In the spring of 1944, the Yiddish poet and partisan Avrom Sutzkever was airlifted into the unoccupied Soviet Union. With him he brought more than new information about the Holocaust. He brought a distinct approach to witnessing, one that summoned Soviet Jews, and refugees especially, to tell him their stories in response. Sutzkever’s testimony differed from other important testimonial publications that appeared in
the Soviet media at the time. In the latter, we find a stylistic and conceptual separation between the voice of Jewish victim and Jewish advocate, observer and interpreter of catastrophe. By contrast, Sutzkever’s work, the epic poem “Kol nidre” in particular, emphasizes dialogue and reciprocity among different witness perspectives. His writing also
ascribes dignity and poetic beauty to the voice of the Jewish victim from Poland-Lithuania. In this essay, these observations about Sutzkever’s writing are set in conversation with
epistolary responses to the author from Soviet Jewish refugees.

Elias Khoury’s novel Bab el Shams (Gate of the Sun), which came out in 1998 symbolically marking fifty years to the Palestinian Nakba, is perhaps the most comprehensive narrative of this ongoing event. This fascinating novel has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. My suggested reading of the novel is inspired by and juxtaposed with Holocaust literature
and what might be called ‘Holocaust related critical theory’. This reading, I contend, is invited by the novel itself and is pursued from the perspective of a Jewish Israeli Holocaust and trauma scholar. The main argument of this essay is that the novel deals with the unsettling conjuncture of the extremely destabilizing, traumatized and decentred testimony of the Palestinian victim–
witness and the essential, collective Palestinian national epos  that frames these individual traumatized narratives. The former inevitably undermines the latter while, at the same time, the latter collectively frames the former. These tensions, integrations and disintegrations form the core theme of Gate
of the Sun. To put it differently, I contend that this novel is about the unsettling paradoxes of writing a polyphonic non-monolithic decentralized collective epos. This narrative of collective and individual traumas manages to unsettle old national structures and ultimately invites binational thinking.

The memory of anti-Jewish persecution intersected the work of prominent authors in Italian twentieth century poetry, often following oblique and unexpected trajectories that touch authors such as Montale, Sereni, Fortini, Pasolini, Saba, Levi, Quasimodo. This essay intends to probe a genealogical juncture in this poetic history, bringing into purview a series of poliperspectival models of poetic writing about the Shoah elaborated by Salvatore Quasimodo, Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale in the early postwar years. If Quasimodo's poesia civile paved the way to a literary monumentalization of memory, such poetic configuration ultimately might be seen to hinge on what Friedrich Nietzsche critically termed a «spiritualization of cruelty». Thus it was progressively identified as a potential anti-model for Italian poetry dealing with the memory of the persecution-as a reading of Montale's treatment of this theme reveals. On the other hand, Saba condensed his afterthoughts about the «cannibalism» of racial persecution in Scorciatoie e raccontini ("Shortcuts and Very Short Stories"): a book of poèmes en prose that possesses «the accent of poetry and the rigor of aphorism». These uncanny and ironical shortcuts raise corrosive doubts about the value attached to a purported monumental memory of the Shoah and bring to attention the existence of genealogical complexity in Italian poetic writing about the Jewish genocide that calls for adequate critical recognition.

Cette communication s’interrogera, en deux temps, sur deux aspects propres à Pendant la saison des lilas d’Anna Molnár Hegedűs : le genre féminin de son auteure, de même que la période particulière de sa publication. La première partie se penchera sur le témoignage d’Anna Molnár Hegedűs sous l’angle des études de genre, en tâchant cependant d’éviter les écueils d’une catégorisation étanche entre « expérience féminine » et « expérience masculine » qui porte de plus le risque d’évacuer la dimension individuelle de la représentation de cette expérience, comme le soulève Anna Hardman. La seconde partie effectuera une analyse littéraire en repérant, dans Pendant la saison des lilas, certaines techniques narratives récurrentes dans les témoignages de l’immédiat après-guerre, notamment celle faisant appel à l’intermédialité.

In fine, cette communication visera à offrir un point de vue littéraire sur ce témoignage méconnu, tout en dépassant certaines idées reçues persistantes dans les études sur la Shoah.

Quando ha conosciuto Piero Terracina, ebreo romano sopravvissuto ad Auschwitz, Erika aveva solo quattordici anni. Ma nel volto di quel vecchio signore ha saputo vedere qualcosa di importante. Qualcosa che non poteva andare perduto. Giorno dopo giorno il loro legame si è fatto più forte. Prima con le lettere, poi con le domande occhi negli occhi. Le speranze di Erika, il suo desiderio di capire si sono intrecciati ai ricordi di Piero e alla memoria dell'Olocausto, dando vita a un'amicizia che va oltre il tempo e le generazioni.
"Cioccolata contro dolore. Marmellata contro ricordi. È un metodo che funziona, lo uso anch'io quando sono triste, con i bottoni. Apro la scatola e li spargo tutti sul pavimento. Li metto in fila per forma, per colore, ogni volta mi stupisco di quanto sono diversi. Ti ricordi quando te l'ho raccontato? Dallo sguardo ho capito che sapevi di cosa parlavo. "Bottoni. Ma guarda il destino! Anche a me piacciono tanto. Ora che ci penso non te l'ho mai detto, ma ho diretto un'azienda di bottoni per anni." In questo libro, l'amicizia tra un sopravvissuto di Auschwitz, Piero Terracina, e una ragazza.

Recently the Basel-based Anne Frank Fonds proudly presented the Graphic Diary of Anne Frank (by Ari Folman & David Polonsky). The impression is created as if this is the first ever comic book version of Anne Frank’s narrative. The author shows however that there were various predecessors.

Since the second half of the 1970s, a corpus of studies focusing on the history of women during the Holocaust has been produced. These studies assert that even though Jewish women shared the annihilation threat with the men, Jewish women also underwent unique experiences resulting from their female physiology, their female socialization, and the National Socialist Weltanschauung directed against them. These different experiences were also expressed visually in numerous works of art made by women during the Holocaust era (1939–49). Their art is rife with images of pregnancy, motherhood, feminine crafts such as domestic chores, cooking, female solidarity and mutual assistance, loss of femininity, and sexual violence. This article focuses especially on women's artistic expression of three of these topics: mutual assistance among women, loss of femininity, and sexual violence, all of which have received little attention in Holocaust art research.

A selection of 37  poems in Yiddish, collected in 6 chapters, edited by Dorit Rubinstein:
העניעלע (Henie)
די ברוינע מגפֿה  (The Brown Plague)
פֿון יענע טעג (About Those Days)
דרײַ געשרייען (Three Screams)
קינות (Lamentations)
די גלאָקן פֿון פּערפּיניאַן (The Bells of Perpignan)

This dissertation intends to retrace and critically reconstruct the multiple, and sometimes intimately diverging, trajectories followed by the literary memory of the anti-Jewish persecution in the territories of postwar Italian literature. Specific attention has been accorded to areas and segments of this cultural field that have generally remained at the margins of scholarly inquiry, with a methodological choice has resulted both in a hermeneutic recuperation of texts that have been object of a precocious rejection and perduring disinterest in the cultural economy of the memory of the Shoah in Italy – as it is the case with Otto ebrei by Giacomo Debenedetti – and in an excavation intended to explore literary genres generally excluded from critical mappings of Italian literature about the Jewish genocide – such as poetry, theatrical works, or accounts and memoirs authored Fascist and post-Fascist writers. In bringing at the center of the scrutiny forms of expressions and corresponding intellectual sedimentations previously relegated at the margins of the critical debate, this interpretive reorientation has been thus intended to highlight a series of conceptual and critical articulations that inhabit and at the same time problematize the literary memory of the Shoah in postwar Italy. The identification these “memory perspectivisms” has represented the primary intellectual goal pursued in Counter-memory, Autofictions, (Anti)Poetry: Rethinking Holocaust Literature in Postwar Italy. The first of these literature/memory articulations, is represented by what I termed as a literary “counter-memory” of the Shoah in postwar Italy. The second critical segment of this dissertation has scrutinized what I proposed to call post-Fascist, autofictional narratives of the persecution. The theoretical and cultural implications of the problematic literary paradox raised by Theodor Adorno in 1947 – “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” – have been at the center of the fourth chapter of the dissertation, dedicated to a critical reconstruction of the intellectual genealogies that shaped the field of poetic memories of the Jewish genocide in postwar Italy. The fifth and concluding chapter of the dissertation, instead, has been dedicated to a literary genre thus far substantially neglected in critical studies about Italian literature on the Shoah, that of theatrical representations.

https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Lives-Declaring-Human-Rights/dp/B08GLP3ZJ2

They walked in the darkest parts of human history: in the blood of genocide, the chains of slavery, in the oppression of women, in the death camps of the Holocaust and in the hatred and exclusion of racism. Yet, where others could see only our worst, they saw another path. And what they discovered, they taught to the rest of us. These ten, and others like them, "declared" human rights by their very lives. Often long before the ideas appeared in documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they were there. When human rights were being born, they were there. Some of their names will be familiar, others will not. Bartolome de Las Casas, Thomas Clarkson, Lucretia Mott, Tahirih, Frederick Douglass, Alain Locke, Primo Levi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr. and Albie Sachs. Yet, you won’t find the “official” story of human rights in this book. Indeed, most of the lives you find here, barely appear in that official story. What are human rights? What does it mean to work for them? As we follow their stories we will see through their eyes.

“In telling these stories … this book brings human rights ‘close to
home’, where universal human rights begin, as Eleanor
Roosevelt put it. Michael Curtotti has … done us all a great
service in this.”

Chris Sidoti

Η πραγματική ιστορία της Γερμανοεβραίας ζωγράφου Σαρλότ Σαλομόν, που αν και κατέφυγε στον Νότο της Γαλλίας τελικά εκτοπίστηκε και δολοφονήθηκε 26 ετών στο Άουσβιτς-Μπιρκενάου, αφήνοντας ένα εξαιρετικό εικαστικό έργο, ενέπνευσε τον Γάλλο συγγραφέα David Foenkinos να συγγράψει ένα ιδιότυπο μυθιστόρημα.
Βραβεία: Renaudot, Goncourt des Lycéens

Concentration camps have been and still are one of the strongest symbols for Nazism in general and the extermination of European Jewry in particular. Media reports on the camps shaped the perception of the Nazi regime ever since they were established. By 1940 they had found their way into comic books. Concentration camps appeared in several superhero, horror, adventure and war comics that were released during the Golden Age.
By analysing more than three dozen covers and comic stories, most of which are still virtually unknown, this article provides an overview of early depictions of concentration camps in graphic narratives. The article discusses the comics’ key motifs, the victims’ identities, the features of the depicted camps and the use of Nazi atrocities in order to disparage communism. It examines the role of Jewish victims. The main aim is to show to what degree concentration camp representations in comics correspond to what US society could and wanted to know about what was later to become known as the Holocaust.

Building upon recent developments in memory studies and transnational memory, this book offers a comparative analysis of Yugoslav Holocaust memory and its intersections with other forms of extreme violence, such as the suffering of the non-Jewish South-Slav population during World War II, the victims of Stalinist terror, and the victims of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav wars. Drawing on a variety of sources, including (post-)Yugoslav Holocaust fiction, the author offers novel theoretical concepts that conceive of (traumatic) memory as non-competitive and foreground its capability to transcend the boundaries of the nation.

Omer Bartov has pointed out that even though over half a century has passed since the end of the Second World War, one of the central debates which still rages in Western intellectual and academic circles is not how the Holocaust should be represented, but if the Holocaust can or should be represented at all 1 . One of the major lines of this argument involves questions of whether Auschwitz is in any rational way an understandable event. For Bartov (1996), the Holocaust "is in some sense outside rational inspection," which makes it fundamentally beyond representation. Following the argument about unrepresentability is the notion that concepts such as modernity, rationality and historical causation are all shattered by the irrational and unrepresentable horrors of the death camps and other related atrocities. By contrast, Zygmunt Bauman (1989) has argued that the Holocaust is not outside of modernity, but rather was the logical result of what he describes as the "barbarism" of modernity and rationality 2 . Within the context of debates over the representation and rational understanding of the Holocaust, it is not at all surprising that most film attempts -which by their very nature are media of representation -

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction examines texts that portray the inner experience of Holocaust perpetrators and thus transform them from archetypes of evil into complex psychological and moral subjects. Employing relevant methodological tools of narrative theory, Erin McGlothlin analyzes these unsettling depictions, which manifest a certain tension regarding the ethics of representation and identification. Such works, she asserts, endeavor to make transparent the mindset of their violent subjects, yet at the same time they also invariably contrive to obfuscate in part its disquieting character.

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction contains two parts. The first focuses on portraits of real-life perpetrators in nonfictional interviews and analyses from the 1960s and 1970s. These works provide a nuanced perspective on the mentality of the people who implemented the Holocaust via the interventional role of the interviewer or interpreter in the perpetrators’ performances of self-disclosure. In part two, McGlothlin investigates more recent fictional texts that imagine the perspective of their invented perpetrator-narrators. Such works draw readers directly into the perpetrator’s experience and at the same time impede their access to the perpetrator’s consciousness by retarding their affective connection. Demonstrating that recent fiction featuring perpetrators as narrators employs strategies derived from earlier nonfictional portrayals, McGlothlin establishes not only a historical connection between these two groups of texts, whereby nonfictional engagement with real-life perpetrators gradually gives way to fictional exploration, but also a structural and aesthetic one.

The book bespeaks new modes of engagement with ethically fraught questions raised by our increasing willingness to consider the events of the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrator. Students, scholars, and readers of Holocaust studies and literary criticism will appreciate this closer look at a historically taboo topic.

Memory is rightly seen as a faulty lens, but witness testimony also provides insight and understanding to the historical narrative that would otherwise remain unlocked. This paper weighs the limitations of memory with the unique contributions of memory to address the question, "what is the appropriate role of memoirs in histories of the Holocaust?"

This article displays how Elie Wiesel portrays the role of the bystander in his fictional work “The Town Beyond the Wall” and connects this perspective of literature with psychological and ethical implications.

Due to publishing rights, I am not allowed to upload the full article. The article was published in:
Nesfield, Victoria, and Philip Smith. The Struggle for Understanding: Elie Wiesel´s Literary Works. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019.

This article traces the evolution of the affect of pudore (a sense of modesty, restraint, and privacy) in the literary production of Primo Levi, with references to the works of other Italian Holocaust survivor-writers. Beyond the conventional typology of Holocaust survivors' shame and guilt, the article introduces the category of pudore as both an affect that pertains to concealing the body (through gestures and clothing) and a narrative technique that re-enacts such emotion by means of avoidance language (through reticence, euphemism , understatement, and irony). Because of its paradoxical nature as both an embodied affect and an affect that may conceal other emotions, pudore allows for a reassessment of the production and reception of testimonial literature in postwar Italy. Through an analysis of the tension between testimony and exposure, this article will show the relevance of the affective dimension of pudore in the works of Italian Holocaust survivor-writers.

Deemed 'misconceived and offensive' by critic Michiko Kakutani, Yann Martel's novel Beatrice and Virgil was widely criticised for its construction of an ambiguous allegory which appears to compare animal suffering to the Holocaust.
In this article, I advance an alternative reading of Martel's novel, identifying a double-ended allegory which illuminates both the Holocaust and animal suffering and a simultaneous critique of the allegorical method. I situate the latter within the context of Holocaust writing, arguing that Martel’s novel demands that we question both the nature of ethics and the responsibility of storytelling.

This book was written by Leslie Blau (Blau László). It is a translation of the English "Bonyhad: A Destroyed Community" printed by Blau in 1994 (New York, New York). This translation into Hebrew was edited by Reuven Chaim Klein in 2010. It has yet to be published.ג

The German invasion of the Netherlands on the 10th of May 1940 was not only a tragedy for the Dutch people; it was also a tragedy for Dutch literature. In a few weeks time, the intellectual leaders of an entire generation would disappear. In the chaos of the battle of Rotterdam, Doeke Zijlstra, editor in chief of the publishing house Nijgh & Van Ditmar, was killed by a stray bullet. Publisher Robert Leopold, who feared German revenge for his publication of Hermann Rauschning’s critical work Hitler Speaks, shot himself. The promising Jewish writer Jacob Hiegentlich took poison and died. The young poet Tom de Bruin was accidentally shot by a nervous Dutch sentry. Hendrik Marsman, the most celebrated Dutch poet of his time, was among the few who found a place on a ship that would bring him to England. Within sight of the coast, however, they were hit by a German torpedo and he drowned. By then, two of the most prominent essayists, Edgar Du Perron and Menno ter Braak, had already died; Du Perron collapsed with a heart attack during the bombardment of an airport near his home in Bergen and ter Braak committed suicide upon the news of the Dutch surrender to the Germans. None of them ever knew about the death of the others.
What might seem as the last chapter of a Greek tragedy was only the beginning. During the occupation, at least 700 men and women of the underground press would lose their lives. The punishment for participation in the clandestine press was equivalent to that for acts of sabotage. Propaganda had been an essential element in the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and, as such, a strict control over the press in the occupied Netherlands was considered of paramount importance. Literature was given a totally new purpose in the occupied Netherlands; it became propaganda in support of the Nazification of Dutch society and the tightening of links between the “Germanic” Dutch and their German “brothers.”
Hence, Dutch authors were suddenly confronted with a tough challenge. For decades, most of them had preferred the loftiness of the ivory tower over the squabbling of daily politics. In 1937, the celebrated novelist Simon Vestdijk still wrote: “The creative artist faces war like a toddler: utterly helpless.”  Only a couple of years later, his publishing house was bombed and he himself was taken hostage. The same author, who didn’t want to have anything to do with war, had ended up in its clutches.
In fact, after the German invasion, participation in political debates was no longer an option. It had become a necessity. Even keeping quiet was now considered a political statement. In this context, a simple poem could have a huge impact.

"If the international Finance-Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the peoples of the earth once again into a world war, the result will be ...the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." Hitler's speech to the Reichstag, January 30, 1939. "Europe" as defined by Hitler himself, was "the European nations and their overseas possessions," inclusive of "French Algeria" and its French departments," the French protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia" - also called "France" (see maps 1, 2, 3), and Italian Libya/Italy N. Africa (Libya)."
France: Metropolitan France and its overseas territories/possessions (territoires d’outre-mer); officially the French Republic (French: République française) is a sovereign country in Western Europe that includes several overseas regions and territories. Metropolitan France and Overseas France together form what is officially called the French Republic.

Metropolitan France (French: France métropolitaine or la Métropole – as used by General de Gaulle in 1941) is the part of France located in continental Europe. It is also referred to as "continental France, "mainland France" (as used by Renée Poznanski, expert on the Shoah in France), or as the French mainland.

La France d'outre-mer, or l'Outre-mer (Overseas France) is the collective name for French territories outside 'mainland France.' Because of its proximity to mainland France, French North Africa was considered "le prolongement de la France" and "an extension of Europe."