Draws from journals, diaries, photographs, poetry, and personal testimonies of Holocaust victims, as well as documents of the Nazi regime, to provide information about the day-to-day lives of Jews and others who were persecuted by the Nazis.

Most books on Nazi Germany focus on the war years. Much less is known about the preceding years although these give important clues with regard to the events after November 1938, which culminated in the Holocaust. This book is based on eyewitness accounts chosen from the many memoirs that Harvard University received in 1940 after it had sent out a call to German-Jewish refugees to describe their experiences before and after 1933. These invaluable documents became part of the Harvard archives where the editors of this volume discovered them fifty years later. These memoirs, written so soon after the emigration when the impressions were still vivid, movingly describe the gradual deterioration of the situation of the Jews, the daily humiliations and insults they had to suffer, and their desperate attempts to leave Germany. An informative introduction puts these accounts into a wider framework.

Unlike many Holocaust books, which deal primarily with the concentration camps, this book focuses on Jewish life before Jews lost their autonomy and fell totally under Nazi power. These essays concern various aspects of Jewish daily life and governance, such as the Judenrat, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, religious life, housing, death, smuggling, art, and the struggle for survival while under siege by the Nazi regime. Written by survivors of the ghettos throughout Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, this collection contains historical and cultural articles by prominent scholars, an essay on Holocaust theatre, and an article on teaching the Holocaust to students.

The horrors of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust still present some of the most disturbing questions in modern history: Why did Hitler's party appeal to millions of Germans, and how entrenched was anti-Semitism among the population? How could anyone claim, after the war, that the genocide of Europe's Jews was a secret? Did ordinary non-Jewish Germans live in fear of the Nazi state? In this unprecedented firsthand analysis of daily life as experienced in the Third Reich, What We Knew offers answers to these most important questions. Combining the expertise of Eric A. Johnson, an American historian, and Karl-Heinz Reuband, a German sociologist, What We Knew is the most startling oral history yet of everyday life in the Third Reich.

Much of what is known about people's everyday lives in times past comes from artifacts but also from diaries, letters, and other writings. Many important details of life during the Civil War, for instance, can be found in the diaries of women who carried on while their men were at war. In the Living History series, firsthand accounts such as these are combined with thoughtful narrative to offer a rich and vivid portrait of daily life in various times and places in history. A visual chronology, sidebars that feature quotes from people of the period and from historians, selected vocabulary words, source notes, a bibliography for further research, and an index provide additional tools for student researchers Book jacket.

Written by historical experts, this work offers a chilling portrayal of the Third Reich to bring Germany's most harrowing era to life. Illustrated with 270+ period photos.

The Holocaust—one of the most horrific examples of man's inhumanity to man in recorded history—resulted in the genocide of millions of people, most of them Jews. This volume explores the daily lives of the Holocaust victims and their heroic efforts to maintain a normal existence under inhumane conditions. Readers will learn about the effects of pogroms, Jewish ghettoes, Nazi rule, and deportation on everyday tasks like going to school, practicing religion, or eating dinner. Chapters on life in the concentration camps describe the incomprehensible conditions that plagued the inmates and the ways in which they managed to survive. Soumerai, a survivor herself, offers a unique perspective on the events. Coverage also includes accounts of resistance and the role of rescuers. Four new chapters explore current human rights abuses, including Holocaust denials, modern genocide, and human trafficking, enabling readers to contrast present and past events. In addition to a timeline, a glossary, and engaging illustrations, the second edition also features an extensive bibliography and resource center that guides student researchers toward web sites, organizations, films, and books on the Holocaust and other human rights abuses. Primary source testimonies from survivors provide powerful insight into the devastating effects of Nazi rule on people's lives. Soumerai, a survivor herself, offers a unique perspective on the events and insight into the persecution of non-Jews: Gypsies, gays, clergy who protested or protected victims, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, the mentally ill and handicapped. Readers will explore the effects of pogroms, Jewish ghettoes, Nazi rule, and deportation on everyday tasks like going to school, practicing religion, or eating dinner. Chapters on life in the concentration camps describe the incomprehensible conditions within the camps, including the ways in which inmates managed to survive: avoiding the infirmary, rationing food, utilizing the market system to trade for goods and clothing. Four new chapters shed a modern light on the events of the Holocaust, exploring human rights abuses that continue even today, including Holocaust Denials; genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Sudan; and child slavery and human trafficking. The new material allows readers to compare and contrast present and past human rights abuses, exploring what lessons we have learned, if any, from the Holocaust. An expanded bibliography and resource center guides readers toward related web sites, organizations, films and books related to the Holocaust, modern-day slavery and genocide, child soldiers, and related human rights topics. Illustrations, a timeline of events and a glossary of terms are also included, making this a comprehensive resource for student researchers.

This three-volume encyclopedia, abridged from a 30-volume set in Hebrew and with a foreword by Elie Wiesel, chronicles Jewish life before and during the Holocaust. Arranged alphabetically by town, thousands of entries explore centuries of Jewish life. Some entries, particularly for large cities, provide information on Jewish residents as early as the Middle Ages and discuss the fate of Jews during the Black Death persecutions (1348-1349) and various pogroms from the 17th to 20th centuries. Each entry provides information on the town's Jewish inhabitants on the eve of German occupation, gives the dates of Jewish roundups and mass executions and estimates how many Jews from that community survived the war. Includes more than 600 black-and-white photographs.

A vivid account of German-occupied Europe during World War II that reveals civilians' struggle to understand the terrifying chaos of war In An Iron Wind, prize-winning historian Peter Fritzsche draws diaries, letters, and other first-person accounts to show how civilians in occupied Europe tried to make sense of World War II. As the Third Reich targeted Europe's Jews for deportation and death, confusion and mistrust reigned. What were Hitler's aims? Did Germany's rapid early victories mark the start of an enduring new era? Was collaboration or resistance the wisest response to occupation? How far should solidarity and empathy extend? And where was God? People desperately tried to understand the horrors around them, but the stories they told themselves often justified a selfish indifference to their neighbors' fates. Piecing together the broken words of the war's witnesses and victims, Fritzsche offers a haunting picture of the most violent conflict in modern history.

Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.