Holocaust

Elie Wiesel, Lucy Dawidowicz, Dorothy Rabinowitz, and Robert McAfee Brown explore society's inability to comprehend the horrors of the Holocaust, and its unwillingness to remember. Annotated by Elliot Lefkovitz, educational consultant for the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, this edition contains extensive documentation of ideas and facts that have surfaced since the book's first appearance in 1977.

Also known as The Private Life of the Master Race, this is a sequence of twenty-four realistic sketches showing how "ordinary" life under the Nazis was subtly permeated by suspicion and anxiety. Written when Brecht was in exile in Denmark and first staged in 1938 it was inspired in part by his recent trip to Moscow where he had been researching tasks for the anti-Nazi effort.

A Scrap of Time is a haunting collection of stories about life in Poland during World War II. These shattering stories describe the lives of ordinary people as they are compelled to do the unimaginable.

Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes. Published in Poland after the Second World War, these stories constitute a masterwork of world literature.

"In the writing of Paul Celan even we readers who can hear poetry only dimly in German can sense the greatness of his invention: the cadences of a music tilted against music's complacency; words punished for their plausibility by being reinvented and fused together and broken apart; syntax chopped and stretched to crack and expose its crust of dead rhetoric Michael Hamburger has earned our gratitude for rendering these poems into a reasonably inventive English "Robert Pinsky, THE NEW REPUBLIC. Parallel German text and English translation.

One of Hungary's leading poetic voices of the 20th century, Midlos Radnoti (1909-1944) wrote some of his country's most cherished love poems and political verse even as he anticipated death under the Nazis. This English-only edition presents many of the poems that appear in his Foamy Sky volume and a selection of others dating back to 1929. A good portion of the poems were written during World War II, when Radnoti, of Jewish descent, was forced into a slave-labour squad and sent to work building roads in the Balkans. On the final march through Hungary toward Austria near the end of the war, the guards murdered the disabled prisoners who had not already died en route and buried the bodies in a mass grave. Radnoti's last written poems were found in the pocket of his coat when his body was exhumed.

In Holocaust poet Charles Reznikoff’s subject is people’s suffering at the hand of another. His source materials are the U.S. government’s record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Except for the twelve part titles, none of the words here are Reznikoff’s instead he has created, through selection, arrangement, and the rhythms of the testimony set as verse on the page, a poem of witness by the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust. He lets the terrible history unfold―in history’s own words.

In twelve nonfiction tales, Hanna Krall reveals how the lives of World War II survivors are shaped in surprising ways by the twists and turns of historical events. A paralytic Jewish woman starts walking after her husband is suffocated by fellow Jews afraid that his coughing would reveal their hiding place to the Germans. A young American man refuses to let go of the ghost of his half brother who died in the Warsaw ghetto. He never knew the boy, yet he learns Polish to communicate with his dybbuk. A high ranking German officer conceives of a plan to kill Hitler after witnessing a mass execution of Jews in Eastern Poland. Through Krall's adroit and journalistic style, her reader is thrown into a world where love, hatred, compassion, and indifference appear in places where we least expect them, illuminating the implacable logic of the surreal.

Olga Lengyel tells, frankly and without compromise, one of the most horrifying stories of all time. This true, documented chronicle is the intimate, day-to-day record of a beautiful woman who survived the nightmare of Auschwitz and Birchenau. Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only Lengyel's work in the prisoners' underground resistance and the need to tell this story kept her fighting for survival. She survived by her wit and incredible strength. Despite her horrifying closeness to the subject, Five Chimneys does not retreat into self-pity or sensationalism. When first published (two years after World War 2 ended), Albert Einstein was so moved by her story that he wrote a personal letter to Lengyel, thanking her for her "very frank, very well written book". This book is a necessary reminder of one of the ugliest chapters in the history of human civilization. It was a shocking experience. It is a shocking book.