The Last Train


Book Description

The Last Train is the harrowing true story about young brothers Paul and Oscar Arato and their mother, Lenke, surviving the Nazi occupation during the final years of World War II. Living in the town of Karcag, Hungary, the Aratos feel insulated from the war -- even as it rages all around them. Hungary is allied with Germany to protect its citizens from invasion, but in 1944 Hitler breaks his promise to keep the Nazis out of Hungary. The Nazi occupation forces the family into situations of growing panic and fear: first into a ghetto in their hometown; then a labor camp in Austria; and, finally, to the deadly Bergen Belsen camp deep in the heart of Germany. Separated from their father, 6-year-old Paul and 11-year-old Oscar must care for their increasingly sick mother, all while trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy amid the horrors of the camp. In the spring of 1945, the boys see British planes flying over the camp, and a spark of hope that the war will soon end ignites. And then, they are forced onto a dark, stinking boxcar by the Nazi guards. After four days on the train, the boys are convinced they will be killed, but through a twist of fate, the train is discovered and liberated by a battalion of American soldiers marching through Germany. The book concludes when Paul, now a grown man living in Canada, stumbles upon photographs on the internet of his train being liberated. After writing to the man who posted the pictures, Paul is presented with an opportunity to meet his rescuers at a reunion in New York -- but first he must decide if he is prepared to reopen the wounds of his past.




Shoah Train


Book Description




The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime


Book Description

During the Nazi regime many children and young people in Europe found their lives uprooted by Nazi policies, resulting in their relocation around the globe. The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime represents the diversity of their experiences, covering a range of non-European perspectives on the Second World War and aspects of memory. This book is unique in that it places the experiences of children and youth in a transnational context, shifting the conversation of displacement and refuge to countries that have remained under-examined in a comparative context. Featuring essays from an international range of experts, this book analyses the key themes in three sections: the migration of children to countries including England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, and Brazil; the experiences of young people who remained in Nazi Europe and became victims of war, displacement and deportation; and finally the challenges of rebuilding lives and representing traumas in the aftermath of war. In its comparisons between Jewish and non-Jewish experiences and how these intersected and diverged, it revisits debates about cultural genocide through the separation of families and communities, as well as contributing new perspectives on forced labour, families and the Holocaust, and Germans as war victims.




The Train Journey


Book Description

Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis’ genocidal vision of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Historians have estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps. In his writings on the “Final Solution,” Raul Hilberg pondered the role of trains: “How can railways be regarded as anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds and gas chambers in Eastern Europe?” This book explores the question by analyzing the victims’ experiences at each stage of forced relocation: the round-ups and departures from the ghettos, the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps. Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced the train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to the more studied, fixed locations of persecution, such as ghettos and camps.




Three Minutes in Poland


Book Description

"The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--




Home on the Mornin' Train


Book Description




Shoah


Book Description

Documentaire sur l'extermination des Juifs d'Europe par les Nazis au cours de la deuxième guerre mondiale à travers les témoignages de gens qui ont vécu à cette époque. Le réalisateur s'est surtout attaché à l'étude des méthodes utilisées dans les camps établis en Pologne tels Treblinka et Auschwitz en interrogeant des Juifs survivants, des Polonais qui vivaient à proximité de ces lieux et diverses personnes qui furent mêlées consciemment ou non à ce processus. En finale vient une section concernant la vie dans le ghetto de Varsovie et sa destruction.




Shoah


Book Description

Claude Lanzmann's epic 1985 film 'Shoah' tells the story of the Holocaust through interviews with survivors of the extermination camps, bystanders who watched or participated in mass murder, and some of the perpetrators of genocide. Sue Vice addresses Lanzmann's central role in the film and the issue of representing the unrepresentable.




The Construction of Testimony


Book Description

Groundbreaking analyses of the vast archive of newly digitized and released outtakes from Lanzmann's masterwork.




New Documentary


Book Description

New Documentary: A Critical Introduction provides a comprehensive account of the last two decades of documentary filmmaking in Britain, the US and Europe. Stella Bruzzi's engaging textbook discusses key genres, filmmakers, and issues for the study of non-fiction film and television, including: * key texts such as the Zapruder film of Kennedy's assassination, Shoah, Hoop Dreams and Michael Apted's 7 Up series * documentary genres, from current affairs programming to 'fly on the wall' documentaries to 'reality tv' series * the work of documentary filmmakers such as Emile de Antonio, Fred Wiseman, Nick Broomfield, Molly Dineen and Paul Watson * the work of avant-garde filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Patrick Keiller, Peter Greenaway and Wim Wenders, whose films challenge conventions of documentary filmmaking * movies based on historical events, such as 'JFK' and 'Nixon' * faux documentaries such as This is Spinal Tap, Bob Roberts and Man Bites Dog * gender identity, queer theory, performance, 'race' and spectatorship. Bruzzi shows how theories of documentary filmmaking can be applied to contemporary texts and genres, and discusses the relationship between recent, innovative examples of the genre and the more established canon of documentary.