Jewish Prisoners Research Articles

Zagłada w Danii: kwestia badań i pamięci

The article deals with the most important events of the Holocaust in Denmark. The first part outlines the broader historical context of the events of October 1943 and the deportation of Danish Jews. It also contains a critical comment on the mainstream historical narration, particularly those aspects that concern the situation of Jewish prisoners at Theresienstadt. The second part is an overview of the latest research into the Danish aspects of the Holocaust, such as the expulsion of Jewish refugees, the rescue operation of October 1943, and the actual number of deportees. The author also presents results of her own research of the Danish remembrance culture.

The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp (review)

The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, by Rochelle G. Saidel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. 279 pp. $21.90. As the number of Holocaust survivors who are able to tell their histories decreases, the urgency increases to leave record of their experiences. It is this that has motivated Dr. Rochelle Saidel to document the experiences of the inmates of Ravensbriick concentration camp and, in particulat, those of the Jewish inmates of Ravensbriick. In so doing, she has provided well-researched account that is valuable both to scholars of the Holocaust and to friends and descendants of the Jewish women of Ravensbruck. Dr. Saidel is the founder of the Remember the Women Institute, which is dedicated to the remembrance of the women of Ravensbriick and to the continued historical research of this unique camp and its enormously strong inmate population. This book exemplifies the purpose of this Institute. In parallel to the narratives of the survivors is the narrative of the struggle to realize the Jewish identity of the inmates through history and through recognition at the Mahn- und Gedenhtatte Ravensbruck. Dr. Saidel began making contact with the survivors at the 50th anniversary of the camp's liberation in 1995. She was able to contact other Jewish survivors with the assistance of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which provided mailing list of survivors as well as cover letter for her initial contact. From this list of 300 survivors, Dr. Saidel received sixty replies, with most women completing the questionnaire and often supplying additional names. Dr. Saidel has interviewed many of these Jewish survivors and their descendants in Brazil, Europe, the U.S., and Israel. Of the 132,000 prisoners of Ravensbriick, 117,000 were killed or died there. Jewish women were minority among the inmates of Ravensbriick, comprising about 20 percent of die population, and their story has heretofore never been told. And although there are memorials to these prisoners at Ravensbruck, they are grouped according to nationality. As recendy as 1980, the Jewish prisoners were not memorialized separately but together with their fellow inmates of nation, with often inappropriate results-the Polish Jews were memorialized as part of all Polish prisoners in room with large crucifix. It was this lack of singular identification that motivated Dr. Saidel to begin her research into the lives, and often deaths, of the Jewish inmates of Ravensbriick. Now there is Jewish memorial at the camp, and this book, too, serves as memorial to these Beginning with history of the camp, Dr. Saidel describes what she refers to as a special hell for women. Indeed, Ravensbruck was unique in that it was built for female resisters and political prisoners. …

Blatant Injustice: The Story of a Jewish Refugee from Nazi Germany Imprisoned in Britain and Canada during World War II, and: Searching for Justice: An Autobiography (review)

Reviewed by: Blatant Injustice: The Story of a Jewish Refugee from Nazi Germany Imprisoned in Britain and Canada during World War II, and: Searching for Justice: An Autobiography Irving Abella Blatant Injustice: The Story of a Jewish Refugee from Nazi Germany Imprisoned in Britain and Canada during World War II. Walter Igersheimer and Ian Darragh. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. Pp. 256, illus. $39.95 Searching for Justice: An Autobiography. Fred Kaufman. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Pp. 320, illus. $65.00 In the late spring of 1940, following the debacle at Dunkirk and fearing a Nazi-inspired sabotage campaign on its soil, the British government ordered the arrest of thousands of German and Austrian refugees who had fled to Great Britain to save their lives. Among the 'enemy' aliens detained were two young Jews, Walter Igersheimer, a twenty-three-year-old medical student from Berlin, and Fred Kaufman, a sixteen-year-old from Vienna. Both had been sent alone to England by their parents to keep them out of the murderous clutches of the Nazis. Concerned about a possible uprising of the imprisoned refugees and overwhelmed by the costs both in money and labour of incarcerating so many young men, the British pleaded for help from the Dominions. Predictably, Australia and Canada promptly responded. Within a month Igersheimer and Kaufman and several thousand other demoralized young Jewish men - many of them just teenagers - were packed into three over-crowded ships, one of which was torpedoed by a German U-boat, and sent to overseas prison camps. [End Page 503] These two books describe the Canadian internment experience of Igersheimer and Kaufman. And while their lives behind barbed wire fences were largely similar, their reactions differed dramatically. So awful was the incarceration for one of them that upon his release, he left Canada as quickly as he could, vowing never to return. The other developed a passionate love affair with the country and has made - and indeed still makes - enormous contributions to it. Why the difference? It is clear that the administration of the prison camps in Quebec and New Brunswick was heavy-handed. Because the refugees were civilians, they were typically treated worse than captured German soldiers and Nazi officials, who were officially prisoners of war. As well, many of the Canadian guards were anti-Semites who were contemptuous of their Jewish prisoners. Earlier studies of the internment camps in Canada by Eric Koch, Mark Lynton, Ted Jones, and Paula Draper indicate that while camp conditions were harsh and forbidding, some inmates thrived while others suffered terribly. Walter Ingesheimer was among the latter. Blatant Injustice is a bitter, unrelenting indictment of the Canadian government. Igersheimer contends that Canadian officials knowingly ignored the Geneva conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners-of-war by refusing to provide adequate food, shelter, and medical care to the imprisoned Jews. Convicted murderers in Canadian jails, he argues, were treated more humanely than the internees, and whenever they protested their ill treatment they were told that what they received was 'good enough for Jews.' His is a litany of constant abuse, cruelty, and humiliation. Yet at the same time, he points out that the resilient prisoners refused to bend to authority and created their own 'university,' mounted plays, and composed musicals. Unlike other accounts that have been written about life in Canada's detention camps, Igersheimer's has the benefit - and the disadvantage - of immediacy. It was first written as a memoir in the months following his release while he was recuperating in Cuba. His memories of camp conditions are recent, raw, and painful. It was a shameful period of Canadian history, and one can well understand his anger. It is no surprise then that many years later as a distinguished psychiatrist at Yale University, Igersheimer reiterated his commitment 'never, ever to live in Quebec or Canada under any circumstances.' For the youthful Fred Kaufman, on the other hand, the camp experience was far different and far less traumatic. Indeed he entitles the chapter in his autobiography on his life in confinement, perhaps with tongue firmly implanted in cheek, 'Guest of His Majesty.' He is far less critical of Canadian...

Why Were They So Afraid of Communist Influence?

In 1944 we received, hidden in a tube of toothpaste, a circular from the Central Committee of the French Communist Party addressed to party members in prisons, prisoner of war and concentration camps. It gave guidance on the tasks of the party in such places, stressing particularly the need for national and international solidarity, clandestine propaganda and preparation for escape. We had already acted on similar lines, nevertheless the letter was fully discussed by our committee, accepted and distributed, with appropriate caution to other camps. I delivered a copy to the women comrades in Rajsko, one of the subsidiary Auschwitz camps.Account by Jonny Huttner, a Jewish and Polish-German prisoner in Auschwitz-Monowitz1 1Len Crome, Unbroken: Resistance and Survival in the Concentration Camps (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 102.

Exanthème

German anatomical institutes always had problems obtaining sufficient cadavers for research and training. In the National Socialist (NS) period this changed. Universities could count on “extraordinary opportunities for cadaver delivery.” Most frequently tacitly, many bodies were those of victims of NS crimes. Scientists increasingly exploited the exceptional political situation to systematically supplement their institutional collections. Their endeavors to fill the, in their terms, “lamentable gaps” in their collections took on truly bizarre forms. In Austria, Jewish cemeteries were plundered for racial-political expansion of anatomical collections. A change in paradigm was merely the next step: intentional murder for the benefit of NS-oriented science. In December of 1942, anatomists meeting in Tübingen discussed plans for “material acquisition.” August Hirt, director of the anatomical institute at the Reichsuniversität in Strasbourg, was to develop guidelines. There was express reference to “Auftrag Beger,” which had already been conceived although not yet realized: at the behest of Hirt and the SS-scientific organization, “Ahnenerbe,” the anthropologists Bruno Beger and Hans Fleischhacker selected 86 Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz in June of 1943 and deported them to the concentration camp at Struthof near Natzweiler, where they were murdered. The bodies were delivered to the anatomy department in Strasbourg for preparation and used as anatomical specimens. The Reichsuniversität Strasbourg was considered a center of excellence for Nazi ideology. For modern scientists, the elucidation of these criminal acts is not exhausted in the search for an answer to the questions of perpetrator, place, modus operandi or motive. A suitable memorial to the victims must go beyond mere quantification.

Til det beste for Sverige? Svenske myndigheter og den Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm sin politikk overfor jødiske displace persons 1945 til 1950

In the last weeks of the Second World War and the following months Sweden played a crucial role in saving more than 30.000 non-Jewish and Jewish prisoners from German concentration camps, carrying them with the White Buses to Sweden. One of the mayor reasons for this action was to regain the positive relations to the Allied powers which had been seriously damaged during the first years of the war. The Jewish group counted 11-12.000 persons, mostly young women. An analysis of the treatment of these Jewish displaced persons by the Swedish authorities and the Jewish community in Stockholm from 1945 to 1950 shows that the authorities conducted their policy according to national interests and that the Jewish community was characterized by caution to keep the benevolence of the authorities. It was not considered a Swedish interest that they would stay, but after a few months the authorities, influenced among others by the Jewish Community, realized that forced repatriation was neither feasible out of humanitarian nor international political considerations. There were no restrictions for giving them medical help, but the treatment of these persons did not pay much attention to their psychic condition. One example is the use of their working power soon after their arrival in Sweden. Together with other displaced persons and refugees they became an important working power in building the Swedish welfare state, folkhemmet. Therefore, their inability to repatriate never became a problem for Sweden.

Rose Blanche, Rosa Weiss, Rosa Blanca : A Comparative View of a Controversial Picture Book

Published in Switzerland, the USA, and Britain in 1985, Rose Blanche, Roberto Innocenti's controversial and prize-winning picture book about a young German girl's experience of the Second World War and the Holocaust, has been translated into at least ten different languages. It has remained in print in the United States since publication, and a paperback edition of the British translation was issued by Red Fox in 2004, testifying to the ongoing topicality of Innocenti's story. Its cultural importance was further documented in a recent (2004) article by Susan Stan in Children's Literature in Education about the initial chequered publication of Rose Blanche. Using an English-language translation by a colleague, Stan also explored some of the differences between the texts of the German, American, and British editions of the picture book. This essay, based on a lecture given at CLISS 2003, addresses the international reception of Rose Blanche and asks how it is bound to such factors as the role of the target culture in the Second World War and its engagement with the subject of the Holocaust. After a brief analysis of Roberto Innocenti and Chrisoph Gallaz's original Italian/Swiss visual and verbal text Rose Blanche, I first review its international reception and translation before moving on to examine the French, American, English, German, Spanish, and Italian versions to question how cultural differences are inscribed into these, even though the pictorial narrations are identical. Close textual analysis of the opening page of the different translations is followed by a discussion of the implied readers of the translations which asks how the texts reflect the cultures' desire or need to tell the story differently. [End Page 152] Rose Blanche: The Original Version by Innocenti and Gallaz Conceived and illustrated by the Italian artist Roberto Innocenti1 with a French text by the Swiss journalist and author Christophe Gallaz, Rose Blanche tells of the final phase of the Second World War in a small town in eastern Germany from the perspective of a nine-year-old girl. Set between autumn 1944 and May 1945, it starts with celebratory flag-waving euphoria and ends with destruction, retreat, and the advent of the liberating Red Army. Rose is confronted with the awful truth of the Holocaust after she sees a young boy try unsuccessfully to escape from a lorry. Following it, she discovers a concentration camp in the woods outside the town. She displays instinctive compassion and civil disobedience by sneaking food to the emaciated Jewish child prisoners. In the confusion of the retreat, Rose is killed by a stray bullet. The final page of the book shows spring returning to the forest. The pictures are composed in a hyper-realistic style obsessed with detail. Red-brick buildings fill most of the pages, creating the claustrophobic confines of the town scenes; grey lorries with blind windows and tanks with soldiers in grey uniforms move from left to right across the page, toward the Eastern Front, until the reversal of the final retreat. Contrasting with the dark, warm color of the bricks is the green hue of the scenes at the edge of the concentration camp; juxtaposing the loud celebrations in the town is the silence of the prisoners. The portrayal of Rose just before her death has visual associations with pictures of Christ: her eyes are downcast, one hand lightly touching her heart, and the other placing a small blue flower in remembrance onto the barbed wire. The picture on the cover, identical on the hardback editions in all languages, shows Rose framed by the window of a red-brick house, which is used as a mirroring device. In it we see the final movement of soldiers to the front. She is captured here in her prime role as innocent witness who sees, but is not seen. We are looking at her...

The Dog Man: Becoming Animal in Coetzee’s Disgrace

Crossing borders or the ends of man I come or surrender to the animal--to the animal in itself, to the animal in me and the animal at unease with itself. --Jacques Derrida (372) With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species. --John Berger (6) The comfort lavished by animals ... is as timely as grace. --Luce Irigaray (197) Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool. --Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus 240) An extraordinary moment in Levinas: And then, about half way through our long captivity, for a few short weeks, before the sentinels chased him away, a wandering dog entered our lives. One day he came to meet rabble as we returned under guard from work. He survived in some wild patch in the region of the camp. But we called him Bobby, an exotic name, as one does with a cherished dog. He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men. (153) In desperate conditions Emmanuel Levinas comes close to articulating a new relationship with the animal, with the creature that confers on each and every member of the seventy of us in a forestry commando unit for Jewish prisoners of war in Nazi Germany (152) the status that is proper to man. Levinas goes a considerable distance toward the other animal; he tries not to allegorize or metaphorize dog; he tries to see Bobby in his own right. But as the moment of identification passes, Levinas returns to more philosophically conventional modes of thought: Bobby has neither ethics nor logos, he is the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives (152). For Levinas, the dog is, as David Clark observes, too stupid, trop bete, the French condensing idiocy and animality into one crassly anthropocentric expression (188). But at the same time, Bobby has done something that the human beings surrounding the detainees of Camp 1492 (the guards, the locals living outside the camp) do not. By not differentiating between categories of his fellow beings, by being unconcerned whether these men are gentiles or Jews, Bobby has recognized the of the prisoners; he has acknowledged the absolute and irreducible worth of the other. But for Levinas, the strain of coming to terms with the fact that one's very has been affirmed by an animal creates passages of remarkable tension and irresolvable contradictions: what or who is animal? How to respond to the gift he has bestowed on you? How is it possible to be with and alongside fellow being, dog, without reducing him to a mere representative of his kind? Levinas's difficulties with the animal are by no means unique. Indeed, Jacques Derrida includes Levinas amongst the pantheon of European philosophers (he is thinking in particular of Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Lacan) whose discourses [on the animal] are sound and profound, but everything goes on as if they themselves had never been looked at, and especially not naked, by an animal that addressed them ... as though troubling experience had not been theoretically registered, supposing that they had experienced it at all, at the precise moment when they made of the animal a theorem, something seen and not seeing. The experience of the seeing animal, the animal that looks at them, has not been taken into account in the philosophical or theoretical architecture of their discourse. (383) When Levinas so movingly registers his debt to cherished being, we can see a temporary testing of the limits of discourse, of what Derrida terms this immense disavowal whose logic traverses the whole history of humanity (383). …

Songs Confront the Past: Music in KZ Sachsenhausen, 1936–1945

This article considers the role of music among German, Polish and Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen, the Nazi concentration camp. It focuses primarily on the songs that were composed and sung in the camp, of which at least 350 are known. The article uses song as a lens through which to examine the diversity of the camp's social landscape, and places particular emphasis on the distinctive ways in which prisoner groups chose to interpret and respond to the experience of incarceration.

Jewish Prisoner Labour in Warsaw After the Ghetto Uprising, 1943‒1944

Jewish Prisoner Labour in Warsaw After the Ghetto Uprising, 1943‒1944

A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism

IT HAS BECOME SOMETHING of a commonplace in recent criticism to claim that the Holocaust inaugurates a ''crisis of representation.'' To read, understand, and transmit a historical trauma of this magnitude is to confront the boundaries of the thinkable and the sayable. This essay critically examines the emergence of a theoretical current that presents the Holocaust primarily as a trauma that - as trauma - opens up unlocatable and unrepresentable forms of knowledge. It argues that the overwhelming focus on trauma as an optic for viewing the Nazi genocide leads to a dangerous conflation of the differences between victims, executioners, witnesses (primary and secondary); between literal and metaphorical survival and culpability; and between historical event and metaphorical, transhistorical condition.For a generation that did not live through the Holocaust but encountered it as secondary witnesses, as readers and viewers of films and documentaries, a sense of metaphorical survival and second-hand guilt seems to be an inescapable condition of Holocaust reception. Theoretical approaches to representations and testimonies of the Holocaust, especially in the wake of deconstruction, increasingly rely on models of contamination, complicity, and trauma. Such models complicate not only the difference between victims and executioners within the camps, but also the differences between witnesses, bystanders, and successive generations of secondary witnesses. Primo Levi's description of a ''gray zone'' in the concentration camp (in The Drowned and the Saved) has played a crucial role in this recent focus on the traumatized culpability of the secondary witness. The ''gray zone'' describes situations that blurred and even dismantled the opposition between victims and executioners (as in the case of the Special Squads, or Sonderkommando s, composed primarily of Jewish prisoners working in the crematorium). This essay argues that Levi's ''gray zone'' is now deployed as a figure in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, and Shoshana Felman. Identifying proximities in their views of trauma and testimony, the essay shows how Levi's ''gray zone'' is transformed into an overarching metaphorical framework for thinking not only about the Holocaust, but more broadly, about history, subjectivity,and ethics in the fields of psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and literary criticism. This hypostasis of the ''gray zone'' not only erases the historical specificity of the Nazi genocide, but also subsumes the irreducibly distinct positions of victim, executioner, witness, accomplice, and proxy-witness under a general condition of traumatic complicity. The essay concludes with a paired reading of Albert Camus's La chute and Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, suggesting that Camus's novel, while often read as an exemplary testimony to historical trauma, instead stages some of the ethical and political problems of reading history through the optic of trauma.

Interpretation of the Unimaginable: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., and “Dark Tourism”

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., has received visitation levels in excess of 2 million per annum since its opening in April 1993. Such a development was not without controversy. The museum’s permanent exhibition contains more than 5,000 artifacts, including photographs, uniforms, letters, and a rail car used to take Jewish prisoners and others to the death camps. Through the use of computer terminals, visitors are able to review records in newspapers, watch film clips, and hear taped interviews with Holocaust survivors. Such a concern with replication and simulation is central to the treatment and analysis of the phenomenon known as “dark tourism” (tourism of sites of death, atrocity, and mass killing). This article analyzes the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in the context of dark tourism, concluding that the museum’s nature, content, and purpose pose questions about visitor motivation, “dark” attraction development, ethical management, and the interpretation of history.

Religion and state in the American Jewish experience

This text focuses on what it means to be Jewish in America and the different positions held within the Jewish community on past and present church-state issues - whether Orthodox Jews in the military should wear yarmulkes while in uniform - and if Jewish prisoners have a right to Kosher food.

Georges Perec, W, and the Memory of Vichy France

At nightfall, the gates of the VWlodrome d'Hiver were closed, shutting in the stench which, of all the physical tortures inflicted on prisoners, proved to be the most difficult to bear.... From the first day, this pestilential smell settled over the place, and it is striking how all of the eyewitness accounts mention and agree on its pervasiveness and overpowering quality. The V~1 d'Hiv had been sealed. The swinging doors on the Rue Nelaton were opened only to let in the Jewish prisoners as they arrived and then quickly shut again. Apart from the doors, there was not one opening or ventilation shaft in working order. The hot July sun fell on the glass roof of the stadium with the weight of lead.... With thousands of people living, breathing, and perspiring in that furnace, one's first impression on entering was that the air inside had a different density from the air outside. Claude Lhvy and Paul Tillard, Betrayal at the Vil d'Hiv1

The Social and Cultural Life of the Prisoners in the Jewish Forced Labor Camp at Skarżysko-Kamienna

The article discusses the social and cultural life among the Jewish prisoners at the Skarzysko-Kamienna forced labor camp in central Poland. The activities included organized observances of religious and national customs and creative arts and performances of many kinds. The activities served several functions for the artists and audiences. Whether as a source of income in the struggle for physical survival, or as a psychological escape from the terrible reality of daily life in the camp, or as a unifying element for the fragmented prisoner population, or as a from of political resistance, these social and cultural activities in the camp constitute a singular phenomenon in the history of the Holocaust.

Temporary Single Parenthood--The Case of Prisoners' Families

The plight of prisoners' children was investigated. The study delineates the adjustment problems children experienced as a result of their separation from the father, and identifies the predicting variables affecting successful adjustment to father's incarceration. The study was undertaken within the wider context of family system functioning and family relations. Data were collected through structured personal interviews with 118 Jewish prisoners' wives-mothers whose husbands were first-timers serving terms of 13 months to life imprisonment. The interview schedule was based on the predictor variables of family background, family systems functioning as measured by the Family Resource Inventory and Coping with Separation Inventory. The criterion variable was measured with the Children's Adjustment Inventory. Findings indicated predicaments in three areas: interactional, emotional, and health and behavioral. Through the use of discriminant analysis two clusters of predictor variables emerged. Ability of the children to adjust successfully to father's imprisonment was related to familial and personal resources of the mother and to the stigmatizing effects of the criminal event. Clinical intervention strategies are recommended.

Coping with Stress: The Case of Prisoner's Wives

Coping with the nonnormative stressful event of husband's incarceration is investigated. The study describes coping patterns of prisoners' wives and identifies the predicting variables affecting a wife's successful coping ability to her husband's imprisonment. The investigation used the conceptual model developed by Burr (1973), based on Hill's (1949) ABCX formulation within a life-cycle framework. The discussion is based on data collected through structured personal interviews with 143 Jewish prisoners' wives whose husbands werefirst-timers serving terms of 13 months to life imprisonment. Concentrating on both precrisis and postcrisis periods, the interview schedule contained three measures: the Predicament Inventory, the Coping with Separation Inventory, and the Family Resources Inventory. Findings indicate predicaments and role disruptions in three areas: sequential, complementary, and concurrent role functioning. Through the use of discriminant analysis, eight different coping patterns emerged. Successful coping was related to wives' higher level of education, an egalitarian pattern of the family's division of labor prior to the husband's incarceration, and the length of prison sentence the husband has served. The findings support use of a conceptual base combining a sociopsychological perspective in the study of families under stress.

Re Extradition Act 1870

The individual in international law — Extradition — Political crimes — Murder of Jewish prisoners at concentration camp during Second World War — Guards charged with murder after war — Whether political offence — Request for evidence — Extradition Act 1870 — The law of England