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Mea culpa, everyone! When setting up the threads, I thought I could delete threads and create new ones, but all I was doing was ignoring them and creating duplicates. I'm sorry. Bear with me as I clean up my mess.

As many of you know, today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Do you do anything special on this day? Last year my daughter and I watched the The Pianist. Today I was hoping to watch the special remembrance webinar on Lockdown University, but I had my niece then.

I had not planned anything special today. I might pull out Holocaust Poetry this evening and read some poems.

I posted about it on FB, and lit a yarzeit candle. I always light one on the anniversary of the massacre of my family; that always had more meaning than this one day. But this year, it seems appropriate to light thousands.

I was on my own last night after more than a week of company, so I decided I wanted to read. I put on the soundtrack to Schindler's List while I read last night.

>3 labfs39: I light on Yom HaShoah rather than the secular day.

(deleted rest of comment because it was bitter and unfair and inappropriate for this setting)

I did see the webinar from Lockdown University at 12 pm and then another talk at 2 pm organized by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. A significant collection of books and memoirs was donated the rare books librrary. There were presentations by two professors and one Holocaust survivor-she was terrific. ( and 93 years old)

I retired last year, but when I was still actively teaching, I took my high school students to the local temple where they had a ceremony (that lasted about 24 hours) where readers would read the names of those who perished. It was very moving and the surprisingly, the students liked it. Of course, we only stayed about an hour and listened while we read literature provided to us by the temple. We also wore paperclips for the entire week, it was a school wide project. The Norwegians wore paperclips on their lapels to protest Nazi occupation; that is until they were shot on sight for wearing them.

>9 Tess_W: What a powerful experience for your students, and drives home the point that each of those six million was an individual.

you guys all hear about Whoopi Goldberg? Watch her sorta apologize,except she basically will continue to believe what she wants on stephen colbert

heres more https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/whoopi-goldberg-the-view-holocaust-...

The February thread for the Nonfiction Challenge is up: https://www.librarything.com/topic/339247

Theme is Welcome to the Anthropocence!

I stumbled across this resource today and thought I would share. It's called Voices of the Holocaust.

"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.

Over a period of three months, he visited refugee camps in France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, carrying a wire recorder and 200 spools of steel wire, upon which he was able to record over 90 hours of first-hand testimony. These recordings represent the earliest known oral histories of the Holocaust, which are available through this online archive."

>13 labfs39: Oh, thank you for that. I've just added it to my Holocaust LibGuide.

The Ghetto Fighters' House "Talking Memory" Series Presents:
Marking the 80th Anniversary of the Transport of 999 Jewish Women to Auschwitz: The Beginning of the Systematic Annihilation of the Jews.
Mar 27, 2022 09:00 PM in Jerusalem via zoom

'If the Wannsee Conference discussed plans to target young Jewish women as part of its Final Solution protocol that part of the minutes was destroyed. What we do know is that a few weeks after that meeting, Himmler ordered the creation of a women’s camp in Auschwitz. So began the official systematic annihilation of Jews, which attacked, first and foremost, unmarried Jewish girls and young women, between the ages of 16 and 32.'

https://www.gfh.org.il/eng/Events/947/Marking_the_80th_Anniversary_of_the_Transp...

>15 avatiakh: Thanks, I've added it to my calendar

Here's ReformJudaism.org's Ten Holocaust Related Books to Read this Yom HaShoah. I have only read the last

A LUCKY CHILD: A MEMOIR OF SURVIVING AUSCHWITZ AS A YOUNG CHILD BY THOMAS BUERGENTHAL
Buergenthal, the American judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague, is a scholar in the post-Holocaust field of international law and human rights. He is also a child survivor of Nazi labor and concentration camps. His memoir tells of the series of events that allowed him to survive the Holocaust.

Israeli children's author, Holocaust survivor Uri Orlev dies at 91.
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-713079

thanks for sharing that

AudioFile sponsors the Sync program to offer free audiobooks to teens throughout the summer, with two audiobooks offered each week of the program. This week's selections are 28 Days by David Safier and The White Rose by Inge Scholl. These audiobooks will be available free through August 3. For more info, see https://audiofilemagazine.com/sync/

Martin Gilbert is the author of Winston Churchills biography. During WWII he was a child shipped to Canada. Much later he settled in England and married one of my cousins and wrote tomes and tomes about the Holocaust. When he passed away my cousin set up a blog in his memory Wanted to share an article from this months newsletter that you might be interested to read

https://www.martingilbert.com/blatt/survivors-in-their-own-right/?mc_cid=747c240...

The blog is opened to the public, you can sign up to receive their newsletter

The winners of the 2022 National Jewish Book Awards can be found here:

https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/awards

Note that the linked page only shows the first five winners, and the arrows to either side of those first five books let you navigate to the additional award winners. Obviously, not all of these books are Holocaust related, but some are. Also, I was thinking we might need a "Pre-Holocaust Books" thread here. That is, books about Europe in the time leading up to the Holocaust.

One of the 2022 award winners that caught my eye along these lines is An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland by Ken­neth B. Moss. This book looks fascinating, and resonates with me particularly because of my recent reading of Isaac Singer's early novels, all of which take place in pre-WW2 Poland. The description of the book on the Jewish Book Council site is here:
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/an-unchosen-people-jewish-political-recko...

>22 rocketjk: I was thinking we might need a "Pre-Holocaust Books" thread here

That's a great idea, Jerry. Want to start it?

Off to check out the list of award winners

Are you looking for the political events leading up, or how people were living before hand especially in the shetyls, or something else?

>24 cindydavid4: I would say how the people were living beforehand, but not especially in the shtetls, although that, too. In other words, shtetl life, yes, but not to the exclusion or even necessarily by way of emphasis over life in places like Warsaw or Minsk or any other city where Jews lived in numbers. Political events also, but especially having to do directly with Jewish life. So the laws in 1920s and 1930s Poland that excluded Jews from working in municipal jobs or kept Jewish writers out of the Polish writers guild. Things like that more than, say, the internal German political events that helped bring the Nazis to power.

My own personal emphasis would be any events that help minimize the idea that the Holocaust was an isolated event, rather than the culmination of thousands of years of cultural belief and governmental and church policies.

But I would not presume to (or want to) try to set boundaries over how others wanted to populate the thread with books and/or other discussion prompts.

your response was just what I needed, which is why I asked :) interested in what you come up with. Im writing to my cousin whose late husband may have a volume or too regarding this topic

>26 cindydavid4: Cool! I should add that in my conception we would include both fiction and nonfiction. As I mentioned above, my own entries to this point would be those Singer novels. I could probably come up with one or two histories by going back over my older reading lists. I will get something up tomorrow.

>25 rocketjk: Sounds great, Jerry. I look forward to the new thread.

From my cousin:

"Martin's books begin with the pre-Holocaust times but then get quickly into the history of the Shoah. His main history is The Holocaust (the Holocaust) His book Kristallnacht (Kristallnact) is the story of pre-war Germany.

I am reading Jeffrey Veidinger's book, In the Midst of Civilized Europe (https://www.amazon.com/Midst-Civilized-Europe-1918-1921-Holocaust/dp/1250812127/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1Y8Y378RJ5C6Z&keywords=jeffrey+veidlinger&qid=1676179662&sprefix=jeffrey+veidlinger%2Caps%2C104&sr=8-1) which is about the pre-war Ukrainian pogroms, so not really Polish though western Ukraine was Poland then, but it really helps to show how the local killings during the German occupation really had history.

Awhile ago I read my father's copy of I J Singer's book The Brothers Ashkenazi, which, written in 1936, describes deportations which really struck me as being "a thing" well before the Shoah."

So looks like your reading Singer is a good start (just looked on line,really expensive, will need to check other sources) I would like to read Jeffrey Veidinger book as my family (as many of yours) were in of the Ukraine and died at that time

an interesting aside from the Yiddish Book Center: "English readers are now able to sample I.J. Singer’s Yiddish journalism thanks to two recent translations. First, Ezra Glinter discovered I.J. Singer’s report of “A Nazi Meeting at Madison Square Garden” in 1934 “Truth be told, people warned me not to go to the local Nazi gathering at Madison Square Garden,” I.J. Singer writes. “But my interest in seeing Hitler’s Germany in the middle of New York overcame any reluctance. I bought a ticket with a swastika on it and took myself to little Berlin in New York.”

Having trouble finding this, but if you google you get several hits on the rally

>30 cindydavid4: "so not really Polish though western Ukraine was Poland then . . . "

That book looks fascinating. Thank you for bringing it up. To be clear, my mentioning of Poland was only by way of an example. This topic would certainly take in all of Europe.

"So looks like your reading Singer is a good start (just looked on line,really expensive, will need to check other sources)"

The Singer I've been reading is Isaac B. Singer. For clarity's sake, although you probably know this, the I.J. Singer who wrote The Brothers Ashkenazi was I.B. Singer's older brother, who came to the U.S. first and was somehow able to wrangle his younger brother a U.S. entry visa at a time when the State Department was making it very hard for European Jews to emigrate here.

I believe there is also a documentary about that rally. There's been quite a lot of discussion about it given the high profile reemergence of white supremacy into the news over the past decade or so.

I always got them confused, thanks for the clarification. I spent much of today reading Brothers, and cant believe I havent read this before now. the writing is so good and the set up for the background for the holocaust is getting ominous. Interesting how it was that the Poles asked the Germans to come and help with the production of clothing..one of those what if questions (one does think about the two brothers, is some of this biographical; was there tension between them?)

an article from my cousins blog on Martin Gilbert

Is Historical Fiction an Oxymoron

comments?

https://www.jpost.com/j-spot/article-731627 Novel about Chinese rescuer of Jews raises questions about facts vs. fiction in Holocaust stories

Reposted from FlorenceArt on the Club Read Message board:

The University of Chicago Press free ebook for this month is The Tiger in the Attic. Here is the book's description from the e-mail I got:

In 1939, on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, seven-year-old Edith Milton (then Edith Cohn) and her sister Ruth left Germany by way of the Kindertransport, the program which gave some 10,000 Jewish children refuge in England. The two were given shelter by a jovial, upper-class British foster family with whom they lived for the next seven years. Edith chronicles these transformative experiences of exile and good fortune in The Tiger in the Attic, a touching memoir of growing up as an outsider in a strange land.

In this illuminating chronicle, Edith describes how she struggled to fit in and to conquer self-doubts about her German identity. Her realistic portrayal of the seemingly mundane yet historically momentous details of daily life during World War II slowly reveals istelf as a hopeful story about the kindness and generosity of strangers. She paints an account rich with colorful characters and intense relationships, uncanny close calls and unnerving bouts of luck that led to survival. Edith’s journey between cultures continues with her final passage to America—yet another chapter in her life that required adjustment to a new world—allowing her, as she narrates it here, to visit her past as an exile all over again.

The Tiger in the Attic is a literary gem from a skilled fiction writer, the story of a thoughtful and observant child growing up against the backdrop of the most dangerous and decisive moment in modern European history. Offering a unique perspective on Holocaust studies, this book is both an exceptional and universal story of a young German-Jewish girl caught between worlds.