Holocaust

Malka attempts to escape the horrors of the Holocaust by hiding out in the Christian neighborhoods of Warsaw.

In 1973, Leonard and Edith Ehrlich chose to undertake a daunting task that would ultimately become their greatest work: conducting over thirty years of meticulous research to investigate and document Vienna’s Jewish community and its leadership during the Holocaust. Inescapably, this path led them to the controversial figure of Benjamin Murmelstein, Viennese rabbi and later Judenrat council elder at Theresienstadt. Choices under Duress of the Holocaust is most certainly a historical work, but it is also a philosophical work, in which “duress” and “choice” are considered fully in their relevant contexts. It is, then, a history of the destruction of the Jewish community of Vienna and an examination of the performance of the Jewish leadership in its dealings with the Nazis on behalf of the Jews. But it is also the positing of a question, the opening of a space to consider the nuances of consent, complicity, and condemnation.

A harrowing tale of destruction and loss amid the Holocaust ghetto and concentration camps of Holocaust Poland, it is also a story of the goodness that still exists in a dark world, of survival and renewal.

Seventy years ago, on April 29, 1945, the forward battalions of Rainbow Division, 42nd Infantry, were moving swiftly toward Munich. Confident and optimistic, they had survived four months of costly...

Ravensbrück was the only major Nazi concentration camp for women. Between 1939 and 1945, it was the site of murder by slave labor, torture, starvation, shooting, lethal injection, medical experimentation,...

Under the legal and administrative system of Nazi Germany, people categorized as Fremdvölkische (literally, “foreign people”) were subject to special laws that restricted their rights, limited...

On September 27, 1939, after the Nazi invasion, Poland ceased to exist as a nation. Ten-year-old Hanna Davidson’s father, Simon, and older brother, Kazik, had been drafted to defend Warsaw. Hanna and her mother, Sofia, found themselves subjected to Hitler’s efforts to dehumanize Poland’s Jewish population. There seemed no choice but to submit to a ruthless tyranny. Learning that Simon and Kazik were alive in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland, Hanna and her mother decided to risk a harrowing escape from Nazi Poland into safer Soviet territory. With only the clothes on their backs, they fled their apartment to face a daunting crossing and the threat of persecution under Stalin's regime. As recounted by Hanna, the Davidsons’ journey into the Soviet interior makes for an extraordinary story. More than a memoir of survival, their story is clearly one of a family whose spirit could not be destroyed by persecution, war,...