This year marks the close of Yad Vashem’s Jubilee year, and sixty years since the end of World War Two. During the last few months of the war in 1945, as the Third Reich was crumbling, the Nazis made every effort to complete the genocide of the Jews, and forced the remaining survivors in the camps to set out on “death marches” into the heart of Germany. When the war finally ended, the remnants of those survivors, the “burning brand from the fire,” the “She’erit Hapleita,” began their superhuman effort to achieve rehabilitation and revival.

This year also marks the completion of Yad Vashem’s new physical plant in Jerusalem, a monumental entry plaza and modern building of unusual architectural design. To commemorate the new Yad Vashem Museum complex, we are publishing To Bear Witness: Holocaust Remembrance at Yad Vashem, edited by Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev and Dr. Bella Gutterman, Publications Director. The book includes unpublished material and photographs, and will soon appear in Spanish, French and German editions.

The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, a long-term research project, is now ready with three separate English language volumes on rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust in the Netherlands, Poland, and Belgium. Yad Vashem has published French-language and English-language volumes on rescuers of Jews in France, as well as a German-language volume on rescuers in Germany and Austria (co-published with Wallstein Verlag). Local publishers in Greece and Italy will soon be publishing books on rescuers in their respective countries. Slated for publication over next year are the volumes on European Countries and Others and Selected Profiles, under the direction of series Editor-in-Chief Israel Gutman.

Yad Vashem Studies, the annual academic journal edited by David Silberklang, featuring articles on the cutting edge of research and reflection on the Holocaust, presents Volume 33, with two special sections on the Warsaw Ghetto and on postwar issues of memory and attitudes to the subject, in addition to varied new research and review articles.

Continuing the important series co-published with the University of Nebraska Press, The Comprehensive History of the Holocaust, we expect to see the volume on Bohemia and Moravia towards the end 2005.

Editor-historian David Bankier’s latest work, The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to Their Countries of Origin After WWII, discusses the traumas that yet awaited those who had survived the Holocaust as they attempted to return to their former homes. Prof. Bankier is now completing Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust, to be co-published with Enigma Books.

Our ongoing research series are advancing: Search and Research: Lectures and Papers has two new issues: In Holocaust Diaries as “Life Stories” author Amos Goldberg applies innovative Life Story Theory to Holocaust documents, and A Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowksi, by Michal Unger, expert in the history of Ghetto Lodz, discusses the extremely controversial figure of the “Elder of the Jews.”

Yad Vashem announces a new series - The Survivors’ Memoirs Project - in English. This newly inaugurated series debuts with Days of Rain, by Enzo Tayar, based on his wartime diary in Italy; and Guarded by Angels: How My Father and Uncle Survived Hitler and Cheated Stalin, by journalist Alan Elsner. Five additional books are in the works for 2005\6.

New memoirs on the list are: Mama, it will be Alright, which was written by Sol Silberzweig, a courageous hero who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, seven camps and two death marches; The Fire and the Light, translated from Norwegian, with a foreword by Elie Wiesel, is Herman Kahan’s own story as told to Knut M. Hansson; Avraham Cytryn’s Polish diary (currently in Hebrew) will be published in an English edition as Youth Writing Behind the Walls: Avraham Cytryn’s Lodz notebooks; Cry Little Girl (currently in Hebrew and English) will be published in a German edition; The wrenching, beautifully-written story, The Soldier with the Golden Buttons, is a thinly-disguised memoir by Miriam Steiner-Aviezer. The book, now in its second edition, reflects the experiences of innocent children facing senseless brutality.

Further testimony is the diary of the leader of the Romanian Jewish community in the interwar period, edited by expert on Romanian history, Jean Ancel. Wilhelm Filderman: Memoirs & Diaries, Volume 1 – 1900-1940, covers early life and work; Volume II – 1940-1944 covers the Holocaust period. Jean Ancel is currently completing work on The Looting of Jewish Property in Romania, to appear towards the end of the year.

Yad Vashem recognizes the importance of the visual arts: Private Tolkatchev at the Gates of Hell: Majdanek and Auschwitz Liberated – Testimony of an Artist, edited by Yehudit Shendar, with text in three languages (English/French/Hebrew), and a forthcoming German edition, presents an intense, immediate record of reactions by an artist-soldier in this catalog of all of his works owned by the Yad Vashem Museum.

Several co-publishing and translation projects are now in print. The chilling Auschwitz Album is now available in Hungarian, Dutch, and German, in addition to English and Hebrew. “These are my last words…”: Last Letters from the Shoah – Testimonies from 1945, edited by Zwi Bacharach, will soon be available in a German edition, “Das Sind Meine Letzten Worte…”: Abschiedsbriefe Aus Dem Holocaust.

A unique document being published this year is a book of poems from Bergen-Belsen composed by prizewinning writer Uri Orlev, internationally known for his prose works for young people and adults. They were written by the young Orlev in Polish when he was imprisoned in the camp, and are being published in the original Polish together with the Hebrew version translated by the author himself: Wiersze z Bergen Belsen, 1944.

This is only a taste of the list to come. Further details are in our catalog, and many more are in the works, as books are what remain when all else is gone…