Jarmila wrote: "Hi,can anyone recommend me the books that are dealing with the problem of post traumatic stress of holocaust survivor? tx" The Allies created the International Tracing Service (ITS), now referred to as the Arolsen Archives, to centralize postwar efforts to locate missing persons and help survivors discover the fate of family members in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust.

Books on Auschwitz - Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust Two Books on Auschwitz - Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust

We have many stories of ghettos, but even there, we sometimes see a kind of implicit hierarchy of suffering or heroism. We also have an implicit view of ‘survivor’, meaning someone who survived the camps. But I think we have to try to understand the full range and impact of experiences of Nazi persecution, including for those who managed to get out before the war. Sadly, too few were able to emigrate in time. If you look at all the people who gave that book 5 stars (none of whom wrote a review, btw), they are all authors. This is called an "Author Circle Jerk." They conspire together to rate each other's books 5 stars and vote them onto as many listopias as possible. That’s an intriguing point you make about the interest in survivors’ memoirs and survivors’ testimony only taking off in the 1970s. What was it that changed around that time? We remember this—probably quite rightly—as an almost uniquely horrific crime in human history, and yet in the immediate aftermath of the war, it doesn’t seem to have registered in the way that one would have expected it to . . .

It doesn’t make sense to use the individual crime of murder as the basis for prosecution when what you’re dealing with is mass murder, which is part of a system of collective violence.” I’ve got an issue with the predominant focus on Auschwitz because I think that, important though it is and horrifying though it is, it may inadvertently serve to displace attention from the multiplicity of other experiences and contexts. The Auschwitz story of arrival on the train and selection on the ramp for the gas chambers or slave labour has become the patterned narrative that we expect from a survivor. We don’t expect the miserable homosexual emerging after the war, too ashamed to talk about it. We don’t know the stories of those who are just shot into a mass grave outside their village in Eastern Europe. Seweryna Szmaglewska was a Polish Catholic who produced one of the initial first-hand accounts of the extermination process at Auschwitz. Translated by Jadwiga Rynas. New York: H. Holt, 1947. Wanda wrote: "While a superbly written book, The Cellist of Sarajevo may not be appropriate for this list unless one is speaking about the Bosnian Holocaust of 1992-1995." That this gripping story of memory and tragedy won both the 1996 National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle award should clue you in to how extraordinary this book is. What begins, familiarly, as the story of a young boy learning about the tragic but mysterious fate of his relatives in the Holocaust, ends in a continent-spanning labyrinth, a sad and seductive tale of near mythic proportions. The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. by George Steiner

Auschwitz The Imperative to Witness: Memoirs by Survivors of Auschwitz

Let’s move on to Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. He was a highly educated man, an academic psychoanalyst. Tell us a bit about this book—it’s a combination between a memoir of Auschwitz and also a work of psychoanalysis. That’s one aspect that I think is extraordinary and extremely powerful: this very raw experience, particularly in the first part of the trilogy, which she wrote very soon after the war. The other thing I find fascinating is the way in which she tries to develop a notion of two selves: the disassociation of her post-war self from the Auschwitz-self, a complete disconnect (or attempted disconnect) between the self who experienced and lived through Auschwitz, and the self who survived and was recounting it. That captures what a lot of survivors try to convey in one form or another: this complete caesura in their lives between what they went through and how they live later. Different people deal with it in different ways, and come to terms with it in different ways.Frankl doesn’t talk about that so much as his critics do. His critics point out that he had managed not to be deported until quite late, and when he was in Theresienstadt, he had certain privileges. But he’s not actually as interested in that aspect as he is in the inner life. It’s about how meaning can give you psychological sustenance. Let’s move on to the one history book you’ve chosen, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-65 by Devin O Pendas. We’ve talked about this already a bit, but can you tell me how the trial came about? How was it received and what were the “limits of the law” mentioned in the subtitle?