This article presents a methodology designed to yield a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the behaviour of prisoner-functionaries in Nazi camps: the coercion-resistance spectrum. After a short discussion of historiographical trends related to Jewish functionaries and to Jewish resistance to the Nazis, the article details this new analytical approach to these figures whose assigned tasks facilitated ...

Esther Raab was born in Chelm (Poland). Having grown up in a middle-class Jewish family, she remembers a "comfortable" childhood. Her father had many non-Jewish clients, with whom he could get on well. One of them helped Esther and her brother hide from the Nazis during the last year of the war. Esther had worked in a number of labour camps before she arrived in Sobibor in December 1942. In Sobibor, ...

The Nazi Germans used Izbica, the Polish village where Philip Bialowitz was born, as a transitory ghetto for Jews on their way to the destruction camps in Eastern Poland. In Izbica Philip Bialowitz survived a fire squad as a young boy. He was deported to Sobibor in 1943 and selected for forced labour upon arrival. Philip's elder brother, Simkha, took care of him wherever possible. Philip was involved ...

Among millions of Holocaust victims sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944, Priska, Rachel, and Anka each passed through its infamous gates with a secret. They were newly pregnant, and facing an uncertain fate without their husbands. These young women were privately determined to hold on to all they had left: their lives, and those of their unborn babies. That the gas chambers ran out of Zyklon-B just ...

163256 : a memoir of resistance is Michael Englishman's astonishing story of courage, resourcefulness, and moral fibre as a Dutch Jew during World War II and its aftermath. It begins with the Nazi occupation of Holland in 1940 and continues through his incarceration in numerous death and labour camps, where, surviving by his wits, he escapes death time and again. Committing daring acts of bravery to ...

Hildegard Frübis: Einleitung: Beweissicherung und ästhetische Praxis. - Der Häftlingskörper und seine Disziplinierung. - Lukas Meissel: Perpetrator Photography. The Pictures of the Erkennungsdienst at Mauthausen Concentration Camp. - Sandra Starke: »... davon kann man sich kein Bild machen.« : Entstehung, Funktion und Bedeutung der Baumhängen-Fotos. - Élise Petit: What Do Official Photographs ...

"This book contains essays by distinguished scholar Professor Dan Stone on Fascism, Nazism and the Holocaust. It examines issues such as race science and the racial state, Nazi race ideology, slave labour, concentration camps, British reaction to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, the search for missing persons in the chaos of postwar Europe, and the postwar revival of fascism. Though mainly focused ...

'The Long Shadow of Sobibor' is an interview project representing a unique historical document. The collection comprises open interviews taken by Professor Selma Leydesdorff with 9 survivors of the Sobibor revolt (1943) and 22 next of kin to persons murdered in Sobibor. These unique testimonials are far more than stories about camp life alone. --Stories of lives-- The interviews are the stories of ...

Thomas Blatt grew up in the Polish village of Izbica, which was used by the Geman Nazis as a transit ghetto for Jews on their way to the extermination camps in Eastern Poland. He was sixteen years old when he arrived at Sobibor with his parents and his brother. All three were immediately sent to the gas chambers, but Thomas himself was selected for forced labour. He had to cut women's hair before they ...

Alexsy Wajcen was born in the shtetl of Hodorov, a Jewish community not far from the town of Lvov in Ukraine. Horodov was part of Poland before the Second World War, but annexed by the Soviet Union after 1939. Alexsy was the oldest of five children. He served in the Soviet army from 1940 onwards and as a prisoner of war arrived in Sobibor, where he was selected for forced labour. With the exception ...

Arkady Wajspapir (Arkadii Weisspapier) was born in 1921 in the Ukrainian village of Bobrovyy Kut, then a Jewish community. He had an elder brother and a younger sister. The family lived together with the grandfather from his father's side - and his second wife plus a few relatives - in a house divided for the purpose. Arkady had had ten years of school when he enrolled in the Red Army in 1939. He was ...

Semion Rozenfeld was born and grew up in Ternivka, a shtetl in Ukraine. He had two sisters, his father was a taylor. Semion graduates from secondary school before enlisting in the Soviet army at age eighteen. He was wounded during heavy fighting and was made POW by the German army. After a stay in a concentration camp in Minsk he was deported to Sobibor, where he was elected for forced labour. Semion ...