Drawing on a selection of recently available documents from the International Tracing Service, one of the largest Holocaust-related archival repositories in the world, this compelling volume provides ...new insights into human decision-making in genocidal settings, the factors that drive it, and its far-reaching consequences.
This interdisciplinary study intergrates historiographical, literary and cultural methodologies in its focus on a little known corpus of testimonial accounts published by French women deported to ...Nazi camps. Comprising epistemological and literary analyses of the accounts and an examination of the construction of deportee identities, it will interest those working in the fields of modern French literature, genre, women's studies and the Holocaust.
Margaret-Anne Hutton is Seniro Lecturer in French at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of The Novels of Christiane Rochefort: Countering the Culture (1998), Michel Tournier's Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1992), and editor of French Fiction in the 1990s (2002) and Text(e)/Image (1999). She has published widely in the fields of contemporary French fiction and female-authored WWII testimonial accounts.
Sport was an integral part of life in camps during the twentieth century, even in Nazi concentrations camps or in the Soviet Gulag. Traditionally perceived as a symbol of equality, play, and ...peacefulness, sport under such unexpected circumstances irritates most observers, back then and today. This volume studies the irritating fact of sport in penal and internment camps as an important insight into the history of camps. The authors enquire into case studies of sport being played in different forms of camps around the globe and throughout the twentieth century. They challenge our understanding of camps, question the dichotomy of insiders and outsiders, inner-camp hierarchies, and the everyday experience of violence. This fresh perspective complements the existing camp studies and gives way for the subjectivity of camp inmates and their action.
This book is rooted in the author’s experience as an interviewer and researcher in the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project – the biggest European oral history project devoted to a single Nazi ...concentration camp system, realized in the years 2002/2003 at the University of Vienna. Over 850 Mauthausen survivors have been recorded worldwide, more than 160 of them in Poland, and over 30 by the author. The work offers an in-depth analysis of Polish survivors’ accounts, sensitive to both, form and content of these stories, as well as their social and cultural framing. The analysis is accompanied by an interpretation of (Polish) camp experiences in a broader biographical and historical perspective. The book is an interpretive journey from camp experiences, through the survivors’ memories, to narratives recalling them − and backwards.
Artifacts of Loss Dusselier, Jane E
2008, 20081201, 2008-12-01
eBook
From 1942 to 1946, as America prepared for war, 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forcibly interned in harsh desert camps across the American west.
In Artifacts of Loss, Jane E. Dusselier looks ...at the lives of these internees through the lens of their art. These camp-made creations included flowers made with tissue paper and shells, wood carvings of pets left behind, furniture made from discarded apple crates, gardens grown next to their housingùanything to help alleviate the visual deprivation and isolation caused by their circumstances. Their crafts were also central in sustaining, re-forming, and inspiring new relationships. Creating, exhibiting, consuming, living with, and thinking about art became embedded in the everyday patterns of camp life and helped provide internees with sustenance for mental, emotional, and psychic survival.
Dusselier urges her readers to consider these often overlooked folk crafts as meaningful political statements which are significant as material forms of protest and as representations of loss. She concludes briefly with a discussion of other displaced people around the globe today and the ways in which personal and group identity is reflected in similar creative ways.
Genocide in Libya Ahmida, Ali Abdullatif
2021, 20200806, 2020, 2020-08-07, 2020-08-06
eBook
This original research on the forgotten Libyan genocide specifically recovers the hidden history of the fascist Italian concentration camps (1929–1934) through the oral testimonies of Libyan ...survivors. This book links the Libyan genocide through cross-cultural and comparative readings to the colonial roots of the Holocaust and genocide studies.
Between 1929 and 1934, thousands of Libyans lost their lives, directly murdered and victim to Italian deportations and internments. They were forcibly removed from their homes, marched across vast tracks of deserts and mountains, and confined behind barbed wire in 16 concentration camps. It is a story that Libyans have recorded in their Arabic oral history and narratives while remaining hidden and unexplored in a systematic fashion, and never in the manner that has allowed us to comprehend and begin to understand the extent of their existence.
Based on the survivors’ testimonies, which took over ten years of fieldwork and research to document, this new and original history of the genocide is a key resource for readers interested in genocide and Holocaust studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and African and Middle Eastern studies.
The phenomenon Muselmann was a peculiarity of Nazi concentration camps. In survivor's testimonies, the term appears frequently enough to assume that it denotes a particular, commonly recognized ...category of prisoners. It was probably the only category that was not defined by the Nazis' system of triangle badges and functions. Instead, the prisoner community called specific prisoners Muselmann. In nearly every NS concentration camp, prisoners labeled their weakest fellows with a racist term and located them at the bottom of the hierarchy. My research explores the moral dimension of this label. Introducing Moral Foundations Theory to the topic, I map the domain of morality in NS concentration camps as presented by Auschwitz-Birkenau and Mauthausen survivors when they speak or write about Muselmänner. My analysis deepens the understanding of the relationship between Muselmänner and other prisoners. Engaging in moral history or history of morality, it offers a fresh perspective on the functioning of prisoners' society in NS concentration camps. Doing so, it contributes to the discourse on stability and change of normative morality in extreme situations.
In Holocaust discourse, Muselmänner are commonly depicted as mute, passive prisoners fated to die. We identify alternative representations in works of Jorge Semprún and Imre Kertész but also in a ...great number of other testimonies. Many of them were written by former Muselmänner. We argue for a sociohistorical turn in Muselmann discourse. Many testimonies show that Muselmänner were a constitutive part of the social structure of prisoner societies. Taking up a term from the camp language, we analyze the process of Muselmanization. We argue that the Muselmann must be understood as a processual and relational rather than an essentialist category. We propose to add a spatiotemporal approach to the analysis of prisoner societies. A close examination of particular blocks, barracks, or commandos and their changing function in the course of the camp system's development yields unexpected insights into the social realities of Muselmänner and, in turn, into the inner workings of prisoner societies. We conclude that the Muselmann signifies that death and dying became defining factors of the social order of Nazi concentration camps.
After World War II, tracing and documenting Nazi victims emerged against the background of millions of missing persons and early compensation proceedings. This was a process in which the Allies, ...international aid organizations, and survivors themselves took part. New archives, documentation centers and tracing bureaus were founded amid the increasing Cold War divide. They gathered documents on Nazi persecution and structured them in specialized collections to provide information on individual fates and their grave repercussions: the loss of relatives, the search for a new home, physical or mental injuries, existential problems, social support and recognition, but also continued exclusion or discrimination. By doing so, institutions involved in this work were inevitably confronted with contentious issues—such as varying political mandates, neutrality vs. solidarity with those formerly persecuted, data protection vs. public interest, and many more. Over time, tracing bureaus and archives changed methods and policies and even expanded their activities, using historical documents for both research and public remembrance. This is the first publication to explore this multifaceted history of tracing and documenting past and present.
PDF
