Academic Studies Press is proud to publish important work documenting the experiences of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, as well as scholarly studies of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Several of these have also been published Open Access, freely accessible online. In honor of Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, we’ve put together a collection below of some of our recent publications in Holocaust Studies and biographies and memoirs of Shoah survivors.
Biography & Memoir
My Journey Home: Life After the Holocaust
Zsuzsanna Ozsváth
My Journey Home commences with the author’s childhood during the Holocaust in Hungary, when almost 500,000 of the resident Jews were deported and killed in Auschwitz. In Budapest, about 150,000 survived the German occupation as well as the dictatorship of the Hungarian National Socialists, which took over the power in October 1944: Ozsváth’s family belonged among those who lived. The author describes their life after the war in Communist-ruled Hungary, and her flight, together with her husband, to Germany and later to the USA. Ozsváth’s poignant story of survival, friendship, and love provides readers with a rare first-hand account of her extraordinary journey.
Schindler’s Listed: The Search for My Father’s Lost Gold
Mark Biederman
with Randi Biederman
This is the extraordinary story of the author’s twenty year quest to find gold coins which his father’s family buried in their backyard in Poland just prior to being deported by the Nazis into concentration camps. His father survived the war but died when the author was a teenager, leaving him only with the knowledge that he had buried coins somewhere in Poland, and no information about his family. During his quest, Biederman uncovers many interesting and disturbing facts about his father and mother and their families, such as the fact that his father was the third person on Oskar Schindler’s list and had a chance meeting with Adolph Hitler, and that his mother was selected as a cook for the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. The book details the author’s quest to unearth his family’s past and hist father’s treasure and continues with his parent’s amazing post-war years in Europe and their eventual arrival in North America.
Holocaust Studies
Fragments of Hell: Israeli Holocaust Literature
Dvir Abramovich
In this compelling and engaging book, Dvir Abramovich introduces readers to several landmark novels, poems and stories that have become classics in the Israeli Holocaust canon. Discussed are iconic writers such as Aharon Appelfeld, Dan Pagis, Etgar Keret, Yoram Kaniuk, Uri Tzvi Greenberg and Ka-Tzetnik, and their attempts to come to terms with the unprecedented trauma and its aftereffects. Scholarly, yet deeply accessible to both students and to the public, this illuminating volume offers a wide-ranging introduction to the intersection between literature and the Shoah, and the linguistic, stylistic and ethical difficulties inherent in representing this catastrophe in fiction. Exploring narratives by survivors and by those who wrote about the European genocide from a distance, each chapter contains a compassionate and thoughtful analysis of the author’s individual opus, accompanied by a comprehensive exploration of their biography and the major themes that underpin their corpus. The rich and sophisticated discussions and interpretations contained in this masterful set of essays are sure to become essential reading for those seeking to better understand the responses by Hebrew writers to the immense tragedy that befell their people.
In Enemy Land: The Jews of Kielce and the Region, 1939-1946
Sara Bender
Translated by Naftali Greenwood and Saadya Sternberg
This book offers a study of the Jewish community in Kielce and its environs during World War II and the Holocaust. It is the first of its kind in providing a comprehensive account of Kielce’s Jews and their history as victims under the German occupation. The book focuses in particular on Jewish-Polish relations in the Kielce region; the deportation of the Jews of Kielce and its surrounding areas to the Treblinka death camp; the difficulties faced by those attempting to help and save them; and daily life in the Small Ghetto from September 1942 until late May 1943.
Open Access Books
Macht Arbeit Frei?: German Economic Policy and Forced Labor of Jews in the General Government, 1939-1943
Witold W. Medykowski
This volume is the first ever complex study to address Jewish forced labor and the German economic policy in the General Government, which was a part of occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. The study presents German economic policy on the occupied territories, discussing Germany’s misappropriation and misuse of available resources—particularly human resources and their inhuman treatment—and how this policy ultimately led to the downfall of the Nazi regime. This fascinating study sheds a light on the mutual dependence of economics and warfare during one of the most difficult periods in human history.
Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Japan and the Jews during the Holocaust Era
Meron Medzini
Even before Japan joined Nazi Germany in the Axis Alliance, its leaders clarified to the Nazi regime that the attitude of the Japanese government and people to the Jews was totally different than that of the official German position and that it had no intention of taking measures against the Jews that could be seen as racially motivated. During World War II some 40,000 Jews found themselves under Japanese occupation in Manchuria, China and countries of South East Asia. Virtually all of them survived the war, unlike their brethren in Europe. This book traces the evolution of Japan’s policy towards the Jews from the beginning of the 20th century, the existence of anti-Semitism in Japan, and why Japan ignored repeated Nazi demands to become involved in the “final solution.”
