ENGL 2020: Themes in Literature and Culture: Holocaust Survivor Literature (Helford): Home

"Many books on Holocaust survivors deal with their lives in the Displaced Persons camps, with memory and remembrance, and with the nature of their testimonies. Representing scholars from different countries and different disciplines such as history, sociology, demography, psychology, anthropology, and literature, this collection explores the survivors' return to everyday life and how their experience of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust impacted their process of integration into various European countries, the United States, Argentina, Australia, and Israel. Thus, it offers a rich mix of perspectives, disciplines, and communities."

"This volume examines the Kindertransport to Britain 1938/39. The seventeen contributions provide various new perspectives, which are investigated for the first time in this volume. Chapters focus on the Kindertransport in British historiography, on the identity development of specific groups of Kindertransportees, on the Kindertransportees¿ further migration pattern, and on Kindertransport literature. Further contributions include a comparative study of Kindertransportees and evacuees, an article on therapeutic work with former Kindertransportees and reports on various memorial and cultural projects. The volume questions widely held myths and assumptions and provides new insights into the Kindertransport phenomenon."

A moving, powerful tale of survival under the most extreme circumstances recalls the experiences of the Ovitz family--a troupe of performing dwarves, all relatives, who were deported to Auschwitz, but managed to stay alive, despite special attention from the camp's Angel of Death, Joseph Mengele.

A Promise at Sobibór is the story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi gas chambers.

The organization Oeuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE, or Society for Assistance to Children) saved thousands of Jewish children in France from deportation to Nazi extermination camps. These children were either hidden among non-Jewish families, placed in the 18 children's homes run by the OSE, or selected to escape clandestinely to the neutral countries of Switzerland or Spain. As a result of the efforts of the OSE and like-minded organizations, both Jewish and non-Jewish, about 86 per cent of the Jewish children in France survived the Holocaust.

"In 1938, seven-year-old Eva Schlesinger is put aboard a train filled with other Jewish children and carried away from Nazi Germany in a little-known rescue operation called "Kindertransport." More than four decades later, she had become a quintessential Englishwoman who hides her origins from everyone, including her own daughter. Here in Kindertransport her past and present collide."

"In 1939, on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, seven-year-old Edith Milton (then Edith Cohn) and her sister Ruth left Germany by way of the Kindertransport, the program which gave some 10,000 Jewish children refuge in England."

"Between December 1938 and September 1939, nearly ten thousand refugee children from Central Europe, mostly Jewish, found refuge from Nazism in Great Britain. This was known as the Kindertransport movement, in which the children entered as "transmigrants," planning to return to Europe once the Nazis lost power. In practice, most of the kinder, as they called themselves, remained in Britain, eventually becoming citizens."

"For nine months before the outbreak of World War II, Britain conducted an extraordinary rescue mission. It opened its doors to over 10,000 endangered children-90 percent of them Jewish-from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. These children were taken into foster homes and hostels in Britain, expecting eventually to be reunited with their parents. Most of the children never saw their families again."

Children of the Flames is a story of unsurpassed poignancy and enduring historical interest that expresses the continuing paradox surrounding the infamous Angel of Death. In a narrative evocative of the award-winning film Shoah, the long-lost survivors of Dr. Josef Mengele's notorious medical experiments recount their stories with ambiguity and anger. 20 black-and-white photos. LG.

"A fascinating and inspiring account of one man's uncommon journey through the horrors of the Holocaust."

., .Two major sections deal with the Resistance and with concentration camp life; a shorter final section concerns re-entry into normal life by the survivors.... Library Journa

"This text features the memoirs of Simha Rotem and his experiences of the uprising in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1943. He describes the terrible battle, how he assumed a false Aryan identity as he found hiding places for survivors, and finally witnessed liberation by the Russians."

...." The story of how European Jewry was forsaken by the Western Allies is by now familiar, but this book exposes for the first time the abandonment of American Jews."