Holocaust

Friday

J P O'Malley

Interview: Bernard Wasserstein and the Nazi genocide

As 1930s Europe moved towards the catastrophe of the Second World War, much of the greater part of the continent —  for Jews — was being turned into a giant concentration camp. Bernard Wasserstein’s On the Eve, The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War, captures the sorrows and glories of European Jewry in the decades leading up the Nazi genocide. From the shtetls of Lithuania, to the salons of Vienna, Jewish culture was already on the road to extinction. Wasserstein’s book also proves that contrary to received wisdom, there was a growing awareness that Jews were approaching a cataclysmic extinction. Bernard Wasserstein was born in London and has

Thursday

The Spectator

From the archives: Remembering the Holocaust

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day, here’s a piece Sam Schulman wrote for The Spectator 12 years ago, on his fear that ‘Holocaustology’ will create a new form of anti-Semitism. Did six million die for this?, Sam Schulman, 1 January 2000 The Holocaust dominated the moral imagination of the 20th century. Before the rise of Hitler, anti-Semitism was a parochial concern of the Jews; after the war it was everyone’s concern, and everyone regarded it with horror.  The cause of anti-Semitism is a mystery to most Jews and most Gentiles, but it was not a mystery to Isaiah Berlin. He blamed it on the New Testament. That is true of one

Daniel Korski

‘Let everyone live happily…’

Created to remember one of the darkest chapters in mankind’s history, Holocaust Day is for many people an occasion for unadulterated discomfort. Most of my family perished in the Holocaust and those who survived either hid in occupied Poland, pretending to be Catholics, fled to Uzbekistan in the then-USSR or, like Marcel Rayman, fought the Nazis. Today I re-read a letter Marcel sent to his family the night before he was executed by the Nazis for trying to kill the German commander of Paris: Little mother, When you read this letter, I’m sure it will cause you extreme pain, but I will have been dead for a while, and you’ll

Daniel Korski

Thank you, Nacia Anastazja Brodziak

Today is Holocaust Day. A day to remember the horrors of the past. But it should also be an occasion to recall the moments of hope and the people – and peoples –  that personified that life-saving hope. Like Nacia Anastazja Brodziak who took in my fleeing grandparents, hid them from the Nazis in her tiny Warsaw flat and for five years pretended they were her Catholic cousins from the countryside. I went to see her more than a decade ago. I wanted to thank her. It is actually hard to thank someone without whom neither I nor my father would have been born. Today is a way to do

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

Can it be described?

Where was God in the Holocaust? This question confounds even learned rabbis, so let’s not linger there. Where was God in the Holocaust? This question confounds even learned rabbis, so let’s not linger there. Was there a Holocaust? Until I began preparing this notice I had never looked into the claims of Holocaust deniers. What I found was a volume of assertions that the Holocaust never happened that might make Hitler and David Irving blanch. Very difficult in a different way is how to write about one of the greatest crimes ever and still tell the truth. Can an author who witnessed terrible things write about them while adhering to

Tuesday

Alberto Manguel

Reading between the lines

‘Voltaire and the Sun King rolled into one’ is how Elizabeth Longford has described her Oxford tutor Maurice Bowra. If the promoters of the e-book have their way, personal libraries of the future will consist of intricate cyber-memories holding thousands of volumes conjured up at the touch of a finger, while the reader, bounded in an electronic nutshell, will count himself a king of infinite space. Gone will be the pleasures of sitting in a book-lined room watched by the ghosts of the garrulous dead, gone the unique feeling of companionship and awe that the accumulation of books over a lifetime can inspire. Gone too the harmless and prurient delight

Saturday

Patrick Marnham

Not for the faint-hearted

‘You might be wondering how I end- ed up in the lace business . . . ’, so the hero of The Kindly Ones, a doctor of law and former SS officer, introduces himself to readers of his fictional memoirs. Dr Max Aue, an ingenious Nazi of Franco-German descent, has survived the war and assumed a false identity in order to escape ‘the rope or Siberia’. As Berlin falls to the Red Army he slips out of the city and makes his way to Paris disguised as a returning French STO, an enlisted worker. But the war has reduced him to ‘an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and