust? There were people who adopted Jewish
children and passed them off as nieces or nephews who had been recently
orphaned. Others hid strangers in attics and shared with them their own meager
supply of food, or else supplied former workmates with forged identity papers.
Over the past five decades, Yad Vashem has acknowledged approximately 20,000 people as
Righteous among the Nations. They come from all nations, all religions, and all walks of
life. Each has a human story that represents the preservation of human values in
a world suffering utter moral collapse. They prove that in spite of great
danger, there were still people who were willing to take enormous risks in order
to fulfill the commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” These ordinary
people have become cultural heroes and symbols of courage. They are rays of
hope, role models, and inspirations.
The Encyclopedia
of the Righteous among the Nations presents an authentic record of some of the most
moving and heroic acts of our time, and is a fitting tribute to the men and
women who performed them.
The Encyclopedia of the Righteous among the Nations will be published in seven
volumes: one focusing on France, two on Holland, two on Poland, one on
Eastern Europe (including Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary,
Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Romania, Russia, the Ukraine, and Yugoslavia)
and one on Western Europe (including Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, the Czech republic,
Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia,
Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States of America).The encyclopedia
highlights the stories of those Righteous among the
Nations who
have been acknowledged by Yad Vashem up until the year 2000. A further volume of
additional entries will be issued in the future. Each volume includes a general
preface, a specific introduction about the Righteous among the Nations in the particular
countries in that volume, entries for each individual designated as Righteous among the Nations,
photographs, maps and an explanation of terms. For now, certain volumes of the
encyclopedia have been published in English. In the future, the encyclopedia
will also be published in other languages.
For more information about the Righteous among the Nations,
click here.
Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the
Holocaust. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).
Did Jewish men and women
experience the Holocaust in different ways? Did female Jewish prisoners suffer
more than their male cuonterparts? These questions have not received adequate
scholarly attention over the last thirty or forty years. However, Holocaust researchers have become
increasingly involved in answering them, and they now hold great interest among
the academy and the general public.
Nechama Tec’s book examines how Jews during the
Holocaust tried to be inventive, and struggle to live.
Tec’s book also examines issues of gender vis-a-vis Jewish suffering. Tec’s book exposes a relatively unexplored area,
suggesting that
there are areas of Holocaust research that have not been exhausted, especially
in the realms of sociology and psychology. In particular, Tec points out the
necessity of an interdisciplinary, rather than a purely historical, approach to
Holocaust research.
For the purposes of her research, Tec interviewed tens of male and female
survivors, examined archival documents and read written testimonies and diverse
secondary sources. Tec’s research results in a book that explains, with
remarkable fluency and clarity, the human processes that produced the Jewish
response to genocide and annihilation. Tec finds notable differences in the
patterns of response and the behavior of Jewish men and women during the
Holocaust.
Nechama Tec, a professor of sociology from the University of Connecticut, has
authored a number of books that have earned a fine reputation, and many of them have been
translated into Hebrew (published by Yad Vashem). Tec believes that an
examination of the differences in responses of Jewish men and women in the
Holocaust is significant, since analysis of these differences may provide an
additional tool with which to come to a deeper understanding of Jewish responses
in the Holocaust in general. Tec, in the eight chapters of her recent book,
approaches her research from different points of view: life in the ghetto,
leaving the ghetto, life in the concentration camps, life in hiding and
subsistance in the Christian world, and the resistance movements.
Since Nechama Tec is a sociologist and a Holocaust survivor, she is able to
examine the various responses of Jewish individuals to the Holocaust with a
scientitic, but also extremely empathetic and sensitive approach. Tec does not
resort to artificial intellectualizations, nor does she presume to judge or
moralize, and she succeeds at avoiding absolute conclusions.
Tec understands the importance of verbal testimony in understanding Jewish
responses during the Holocaust. The era of gathering testimonies from Holocaust
survivors is coming to an end, unfortunately, and Tec has therefore made
concerted efforts to reach tens of survivors (many of them in Israel). She
repeatedly stresses the importance of oral history.
In an attractive and gripping
style, Nechama Tec attempts to understand what drove women or men to respond in the
ways they did, how men and women bore physical and mental suffering, and how men
and women clung to their humanity and dignity. Tec’s work is
not a Gender Studies or feminist essay, according to liberal sociological
definitions. It is, rather, a treatment of feminist issues at the level of
research. An investigation of the differences between the sexes enables a deeper
understanding of the behavior of all Jewish victims in the Holocaust, and gives
readers a closer acquaintance with sociological study of the patterns of
response of Jewish men and women.
In her article about Tec’s book, Professor Judith Tydor Baumel writes that, “Resilience
and Courage is not only the name of the book, but are also characteristic of
the author.” It is easy to concur with Professor Baumel’s characterization. Nechama
Tec’s books on the Holocaust are always surprising and innovative in their
presentation of refreshingly original research.
Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust. New
Haven and London, 2003. 438pp
David Bankier and Israel Gutman,
ed. Nazi Europe and the "Final Solution." (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003).
International conferences are usually accompanied
by a book that is comprised of the papers that were given during the
proceedings, together with additional scientific commentary and literature.
The volume we have here originated with a conference that took place in
Warsaw in 1999, under the initiative of Yad Vashem, the Warsaw Jewish
Historical Institute, and the Institute of Sociological Studies in Hamburg,
and in which leading Holocaust researchers from Israel and around the world
took part. Amongst the participants were the Israeli researchers Dan
Michman, Israel Gutman, David Bankier, Daniel Blatman, Renee Posansky,
Shmuel Krakowski, Jean Ancel, Yitzchak Arad, as well as the European
researchers Wolfgang Benz, Beata Kosmala and Felix Tych.
The subject at the heart of the volume is the attitude of the local populations
in the countries occupied by Nazi Germany towards the Jews of those countries.
In simple terms: What was the attitude of the local non-Jewish population to
their Jewish neighbors after the Nazi invasion? How did non-Jewish merchants
relate to the Jewish merchants with whom they had done business for years, once
the Jews were cast out of the cycle of the economy? How did artists or writers
relate to their Jewish colleagues once they had been expelled from cultural
life?
In order to approach these questions, we first ask: why have these matters not
been discussed at an international conference until now? There are two major
reasons for this. First, time was needed for research into these
delicate questions, and the distance of time facilitates a more far-reaching
overview. Second, freedom of research was not possible in Eastern Europe
under communist regimes. Only throughout the last decade has research in these
countries been carried out in a manner that meets academic and scientific
standards.
The advantage of papers that appear in a collection published in connection
with an academic conference is that they focus on a very specific and defined
topic. For example, subjects included in this volume highlight the attitude towards Jews in the Polish underground press; the
rescue of Jews in Italy; the stance of the Ukrainian nationalist groups towards
Jews during the war; the Czech and the “Final Solution;” the position of Slovak
public opinion about the “Solution of the Jewish Problem;” Polish
historiography of the Holocaust; the “Bund” and the Polish socialists at the
time of the Holocaust; the Polish Resistance and the Jews during WWII; French
public opinion and the Jewish question during the years 1930–1942, etc.
The forty articles featured in this volume touch upon traditional antisemitism prevalent in
those countries, as well as attitudes towards Jews in
those countries between the two World Wars. The question which all of the
researches share is a basic one: How did people respond to their Jewish
neighbors who were humiliated,
shunned, and ultimately murdered?
The articles discuss different types of response, or lack of response, on the
part of the Church, official institutions and underground organizations, on the
part of those defined as “bystanders”, (by no means a simple definition) and on
the part of ordinary citizens. Furthermore, the articles deal with those
complex instances of Germany’s allies, such as Romania and Slovakia, and of
countries like the Ukraine and Lithuania, whose nationalist movements believed
that the Third Reich would bestow upon them the nationalist rights which they
sought. The articles also deal with countries like Denmark and Italy, where
Jews did benefit from the help of the local population. In sum, a spectrum of
possibilities, situations and circumstances are addressed within this important
volume.
David Bankier and Israel Gutman, ed. Nazi Europe and the "Final Solution."
(Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003).
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