No comments about When Hope Prevails: The Personal Triumph of a Holocaust Survivor.

No comments about The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940-1944 (Studies in Jewish History).

No comments about What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History).

No comments about Ave Maria in Auschwitz: The True Story of a Jewish Girl from Poland.

2 comments about Will to Live.

1. I justy read this book and it was very informative and interesting. Such hardships by all but informative as well. I just recently visited Dauchau Concentration Camp in Germany and it makes me appreciate what they went through so much more. Everyone should read some of the books on the Holocaust.



2. This is a remarkable book. It is different from many books on the Holcaust because the main characters do not end up in a concentration camp or death camp. Instead, they remain in Poland and try to survive by maintaining Christian identities. Without giving anything away, the method that the parents select for their baby daughter to escape the ghetto is not to be believed. The book also provides a stunning first-hand account of the conquest of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union.

1 comments about Rememberings: The World of a Russian-Jewish Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture, 9).

1. Being an avid reader, I rarely read a woman's perspective on history, but Pauline Wengeroff's story opened my eyes to Jewish history from a totally different viewpoint. The story is magnificent and a must for independent minded women of any age. People of the twenty-first century will be able to identify easily with a woman of the 1840-1860's. Conditions of life change, but people don't.

2 comments about The Diary of a Young Girl.

1. I really liked reading this book.
   But I skipped over the majority of the
   boring war stuff that she tends to ramble
   on and on about. The beginning of the book
   would probably be the best part.



2. We purchased this book at the Anne Frank museum, Prinsengracht 267 Amsterdam, Netherlands. I was told that it was a bit too mature for my 8 year old but we bought it anyway (Anne was 12 when she started writing it). My daughter has been reading it every day and loves it. She likes to write in her own diary so this is very interesting to her. This is a great book for anyone but especially young girls that love to read and write. Very inspiring!

4 comments about Night, Dawn, and Day (B'Nai B'Rith Judaica Library).

1. This book should simply be read by everyone interested in Judiasm or the Holocaust. Just read it!



2. The cries of a madwoman on an Auschwitz-bound cattle car are just one of many portents shepherding doomed souls on their way to Nazi furnaces. In "Night", the first of three books in this collection, Elie Wiesel recounts his deportation to the death camps where the rest of his family perished. The tragic weight of his witness to this obscene cruelty burdens the reader with the fates of the inmates and his reflections on the meaning of evil. Wiesel questions his god and his faith. He sees sons kill fathers: "Meir. Meir, my boy! Don't you recognize me? I'm your father... you're hurting me... you're killing your father! I've got some bread... for you too... for you too..." (p.106), and becomes intimate with death.

   In "Dawn", Wiesel has migrated to Palestine and faces the duty to execute a captured prisoner. His long night of contemplation and uncertainty exposes his preoccupation with killing and killers and again with death: "Death," Kalman, the grizzled master, told me, "is a being without arms or legs or mouth or head; it is all eyes. If ever you meet a creature with eyes everywhere, you can be sure that it is death." (p.140). It is a preoccupation to be squeezed only from one who has not fully lost his faith or his humanity. A beggar explains the face of the night: "Listen," he said, digging his fingers into my arm. "I'm going to teach you the art of distinguishing between day and night. Always look at a window, and failing that look into the eyes of a man. If you see a face, any face, then you can be sure that night has succeeded day. For, believe me, night has a face." (p.126) Fear, night, suffering, and evil are his companions, and he explores them constantly. "Being afraid is nothing. Fear is only a color, a backdrop, a landscape." (p.174).

   Until, in "Day", he survives a terrible accident and is faced with his own complacent acceptance of mortality. He struggles with the urge to explain to his talented young doctor the futility of fighting against death, and reaches an epiphany when he understands the tragedy of splashing others with his suffering. "Suffering brings out the lowest, the most cowardly in man. There is a phase of suffering you reach beyond which you become a brute: beyond it you sell your soul - and worse, the souls of your friends - for a piece of bread, for some warmth, for a moment of oblivion, of sleep." (p.247).

   These stories are powerful and frightening,. Death is an implacable enemy, but also a partner for life who never goes away and will always win in the end. Wiesel has stared at evil, his stories are wrenching.




3. This was one bound volume of Wiesel's first three books, which concern the Holocaust, survival, and humanity. Night is Wiesel's personal memoir, which relates his personal story before and during World War II, as he and his father are separated from his mother and sister and interned in a series of concentration camps. Dawn is the story of a member of the movement to free Palestine from British occupation and Day concerns how one could move from a past that consumes one's every thought (or even if one should).
   
   Quote: "Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."
   
   I read Night in high school, and always think of it as being a particularly long book, which it is not. Wiesel manages to pack more than I would think possible into a little over a hundred pages, which relates the story of himself and his family during the Holocaust. It is a beautifully written work that relates a terrible story. I found the story of Wiesel's loss of faith and the relationship he had with his father particularly memorable. If you somehow missed this in high school, pick it up, if you didn't, find it again. It's worth it. Dawn and Day are not as catching as the first work, but are still interesting in their own way.



4. I read this book when going through a particularly difficult loss. While I share very little in common with the author, I found all three stories to be profound and touching. While I cannot be thankful for the suffering and tragedy that Elie Wiesel experienced, I will always appreciate that he wrote about it.

No comments about Introducing Walter Benjamin (Beginners).

2 comments about The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp for Women.

1. What do you think of whenever you hear the word, "Holocaust?" If you are like me, you think of German concentration camps and the Jews. It came as a complete surprise to me that Roman Catholic Aryan German could land in one of their "own"camps. This is exactly what happened to Nanda Herbermann, a German living in Munster. As an editor and writer for The Grail, her parish publication, Herbermann and parish priest, Father Muckermann, were part of the German, Catholic resistance to the Nazis. For this, Muckermann was forced to flee Germany; Herbermann was eventually arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated at Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women. In her own words, penned in "The Blessed Abyss, Inmate #6582 in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp for Women," we receive from Herbermann a detailed account of the horrors of her daily life, but from a very different perspective than Jewish accounts. Here is a woman who was brought up as an Aryan, with Aryan views, who slowly softens and revises her attitude toward Jews, lesbians, prostitutes and all other minorities imprisoned in Ravensbruck as she is thrown in among them and faced with the realities of their mutual hardships. Her incredulity that this is happening to her, that these atrocities are committed by her beloved, fellow Germans is a crushing blow. It is truly her faith that carries her through these daily "stations of the cross." This compelling reading is enhanced by Hester and Elizabeth Baer's meticulously written Preface and Introduction. Here she provides the reader with a detailed history of the Catholic Church's involvement with the Nazis, Herbermann's life and family, and a provocative discussion of women and the Holocaust. This is truly eye-opening, ground breaking reading that I consider imperative to any scholar of the Holocaust or someone who wants to read "the rest of the story."



2. Ravensbruck stood out among German concentration camps as gender specific: only women were imprisoned there. Perhaps for this reason, it has suffered from historical neglect, despite the fact that its inmates were often extremely important members of resistance movements in France, Germany and throughout Europe. By translating this extremely important memoir of Nanda Herbermann, known and taught widely in Germany, the Baers have made an important first step in telling the history of Ravensbruck. Baer's scholarly introduction frames the memoir from many angles--women in the holocaust, the new woman, the Catholic Church and the Nazis and wartime resistance. This is an important book for scholars of the twentieth century, and would make an excellent choice for teaching Nazi Germany, the Second World War and the Holocaust. It would also fit well in courses on women's autobiography.