#Stolen Memory and the Difficult Heritage of Spaniards in Nazi Concentration Camps: Spatial, Digital and Virtual Approaches

Reviewed by: Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading by Leona Toker Benjamin Paloff Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading. By Leona Toker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 281 pages. $40.00 (paper). The ways in which we read the literature that emerged from the experience of concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, on the one hand, and the texts that arose from the Soviet Gulag system, on the other, will be markedly different in the twenty-first century from what they were in the twentieth. So broad a generalization is justified by its actualization already in progress: those who have known the spaces to which these texts refer are passing quickly from this life, and those who are currently being born into it will be more likely to respond to the similarities between a Gulag novel and a Holocaust novel than to default immediately to the theoretical and political arguments that have long striven to treat these bodies of work as separate. Those of us who teach this material to undergraduates know that doing so requires an ever-increasing amount of contextualization that just a few years ago might have been assumed to be common knowledge. At the same time, the separation we have carefully maintained between the stories of survival in Nazi camps and Soviet penal colonies are starting to seem more and more trivial to readers encountering them for the first time. [End Page 204] This is because the insistence that these phenomena—and, indeed, any experience of collective and forced detention, confinement, depravation, labor, and torture—are irreconcilably distinct from each other is driven more by ideological exceptionalism than by fundamental differences in institutions or their representation. On the contrary, the institution of the concentration camp is broadly comparable across the Nazi and Soviet contexts (and a great many others besides, both historical and contemporary), and the texts that have emerged from these places are generically so similar that insisting on their strict separation risks a kind of interpretive malpractice. This is not to reject the argument that the Nazi genocide perpetrated against European Jewry created a special inflection of the camp experience, since one inevitably experiences the camp differently, and the reader reads that experience differently in turn, when one's entire race or ethnic group has been marked for extinction. Nor is it to assume that the peculiarities of the Soviet penal system are not significant in themselves, from the system's endurance across generations to its eagerness to absorb those who, even in their internment, viewed themselves as true believers in the system that was persecuting them. But the sequestration that had separated "Gulag literature" from "the literature of Nazi camps" while scholars working on these corpuses were still defining their respective subfields in the 1960s and 1970s has long since calcified into a taboo, one that refuses an otherwise self-evident comparative field at the outset. The handful of more expansive treatments that Leona Toker mentions in a footnote to Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Concentration Camps—most notable among them, Terrence Des Pres's The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (1976) and Tzvetan Todorov's Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1991; English translation, 2000)—are the exceptions that prove the rule. The cumbersome title of Toker's new study is symptomatic of this circumstance. And, in the interest of laying a strong foundation for future comparison, Toker is at pains to avoid weighing in on the exceptionalist position by stating, for instance, that concentration camp literature can or should be treated as a unified genre. Instead, [End Page 205] she emphasizes that her method is "intercontextual." In this way, she effectively does an end-run around the exceptionalism dilemma simply by treating the Nazi and Soviet systems as parallels of each other that are likewise mirrored in literary artifacts, focusing "on those cases where the two bodies of literature about concentration camps provide helpful contexts for each other—where what is clear in one literary corpus sheds light on what is obscure in the other" (9). By presenting Nazi concentration camps and...

Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps. By Shirli Gilbert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. [xxii, 243 p. ISBN 0-927797-4. $45.] Index, bibliography, appendix, music examples, illustrations. When one takes into consideration the weight of testimony and analysis of events pertaining to the Nazi attempt to obliterate European Jewry during the Holocaust it comes as a surprise to find that Shirli Gilbert's Music in the Holocaust is one of the few available works in English that attempts to discuss and analyze the role of music in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps. Much of the available literature deals with music and musical personages in two widely different concentration camps, Auschwitz, which primarily functioned as an extermination center with subcamps designed for forced labor, and Terezin (Theresienstadt), which functioned as a holding center but whose active cultural life was permitted by the Nazis for public relations purposes. With the exception of these two areas, researchers working in the field of music and its use in ghettos and concentration camps need to access diverse sources in order to obtain information. I hoped that this volume would present a consolidation of information, and many of my hopes have been realized. However, the title is perhaps a bit misleading as the actual content of the book is more restricted than the title would lead one to believe. Gilbert divides the book into four main sections, each illuminating the multiple layers of function that music filled within the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos and Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz. Appendices list tides of newly created songs in the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos, the contents of German political prisoners' songbooks in Sachsenhausen, newly created Polish songs in Sachsenhausen, the repertoire of the Orchestra in Sachsenhausen, and newly created songs in Auschwiu. There is also an extensive bibliography. As is clear from Gilbert's material, even though there were commonalities, each situation, be it ghetto or concentration camp, had its own unique issues, pertaining not only to artistic personages, but also to historical contexts and the actions of political leaders such as Jacob Gens in Vilna and Chaim Rumkowski in Lodz. For example much music from the Warsaw ghetto arose under horrific conditions, not the least of which was the confinement of over 400,000 people in a minute portion of the city. There was great social stratification resulting in profoundly startling levels of inequality as people from many strata of society were brought in and confined. In contrast to this situation the ghetto in Vilna was relatively underpopulated with only about 20,000 individuals confined. However, their confinement was preceded by the indiscriminate murder of two thirds of the Jews of that city and as a result the level of anxiety and insecurity there must have exceeded that initially found in Warsaw. Gilbert provides substantial information which illustrates how the individual social stratification found within the ghettos resulted in different types of music making, ranging from orchestral, chamber, theater, cafe music, and house concerts to street songs (some of which were sung for the purpose of begging for food, while others expressed anger at the social discrepancy within the ghetto and still others voiced criticism of the Judenrat, the Jewish Council). A final type of song, those of resistance, came from members of partisan organizations. In some ghettos these were in direct conflict with the policy of the selfgoverning Jewish councils who thought that passive acquiescence and participation in labor useful to the Germans was the best option for survival. Information is quite detailed at times. For example the orchestra in the Warsaw ghetto performed approximately forty times between November 1940 and April 1942 with a repertoire that included works by Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Grieg, Borodin and Saint-Saens (even though regulations proscribed the performances of such 'Aryan' composers, p. …

Holocaust Memory and Restorative JusticeCompetition, Friction, and Convergences Björn Krondorfer (bio) Keywords Holocaust, transitional justice, memory, restorative justice, Jewish and Christian responses, trauma, uniqueness, reconciliation, politics of difference, national entrenchment, dialogical engagement In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Michael Rothberg argues for the value of overlapping and intersecting Holocaust memory with other collective memories. He traces how the history and memory of the Holocaust have been evoked, adopted, and employed as a way of making sense of political struggles and group identity in various colonial and postcolonial contexts. For Rothberg, the concept of multidirectional memory recognizes that remembrances of cataclysmic events do not cancel each other out but are venues through which meaningful moral and political decisions can be formed in the present. In a time when momentous collective (and often traumatic) memories flow freely and rapidly across national borders, they are often pitted against each other competitively. But, Rothberg argues, the idea of "competitive memory" must be abandoned since it assumes a public sphere that cannot hold "different collective memories"—as if it were "a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources."1 While Rothberg's study largely focuses on how the Holocaust has figured as a political, cultural, and moral trope in negotiating the meaning of the Algerian War (in which Algeria eventually won independence from France), it transcends any specific cultural location. His frame is global in perspective and rests on an ethical foundation that pursues the "notion of transnational, comparative justice."2 Consequently, Rothberg disagrees with claims that view the Holocaust (or any other calamity, for that matter) as a unique and incomparable event. [End Page 373] In this essay, I use Rothberg's critical intervention—multidirectional memory—and its application as a "shared moral and political project"3 to probe the dichotomizing language of uniqueness/universality when applied to memorable events of great harm. By eschewing competition among collective memories, I seek new pathways of justice-oriented, dialogical engagement. I do so by tracing, on the one hand, the rhetorical weight of Holocaust uniqueness claims (particularly in American and occasionally German contexts) and, on the other, the universalist claims of transitional justice as they evolved after 1945. I will read uniqueness claims through and against a transitional justice genealogy, eventually arriving at the concept of restorative justice. I will argue that neither uniqueness nor universality is a helpful mechanism for thwarting the entrenchment of partisan political memory. I propose, instead, to speak of "singularity" with respect to the gravity of each injurious history and collective memory. Creating a framework that averts competition among narratives of suffering will be "inevitably dialogical," as Rothberg suggests.4 It supplants the competitive deployment of political memory with an ethical vision of engaged relationality. UNIVERSAL, UNIQUE, SINGULAR: PRELIMINARY CLARIFICATIONS "The question of the uniqueness and universality of the Holocaust," writes Michael Berenbaum, "is being considered with increasing frequency not only in scholarly quarters with a focus on historiography but also in communities throughout the United States where Holocaust memorials and commemorative services raise a consciousness of the Holocaust."5 Berenbaum wrote those lines before the 1993 opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, at a time when Jewish American and Israeli scholars were debating the place of the Holocaust along the oppositional poles of uniqueness and universality. In his 1981 essay, Berenbaum briefly reviewed the positions of some of the major participants in the debate, including Yehuda Bauer, Lucy Dawidowicz, Emil Fackenheim, Elie Wiesel, Richard Rubenstein, Ismar Schorsch, Eliezer Berkovits, Robert Alter, and Henry Feingold. Berenbaum, who had been a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, sided with a restrained embrace of the uniqueness claim, arguing that neither the perceived threat of a so-called Americanization of the [End Page 374] Holocaust nor the attempt to compare Jewish victims to other victim groups or other genocides would diminish the historical uniqueness for the Jewish community. To Americanize the Holocaust, he suggested, is just a way of telling "the story . . . in such a way that it resonates" with an American audience; to compare the Holocaust to other events, he continued, is no cause for fear since they are "analogous...

Charlotte Delbo's Voice: The Conscious and Unconscious Determinants of a Woman Writer Nicole Thatcher Rentrer du camp rentrer dans le rang après l'histoire le tous les jours après le maquis le traintrain de la vie. [..·] Sortir de l'histoire pour entrer dans la vie essayez donc vous autres et vous verrez. (Mesure de nos jours, 82) THESE VERSES, WRITTEN AFTER Charlotte Delbo's return to France from Nazi concentration camps, encapsulate the considerable shift in the relationship of women with war brought by World War II. The total war character of this conflict gave women the opportunity to play an increasing role in the action: not only did they participate in the war effort through their work, but they also appeared as combatants, even in commanding positions in the case of the Soviet armed forces. Furthermore, as Billie Melman reminds us, with the German occupation of many countries, such as France in 1940, "the impact of the war on entire populations blurred the borderlines between 'front' and 'rear' in their gendered perspective,"1 allowing women, like men, to take an active part in the war in non-traditional ways, one being underground resistance. In this newly defined battlefield, women were able to make a personal decision to join the fight, with the accompanying risks of injury, arrest, imprisonment, torture and death. It was very consciously that Delbo chose to become involved in the French Communist resistance. Abandoning the South American tour of Louis Jouvet's theatrical company, in which she held the post of Jouvet's secretary, she rejoined her husband, Georges Dudach, in Paris, in November 1941. There, attached to the Communist underground resistance movement, they both worked at publishing clandestine material. Arrested by the French police in May 1942, and imprisoned in La Santé, they were transferred to the Gestapo. Dudach was executed in May 1942 and Delbo sent to Romainville prison, and from there to Auschwitz-Birkenau, in January 1943, in a convoy of 230 women. Delbo's involvement in the French resistance and her 35 months of capVol . XL, No. 2 41 L'Esprit Créateur tivity may have been a short period in her lifetime (1913-1985), but they were a watershed which affected her to the end of her life. In this essay, I aim to analyse how her writings reflect her war experience and what singularises them as feminine, although Delbo declared that she was not a woman in her writing.21 will look firstly, and more particularly, at the representation of her specific experience in a Nazi extermination-concentration camp, and secondly at her view of war, with its accompanying concepts of patriotism, sacrifice and heroism. The predominant representation of war in Delbo's writings is that of the Nazi concentrationary universe, and more particularly of Auschwitz-Birkenau : it is a firsthand account of her own and other women's experience. This character of participatory witness of war until recently was mainly the prerogative of men, and consequently "sets apart her representation, alongside that of other ex-detainee women writers." However, having segregated them, the Nazis did not treat women and men differently in concentration camps, and thus it would seem that a woman's account should be similar to a man's: women and men were both subjected to ill-treatment, strenuous physical and often senseless work, in abysmal conditions of hygiene, nutrition and accommodation . They were made to work to the limits of their physical strength, before dying of exhaustion, lack of food, water and medical care. However, as Marlene E. Heinemann remarks: "Even the most impartial and sensitive male observer will be unable to provide an inside picture of women's experiences in the Nazi camps, since male and female prisoners were segregated in separate camps."3 Thus the singularity of Delbo's representation results in part from the segregation of men from women. It is a convoy of women and a women's extermination camp, Birkenau, placed under the supervision of female guards and SS that Delbo makes us "see," in her trilogy Auschwitz et après4 in particular; it is her experience and that of other women detainees that she makes us share...

War memorials are both sites of memory and narratives of national identity and can sometimes go against acknowledging a country’s difficult histories. BBPR’s Monument to the Fallen in Concentration Camps in Milan’s Monumental Cemetery both commemorates Italians who died in Nazi concentration camps and marks the end of the Fascist regime. Its abstraction was core to the architects’ design intention yet remains at odds with the need for a grieving site and the acknowledgement of Italy’s role in the deportation of Jews and political prisoners. This chapter engages with the broader question of abstraction in art and architecture by comparing an analysis of architectural intention and elite critique to contemporary reception through onsite vox pop–style interviews. The Monument accentuates a spurious distinction between history and memory: rather than allowing the Monument to be part of Italy’s difficult heritage, it demonstrates a form of identity, partitioning where the self-affirming narrative of Italy’s post–World War II identity as an anti-fascist nation obscures the reality of its fascist past.

Spanish Holocaust through Memory Representation:Fictional Biography of Neus Català Ana Corbalán "No reivindicamos la verdad como unprivilegio, sino por justicia y reconstituciónde una parte histórica que arranca de 1.936;por el respeto a nuestras muertas, pordesagraviar a tantas mujeres olvidadas." (Neus Català, De la resistencia y la deportación 29) It is estimated that 15,000 Spaniards died in German concentration camps. However, the troubling reality that accounted for the repression experienced by the Spanish Republicans in occupied France and Nazi Germany during the Second World War has not been widely studied. Although not particularly well known, there are several testimonies, documentaries, and narratives that focus on the Spanish Holocaust.1 These narratives are especially traumatic because they describe the humiliations suffered by human beings who were stripped of their [End Page 368] dignity while detained in the Nazi camps.2 According to Michel Leiberich, these texts serve to explore key concepts such as: democracy, human rights, human values, human dignity, and freedom (118). Despite considerable scholarship about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, few publications explore the importance of Spanish women's roles during that time period, and scant attention has been given to the presence of female activists who fought against international Fascism.3 Recovering their silenced voices is the first step towards the rewriting of history, due to the scarcity of narratives that stress women's agency in the concentration camps.4 It is important to consider that the last survivors of the Spanish Civil War are currently in their nineties. Their advanced age means that little time remains to address, through retelling their stories, the damage suffered by exiled and deported women.5 By hearing these voices—from their memoirs, oral testimonies, and fictional biographies—we can understand their crucial role in the resistance against totalitarian regimes and how they protested the systematic violation of human rights that they endured during times of dictatorship and war. Thus, it is imperative that we [End Page 369] recover the missing information about women's activism in order to add their life accounts to the annals of history. One of these women is Neus Català, born in a small rural town in the province of Tarragona in 1915. She was politically active even in her childhood, due to her parents' affiliation with the Communist Party. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Català left Spain and joined the French Resistance until the Gestapo arrested her in 1943. Shortly after that, she was sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp where it is estimated that 92,000 people died. Her memory text, Cenizas en el cielo: La vida de Neus Català, written by Carme Martí in 2012, reconstructs this deportee's sufferings in Ravensbrück.6 At the time of the publication of this novel Català was ninety-six years old, and she felt the urgency of sharing her memories about her experiences in a concentration camp. The text recounts Català's most important life events: her childhood, her maturation, and her traumatic memories of war, repression, exile, and deportation. Using a female, feminist, and anti-fascist political lens, Cenizas en el cielo vindicates the memory of thousands of Republican women who experienced the humiliation of Nazi concentration camps. Consequently, Cenizas en el cielo reconstructs and reinterprets the forgotten history of the Spanish Holocaust through the eyes of a woman who suffered a systematic violation of her most basic human rights. The protagonist of the novel embodies an ostensibly real and historical figure. In a similar way, the fictional account of this witness in the camp allows the contemporary reader to understand the trauma suffered by millions of people who were detained in the Nazi camps. This text, alongside former testimonies from Spanish Holocaust survivors collected by Català in De la resistencia y deportación: 50 Testimonios de mujeres españolas, establishes an effective link to the study of women's historical memory, especially since, as Català's fictional narrative voice notes in Martí's novel, the deported women have been almost completely forgotten: "los deportados españoles son los grandes olvidados de esta historia, y nosotras somos las olvidadas...

Drawing on construal level theory, prior literature has found a positivity bias in online ratings when consumers evaluate an experience from a psychological distance, whether spatial or temporal. Self-distancing theory posits that psychological distance enables individuals to reflect on psychologically distant negative experiences more genuinely, in a less biased way. This raises the question of whether the positivity bias in ratings due to psychological distance persists for negative experiences. To address this question, we collected data from a large review platform that enables the identification of reviewers’ spatial and temporal distance. The negativity of an experience was operationalized via review text sentiment. We introduced spatial and temporal distance as moderators between sentiment negativity and ratings and found a negative moderation by spatial distance and a positive moderation by temporal distance. Our findings indicate that the relationship between sentiment negativity and rating grows stronger under spatial distance and gets weaker under temporal distance. Text mining confirmed self-distancing as the driver behind the spatial moderation and construal levels as the driver behind the temporal moderation. We attribute the asymmetric moderations to differences in the tangibility of spatial distance (more tangible) and temporal distance (less tangible). These results improve our understanding of reviewing behavior and can help platforms de-bias ratings.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the decision-making process for the purchase of tourism product in different choice situations with different temporal and spatial distances. Unlike ordinary retail product, tourism products are separated in temporal and spatial distance between purchase and experiencing product, so that those can have an important influence on product purchase decisions. Despite its importance, the psychological distance of tourism consumers about temporal and spatial distance has not received much attention among researches in tourism discipline. Based on construal level theory, this study examined whether psychological distance (temporal and spatial) influences potential travelers' making-choice and choice satisfaction. Using a scenario method, respondents were randomly assigned to one of four different scenarios (2 temporal distance × 2 spatial distance). The results of this study showed that potential travelers made different purchase choice decision depending on the temporal and spatial distance. To be specific, potential travelers increased the likelihood of making choice product that are close temporal and far spatial distance, and they were more satisfied with their decision-making in far psychological distance (temporal and spatial distance) of choice situation. This study also demonstrated that participants who made 'no-choice' in far temporal distance perceived a lower satisfaction with their decision than those who made a 'choice' preferred product. Results from this study showed that temporal and spatial distance can have an important influence on the purchase choice and their decision satisfaction. Based on these results, implications related to the psychology of choice of tourism consumers and the future research directions are provided.

In one of the most shocking passages of her 1963 feminist classic, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan claimed that "the women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps. . . ."1 Friedan went on to explore this analogy for several pages, and then continued to use the phrase "comfortable concentration camps" to refer to suburban homes throughout the rest of The Feminine Mystique. Scholars have since castigated Friedan for her inaccuracy and insensitivity in developing the concept of the "comfortable concentration camp." Feminist scholar bell hooks, for example, has charged Friedan with "narcissism, insensitivity, sentimentality, and self-indulgence."2 Historian Daniel Horowitz called Friedan's comparison "problematic," "trivializing," "careless and exaggerated."3 And Friedan herself has backed away from her imagery, saying in her recent memoir, "I am ashamed of that analogy. . . . The American suburb was no concentration camp."4 Indeed, in a 2001 interview, Friedan refused to discuss her camp analogy in any detail, repeating several times that she had made an error in judgment.5 [End Page 205] There is no question that Betty Friedan's analogy was an exaggerated and flawed one, as she herself now recognizes. The Nazi regime publicly confined, starved and tortured its victims in camps, and selected Jewish victims for mass extermination. This psychological and physical destruction was obviously wholly different from, and much more extreme than, the psychological devastation that was wreaked by suburban homes, which privately confined and socially marginalized middle class women. Nonetheless, it is intellectually unsatisfying to dismiss this powerful analogy merely as inaccurate or sensational, or to accept Friedan's disavowal of the analogy without probing further. Friedan's analogy offers historians an important window into the impact of the Holocaust on American Jewish thinkers, as well as the impact of the Holocaust in larger American culture.By comparing Nazi concentration camps to American suburban homes in 1963 , Friedan demonstrated that American Jewish intellectuals were not only conscious of the devastation of the Holocaust earlier than most historians have recognized, but that these intellectuals were also vocal about the Holocaust, using it to shape American public opinion in ways that most historians have thus far overlooked. In describing the impact of the Holocaust on American Jews and especially on Jewish intellectuals, historians have typically emphasized Jewish reticence in discussing the Holocaust before the Six Day War in 1967 , as well as the Holocaust's strong impact on American Jewish identity and support for Israel after 1967.6 Historians have only recently begun to describe as significant discourse surrounding the Holocaust before 1967 , or the variety of ways in which American Jews have interpreted and used the Holocaust to address non-Jewish subjects.7 Friedan's analogy demonstrates that most historians have neglected to examine a distinct period of Holocaust consciousness in the late 1950s [End Page 206] and early to mid-1960 s, a time when some American Jewish thinkers who had come of age during the Nazi era publicly emphasized the evils of Nazi concentration camps, not as an expression of their personal Jewish identity or a justification of Israeli military policy, but instead, as a means of expressing prevalent intellectual concerns with bureaucracy, alienation, and conformity and criticizing American society from a liberal perspective.8 Within this earlier period of Holocaust consciousness, and during an era in American history shaped by a spirit of social commitment and cultural transgression, American readers—both Jews and non-Jews—were inspired and engaged by such uses of Nazi concentration camps, not repelled or insulted. Indeed, during this era, in part because of works like The Feminine Mystique, Nazi concentration camps became, for many liberal readers in the United States, appropriate and valuable symbols for exploring inhumanity on an American...

The Development of the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Slovenian Prisoners In the article, the author first presents the development of the Nazi concentration camp system and its organization. Then, she focuses on the Slovenian prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps and places them in different statistical groups. The first forms of concentration camps as well as the first use of the term appear during the Anglo-Boer War in the period 1899-1902. The similarities with the later concentration camps are also reported by the First World War prisoners. The development of the Nazi concentration camps can be divided into two periods: from 1933 to 1939 and from the beginning of World War II in Europe to the year 1945. In the first period, concentration camps represent a place of brutality; however, for the most part, they were in operation only a short time and had low mortality. The second period is marked by violence, slave work and systematic destruction. The number of the Slovenian concentration camp prisoners across different concentration camps within the four occupation systems was around 60,000. About one third, i.e. a little over 21,000, were in the Nazi concentration camps; one third of these died.

The study of the documentary films made on the Nazi concentration camps at the Liberation immediately entails the following reflection: these films allow us to measure the size of the disaster even as they inform us of the extent of that loss of which they are, ultimately, the last trace. A first consideration arises with the force of the resulting paradox: if the Nazi camps have a filmic existence, that does not allow us to claim the existence of films, in the proper sense of the word, on the Nazi camps, but rather and at best, images of the Nazi concentration camps liberation-images, although prompt ones, of the camps' aftermath.' We know, moreover, that the Final Solution was conceived as an attempt at the perfect historical crime, in a wish to rewrite history that begins by destroying books. It was quite logical for the Nazi policy of extermination to efface the fact that it had ever existed.

How Did They Survive? Mechanisms of Defense in Nazi Concentration Camps* Death in a Nazi concentration camp requires no explanation. Survival does. Detailed knowledge of the techniques of torture and extermination has made us understand the outcome of nine to ten million dead. What bewilders us are the survivors. Through the flogging and the shooting, the cold and the hunger, the sixteen hours working day and the epidemics, through individual tortures and mass murder, thousands of them lived for years, three, five, eight years, and longer. What was it that enabled them to survive? Death reached out for them ever so often. How did their urge to live win over the wish to die? What kept them from suicide and insanity? Some of the survivors have begun to speak. In books and articles they have tried to communicate an experience which impossible to communicate-as one of them put it (Rousset). The following study is based on twelve such autobiographical accounts. (For a complete list see Bibliography). They have been written by authors of greatly different background: among them a German poet (Wiechert), an Austrian economist (Kautsky), a French professor of philosophy (Rousset), a Polish-Jewish businessman (Szalet), a British officer (Burney), two psychologists (Bettelheim and Frankl), two journalists (Karst and Kalmar), a Polish girl student (Szmaglewska). The authors include political and non-political prisoners, Germans and non-Germans, men and one woman; the terms of their imprisonment range from several months to seven years. The character of the books is as different as the background of their authors. There are grim accusations, such as Kalmar's Zeit ohne Gnade (Time without Mercy) and Karst's Beasts of the Earth, there is Wiechert's Forest of the Dead,-a poetic story which is like a stream of never ending sadness; there is Kautsky's Teufel und Verdammte (The Devil and the Damned)-actually a comprehensive sociology of the concentration camp, written in a highly detached and scholarly way; there is, furthermore, Szalet's Experiment E, a detailed and realistic report of facts, and Bettelheim's revealing psychological analysis My Life in a Concentration Camp. Apart from the books on which this study is based, other biographical reports on concentration camps have been written and still more are coming out. They may add to the insight to be gained from our selection; the essence of this insight, however, does not depend on the completeness of the underlying material. The topic of this study is the mental mechanisms of survival, i.e., the mechanisms of defense developed by the ego in order to protect the individual from physical death and mental disintegration. But this prevalence of psychological interest must not make us overlook the great number of other circumstances on which survival in a concentration camp has depended, circumstances which have little to do with mental phenomena of the type mentioned. There was, first of all, the factor of physical stamina: the sick, the old, and the weak were those most likely to perish; there was also the difference in locality and time: in some camps, the food, housing, working, and hygienic conditions were much worse than in others, and it also happened that in the same camp periods of deterioration alternated with periods of improvement. Likewise significant was the kind of work to which the inmate had been assigned: Wiechert, for instance, seems to owe his life to the fact that he was transferred from working in a quarry to mending stockings. Of greatest importance was, furthermore, the official classification of the prisoner. The camp was a rather complicated setup of many divisions and sub-divisions, and every prisoner belonged to several official categories.l As far as living conditions were concerned, it made all the difference, whether the internee was a German or a non-German, an Aryan or a Jew. In general, German Aryans fared best. …

Recently, health-related misinformation has plagued social media. We investigate the behavior of misinformation sharing on Twitter. We argue that misinformation sharing is likely to be influenced by the distance to the health crisis as afforded by Twitter. This article investigates three types of distances, namely social (personal relations), spatial (geometric), and temporal (time gap). We address three research questions in the context of Zika virus: first, how does social, spatial, and temporal distances affect the threat appeal of a misinformation message? Second, how does social, spatial, and temporal distances influence misinformation sharing? Third, how does the effect of social, spatial, and temporal distances on misinformation sharing varies based on the influence afforded by Twitter? The results indicate the negative effect of social and temporal distances on threat appeal, and the negative effect of spatial distance on misinformation sharing. The results also indicate the negative effect of temporal distance on misinformation sharing for more influential Tweeters and the negative effect of social and spatial distance on misinformation sharing for less influential Tweeters.

Discounting environmental policy: The effects of psychological distance over time and space

The paper aims at understanding two movies rooted in World War II, based on their genre, content, understanding of historical, institutional contexts prevalent in the society during World War II. The details that the paper has aimed at studying pertain to Auschwitz concentration camps. Furthermore, the paper will also try to comprehend the variety of ways in which a film creates meaning. The study takes up a discourse analysis of the two movies- a romantic tragedy Colette and a historical period drama Schindler’s List. What makes it relevant and expedient is the fact that the movies in discussion have both been made out of experiences of the World War and more importantly, Auschwitz (Concentration Camps). This has given a perspective to the analysis and has fittingly created a realm of discussion and discourse on the theme. What is even more significant to note is the fact that both the films are inspired from true events that happened at the concentration camps, in their own time. Colette is inspired from a work of art titled A Girl from Antwerp written by Arnost Lustig, as an autobiographical novel from his experiences in a Nazi Concentration Camp. Lustig was a renowned Czech-Jewish author, and this novel is an important piece of work in the history of Czech literature. Schindler’s List is an American historical period drama, inspired from Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark. The literature is an inspiration from a story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of over a thousand Polish-Jewish refugees from frequent genocides at the Nazi concentration camps. The paper aims at studying the content of the two different genres under the same theme and topicality. It aims at coming to an understanding of Auschwitz, the lives therein and the trail it left.