Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day… Yesterday the Polish Parliament approved a controversial draft law outlawing the term “Polish extermination camp” and criminalizing discussion of any Polish crimes relating to the Holocaust. However, you cannot just legislate uncomfortable historical facts away:
Archive for Holocaust
“Yes, some Poles were Nazi collaborators”
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Holocaust, legislation, perpetration, Poland on 27 January 2018 by delclem“How History Broke Us”
Posted in Uncategorized with tags America, anti-Semitism, Belarus, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, family history, Holocaust, Jews, Judaism, pogroms on 7 December 2013 by delclem
“How to tell the story of the rise and destruction of European Jews? Perhaps the most compelling way is through family history, as David Laskin does in his fascinating new book.” >review & photo (c) THE DAILY BEAST, 2013
Surviving on Music
Posted in Uncategorized with tags concentration camp, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Holocaust, survivors, Terezín, testimony, Theresienstadt on 1 December 2013 by delclemHow Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest Holocaust witness, survived the horrific ordeal of Theresienstadt (Terezín) with music. >article (c) open culture 2013
The former concentration camp >photos
WW2 genocides in Croatia/Bosnia
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Bosnia-Herzegovina, concentration camp, Croatia, genocide, Holocaust, Jasenovac, Serbia, Ustasha, yugoslavia on 29 November 2013 by delclem“From August 1941 to April 1945, hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Romas, as well as anti-fascists of many nationalities, were murdered at the death camp known as Jasenovac.” A documentary with English subtitles. (Later, unfortunately, the camp of Jasenovac would me used to legitimize and/or relativize Serbian war crimes in the Yugoslav Succession Wars of the 1990s.)
It’s not always ‘us versus them’…
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 1941, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Holocaust, Jews, Muslims, Sarajevo, Ustasha, veil on 12 November 2013 by delclem
Muslim woman covers the yellow star of her Jewish neighbor with her veil on the
streets of Sarajevo in 1941. Photo (c) imgur.com, 2013
‘Banality of Evil’ Revisited
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Adolf Eichmann, Banality of Evil, Germany, Hannah Arendt, Holocaust, National Socialism, philosophy, USA on 20 August 2013 by delclem
“Hannah Arendt employed this memorable phrase in both the subtitle and closing words of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, her book on the trial of Nazi lieutenant-colonel Adolf Eichmann. To Arendt’s mind, Eichmann willingly did his part to organize the Holocaust — and an instrumental part it was — out of neither anti-semitism nor pure malice, but out of a non-ideological, entirely more prosaic combination of careerism and obedience. Readers have argued ever since its publication about this characterization, and those with a special interest in how Arendt arrived there can find in the New Yorker‘s online archives the original series of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” articles out of which the book grew.”>full text
(c) OPEN CULTURE, 2013
‘The Fragmentary, Mystical Thought of W.B.’
Posted in Uncategorized with tags film, flaneur, France, Germany, Holocaust, literary theory, Spain, Walter Benjamin on 1 August 2013 by delclem“The 1993 experimental film above—One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin—is part documentary, part low-budget cable-access editing exercise. The film provides an introduction to Benjamin’s life and thought through interviews with scholars, re-enactments of his last days, and montages centered around his many aphoristic expressions.” >full text (c) open culture 2013
>another film: Flâneur III: Benjamin’s Shadow (1998)
Mauthausen: Life in the Details
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Austria, concentration camp, exhibition, Holocaust, Mauthausen, National Socialism, review on 21 July 2013 by delclem
“A bicycle from Poland. Pieces of a Messerschmitt fighter plane from U.S. Air Force archives in Alabama. Camp log books from Caen. An embroidered handkerchief, tossed out a prison window by a woman on her way to execution for helping Allied paratroopers. A rusty watchtower searchlight, unearthed just last year. Wedding rings, watches & photos confiscated upon arrival here 1938-45.
On 5 May, two new permanent exhibitions were opened at Austria’s concentration camp memorial at Mauthausen along with a Room of Names – all part of an ongoing redesign scheduled for completion in 2018.”>full text (c) THE VIENNA REVIEW, 2013
Voices of the Holocaust
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Chicago, David P. Boder, Europe, Holocaust, oral history, research project, testimony on 7 July 2013 by delclem
“In 1946, Dr. David P. Boder, a psychology professor from Chicago’s
Illinois Institute of Technology, traveled to Europe to record the
stories of Holocaust survivors in their own words.”
>project homepage
How Ordinary Germans Did “It”
Posted in Uncategorized with tags compliance, complicity, Germany, Harald Welzer, Holocaust, National Socialism, ordinary people, soldiers, Third Reich on 20 June 2013 by delclem
“Growing consciousness of the Holocaust in both academic scholarship and society in general became evident in the late 1970s and intensified in the 1980s. Initially, important research focused on the different roles of Hitler, Nazi ideology, and the structure of the dictatorship in shaping the decision-making process that led to the Holocaust. Research also concentrated on the complicity of various professions and institutions in the Third Reich, and particularly on the SS. Still lacking was careful empirical study of how Nazi racial policy was also carried out by “ordinary” Germans.” >text (c) NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, 2013
delirium clemens 