Extermination Camps Research Articles

What Is Good?

Professor Timofey Pnin, the lovably hapless, ‘ideally bald’, comic-heroic émigré protagonist of Nabokov’s novel, thinks the unthinkable: In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin – not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind … but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira’s death were possible. One had to forget – because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past.

A multi-level and multi-sensor documentation approach of the Treblinka extermination and labor camps

Abstract At Treblinka extermination camp, almost one million of people were killed during the Holocaust. A further 10,000 people are estimated to have been murdered at the nearby labor camp. Since 2007, the Centre of Archaeology of Staffordshire University (UK) has been involved in the study and research of the evidence of these atrocities in order to demonstrate how an archaeological approach to Treblinka has, and will continue to, enhance contemporary discussions about the camps and provide a richer, more accurate record of events. This study focuses on the use of digital 3D technologies and web visualization tools for the analysis of the sites, providing a digital interactive platform, which can be used both by professional users and a public audience. It proposes a pyramidal multi-level and multi-sensor approach – providing a 3D resolution spanning from a few centimetres in the landscape Digital Terrain Model to few millimetres in the layer-by-layer archaeological test trench.

The Evolution of Holocaust Remembrance in Israeli Society

For the Jewish prisoners who lived to see the day of liberation from concentration and extermination camps, the Holocaust did not end with the capitulation of National Socialist Germany. They had to try and start a new chapter of their life-alone and full of pain and shame.

Mathilde Krim: doyenne of AIDS research funding in the US

Credit: Annie Leibovitz In the beginning, there was Mathilde Krim. Amid the darkness, despair, and scientific ignorance of AIDS, when rumour, panic, and victimisation flourished, she was a beacon of...

A Pécsi Közjegyzői Kamara 1938 és 1945 között

The writings of the Notary Chamber of Pecs are important documents of the epoch between 1938 and 1945. In particular, the word-for-word reports of the annual ordinary general meetings reveal the reactions of the highly educated chamber members to the historical and political changes. It is also important for legal historians to study the outlawry in the 2nd half of the Horthy era and to consider the following questions: Which rhetorical methods were used in the chamber accounts? What was the opinion of the royal notaries (”the wards of the constitutional state”) about the violation of equality under the law? Did the outlawry have an impact on the membership in the chamber? If so, how did the royal notaries evaluated these changes? The report of the annual ordinary general meetings began every year with the opening speech of the chamber president, Bela Angyal. Surprisingly Angyal analyzed the political changes instead of professional questions. In 1938 he spoke about the 900th jubilee of the death of King St. Istvan and about the glory of his empire. In 1939 he rejoiced over the annexation of North Hungary (Felvidek) and Subcarpathia, which he called the ”resurrection of Hungary” after the tragical peace treaty in Trianon 1920. In 1940 Angyal considered it necessary to celebrate the 20th jubilee of the governor's reign, who was honored as ”Savior of Hungary sent by God” and achieved the annexation of East Hungary and a part of Transylvania. The general meeting began this year with a common ”prayer”. This so-called Magyar Hiszekegy (”I believe in one God, I believe in one mother country, I believe in the eternal godlike verity, I believe in the resurrection of Hungary”) was not really a prayer, but more like a kitschy and chauvinist quatrain. In 1941 the main topic of the opening speech was the annexation of South Hungary and the chamber president blessed the ”wise governor”. In 1942 Angyal mourned for the son of the governor, the ”young hero of the nation”, who died in plane accident in the eastern front lines. In 1943 Angyal designated Word War II (and unexpressed also the convention of Hungary with the Nazi Germany) ”a fight against communism for Christianity”. In 1944 the Notary Chamber of Pecs did not hold the general meeting, and finally in September 1945 the rhapsody of Angyal broke off. Neither in the opening speeches of the chamber president nor in the chamber reports can we find protest against the harm of the principle of equality before the law. The outlawry, especially the anti-Jewish statutes and orders were no problematic for the members at the general meetings or they simply remained quiet. When the number of the Jewish notaries was limited in the chambers, Angyal suggested the introduction of the notary identity card and in 1945, when he informed the membership that the notary of Mohacs, Győző Krausz, did not return from the extermination camp, he did not use the word ”unfortunately”.

Glory to new mankind

The “Promethean shame” (Gunther Anders) is propitious to understand the collective sensibility which accompanied the deliquescence of Enlightenment humanism. After two critical events over twentieth century (extermination camps and Hiroshima), we attend two main “escape way”. The first concerns the self-engineering; the second the becoming-animal as “absolute deterritorialization”. In hollow of this “imaginative tension” we can catch the new imaginary of humanity growing from modern values debris. In this article it will be question of exploring imaginary relating to these “escape way”, on the one hand the becoming-thing of humanity (for example the video game NieR Automata), on the other hand, the becoming-animal of humanity (for example the fur fandom). We propose a sociological analysis of saturation of Enlightenment humanism and ways in which it tries to persist through the absorption of non-human.

American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay by Adele Valeria Messina

Reviewed by: American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay by Adele Valeria Messina Lori Gemeiner Bihler (bio) American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay. By Adele Valeria Messina. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017. xxxviii + 459 pp. In 2007, Judith Gerson and Diane Wolf wrote that studying the Holocaust from the perspective of sociology was akin to wandering in the desert. Adele Valeria Messina’s new book, American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay, provides a close topography of that desert, uncovering forms of early life and the harsh conditions that inhibited growth. Metaphors aside, this comprehensive volume tracks the precise historical and political factors that shaped seven decades of American sociological thought on Nazism and the Holocaust, offering new insight into the notion of a “sociological delay.” The book’s four dense chapters are arranged chronologically, presenting a rich compendium of Holocaust-related sociological scholarship. In each chapter, Messina effectively uses a historiographical narrative to explore the field’s inconsistent level of attention to Nazism, racism, and the extermination of the Jews. Chapter One points to the postwar political environment and long-standing prejudices within the academy that led to the marginalization of Holocaust-related research by the establishment, now called the “sociological delay.” Chapter Two starts in the early 1970s and connects American sociology’s newfound interest in Nazi extermination camps to growing national discourse on the Holocaust, as well as to political events including the Vietnam War and the Yom Kippur War. The third chapter reviews 1980s sociological theory on the “genocidal state,” suggesting that it was prompted in part by atrocities occurring against the Maya Indians, Sikh, and Burundians that decade. The last chapter begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall in [End Page 587] 1989 and ends at the present moment, situating American sociology at the fulcrum of interdisciplinary Holocaust studies. In this history of the sociology of the Holocaust, Messina reveals that there were, in fact, sociologists writing about Nazi atrocities all along. Most intriguing is the author’s discussion of the eminent sociologists Talcott Parsons and Everett C. Hughes, who in 1948 both shied away from publishing research on Nazism. Messina shows that Parsons’ abrupt disinterest coincided with his trip to Allied-occupied Germany and the establishment of the Harvard Russian Research Center (HRRC). She revisits the controversy around Parsons’s supposed role in the resettlement of Nazi sympathizers and considers whether the unexplained murder of Parsons’ colleague, Edward Hartshorne, Jr., a fellow sociologist and staunch anti-Nazi, influenced the direction of Parsons’s research. Parsons’ place in sociology cannot be overemphasized: as president of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1949, he secured funding for its re-establishment and then served as its secretary from 1962 to 1965. He was the founder and director of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, where he advised dozens of future sociology professors and developed his ideas around structural functionalism. It is no wonder that Parsons’s “values free” sociology avoided a close examination of racial prejudice when ideas of American exceptionalism and fears of communism prevailed. In the first chapter, Messina also questions Everett C. Hughes’s 1948 decision to halt publication of his essay on Nazi violence called “Good People and Dirty Work.” Hughes, serving as editor of the American Journal of Sociology from 1952 to 1961 and as president of the ASA in 1963, knew that if he published this work in 1948, his funding would likely be jeopardized. In analyzing Parsons’s and Hughes’s actions that year, the author pinpoints the roots of the sociology establishment’s delay in engaging with the Holocaust. Messina writes that studying this era is “useful for understanding the status of sociologists from a ‘wider perspective,’ that is, when academic research is not free and unfettered, but rather conditioned by political intentions. Briefly, the main American universities, as with the HRRC, could not deal with the Holocaust theme, which concerned a matter of accountability and a very recent event calling for political accountabilities or for a kind of public admission of guilt...

Representaciones Sociales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial: Valores y Dominancia social

From the perspective of the Social Representations (SR), appears an investigation line that takes history as a representational object. Previous studies show World War II (WWII) as a central element of universal history. The purpose of this study is to describe the representational structure of the WWII, its effects, the psychosocial profile in values, beliefs in social dominance and counter-dominance and willingness to fight for the country. On the other hand, it is proposed to verify if there are associations between the effects of WWII and beliefs, which have a group of general population (n = 224, 59.8% women, 40.2% men, Mage = 30.5, SD = 10.68, Min = 18, Max = 65). The results show that the structure of the SR of the WWII is organized giving centrality to death, and to characteristics of this particular war, such as Nazism, Hitler, concentration and extermination camps, and atomic bombs. Participants consider the WWII as a social catastrophe, which also contributed to the formation of the United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights. In addition, they prioritize values of openness to change and self-trascendence, exhibit high levels of social counter-dominance and a low willingness to fight for the country.

Inocencia y holocausto en Hijos de un mismo Dios (2001) de Yurek Bogayevicz

La Segunda Guerra Mundial es, sin duda, el acontecimiento más traumático del siglo xx. Y dentro de la guerra el más singular y desgarrador fue la Shoah, el exterminio del pueblo judío. Los puntos de vista que se han ido ofreciendo sobre este hecho han sido muy diversos, ya sea desde el cine documental o desde el cine de ficción, pasando por innumerables géneros y estilos cinematográficos. Este artículo aborda, en concreto, las claves del filme Hijos de un mismo Dios (2001), de Yurek Bogayevicz, que nos ofrece un revelador, y metafórico, relato de las vivencias de varios niños en la Polonia ocupada y, por lo tanto, de aquel mundo brutal e inhumano, que surgió a la sombra de los campos de la muerte. Bogayevicz condensa la perversidad del nazismo y el efecto tan desgarrador que tuvo para la inocente juventud.

II.8. Carl Schmitt, de l’accréditation de la Shoah à sa négation

We know that the intellectual and political path of Carl Schmitt, the German jurist and public and international law theorist, was marked by his active participation in the justification of Nazism. In this article, we look at the role that ideas played in the process that led to the extermination. On this point, I do not believe that we may claim, as did Hermann Rauschning, that National Socialism was pure activism. For the possibility of the Final Solution and its implementation to exist, the ideas of isolation, concentration and later extermination had to have been accredited and approved, even passively, as inevitable, useful and even desirable. This accreditation and approval, however passive, depended on the existence of justifications. It can be said that Schmitt participated in the accreditation of the concentration camp imprisonment and the extermination. In my opinion, his concept of the race enemy, formulated starting in 1933, played an important role in the definition of the irreducible enemy of Germany, which I have called the substantial enemy in order to distinguish it from the relational enemy: the Jew.Much less known is the fact that not only did Schmitt support the Nazi regime by providing theoretical and legal justifications for it, but he also became the first negationist after the war, calling into question what he called “the criminalization of the [German] war.” His was not a historical negationism intended to question the existence of the concentration and extermination camps and therefore of the gas chambers, which he never mentioned. That kind of negationism was to come later on. Instead, Schmitt’s was a theoretical negationism that consisted of switching the direction of the criminalization process.

I.5. Arendt, Heidegger et le « déluge » d’Auschwitz

This article offers a critical analysis of the ways in which Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt elaborated a “revisionist” rereading of modernity that reversed the assignment of true responsibilities. They linked National Socialism to the modern subject, reason and the Enlightenment, all of which it had targeted, rather than linking it to the extermination-based vision of the world that laid the groundwork for and implemented the destruction of the European Jews. Moreover, Arendt raises the camps to the level of paradigms of our modern egalitarian societies. She does so without seriously accounting for the distinction between the concentration camps and the extermination camps, despite the fact that this distinction was specifically documented as early as 1946 in The Black Book, which she critiqued in oddly negative terms in a published review. In a letter to Karl Jaspers published in Germany in 1948, she speaks of Auschwitz as a “flood” and maintains that it is necessary to leave the factual territory in order to overcome the Jewish people’s “blind hatred” of the Germans, which was “created in the gas chambers.” Hatred is no longer ascribed to the exterminators but to the exterminated people! Lastly, the article challenges interpretations that hold that we need Heidegger in order to “conceive the Shoah.”

“This is Proof”? Forensic Evidence and Ambiguous Material Culture at Treblinka Extermination Camp

In recent years, a forensic archaeological project at Treblinka extermination camp has uncovered significant evidence relating to the mass murder that took place there. A number of questions emerged regarding the provenance and origins of objects discovered as part of this work, and why they had remained undiscovered for over 70 years. These discoveries led to an opportunity to confirm and challenge the history of the extermination camp, and demands (from the public) to view the objects. This paper will outline how archaeologists and artists came together to reflect on these issues, whilst simultaneously providing access to the new findings.

Introduction – diverse perspectives on Jewish life in Southeast Europe: the Holocaust and beyond

Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize winner, journalist and activist originally from Romania who survived Nazi extermination camps, noted in his speech at the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwit...

Relacja ks. Szczepana Trochty SDB o salezjanach w KL Dachau przesłana po wyzwoleniu obozu do ks. Piotra Ricardone SDB Przełożonego Generalnego Towarzystwa Salezjańskiego

The paper presents a letter of Fr. Szczepan Trochta, rector of the Salesian house in Prague to the Rector Major, Fr Pietro Ricardone, sent to Turin after the liberation of the concentration camp in Dachau. Fr. Trochta reports in the letter about his three years’ long imprisonment in German extermination camps, and informs also about the fate of other Salesians who were held in KL Dachau. Fr. Szczepan Trochta was appointed bishop of Litoměřice in 1947. He was interned by the communist government in 1951 and in 1953 sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment. In 1960, he was released under amnesty. On 24 April 1969, Trochta was appointed cardinal in pectore by Pope Paul VI. This nomination was by the Holy See on 5 March 1973.

PROPAGANDA REARTICULATION OF A CRIME AGAINST CIVILIZATION: THE CONCEPT OF THERESIENSTADT IN THE SERIES HOLOCAUST

The most notorious Nazi extermination camps or death camps were Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka, etc. Apart from the death camps, the Nazis established concentration labor camps where they exploited the labor force. By its function, one of the unique concentration camps was Theresienstadt, which became a Nazi concentration camp for Jews in November 1941. In fact, Terezin was advertised as a spa center for wealthy senior citizens who were promised safety and luxury. Media articles on the topic of the Holocaust have become a significant part of the culture of remembrance. The American television mini-series Holocaust is one of the media narratives that deal with crimes against civilization and its premiere was in 1978. The concept of Theresienstadt in the series Holocaust corroborates the statement that this camp was used for the purpose of propaganda rearticulation of a crime against civilization and it reveals the hidden and repressed fear and horror underneath the smiling façade of Theresienstadt. The colorfulness of the exterior in the scenes which show Terezin, and on the other hand a horror interior, as well as everything that was happening behind the scenes expressed in the form of secret images of the artists, clearly emphasize the living conditions in Theresienstadt, as well as its role in Nazi propaganda.

Die Rolle des Ghetto Litzmannstadt (Łódź) bei der Versorgung der Wehrmacht und der deutschen Privatwirtschaft mit Kleidung (1940 bis 1944)

Abstract The Role of the Ghetto Litzmannstadt (Łódź) for the Clothing Provision of the German Armed Forces and Private Firms (1940 to 1944) Shortly after the establishment of the Ghetto in Łódź, the German administration set up a textile and clothing department. As Łódź was the leading Polish textile center, many ghetto inhabitants had basic or advanced skills in the textile and clothing business. After several months it became clear for the Jews that working for the Germans was the only chance to making themselves valuable and to avoid or postpone being deported to extermination camps. The textile and clothing department soon became the largest sweatshop in the ghetto and was also an important provider of textiles, clothing and leather goods for the German economy. Previous research followed the claim of the department's head that the German military took over 90 per cent of its production. We show for the large textile and clothing department that the share of production for civilian purposes was much higher, around 50 per cent. Moreover, we analyze the business relationship between the ghetto administration and German firms.

O RELATO COMO VINGANÇA: as memórias de Stanislaw Szmajzner

This article analyzes the book Hell in Sobibor: the tragedy of a Jewish teenager by Stanislaw Szmajzner, a former prisoner in the Nazi extermination camp in Sobibor that latter resided in Brazil where he published his memoirs. Based on the reading of the text we aim to verify how this autobiographical work is constructed based on the memory of a survivor of an extermination camp during World War II, identifying its characteristics and frictions between the report and other sources. Szmajzner’s book fits in what Todorov established as good use of the memory , since the exemplar case of the author is used to generate a lesson, intended to prevent that analog cases occur in the future. Also, the book is established as an instrument so that the crimes committed by the tormentors of the author are not forgotten, using the work as a form of revenge.

The Complete Works of Primo Levi by Primo Levi

Reviewed by: The Complete Works of Primo Levi by Primo Levi Stefania Benini The Complete Works of Primo Levi By Primo Levi. Edited by Ann Goldstein. New York: Norton, 2016. 3008 pp. We can speculate on what Primo Levi would have thought about the American edition of his complete works that appeared on the shelves in late summer 2015. In an essay on translation, titled "On Translating and Being Translated," Levi claims: "Linguistic friction tends to become racial and political resistance, another of our maledictions. It should follow that whoever practices the trade of translator or interpreter should be honored, insofar as he labors to limit the damage of Babel's curse; but this doesn't usually happen because translating is difficult work." Primo Levi himself was a translator and had a very troubling experience translating into Italian Jacob Presser's 1962 novella, De Nacht der Girondijnen, and Franz Kafka's The Trial. Levi writes about this experience in the project Ricerca delle Radici (In search of roots) that has not been translated in Ann Goldstein's edition of the complete works, modeled upon the complete Italian edition edited by Marco Belpoliti in 1997. This missing text is a significant absence in the American anthology because it does not allow readers to explore in a deeper fashion Levi's thought about translation and language, important because the concept of translation encompasses Levi's experience in the extermination camps. I am following here the thesis of Lina N. Insana in her Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (2009). According to Insana, her volume, "sees in translation a signpost for Levi's reflection on language, on language in the camps and within the project of the Final Solution, on the challenges of testimony, and on the transmissive process, revealing the essential difficulty of translation and thus the challenges of survival-testimonial writing: the utter arduousness of the testimonial task" (11). The importance of the concept of translation for transmitting the babelic Lagersprache of Auschwitz, and for expressing the unutterable horror of the Lager's experience makes the task of the Primo Levi's translator even more arduous. Translating Levi with accuracy is crucial: it is necessary to honor his effort to write the unwritable with clarity, concision, and with a clear sense of [End Page 145] observation and attention to detail. To convey Levi's ability to portray a situation or a personality with few traits, with a moral sense of the weight of language that, in the extermination camp, was a matter of life and death, becomes a foundational task for the translator. If translation, as Insana claims, is a "necessary metaphor for Holocaust witnessing," Goldstein's anthology of Primo Levi's works comes forth as a crucial step for Levi's project of translating survival. It will fulfill the aftermath of the original as anticipated by Walter Benjamin in his pivotal essay "The Task of the Translator": "[A] translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translations mark their stage of continued life." The afterlife of Levi's works comes through in this anthology through the voices of ten different translators (Anne Milano Appel, Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli, Jonathan Galassi, Ann Goldstein, Jenny McPhee, MichaelF. Moore, Nathaniel Rich, Anthony Shugaar, and Stuart Woolf). In 2,800 pages, they provide not only the acclaimed and well-known works by Primo Levi already translated into English (If This Is a Man, known in English as Survival in Auschwitz; The Truce, previously translated as The Reawakening; and The Periodic Table), but also Primo Levi's poetry, his fiction works, and his essays that have been only partially translated. Some of the works already published in English have been retranslated, such as The Truce, translated for the anthology by the editor Ann Goldstein. The three volumes, ordered chronologically, also contain an introduction by Toni Morrison, a chronology, notes on the texts, essays on Primo Levi in the American and world context, and a select bibliography...

A Journey to Armenia: Visual Reminders of Genocide and Oppression

A Journey to Armenia: Visual Reminders of Genocide and Oppression

East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” by Philippe Sands

Reviewed by: East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” by Philippe Sands David Hawk (bio) Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) ISBN 978-0385350716, 425 pages. Philippe Sands may not be the first person to look at the lives and teachings of Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, examine their seminal contributions to international human rights law, or note that they both attended the same (to North Americans, unfamiliar) law school in East Galicia.1 But a confluence of several coincidences led Sands, a law professor and practicing human rights attorney, to see the promise of an extraordinary story. Or rather, the promise of East West Street’s several intersecting extraordinary stories. The chain of coincidences began with an invitation for Sands to lecture at Jan Kazimierz University Law School in the city now known as Lviv, in the Ukraine where Lauterpacht and Lemkin first studied law. Sands claims, not without reason, that the university marks the origin of the modern system of international justice. Lviv, with its neoclassical architecture and art neuveau trim, was once dubbed the “Paris of the East.” The city has quite a history. At the beginning of Sands’ story, Lviv was called Lemberg. The historic city is also identified on maps as Lvov, Lwow, or Lviv when the city was under alternating German, Polish, Russian, or Ukrainian control. Located at what Sands calls the very fault lines between North and South and East and West Europe, this medium sized city changes sovereign ownership [End Page 246] and control eight times in the course of Sands’ narrative. Lemberg/Lvov/Lwow/Lviv, is located at the Eastern most reaches of what was once the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. It lies at the Western lip of what was then called the Pale of Settlement, the heartland of Eastern European Jewry. This area of South-Central Europe, more aptly termed the The Bloodlands, is where Stalin and Hitler murdered masses of individuals and where armed bands of Poles and Ukrainians fought, when they could, for their bit of turf. This region is where, as Sands puts it, “Jews were targeted or caught in the middle.”2 The second, quite remarkable, coincidence that led to East West Street emerged from Sands’ deep, fascinating, and sometimes investigator-assisted research into his own complicated family history. The recognition that his mother’s parents lived in this same town where Lemkin and Lauterpacht first studied law contributed to his interest in pursuing the narrative. In addition, the author’s great-grandmother was even born on the same street as Lauterpacht: East West Street in Lviv’s next-door village of Zolkiew. (In case readers wonder, the village of Zolkiew also featured a perpendicularly intersecting main-street named North South.) In East West Street, Sands produces a 1911 map of Lwow showing the location of the law faculty, the home of his mother’s family, the home of Lauterpacht, and Lemkin’s three successive residencies while attending university. He adds a wonderful 1854 map of Zolkiew showing the family homes of Lauterpacht and his great-grandmother’s family, and scores of period photographs of the persons and places that figure in the narrative of East West Street, creating even more sense of place and time. As Sands discovered in the course of his research, the coincidences tragically continue. His grandmother perished at the same extermination camp as Lauterpacht’s parents: Treblinka. In Sands’ great-grandmother’s case, she was transported there, he relates, on the same cattle-car train as three of Freud’s sisters. Much of East West Street’s narrative is driven by Sands’ personal search for family history. His mother was one of the “hidden children” of the Holocaust, saved by an evangelical British missionary devoted to protecting Jewish children. Sands’ infant mother knew next to nothing about her rescue. Sands tracks down information about her rescue, uncovering this once hidden story. His mother’s father, Leon Buchholz, was born and raised in Lemberg/Lviv; although he is one of the central characters of East West Street, he would not speak about his life...