This is a meditation on memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. It is also an exploration of the ways in which fiction and drama have attempted to approach a subject so resistant to the imagination. Beginning with W. G. Sebald, for whom memory and the Holocaust were the roots of a special fascination, Bigsby moves on to consider those writers Sebald himself valued, including Arthur Miller, Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Peter Weiss, and those whose lives crossed in the bleak world of the camps, in fact or fiction. The book offers a chain of memories. It sets witness against fiction, truth against wilful deceit. It asks the question who owns the Holocaust - those who died, those who survived to bear witness, those who appropriated its victims to shape their own necessities.

Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider examine the forms that collective memory take in the age of globalisation. They explore how the Holocaust has been remembered in Germany, Israel and the US over the past 50 years and demonstrate how this event has become detached from its precise context.

This ground-breaking book opens a closet and allows hundreds of people of this generation to emerge, with their nightmares, phobias, and flashbacks suggestive of an incarnation in the Holocaust. Through that open door, author Sara Rigler introduces the reader to people from all over the world whose stories defy rational explanation-unless they are indeed reincarnated souls from the Holocaust. Because the purpose of reincarnation is to rectify past mistakes and failings, Part Two narrates the journeys of souls who in their current lifetime replaced fear with courage, hatred with love, and guilt with self-forgiveness. Fascinating and convincing, this page-turner will quicken your awareness of your own soul and how your inexplicable fears, attractions, and repulsions may be comprehensible through the notion of past-life experiences. "Sara Rigler has written a powerful and gripping narrative.... The stories make for fascinating reading." -Rabbi Yitzchak A. Breitowitz, Kehillat Ohr Somayach "An eye-opening journey." --Alicia Yacoby, Founder, Our6Million "Sara Rigler's extensive research and collection of past-life Holocaust memories confirms the reality of this phenomenon, and offers hope for healing the trauma that carried over for many of us. For those who have not had their own memories, the case studies offer compelling evidence for the continuation of a personal consciousness after death." --Carol Bowman, author of Children's Past Lives "This book is not only credible, it is important." -Rebbetzin Tziporah (Heller) Gottlieb, author and lecturer "Sara Rigler has done exceptional work in meticulously compiling, recording, and describing personal stories of Jews and non-Jews from many countries. By doing so she has rendered an invaluable service ... to humanity." --Sabine Lucas, Ph.D., Jungian analyst

Otto Dov Kulka's memoir of a childhood spent in Auschwitz is a literary feat of astounding emotional power, exploring the permanent and indelible marks left by the Holocaust Winner of the JEWISH QUARTERLY-WINGATE PRIZE 2014 As a child, the distinguished historian Otto Dov Kulka was sent first to the ghetto of Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz. As one of the few survivors he has spent much of his life studying Nazism and the Holocaust, but always as a discipline requiring the greatest coldness and objectivity, with his personal story set to one side. But he has remained haunted by specific memories and images, thoughts he has been unable to shake off. Translated by Ralph Mandel. 'The greatest book on Auschwitz since Primo Levi ... Kulka has achieved the impossible' - the panel of Judges, Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize

"This behind-the-scenes account details the emotionally complex fifteen-year struggle surrounding the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's birth."--

In Imagining the Holocaust, Daniel R. Schwarz examines widely read Holocaust narratives which have shaped the way we understand and respond to the events of that time. He begins with first person narratives-- Wiesel's Night and Levi's Survival at Auschwitz --and then turns to searingly realistic fictions such as Borowski's This Way to the Gas Chamber, Ladies and Gentlemen, before turning to the Kafkaesque parables of Appelfeld and the fantastic cartoons of Spiegleman's Maus books. Schwarz argues that as we move further away from the original events, the narratives authors use to render the Holocaust horror evolve to include fantasy and parable, and he shows how diverse audiences respond differently to these highly charged and emotional texts.

“An illuminating exploration that offers a worried look at Holocaust representation in contemporary culture and politics.” —H-Holocaust In this provocative work, Alvin H. Rosenfeld contends that the proliferation of books, films, television programs, museums, and public commemorations related to the Holocaust has, perversely, brought about a diminution of its meaning and a denigration of its memory. Investigating a wide range of events and cultural phenomena, such as Ronald Reagan’s 1985 visit to the German cemetery at Bitburg, the distortions of Anne Frank’s story, and the ways in which the Holocaust has been depicted by such artists and filmmakers as Judy Chicago and Steven Spielberg, Rosenfeld charts the cultural forces that have minimized the Holocaust in popular perceptions. He contrasts these with sobering representations by Holocaust witnesses such as Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Imre Kertész. The book concludes with a powerful warning about the possible consequences of “the end of the Holocaust” in public consciousness. “Forcefully written, as always, his new volume honors his entire life as teacher and writer attached to the principles of intellectual integrity and moral responsibility. Here, too, he demonstrates erudition and knowledge, a gift for analysis and astonishing insight. Teachers and students alike will find this book to be a great gift.” —Elie Wiesel “This remarkable new work of scholarship—written in accessible language and not in obscure academese—is exactly the Holocaust book the world needs now.” —Bill’s Faith Matters Blog “This book has monumental importance in Holocaust studies because it demands answers to the question how our culture is inscribing the Holocaust in its history and memory.” —Arcadia

A New York Times Critics’ Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biography From a gifted young writer, the story of his quest to reclaim his family’s apartment building in Poland—and of the astonishing entanglement with Nazi treasure hunters that follows Menachem Kaiser’s brilliantly told story, woven from improbable events and profound revelations, is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s former battle to reclaim the family’s apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland. Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as “The Killer.” A surprise discovery—that his grandfather’s cousin not only survived the war, but wrote a secret memoir while a slave laborer in a vast, secret Nazi tunnel complex—leads to Kaiser being adopted as a virtual celebrity by a band of Silesian treasure seekers who revere the memoir as the indispensable guidebook to Nazi plunder. Propelled by rich original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living? Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance—material, spiritual, familial, and emotional.

A controversial bestseller likened to Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, Still Alive is a harrowing and fiercely bittersweet Holocaust memoir of survival: "a book of breathtaking honesty and extraordinary insight" (Los Angeles Times). Swept up as a child in the events of Nazi-era Europe, Ruth Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. By age eleven, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Theresienstadt, the first in a series of concentration camps which would become the setting for her precarious childhood. Interwoven with blunt, unsparing observations of childhood and nuanced reflections of an adult who has spent a lifetime thinking about the Holocaust, Still Alive rejects all easy assumptions about history, both political and personal. Whether describing the abuse she met at her own mother's hand, the life-saving generosity of a woman SS aide in Auschwitz, the foibles and prejudices of Allied liberators, or the cold shoulder offered by her relatives when she and her mother arrived as refugees in New York, Kluger sees and names an unexpected reality which has little to do with conventional wisdom or morality tales. "Among the reasons that Still Alive is such an important book is its insistence that the full texture of women's existence in the Holocaust be acknowledged, not merely as victims. . . . [Kluger] insists that we look at the Holocaust as honestly as we can, which to her means being unsentimental about the oppressed as well as about their oppressors." —Washington Post Book World

Ellen Cassedy’s longing to recover the Yiddish she’d lost with her mother’s death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the “Jerusalem of the North.” As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after he’d left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country, Jews and non-Jews alike, are confronting their past in order to move forward into the future. How does a nation—how do successor generations, moral beings—overcome a bloody past? How do we judge the bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers, and ourselves? These are the questions Cassedy confronts in We Are Here, one woman’s exploration of Lithuania’s Jewish history combined with a personal exploration of her own family’s place in it. Digging through archives with the help of a local whose motives are puzzling to her; interviewing natives, including an old man who wants to “speak to a Jew” before he dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that endured both Nazi and Soviet occupation—Cassedy finds that it’s not just the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with them.