Reviews for Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporary Personal Accounts

The average rating for Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporary Personal Accounts based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-02 00:00:00 Robert Mara A Critically Important Book About a Time We Must Not Forget There are many books on the Holocaust, but this volume explores the topic from the perspective of diaries, memoirs, photographs, and other primary sources. "Holocaust Chronicles" comprises essays on these invaluable first-hand accounts, each written by a noted authority on the subject. Two Warsaw Ghetto is represented by essays on literary pieces: "Landkentenish: Yiddish Belles Lettres in the Warsaw Ghetto," by David Roskies, and "Literature in the Ghetto in the Polish Language: Z otchlani - from the Abyss," by Rafael Scharf; Janusz Korczak by "Who Korczak Was and Why We Cannot Know Him," by Richard Lourie (who translated Korczak's "King Matt the First"), and "Janusz Korczak on Planet Ro," by Betty Jean Lifton (author of the pre-eminent English-langauge biography of Dr. Korczak); other Warsaw Ghetto diaries by "'Will They Dare?': Perceptions of Threat in Diaries from the Warsaw Ghetto," by David Engel, and "Two Forms of Jewish Resistance, Two Functions of Ringelblum's Oyneg Shabes Archive," by Ruta Sakowska. The Lodz Ghetto is represented by four essays: "Diaries and Memoirs from the Lodz Ghetto in Yiddish and Hebrew," by Robert Moses Shapiro, "Individual Experience in Diaries from the Lodz Ghetto," by Marian Turski, "Mendel Grossman: Photographic Bard of Ghetto Lodz," by Pinchas Shaar, and "The Role of Singing in the Ghettos: Between Entertainment and Witnessing," by Gila Flam. The Vilna Ghetto is represented by four essays: "The Vilna Ghetto Diaries," by Dina Porat, and "Vilna and Warsaw, Two Ghetto Diaries: Herman Kruk and Emanuel Ringelblum," by Samuel David Kassow (who himself grew up in Vilnius and is an authority on Ringelblum's archives), "Two Memoirs from the Edge of Destruction," by Jan Tomasz Gross, and "The Holocaust in the Diaries of Zofia Nalkowska, Maria Dabrowska, and Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz," by Magdalena Opalski. Also included are essays on unpublished diaries and memoirs in Poland and the Soviet Union and a series of Methodological Questions (including Rabbinical works). What makes this book so important is that it documents contemporary efforts to record the history that the Nazis wanted to erase and the rest of the world wanted to ignore.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-27 00:00:00 Derek Nixon These 'tales' are essays and stories written by Anne Frank in a separate notebook from her world-famous diary, but they're all written in that same spirited, irreverent and irrepressible voice. A keen observer of people and nature, a seemingly natural-born storyteller, she leaves the reader, who knows her fate, with a sense of loss over what might have been. Despite her young age, the tragic circumstances of her life and the times she lived in, she knew the way to inner happiness.