In this bold study, Edna Aizenberg offers a much-needed corrective to both Latin American literary scholarship and popular assumptions that the whole of Latin America served as a Nazi refuge both during and after World War II. Analyzing the treatment of the Shoah by five leading figures in Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean writing - Alberto Gerchunoff, Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriela Mistral, and Joao Guimaraes Rosa - Aizenberg illuminates how Latin American intellectuals engaged with the horrific information that reached them regarding the Holocaust, including the sympathy and collaboration of their own governments with the Nazis. Aizenberg emphasizes how - through fiction, journalism, and activism - these five culture-makers opposed and fought fascism. At the same time, her readings of individual texts confront shopworn clichŽs about Latin American writing and literature, suggesting deeper and richer dimensions to many canonical works. This interdisciplinary book fills critical gaps in both Holocaust and Latin American studies, and will be of great interest to scholars and students in both fields.

The Holocaust virtually destroyed the Jews of Poland, once a community of more than three million, constituting ten percent of the population, and the oldest continuous Jewish community in a European country. On the Edge of Destruction looks at the rich and complex nature of that community and the tremendous pressures under which it lived before the tragic end.

Finalist for 2012 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category During his time in the Vught concentration camp, the 21-year-old David recorded on an almost daily basis his observations, thoughts, and feelings. He mercilessly probed the abyss that opened around him and, at times, within himself. David's diary covers almost a year, both charting his daily life in Vught as it developed over time and tracing his spiritual evolution as a writer. Until early February 1944, David was able to smuggle some 73,000 words from the camp to his best friend Karel van het Reve, a non-Jew.

Sheds new light on the views and attitudes of Latin American writers during the Nazi era

How should Germany commemorate the mass murder of Jews once committed in its name? In 1997, James E. Young was invited to join a German commission appointed to find an appropriate design for a national memorial in Berlin to the European Jews killed in World War II. As the only foreigner and only Jew on the panel, Young gained a unique perspective on Germany's fraught efforts to memorialize the Holocaust. In this book, he tells for the first time the inside story of Germany's national Holocaust memorial and his own role in it. In exploring Germany's memorial crisis, Young also asks the more general question of how a generation of contemporary artists can remember an event like the Holocaust, which it never knew directly. Young examines the works of a number of vanguard artists in America and Europe--including Art Spiegelman, Shimon Attie, David Levinthal, and Rachel Whiteread--all born after the Holocaust but indelibly shaped by its memory as passed down through memoirs, film, photographs, and museums. In the context of the moral and aesthetic questions raised by these avant-garde projects, Young offers fascinating insights into the controversy surrounding Berlin's newly opened Jewish museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, as well as Germany's soon-to-be-built national Holocaust memorial, designed by Peter Eisenman. Illustrated with striking images in color and black-and-white, At Memory's Edge is the first book in any language to chronicle these projects and to show how we remember the Holocaust in the after-images of its history.

Memoirs of Loebl, a Jew born to the Bamberger family in Hanover, Germany, in 1925. She fled with her parents and sister to Brussels in 1938. Her father was arrested as an alien and sent to France, where he was interned; he obtained a visa and reached the USA. Describes the relatively slow nazification in Belgium, due in part to General von Falkenhausen, the military commander who was arrested and sent to Dachau in 1944 for being soft on the Jews. In addition, after initially complying with the Nazi order to register their Jews, Belgian authorities resisted this role. Avoiding registration, Loebl, her mother, and sister survived the war with false identification papers and the help of a number of non-Jews who sheltered them separately. Loebl worked for her keep, with one employer being so nasty that her real name is not mentioned. Notes that the resistance was strong in Brussels, but not in the antisemitic Flemish part of the country. Cites from her emotion-filled diary, including letters never sent to her secret beloved, who died a resistance martyr. Loebl regrets never having joined the resistance. After the war, the three females in the family rejoined the paterfamilias in New York.

Mike Koenig, a Holocaust survivor, is a retired engineer who lives in Israel. In 1943, for a period of several weeks, he smelled in his hiding place the horrible smell of bodies being burned on pyres in the nearby death camp, Treblinka. When the uprising took place there in August of that year in which the escaping prisoners set fire to some of the camp's facilities, Mike saw a huge column of smoke rising skyward over the camp. Mike describes in chronological order his family's tortuous path through three ghettos (including the Warsaw Ghetto), his survival of an "aktzyah" and eventually finding a hiding place. The Koenigs managed to stay together throughout the years of the Holocaust. At the time when whole Jewish communities were destroyed and only scattered individuals survived, this represents a statistical rarity. The author presents a powerful collection of material to document the atrocities which took place in Treblinka, and endeavors, in prose and in poetry, to impart to the reader the impact the Holocaust has made on his world outlook. Having survived so close to the Treblinka death camp, the author of At The Edge Of An Abyss presents not only a unique story, but also provides a rare perspective in the annals of the Holocaust.