The Holocaust
Center maintains an extensive lending library which we hope to soon have available
online.Resources available to borrow include books, teaching resources, videos/dvds, posters, and more. To request an item, please email info@wsherc.org.
New arrivals and highlights for Spring 2008:
DVDS
“Auschwitz:
If You Cried You Died.” 3rd Ed. 2007. 30 mins. (DVD)
Includes teacher guide. Chronicles the journey of two Holocaust survivors as they
revisit Auschwitz. This revised addition features youth discussing how the prejudice,
intolerance and violence that characterized the Holocaust provide timely lessons
for all of us today.
“I’m Still Here: Real Diaries
of Young People Who Lived During the Holocaust.” SISU & MTV. 2005. 48 mins.
(DVD)
Age 12 and up. The diaries come to life through the voices of some of today’s
most talented young actors. Photos, text and drawings from the diaries and archival
films are skillfully woven with original footage of remnants of a Jewish ghetto,
and the powerful journey is intensified through the unobtrusive, evocative music
of Grammy Award® nominee Moby. http://sisuent.com/ISH.html.
BOOKS
Bess, Michael. Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II.
NY: Vintage Books, 2006.
Was the bombing of civilian populations in Germany and Japan justified? Were
the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials legally scrupulous? What is the legacy
bequeathed to the world by Hiroshima? With wisdom and clarity, Michael Bess brings
a fresh eye to these difficult questions and others, arguing against the binaries
of honor and dishonor, pride and shame, and pointing instead toward a nuanced reckoning
with one of the most pivotal conflicts in human history. Donated by David and Linda
Stahl.
Daly, M.W. Darfur’s Sorrow: A History of Destruction and Genocide.
NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
As M.W. Daly, distinguished historian and long-term observer of the Sudan, explains,
the roots of the crises lie deep in Darfur’s past. Donated by Linda and David Stahl.
Durland DeSaix, Deborah, and Karen Gray Ruelle, Eds. Hidden on the
Mountain: Stories of Children Sheltered from the Nazis in Le Chambon.
NY: Holiday House, 2007.
A Protestant stronghold whose people had once been persecuted for their religious
beliefs, the community of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon sheltered several thousand Jews,
many of them children. This book tells the poignant true stories of some of the
children who were hidden there and pays tribute to the courageous people of Le Chambon.
Gimlette, John. Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace.
Uncorrected Proof. NY: Alfred Knopf, 2008.
A combined travelogue and personalized military history. The author takes the
reader across Europe in the footsteps of one of the greatest armies ever assembled:
the US forces of 1944-1945. In 2004 Gimlette set off to travel back through the
war in order to discover if it was possible to grasp the physical, social, and psychological
realities of Europe at that time. The book is a rich mix of past and present, a
meeting of cultures, and a singular, deeply personal assessment of one of the most
tumultuous moments in world history. Gimlette has won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial
Prize and the Wanderlust Travel Writing Award. Donated by David and Linda Stahl.
Jeffreys, Diarmuid. Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s
War Machine. Advance Readers Addition. NY: Metropolitan
Books, 2008.
How had one of the world’s leading companies – whose scientists had
won Nobel Prizes, pioneered aspirin and a host of other essential drugs, and whose
expertise in everything from artificial fuel and rubber to fertilizer and explosives
was the envy of the world – fallen from the heights of such success to become Hitler’s
creature, directly involved in the Holocaust with their experimental IG Monowitz
plant at Auschwitz. Donated by David and Linda Stahl.
Kahn, Leora and Rachel Hager, Eds. “When They Came to Take My Father:” Voices
of the Holocaust. NY: Arcade Publishing, 1996.
Fifty images of survival, portraits of the men and women who lived through the brutality
to triumph over oppression. Their first person accounts accompany intimate photographs
and tell of Holocaust experiences with an immediacy that is both mesmerizing and
appalling. Photographs by Mark Seliger. Donated by Leticia Lopez.
Pasternak,
Alfred. Inhuman Research: Medical Experiments in German Concentration Camps.
Hungary: Akademiai Kiado, 2006.
Being a survivor of the Holocaust and a medical school professor, the author
felt a moral obligation to work on the subject. After discussing the nazification
of German medicine, he documents the various experiments followed by their ethical
evaluation. Finally he presents the name and biographical data of the doctors actively
involved in the experiments, and also photos of the main perpetrators.
Porter, Anna. Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the
Holocaust. NY: Walker & Company, 2007.
A controversial figure. A hero or a Nazi collaborator? Directly responsible
for liberating 1,684
Jews on a train from Hungary to Switzerland in 1944 and by
the war’s end he had preserved some 100,000 more lives by bargaining with the Nazis.
Based on interviews with those who were on his train, and those who were denied
a place, as well as documents and correspondence. Kasztner was assassinated by right-wing
activists in Tel Aviv on March 4, 1957. Donated by the JT News.
Shneiderman, S.L., Editor. The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw
Ghetto. Trans. Norbert Guterman & Sylvia Glass. Oxford: One World, 2006.
First published immediately after the war in 1945. After 60 years, it is
now republished for a worldwide audience. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Mary
Berg had just turned 15. From that
time until her arrival in the US in March 1944,
Mary kept a detailed personal diary, recording her years in the Warsaw Ghetto, detention
in Pawiak prison, intnernment in Occupied France, and finally, her journey to freedom
aboard a mercy ship hired by the American government. Donated by the JT News.
Strickland, Eycke. Eyes are Watching, Ears are Listening: Growing
up in Nazi Germany 1933-1946. NY: iUniverse, 2007.
Local author. Memoir.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Crises of Memory and the Second World War. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2006.
Suleiman is one of a handful of scholars who have shaped the interdisciplinary
study of memory, with its related concepts of trauma, testimony, forgetting, and
forgiveness. In this book she argues that memories of WWII transcend national boundaries,
due
not only to the global nature of the war but also to the increasingly global
presence of the Holocaust as a site of collective memory. Donated by David and Linda
Stahl.
Yad Vashem, Time, Zahava (Lakier) Scherz. Eds. Rutka’s Notebook: A
Voice from the Holocaust. Yad Vashem, 2008.
The long lost diary of Polish 14-year-old Rutka Laskier. Her diary entries are
complimented by photographs and comments from Yad Vashem and Scherz.
For more information, suggestions for specific resources, or to request an item,
please contact us -
info@wsherc.org or 206-441-5747.
There is no charge to borrow materials, but a deposit or credit card number will
be required to check out dvds/videos.
The borrower is responsible for replacing all missing and/or damaged items.
