The unforgettable memoir of 70 years of contemporary and personal history from the great French filmmaker, journalist and intellectual Claude Lanzmann Born to a Jewish family in Paris, 1925, Lanzmann's first encounter with radicalism was as part of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. He and his father were soldiers of the underground until the end of the war, smuggling arms and making raids on the German army. After the liberation of France, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, making money as a student in surprising ways (by dressing as a priest and collecting donations, and stealing philosophy books from bookshops). It was in Paris however, that he met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It was a life-changing meeting. The young man began an affair with the older de Beauvoir that would last for seven years. He became the editor of Sartre's political-literary journal, Les Temps Modernes—a position which he holds to this day—and came to know the most important literary and philosophical figures of postwar France. And all this before he was 30 years old. Written in precise, rich prose of rare beauty, organized—like human recollection itself—in interconnected fragments that eschew conventional chronology, and describing in detail the making of his seminal film Shoah, The Patagonian Hare becomes a work of art, more significant, more ambitious than mere memoir. In it, Lanzmann has created a love song to life balanced by the eye of a true auteur.

Groundbreaking analyses of the vast archive of newly digitized and released outtakes from Lanzmann's masterwork.

The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographical index. 292 photographs and illustrations. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.

Trap with a Green Fence is Richard Glazar's memoir of deportation, escape, and survival. In economical prose, Glazar weaves a description of Treblinka and its operations into his evocation of himself and his fellow prisoners as denizens of an underworld. Glazar gives us compelling images of these horrors in a tone that remains thoughtful but sober, affecting but simple.

There were 40,000 Jews in Riga in July 1941, when the Germans occupied Latvia. 33,000 of them were interned in the ghetto, and most of them (according to Schneider's estimate, 29,000) were killed in November-December 1941 in the Rumbuli forest. At the same time, numerous Jews from the Reich began to be deported to the ghetto of Riga. Ca. 20,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews arrived there during the winter of 1941-42; 800 of them survived the war, which is much greater than the numbers of German Jewish survivors from the ghettos of Łódź, Minsk, Kaunas, etc. Presents a story of life and death in the ghetto, focusing mainly on the "German" part of it; the story is largely based on testimonies of survivors, including Schneider's own (she was deported to the Riga ghetto from Vienna in February 1942). Many of the Jews were sent to the Jungfernhof camp near the city, rather than to the ghetto. Later, some were transferred from the ghetto to the Salaspils camp, and in August 1943, 7,874 Jews were sent from the ghetto to the Kaiserwald camp. The rest of the ghetto was liquidated in October 1943, and ca. 60 people were left to remove all traces of the former inhabitants, after which they were also transferred to Kaiserwald. Pp. 157-175 contain a list of survivors, and pp. 177-211 contain documents.

Smolar (b. 1905 in Poland) was in 1941-42 a leader of the Jewish underground resistance organization in the ghetto of Minsk, and later fought in a partisan unit in the Minsk area. His memoirs describe the first days of the war; the establishment of the ghetto in Minsk; the creation of the two underground organizations in the ghetto, one by refugees from Poland, the other - by native Jews, and their subsequent unification; Nazi mass murders of Jews in the ghetto in 1941-42; the flight of ghetto Jews to the forests in order to join the Soviet partisans; partisan warfare. Smolar, as well as other Jews who fought with the partisans, were shocked by the antisemitism of some their non-Jewish comrades in arms. Antisemitism became a habitual phenomenon in the postwar USSR.