Holocaust Remembrance Month: On the Shelf: Books

"The author recalls her experiences when she and her mother were hidden from the Nazis by a Gentile couple in Lwów, Poland, during World War II."

"This important and diverse collection focuses on the art expression from the inferno, documenting the Holocaust through sketches of camp life drawn surreptitiously by victims on scraps of paper, and through contemporary paintings, sculpture, and personal reflections"--Jacket

"Uncovered in various ghettos, concentration camps, and other hiding places, this very special art speaks of the drama, dignity, and courage of the victims." --cover page

Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) was a painter from Berlin who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and spent the last years of her life at her grandparents' home in the south of France. Her grandmother's suicide led Charlotte to paint a dramatized autobiography in an extensive series of gouaches. In this autobiography, all the people that were important to her are brought to life in a special her father, her stepmother Paula Lindberg, the singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn, her fellow students and teachers at the Arts Academy, her grandparents. The original paintings are in the possession of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

A six-day series of interviews between Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel and French journalist Philippe de Saint-Cheron, Evil and Exile probes some of the most crucial and pressing issues facing humankind today. Having survived the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust, Wiesel remained silent for ten years before dedicating his life to the memory of this tragedy, witnessing tirelessly to remind an often indifferent world of its potential for self-destruction. Wiesel offers wise counsel in this volume concerning evil and suffering, life and death, chance and circumstance.

Contains three works of Holocaust literature, including "Night," an account of the author's experiences as a boy at Auschwitz; "Dawn," a short novel about a young Palestinian terrorist who spends the night waiting to execute a British prisoner; and "The Accident," the story of a Holocaust survivor who must choose whether to live or die after being hit by a car

A drama set in a medieval village where three itinerant Jewish actors put God on trial to answer for his silence during a pogrom considers post-Holocaust issues

"In this work, essays examine Wiesel's roots in Jewish storytelling traditions; influences from religious, folk and secular sources; education; Yiddish background; Holocaust experience; and writing style. Emphasized throughout is Wiesel's use of multiple sources in an effort to reach diverse audiences"--Provided by publisher

Offers critical analysis of the major writings of Elie Wiesel, providing information on plot, character development, thematic concerns, style, and historical context

Explores Etty Hillesum's life and writings, seeking to understand how her spirituality was shaped, and what her profound reflections on the roots of violence And The nature of evil can teach us today

Collects the last letters written by the youth Dutch woman during her final months in the Nazi detention camp, Westerbork, where she died at age 29

This body of work reveals the interior life of a brilliant young Jewish woman. Born in January 1914, Etty Hillesum began her diary in 1941, nine months after Hitler invaded her home country of the Netherlands. The record she kept for the next two years contains arresting personal reflections and chronicles her social, intellectual, and - most significantly - spiritual growth. In addition to her ongoing search for God and truth, one of the most noted and instructive features of Etty's development was her recognition of, and her struggle to overcome, the disorder within her own being. It was her success in finally transcending her own sense of captivity within that allowed her to rise above cruel and fearsome circumstances without. Indeed, in the midst of the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, Etty's writings reveal a woman who celebrated life and remained an undaunted example of courage, sympathy, and compassion. Letters that she wrote to friends during her internment at the Westerbork transit camp poignantly describe the day-to-day horrors that the Jewish prisoners faced. Nonetheless, Etty's courage and determination remained strong, allowing her to rise above the hate around her and express her irrepressible faith in humanity. As she wrote in her last letter, thrown from the train that took her to her death at Auschwitz, "We left the camp singing."

A facsimile of drawings made in 1945 of the author's experiences in the concentration camps of Terezin, Auschwitz and Schwarzheide during the period Dec. 1941-May 1945

Much of Samuel Bak's art is influenced by his experiences of surviving the Holocaust as a child in Vilna, Poland.
There is a teacher resource for this book. Look in the Teacher Resources tab.

Issued in connection with an exhibition held April 5-May 25, 2014, Pucker Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts

A poignant testament to the enduring vitality of music and love even in the harshest times, The Inextinguishable Symphony gives us a compelling look at an important piece of Holocaust history that has heretofore gone largely untold

"Music in the Holocaust is, at its core, a social history, taking as its focus the lives of individuals and communities imprisoned under Nazism. Music opens a unique window on to the internal world of those communities, offering insight into how they understood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time."--Jacket

"Music in the Holocaust is, at its core, a social history, taking as its focus the lives of individuals and communities imprisoned under Nazism. Music opens a unique window on to the internal world of those communities, offering insight into how they understood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time."--Jacket

This introduction to the icons of Jewish art celebrates the religion and its culture while addressing fundamental issues about creative expression and the Judaic tradition

This fully illustrated book is published in conjunction with an exhibition of works from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art held at Martin Gropius-Bau in Berlin, to mark 50 years of diplomatic relations between Germany and Israel. The publication features 72 works selected from three departments at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art: Modern Art, Prints and Drawings, and Israeli Art. The focus lies on modern classics by artists such as Alexander Archipenko, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Edgar Degas, Erich Heckel, Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, Ludwig Meidner, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Egon Schiele, and Lesser Ury, which are supplemented by video works and installations by up-and-coming Israeli artists such as Yael Bartana, Guy Ben-Ner, Nevet Yitzhak, Nira Pereg, and Michal Helfman, who address personal, social and political topics. This juxtaposition creates a unique and stimulating dialogue, reveals intriguing relationships and allows for a new reading of the works. Offering a broad view of its multifaceted collection, the book also details the history of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, from its beginnings in a modest residential home in 1932 to its impressive latest building addition in 2011, and allows a peek into the development of its collection, from its first works to the most recent acquisitions

The horrors of the Holocaust and the Jews' indomitable struggle to survive is reflected in art work created in or depicting ghettos and transit, POW, and concentration camps

"This resource guide will help readers locate over 800 first-person accounts, fiction, poetry, art interpretations, and music by Holocaust victims and survivors, as well as videos relating the testimony and experiences of Holocaust survivors. In addition to the few well-known writers, artists, and musicians whose work so eloquently captures their experience during the Holocaust, this guide introduces the work of more than 250 lesser known or unrecognized writers, artists, and musicians from many countries who documented their experience of persecution at the hands of the Nazis. This guide will help students to gain firsthand knowledge of what it was like to experience the Holocaust and how ordinary people created art and meaning from the ashes of their lives."--Jacket

Describes Terezin, or Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where a distinctive and remarkable culture flourished in spite and perhaps to spite it all. Artists such as Otto Ungar, Bedrich Fritta, Leo Haas, Karel Fleischmann, doctors and rabbis, children as well as adults, turned to art, poetry and philosophy not merely to record their plight but to reassert their humanity and to fight back with their only weapon - the undying, creative human spirit.

"Art and the Second World War is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive and detailed international overview of the complex and often disturbing relationship between war and the fine arts during this crucial period of modern history. This generously illustrated volume starts by examining the art produced in reaction to the Spanish Civil War (often viewed as "the first battle of World War II"), and then looks at painting, sculpture, prints, and drawing in each of the major combatant nations, including Japan and China. This ... publication places wartime art within its broader cultural, political, and military contexts while never losing sight of the power and significance of the individual image and the individual artist. Monica Bohm-Duchen's thought-provoking analysis ranges from iconic paintings such as Picasso's Guernica to unfamiliar works by little-known artists. She reinstates war art by major artists as an integral part of their oeuvres and examines neglected topics such as the art produced in the Japanese-American and British internment camps, by victims of the Holocaust, and in response to the dropping of the atom bomb in 1945. In so doing, Bohm-Duchen addresses a host of fundamental issues, including the relationship between art and propaganda and between art and atrocity, and the role of gender, religion, and censorship, both external and internal.

Over the past forty years, the term "Holocaust" has come to represent the deliberate campaign of extermination of Jews by the Nazis of Germany's Third Reich preceding and during World War II. Masses of edited documents and analytical material have been generated by Holocaust scholars, and some bibliographical and encyclopedic guides to the field are available. However, a student or researcher may be confounded by the abundance of publications and may lack the necessary background and endurance to sift the wheat from the chaff. The present volume has a two-fold purpose: to offer substantial analysis in intrinsic areas of study and to assess the relevant literature in each case. Major scholars and brilliant, less established historians from Israel, Canada, and the United States have contributed more than thirty essays complete with extensive reference lists in three broad divisions. The section on conceptual approaches to the Holocaust is composed of such topics as the rise of national socialism, biographies and interpretations of Hitler, concentration camps, post-Holocaust Jewish philosophies, and the "righteous gentiles." Area studies deal with aspects of the Holocaust in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, the Balkans, France, Holland, Italy, and Spain, and with effects and reactions in Switzerland and Britain. Arab-German collaboration and American responses are also addressed. A third section takes up Holocaust subjects in education, belles lettres, and the arts, including diaries and memoirs, fiction, poetry, books for children, art, music, and films. Although the scholars all provide evaluative surveys of their subjects and related literature, each enjoyed considerable latitude in coverage and each presents his or her own views and selections, not all of which are shared by other contributors or the volume editor. The editor also provides an introduction and a final survey of major institutions and resources for Holocaust study.

Collection of poetry bearing witness to the Holocaust

Dora Apel analyzes the ways in which artists born after the Holocaust--whom she calls secondary witnesses--represent a history they did not experience first hand. She demonstrates that contemporary artists confront these atrocities in order to bear witness not to the Holocaust directly, but to its "memory effects" and to the implications of those effects for the present and future. Drawing on projects that employ a variety of unorthodox artistic strategies, the author provides a unique understanding of contemporary representations of the Holocaust. She demonstrates how these artists frame the past within the conditions of the present, the subversive use of documentary and the archive, the effects of the Jewish genocide on issues of difference and identity, and the use of representation as a form of resistance to historical closure

Gathers drawings and sculptures by those in the Jewish ghettos and Nazi concentration camps and includes interviews with surviving artists

Describes the Holocaust experiences of five individual survivors through a series of prints by American artist Barbara Milman, each accompanied by text and introductory remarks

The comics within capture in intimate, often awkward, but always relatable detail the tribulations and triumphs of life. The comics are enhanced by original essays and interviews with the artists that provide further insight into the creation of autobiographical comics that resonate beyond self, beyond gender, and beyond ethnicity

A memoir of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and about his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father, his story, and history. Cartoon format portrays Jews as mice, Nazis as cats. Using a unique comic-strip-as-graphic-art format, the story of Vladek Spiegelman's passage through the Nazi Holocaust is told in his own words. Acclaimed as a "quiet triumph" and a "brutally moving work of art," the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus introduced readers to Vladek Spiegelman. The story succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive. As the New York Times Book Review commented, "[it is] a remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness ... an unfolding literary event." This long-awaited sequel, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, moves us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills. Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Maus ties together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing tale of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of daily life in the death camps, and the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Vladek's troubled remarriage, minor arguments between father and son, and life's everyday disappointments are all set against a backdrop of history too large to pacify. At every level this is the ultimate survivor's tale--and that too of the children who somehow survive even the survivors