Stories from the Holocaust
of the Nazis, of Jewish Deaths, and of Survival
• Behind a Locked Door: The Villa Where a Doctor Experimented on Children (Margaret Talbot, New Yorker, 10-2-23) As a girl in Austria, Evy Mages was confined to a mysterious institution in Innsbruck. Decades later, she learned why. In final part she documents how she searched for information about her roots.
"At the villa, Evy had to sleep with a blanket pulled tight under her armpits, her arms ramrod straight by her sides, to insure that her hands couldn’t wander. Socializing was virtually forbidden. Nobody ever told her the reason for these rules."
• Perseverance: One Holocaust Survivor's Journey from Poland to America by Melvin Goldman and Lee Goldman Kikel. Also available, two history units on the Lodz Ghetto for use in classrooms, available through Teachers Pay Teachers
• No More Lies. My Grandfather Was a Nazi. (Silvia Foti, NY Times, 1-27-21) "On her deathbed in 2000, my mother asked me to take over writing a book about her father. I eagerly agreed. But as I sifted through the material, I came across a document with his signature from 1941 and everything changed. The story of my grandfather was much darker than I had known... In Lithuania, he was celebrated as a hero....I concluded that my grandfather was a man of paradoxes, just as Lithuania — a country caught between the Nazi and Communist occupations during World War II, then trapped behind the Iron Curtain for the next 50 years — is full of contradictions."
• We All Bleed Red: A Conversation with Heather Morris (Jane Ratcliffe, LA Review of Books, 1-30-22) Three sisters, Slovakian Jews, were carted off to Auschwitz. Their real-life story is captured in the gut-wrenching yet stubbornly hopeful novel Three Sisters. A Q&A interview, partly about abuse the women suffered in the camps. "You've got to acknowledge this! We allowed these women to go to their deaths 60 or 70 years later, carrying the shame of having been abused, when it was never their shame, it was ours."
• Cantor has one more lesson to share with his bar and bat mitzvah students: a personal look at the Holocaust (John Barry, St. Petersburg Times, 11-25-09)
• Cousins who survived Holocaust reunite in Broward after almost 70 years (Elinor Brecher, Miami Herald 3-11-12). The two men, who last saw each other in a concentration camp, fulfilled a dream Sunday in Tamarac as they met again, thanks to a memoir that one wrote.
• Introduction to the Holocaust (Holocaust Encyclopedia, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
---The Nazi Persecution of Black People in Germany
---African Americans in Nazi Germany
---The Nazi Olympics Berlin 1936: African American Voices and "Jim Crow" America
---What were some similarities between racism in Nazi Germany and in the United States, 1920s-1940s?
---The Reichstag Fire
---Nazi Party Platform
---Antisemitism
---Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution
---The Nuremberg Race Laws
---Postwar Trials
---International Military Tribunal
---Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings
• Echos of Memory (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) An ongoing collection of survivor reflections, memories, and testimonies, written by Holocaust survivors in their own words.
• Finding My Father’s Auschwitz File (Allen Hershkowitz, New York Review of Books, 1-25-19) A detailed account of what a long-term survivor of the Nazi concentration camps went through and how he survived.
• Found in Translation (Tyler Foggatt, New Yorker, 12-23-19) Lithuanian cartoonist and translator iglė Anušauskaitė travelled to New York to find missing sections of young Jews’ autobiographies, hidden in Vilnius during the Second World War. A contest for the “best Jewish youth autobiography,” open to young men and women, was interrupted by Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. A group of Jews managed to smuggle out thousands of texts.
• A Trove of Yiddish Artifacts Rescued From the Nazis, and Oblivion (Joseph Berger, NY Times, 10-18-17) "Many of the items, the experts said, offer glimpses into the hardscrabble everyday lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe when the region, not Israel or the Lower East Side, was the center of the Jewish world."
• The Nazis took a precious kettle from a Jewish couple. Some 86 years later, their grandson in Maryland got it back.(Sydney Page, Washington Post, 10-16-2020)
• A family hid their Bible in an attic as Nazis invaded. Almost 80 years later, it was reunited with the family’s heirs. (Nicole Asbury, Washington Post, 8-24-21) Listen or read.
• The Louvre is showing Nazi-looted art in a bid to find its owners. Some wonder why it took so long.(McAuley, 2-2-18)
• A Paris exhibit of Nazi-looted art honors a Europe many fear is under threat again (James McAuley, WaPo, 2-28-17)
• History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust What did American newspapers report about Nazi persecution during the 1930s and 1940s? You can help the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum answer this question. "History Unfolded is a project of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. It asks students, teachers, and history buffs throughout the United States what was possible for Americans to have known about the Holocaust as it was happening and how Americans responded. Participants look in local newspapers for news and opinion about 32 different Holocaust-era events that took place in the United States and Europe, and submit articles they find to a national database, as well as information about newspapers that did not cover events."
• 'He Was Sent by God to Take Care of Us': Inside the Real Story Behind Schindler's List (Olivia B. Waxman, Time, 12-7-18) Twenty-five years later, the film is seen as a realistic depiction of life during the Holocaust, in terms of the brutality of the Nazis and the lifestyles of those they persecuted, though it does stray from the real story in a few big ways.
• His father brought hundreds of Jewish tailors to Canada - now he's stitching together their stories (Ryan Patrick Jones, CBC, 4-17-18) When Max Enkin led a Canadian delegation to the displaced persons camps of Europe in 1948, he was looking for more than tailors. The Tailor Project — formally known as the "garment workers' scheme" — was an immigration program that brought around 2,000 displaced people from Europe to Canada to work in the clothing industry. More than half were Jewish. It was the first program that permitted large numbers of Jewish adults to immigrate to Canada following the Second World War. "It opened the doors," said Larry Enkin, 89, the son of Max Enkin. "Slowly but surely Canada began to accept Jews as part of the community."
• Homecoming II (Henrietta Rose-Innes on the quiet secrets of her Cape Town home, Granta)
• Holocaust survivor breaks decades-long silence to share her horrific story (Buffalo News, 1-27-2018) For more than seven decades, Edith Fox kept her Holocaust story inside. To make sure people never forget the Holocaust, she finally told her story to Nina Trasoff, Fox’s “friendly visitor” through a Jewish Family and Children’s Services program in Tucson designed to keep Holocaust survivors active, and to family friend Sharon Price.
• Holocaust Survivor Reunites with the Family That Helped Hide Her from the Nazis After 73 Years (Lindsay Kimble, People magazine, 12-7-18) Charlotte Adelman, 86, was only 11 in 1943 when her Jewish family was separated, and her father orchestrated a daring escape to Eastern France, where she lived in hiding with the Quatrevilles for nearly two years. In November 2014, she received a message. The young boy whose family had hid her from the Nazis in a cellar for nine months during the Holocaust wanted to reconnect.
•The Holocaust Survivors Who Take Care of Their Own (Marina Kamenev, Narratively, 3-7-18) As the children of the war reach old age, one group of survivors is teaching nursing home workers how to treat a type of trauma that only they can understand. Australia has the largest per-capita survivor population outside of Israel, and those who were born during the Second World War are already in their seventies.
• Holocaust survivors will be able to share their stories after death thanks to a new project (video, Leslie Stahl, 60 Minutes, 4-5-2020) Survivors of the Holocaust now have the chance to preserve their stories in a way that allows them to directly answer future generations' questions about their experiences.