The Wartime System of Labor Service in Hungary


Book Description

This volume aims to convey the realities of life in labour service companies through the personal narratives of survivors. The four narratives included were selected to dramatize some of the most distinct experiences endured by labour servicemen.




Studies in Contemporary Jewry


Book Description

How has the Jewish family changed over the course of the twentieth century? How has it remained the same? How do Jewish families see themselves--historically, socially, politically, and economically--and how would they like to be seen by others? This book, the fourteenth volume of Oxford's internationally acclaimed Studies in Contemporary Jewry series, presents a variety of perspectives on Jewish families coping with life and death in the twentieth century. The book is comprised of symposium papers, essays, and review articles of works published on such fundamental subjects as the Holocaust, antisemitism, genocide, history, literature, the arts, religion, education, Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East. Published annually by the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Studies in Contemporary Jewry series features current scholarship in the form of symposia, articles, and book reviews by distinguished experts of Jewish studies from colleges and universities across the globe. Each volume also includes a list of recent dissertations. Volume XIV: Coping with Life and Death: Jewish Families in the Twentieth Century will appeal to all students and scholars of the sociocultural history of the Jewish people, especially those interested in the nature of Jewish intermarriage and/or family life, the changing fate of the Orthodox Jewish family, the varied but widespread Americanization of the Jewish family, and similar concerns.




Conscripted Slaves


Book Description

From the spring of 1942 until the summer of 1944, some 45,000 Jewish men were forced to accompany Hungarian troops to the battle zone of the Soviet Union. Some 80% of the Jewish forced laborers never returned home. They fell prey to battle, starvation, disease, and grinding labor, aggravated immensely by brutality and even outleft murder at the hands of the Hungarian soldiers responsible for them. This study constitutes a unique and invaluable chapter in the mosaic of Holocaust history. The laborers' personal accounts speak powerfully to every Jewish family that lived under Hungarian rule during the Holocaust years, because it is their own personal story. But it is not one to be kept in the family alone, since it is profoundly relevant to all people.




The Politics of Genocide


Book Description

The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Condensed Edition is an abbreviated version of the classic work first published in 1981 and revised and expanded in 1994. It includes a new historical overview, and retains and sharpens its focus on the persecution of the Jews. Through a meticulous use of Hungarian and many other sources, the book explains in a rational and empirical context the historical, political, communal, and socioeconomic factors that contributed to the unfolding of this tragedy at a time when the leaders of the world, including the national and Jewish leaders of Hungary, were already familiar with the secrets of Auschwitz. The Politics of Genocide is the most eloquent and comprehensive study ever produced of the Holocaust in Hungary. In this condensed edition, Randolph L. Braham includes the most important revisions of the 1994 second edition as well as new material published since then. Scholars of Holocaust, Slavic, and East-Central European studies will find this volume indispensable.




The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust: Seredina-Buda-Z


Book Description

This three-volume encyclopedia, abridged from a 30-volume set in Hebrew and with a foreword by Elie Wiesel, chronicles Jewish life before and during the Holocaust. Arranged alphabetically by town, thousands of entries explore centuries of Jewish life. Some entries, particularly for large cities, provide information on Jewish residents as early as the Middle Ages and discuss the fate of Jews during the Black Death persecutions (1348-1349) and various pogroms from the 17th to 20th centuries. Each entry provides information on the town's Jewish inhabitants on the eve of German occupation, gives the dates of Jewish roundups and mass executions and estimates how many Jews from that community survived the war. Includes more than 600 black-and-white photographs.




The Holocaust in Hungary


Book Description

According to most historians, the Holocaust in Hungary represented a unique chapter in the singular history of what the Nazis termed as the ?Final Solution? of the ?Jewish question? in Europe. More than seventy years after the Shoah, the origins and prehistory as well as the implementation and aftermath of the genocide still provide ample ground for scholarship. In fact, Hungarian historians began to seriously deal with these questions only after the 1980s. Since then, however, a consistently active and productive debate has been waged about the history and interpretation of the Holocaust in Hungary and with the passage of time, more and more questions have been raised in connection with its memorialization. This volume includes twelve selected scholarly papers thematically organized under four headings: 1. The newest trends in the study of the Holocaust in Hungary. 2. The anti-Jewish policies of Hungary during the interwar period 3. The Holocaust era in Hungary 4. National and international aspects of Holocaust remembrance. The studies reflect on the anti-Jewish atmosphere in Hungary during the interwar period; analyze the decision-making process that led to the deportations, and the options left open to the Hungarian government. They also provide a detailed presentation of the Holocaust in Transylvania and describe the experience of Hungarian Jewish refugees in Austria after the end of the war. ÿ




The Holocaust in Hungary


Book Description

The Holocaust in Hungary provides a comprehensive documentary account of one of the most brutal and effective killing campaigns in history. After Nazi Germany took control of Hungary late in World War II, Jews were rounded up with unprecedented speed and sent directly to Auschwitz. They would form the largest group of victims who perished in that camp. The complex interplay between German and Hungarian actors brought about the annihilation of a once-thriving Jewish community and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children. The authors present extensive reports, testimonies, and other primary sources of these events accompanied by in-depth commentary that spans the years from the late 1930s to the fractured political landscape of postwar Hungary.







Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944


Book Description

This study of the Antonescu regime’s forced-labor system “offers precious insights to historians and social scientists alike” (Dennis Deletant, author of Ion Antonescu: Hitler’s Forgotten Ally). Between Romania’s entry into World War II in 1941 and the ouster of dictator Ion Antonescu three years later, over 105,000 Jews were forced to work in internment and labor camps, labor battalions, government institutions, and private industry. Particularly for those in the labor battalions, this period was characterized by extraordinary physical and psychological suffering, hunger, inadequate shelter, and dangerous or even deadly working conditions. And yet the situation that arose from the combination of Antonescu’s paranoias and the peculiarities of the Romanian system of forced-labor organization meant that most Jewish laborers survived. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania explores the ideological and legal background of this system of forced labor, its purpose, and its evolution. Author Dallas Michelbacher examines the relationship between the system of forced labor and the Romanian government’s plans for the “solution to the Jewish question.” In doing so, Michelbacher highlights the key differences between the Romanian system of forced labor and the well-documented use of forced labor in Nazi Germany and neighboring Hungary. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania explores the internal logic of the Antonescu regime and how it balanced its ideological imperative for antisemitic persecution with the economic needs of a state engaged in total war whose economy was still heavily dependent on the skills of its Jewish population.




All the Horrors of War


Book Description

The remarkable stories of Rachel Genuth, a poor Jewish teenager from the Hungarian provinces, and Hugh Llewelyn Glyn Hughes, a high-ranking military doctor in the British Second Army, who converge in Bergen-Belsen, where the girl fights for her life and the doctor struggles to save thousands on the brink of death. On April 15, 1945, Brigadier H. L. Glyn Hughes entered Bergen-Belsen for the first time. Waiting for him were 10,000 unburied, putrefying corpses and 60,000 living prisoners, starving and sick. One month earlier, 15-year-old Rachel Genuth arrived at Bergen-Belsen; deported with her family from Sighet, Transylvania, in May of 1944, Rachel had by then already endured Auschwitz, the Christianstadt labor camp, and a forced march through the Sudetenland. In All the Horrors of War, Bernice Lerner follows both Hughes and Genuth as they move across Europe toward Bergen-Belsen in the final, brutal year of World War II. The book begins at the end: with Hughes's searing testimony at the September 1945 trial of Josef Kramer, commandant of Bergen-Belsen, along with forty-four SS (Schutzstaffel) members and guards. "I have been a doctor for thirty years and seen all the horrors of war," Hughes said, "but I have never seen anything to touch it." The narrative then jumps back to the spring of 1944, following both Hughes and Rachel as they navigate their respective forms of wartime hell until confronting the worst: Christianstadt's prisoners, including Rachel, are deposited in Bergen-Belsen, and the British Second Army, having finally breached the fortress of Germany, assumes control of the ghastly camp after a negotiated surrender. Though they never met, it was Hughes's commitment to helping as many prisoners as possible that saved Rachel's life. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including Hughes's papers, war diaries, oral histories, and interviews, this gripping volume combines scholarly research with narrative storytelling in describing the suffering of Nazi victims, the overwhelming presence of death at Bergen-Belsen, and characters who exemplify the human capacity for fortitude. Lerner, Rachel's daughter, has special insight into the torment her mother suffered. The first book to pair the story of a Holocaust victim with that of a liberator, All the Horrors of War compels readers to consider the full, complex humanity of both.