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Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded within families. Even after the war, sole survivors often described their losses and rebuilt their lives with a distinct focus on family. Yet this perspective is lacking in academic analyses.   In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.

This book is a comprehensive account of the Chelmno death camp.Chelmno was not only the first Nazi death camp, it also set a horrific example in establishing gas vans as the first mass use of poison gas to kill Jews.Chris Webb and Artur Hojan cover the construction and the development of the mass murder process, as perfected by the Nazis.

On the 80th anniversary of its liberation, survivors of the Holocaust gathered at the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Of the more than six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, 1.1 million were killed at Auschwitz, nearly a quarter million children. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports on a project to preserve the shoes of the war's smallest victims.

This article examines the Israeli initiative in the 1950s to confer postmortem citizenship upon Holocaust victims. This commemoration initiative, which became a clause in the law establishing Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Center, failed. Jewish communities in the diaspora refused to make their dead an endowment to the State of Israel. Tracing the history of this extraordinary idea and the various discussions about it, I show that it was not merely a national Holocaust commemoration initiative, but a transnational legal, political and moral debate between a new nation-state and its diaspora regarding the terms and boundaries of a new national citizenship.

Virtual reality (VR) is being established as a new medium for Holocaust memory. This article argues that VR experiences, which allow users to visit reconstructed campsites or even to temporarily take on the role of a victim, are changing conceptions of witnessing the Holocaust by simulating primary witnessing. It shows that such a simulation ties in with a wish for immediacy in recent Holocaust memory, as well as with the idea of VR as an \"empathy machine,\" with empathy being defined very narrowly as a mirroring of sensations and emotions. The article advocates that future VR experiences should be grounded in a more complex conception of empathy, one that highlights rather than collapses the social, racial and historical differences between individuals.

This article analyzes the controversies and debates over the commemoration of the Holocaust in one Polish town, as a case study that demonstrates the tensions, ambivalences and competing emotions surrounding the memory of the Holocaust in postcommunist Poland. The article focuses on the annual Memorial March in honor of the Jewish victims in the town of Olkusz, which evoked deep divisions regarding the meaning of the wartime heritage and the hierarchy of suffering and martyrdom. Adopting a bottom-up approach to collective memory and analyzing the Memorial March as a performative act of reenactment, this article highlights the ethical, historical and religious challenges inherent in commemorating the Jewish victims of the Holocaust by non-Jewish communities.

The United States has led the world in providing Holocaust victims with a forum for restitution. Over the decades, Congress and the courts have restored billions of dollars to Holocaust victims and their heirs. Last Term, however, the Supreme Court deviated from this course in 'Federal Republic of Germany v. Philipp', holding that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) would bar a suit brought against Germany arising out of a Holocaust-era taking of Jewish art dealers' property if those art dealers were German nationals. In so holding, the Court expressed practical concerns with allowing U.S. courts to adjudicate international human rights claims. However, a 2016 amendment to the FSIA's expropriation exception actually seems to reflect Congress's intent to permit such claims, at least where they involve property takings that are part of a campaign intended to cause a group's physical annihilation, thus constituting genocide. The Court's reliance on pragmatic considerations led it to adopt a counterintuitive reading of the FSIA that deprives genocide victims of an avenue of recourse that Congress granted them.

From 1933 to 1945, the Nazi regime looted art on a scale with few historical competitors. The Nazis used this state-sanctioned theft to dehumanize the Jewish population and carry out the \"Aryanization\" of German society. To provide redress for the victims of Nazi looting, the United States and the international community adopted the Washington Principles in 1998—a set of guidelines intended to promote a \"just and fair\" solution for claims over Nazi-looted art. Unfortunately, despite this commitment, lawsuits to recover stolen artwork are often barred by time-based defenses. In 2016, Congress passed the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act (\"HEAR Act\") to promote resolution on the merits by effectively removing the statute of limitations as an affirmative defense. Surprisingly, however, Congress left the doctrine of laches available, thereby frustrating the effectiveness and stated purpose of the HEAR Act. The doctrine of laches bars a claim upon a showing that the claimant unreasonably delayed in bringing suit, and that the delay caused the artwork's possessor to suffer prejudice. Yet because lawsuits for restitution of Nazi-looted artwork have only recently become viable, delay and the resulting prejudice—taking the form of lost evidence—are inherent in these claims. The doctrine of laches thereby undermines resolution on the merits, which is antithetical to the HEAR Act's putative goals. This Note argues that for the HEAR Act to provide the relief it ostensibly envisions, the doctrine of laches should be precluded as an available defense. Alternatively, the ability to assert the defense should be restricted to those parties who acquired contested artwork in true good faith. By revising the HEAR Act accordingly, a \"just and fair\" solution can be achieved.

Gabriella Trebits was a prisoner of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp between November 1944 and April 1945. The spaces present in her diary include both the places of the camp and her typhoid hallucinations. Gabriella described venues through their sensuous dimensions. Since the sensory experiences of everyday life mingled with her visions, her diary became a “textual journey” between real and imagined places. Her narratives helped her to express the difficulties caused by her physical environment and the confusion caused by her hallucinations. As a result, the references to changes in her sensory impressions created a discursive space for the diarist to express her feelings. Since her narrative depicts a suffering and painful condition, we use Joanna Bourke’s concept of pain talk in our analysis. Moreover, the diary demonstrates that it was possible for typhoid patients to connect with their environment despite their isolated situation. Even on the periphery of the camp space, social life persisted. This exploration will not only uncover the narrative strategy of one diarist but also contribute to a deeper understanding of the ways in which tens of thousands died of starvation and diseases―without mass executions or gas chambers―in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the spring of 1945.