The memorialization of the Holocaust and the subsequent condemnation of those political regimes that led to this genocide unique until today in human history is a continuous, normal exercise in ...democratic societies. Younger Central and Eastern European democracies, like Romania, took the first steps toward discerning the historical truth of the infamous era of fascism lead by Ion Antonescu only after 1990 and make efforts to boldly confront the darker elements of their own past. Recent issue of the journal Psihologia sociala from Iasi is a good example not only for the act of the courageous confrontation with truths hitherto largely hidden from the public, but also a successful attempt for the extension of research and interpretation of the phenomena of discrimination, inequality and exclusion, but also for the memorialization of genocidal events unfortunately increasingly present in today's world.
This article deals with Hannah Arendt's work on Second World War concentration and extermination camps, which she considers the main institution of organized power. Este artículo sostiene que la ...institución de los campos de concentración y de exterminio -es decir, tanto las condiciones sociales vigentes al interior del campo como su función en el aparato más vasto de terror propio de los regímenes totalitarios- podría muy bien ser ese fenómeno inesperado, ese escollo en la vía de una comprensión adecuada de la política y de la sociedad contemporánea (Les techniques, 203 trad, mía) De este modo, para Arendt, los campos de concentración se constituyen en el escollo que impide una correcta comprensión, no solo de este periodo histórico particular, sino de la política actual. El trabajo y la productividad son elementos fundamentales para mostrar las diferencias entre los campos de concentración, sin embargo, para Arendt la diferencia principal dice relación con el trato que reciben los prisioneros. En este sentido dice Arendt: El resultado es que se ha establecido un lugar donde los hombres pueden ser torturados y asesinados y, sin embargo, ni los atormentadores ni los atormentados, y menos aún los que se hallan fuera pueden ser conscientes de que lo que está sucediendo es algo más que un cruel juego o un sueño absurdo (Los orígenes, 663).
Great strides have been made to uncover the accouterments of established racism that has bristled in colleges and universities for decades.2 These calls urge higher education leaders to define and ...understand racism, defend and empower its victims, and develop institutional accountability and periodic reviews.3 While numerous higher education institutions pledge for racial equity4, reevaluate and reshape their teaching curriculum, this paper begs leaders in performing arts higher institutions to consider the performance of music emerged from marginalized and oppressed people during the Holocaust as means to commemorate, combat various forms of racism, and preserve history while educating students and local communities about music born of struggle. Harvesting lessons learned from the recent OperaCNU, TheatreCNU, and The Virginia Children's Chorus production during November 2021, this paper explores selected compositions borne from repressed composers and artists across a spectrum of time, and considers the cultural and sociopolitical import of teaching and performing such music as a way to bring together individuals from diverse communities to the concert hall, and for a brief moment in time, come together as one supportive community. Brundibár, a children's opera by Hans Krása" (a Prague composer of Jewish descent who was murdered during the Holocaust at Auschwitz) featured first, immediately followed (no intermission) by a locally-commissioned operatic composition1" of Elie Wiesel's 1979 play.6 Several local organizations participated in sponsoring this seriesiv, which included art exhibits, guest lectures, and musical performances throughout the 2021 fall semester.v Te idea to bring Brundibár to the local stage was introduced to Professor Mark Reimer of CNU, two years prior to its production, at the suggestion of an Israeli colleague who had just conducted it abroad. In this little opera, born of a serious mind and yet so pleasant to the ear, idea and form, thought and preparation, concept and execution are joined in a fruitful marriage of mutual collaboration: whether it be cast in a large or small form, whether it be song or symphony, chorus or opera, there can be no higher praise for a work of art.14 Singer's review of the opera could not be more timely or relevant today.
The Myanmar military dominates certain segments of the gemstone market through its extraction and production of more than 90 percent of the world's finest jade and rubies used in jewelry creation. ...This gemstone production directly assists the military in funding their continued genocide against the ethnic Muslim minority Rohingya people. Since government forces began their clearance operations, which include the murder and rape of thousands of Rohingya, an estimated 919,000 refugees have been forced into Bangladesh, where they have suffered brutal and inhumane conditions in refugee camps.
The purpose of the article is to present fragments of the diary of Miriam Korber-Bercovici, a young Jewish woman deported with her whole family from Southern Bukovina to the Transnistria Governorate ...under the Antonescu regime. The excerpts translated from the original Romanian into Polish mainly concern the author’s experiences of deportation and everyday life in the Djurin ghetto. They were selected in order to acquaint Polish readers with the situation of the Jews of Bukovina and Bessarabia displaced to the Transnistria Governorate during World War II. The diary was first published in Romania in 1995 as Jurnal de ghetou. The presented translation is based on the second edition of the diary published in 2017 by Curtea Veche Publishing House and Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania.
Crime writing is not often associated with Holocaust representations, yet an emergent trend, especially in German literature, combines a general, popular interest in crime and detective fiction with ...historical writing about the Holocaust, or critically engages with the events of the Shoah. Particularly worthy of critical investigation are Bernhard Schlink’s series of detective novels focusing on private investigator Gerhard Selb, a man with a Nazi background now investigating other people’s Nazi pasts, and Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case (2011) which engages with the often inadequate response of the post-war justice system in Germany to Nazi crimes. In these novels, the detective turns historian in order to solve historic cases. Importantly, readers also follow in the detectives’ footsteps, piecing together a slowly emerging historical jigsaw in ways that compel them to question historical knowledge, history writing, processes of institutionalised commemoration and memory formation, all of which are key issues in Holocaust Studies. The aims of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, I will argue that the significance of this kind of fiction has been insufficiently recognised by critics, perhaps in part because of its connotations as popular fiction. Secondly, I will contend that these texts can be fruitfully analysed by situating them in relation to recent debates about pious and impious Holocaust writing as discussed by Gillian Rose and Matthew Boswell. As a result, these texts act as exemplars of Rose’s contention that impious Holocaust literature succeeds by using new techniques in order to shatter the emotional detachment that has resulted from the use of clichés and familiar tropes in traditional pious accounts; and by placing detectives and readers in a position of moral ambivalence that complicates their understanding of the past on the one hand, and their own moral position on the other.
This dissertation examines Yiddish-language poetry composed during the Holocaust and in direct response to news and rumors of the events as they reached the Jewish communities of the United States. ...Physically removed from Europe, but unable to imagine themselves as separate from the communities being destroyed, the authors examined are deeply concerned with Jewish existence beyond physical survival. Interpreting the unfolding events against a background of Jewish history, literature, and theology, this poetry confronts the question of what it means to retain, maintain, and rebuild a communal Jewish identity and to imagine a future for the Jewish people in the face of its imminent and ongoing destruction. “No letters arrive anymore”: American Yiddish Holocaust Literature focuses in particular on four Yiddish poets: Kadya Molodovsky (1894-1973), Yankev Glatshteyn (1896-1971), Arn Tsaytlin (1898-1973), and H. Leyvik (1888-1962). The immediacy of these events, the intensity of the crises of identity they engender, and the critical self-awareness that these poets express produce distinct forms of knowing and experience that cannot be understood through current interpretive frameworks derived from the study of survivor memoir and testimony. Rather, these authors are preoccupied with their complex positioning as individual witnesses to the destruction, and as members of a community and, as Jewish tradition would dictate, speakers for a community under existential assault. This dissertation thus offers a critical interpretive framework that understands Holocaust literature to be responding not only to the physical destruction of Europe’s Jews, but also to an accompanying crisis of Jewish self-understanding and collective identity, especially reflective of American Jewish communities of the time, yet to understand their own relationship to the destroyed communities of Europe.
On March 1, 1995, at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, ARTE (a French-German state-funded television network) proposed an encounter between two ...highly-regarded figures of our time: Elie Wiesel and Jorge Semprún. These two men, whose destinies were unparalleled, had probably crossed paths-without ever meeting-in the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald in 1945. This short book is the entire transcription of their recorded conversation. During World War II, Buchenwald was the center of a major network of sub-camps and an important source of forced labor. Most of the internees were German political prisoners, but the camp also held a total of 10,000 Jews, Roma, Sinti, Jehovah's Witnesses, and German military deserters.
In these pages, Wiesel and Semprún poignantly discuss the human condition under catastrophic circumstances. They review the categories of inmate at Buchenwald and agree on the tragic reason for the fate of the victims of Nazism-as well as why this fate was largely ignored for so long after the end of the war. Both men offer riveting testimony and pay vibrant homage to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Today, seventy-five years after the liberation of the Nazi camps, this book could not be more timely for its confrontation with ultra-nationalism and antisemitism.
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