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 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 Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to fixed locations of persecution such as ghettos and camps.
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 displaced children of Europe, who live in and through landscapes and in temporary accommodations-their bare worlds of life stuffed into rucksacks-are our constant companions, their movement and ...immobility paraded as a geopolitical inconvenience and security threat to governments and officials even before they embark on treacherous Mediterranean sea and land crossings to hoped-for asylum in Europe. Gigliotti examines the humanitarian ambitions and changing narrative authority in the coverage of displaced children in the photography of David 'Chim' Seymour, notably from his UNICEF/UNESCO-commissioned tour of Europe in the summer of 1948 and, briefly, in UNICEF's online platform, 'Refugees in Europe: Then and Now'. She outlines the post-war historical context of internationalism and humanitarian engagement with the visual to advocate for displaced children's rights to place, home and belonging, and concludes with an analysis of the representation of the post-war refugee and displaced person as a memory emissary in today's refugee crises.
This article investigates three recent human rights memoirs that chronicle the Rwandan genocide of 1994: Emergency Sex (and other desperate measures): True Stories from a War Zone, Shake Hands with ...the Devil: the failure of humanity in Rwanda, and The Zanzibar Chest: a memoir of love and war. I use these memoirs to explore the complexities of bearing witness to ethnic violence and war as an autobiographical subject shaped by the memory of historical atrocity — as a besieged self in traumatic occupations of the UN protector (Roméo Dallaire), lawyer (Kenneth Cain), and war correspondent (Aidan Hartley). Finally, I suggest that the authors of these memoirs are secondary witnesses, claimants to ethical truths and writers of atrocity testimony that complicate the burgeoning life‐telling compulsion of what is and who can claim to be a genocide victim.
“Your mind with time, in fact, doesn't erase things that are traumas. It makes them clearer. They become digitally clearer and then you are able to sit back and all of a sudden have every individual scene come to you instead of the massive blur of many scenes I saw every day. The accumulation of the spirits that would come to you at night in the form of eyes, thousands of eyes, some mad, some simply there, and others bewildered, innocent children and adults, all that accumulated to the fact that I simply totally broke down”. (Roméo Dallaire)
“What's true is that we didn't understand at the time the full magnitude of what was happening. I was an ant walking over the rough hide of an elephant. I had no idea of the scale of what I was witnessing. And when I did become aware I discovered Rwanda was way beyond my limited talents as a correspondent”. (Aidan Hartley, The Zanzibar Chest)
“I don't know who saved the honor of mankind during my time in the field, but I do know that an ancestral memory of tyranny commands me not to keep silent. There is no ambiguity here. I am a witness. I have a voice. I have to write it down”. (Kenneth Cain, Emergency Sex)
In honor of Berel Lang's five decades of scholarly and philosophical contributions, the editors of Ethics, Art and Representations of the Holocaust invited seventeen eminent scholars from around the ...world to discuss Lang's impact on their own research and to reflect on how the Nazi genocide continues to resonate in contemporary debates about antisemitism, commemoration and poetic representations. Resisting what Alvin Rosenfeld warned as "the end of the Holocaust", the essays in this collection signal the Holocaust as an event without closure, of enduring resonance to new generations of scholars of genocide, Jewish studies, and philosophy.
This article examines the role of testimony in the production of the memory of the Holocaust and the practice of forcible removals in Australia as “limit events”. A “limit event” is an event or ...practice of such magnitude and profound violence that its effects rupture the otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy and so‐called civilising tendencies that underlie the constitution of political and moral community. The references are the stories of removal collated in Bringing Them Home, and eyewitness testimonies from the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. By situating the stolen generations and the Eichmann trial as limit events, I argue that the effects of witnessing and story‐telling exposed a cultural semantics of what was speakable and unspeakable in the narratives of judging historical injustice and remembering past traumas.
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 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 train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to fixed locations of persecution such as ghettos and camps.