In Kaddish for Kovno (the Kaddish is a prayer for the dead) William W Mishell documents in passionate detail the creation and then the obliteration of ghetto Kovno in Lithuania during the Nazi occupation of World War II. It is a troy of ingenuity and heroism as well as of horror and destruction. It illuminates the indomitable human spirit as the Jews of Kovno secured food, smuggled children to safety, set up hospitals, and even organised a ghetto orchestra in the face of numbing deprivations and brutality. A gripping account of four years no human could forget.

After interviewing a Holocaust survivor who took clandestine photographs of the Kovno Ghetto at great risk, a graduate student stumbles over a diary chronicling the same time and place during Nazi occupation. She soon discovers that photographer, George Kaddish is one of only two known Jewish photographers who recorded ghetto life, but most importantly she learns that hope and humanity still exist.

A National Jewish Book Award-winning autobiography that's "an astonishing fusion of learning and psychic intensity; its poignance and lucidity should be an authentic benefit to readers, Jewish and gentile" (The New York Times Book Review). Children have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says "one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death." Beside his father’s grave, a diligent but doubting son begins the mourner’s kaddish and realizes he needs to know more about the prayer issuing from his lips. So begins Leon Wieseltier’s National Jewish Book Award–winning autobiography, Kaddish, the spiritual journal of a man commanded by Jewish law to recite a prayer three times daily for a year and driven, by ardor of inquiry, to explore its origins. Here is one man’s urgent exploration of Jewish liturgy and law, from the 10th-century legend of a wayward ghost to the speculations of medieval scholars on the grief of God to the perplexities of a modern rabbi in the Kovno ghetto. Here too is a mourner’s unmannered response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred in death’s wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Wieseltier’s Kaddish is a narrative suffused with love: a son’s embracing the tradition bequeathed to him by his father, a scholar’s savoring they beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writer’s revealing it, proudly, unadorned, to the reader.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: viewing the Holocaust through the eyes of youth “Zapruder . . . has done a great service to history and the future. Her book deserves to become a standard in Holocaust studies classes. . . . These writings will certainly impress themselves on the memories of all readers.”—Publishers Weekly “These extraordinary diaries will resonate in the reader’s broken heart for many days and many nights.”—Elie Wiesel This stirring collection of diaries written by young people, aged twelve to twenty-two years, during the Holocaust has been fully revised and updated. Some of the writers were refugees, others were in hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos, and nearly all perished before liberation. This seminal National Jewish Book Award winner preserves the impressions, emotions, and eyewitness reportage of young people whose accounts of daily events and often unexpected thoughts, ideas, and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our understanding of life during the Holocaust. The second paperback edition includes a new preface by Alexandra Zapruder examining the book’s history and impact. Simultaneously, a multimedia edition incorporates a wealth of new content in a variety of media, including photographs of the writers and their families, images of the original diaries, artwork made by the writers, historical documents, glossary terms, maps, survivor testimony (some available for the first time), and video of the author teaching key passages. In addition, an in-depth, interdisciplinary curriculum in history, literature, and writing developed by the author and a team of teachers, working in cooperation with the educational organization Facing History and Ourselves, is now available to support use of the book in middle- and high-school classrooms.

In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe. Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated "performative masculinity," expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. Such inebriated exhibitions extended from meetings of top Nazi officials to the rank and file, celebrating at the grave sites of their victims. Westermann argues that, contrary to the common misconception of the SS and police as stone-cold killers, they were, in fact, intoxicated with the act of murder itself. Drunk on Genocide highlights the intersections of masculinity, drinking ritual, sexual violence, and mass murder to expose the role of alcohol and celebratory ritual in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Its surprising and disturbing findings offer a new perspective on the mindset, motivation, and mentality of killers as they prepared for, and participated in, mass extermination. Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

On July 21, 1941, Tikva Cholomovitch was born in Kovno, Lithuania, to Yosef and Asya Cholomovitch, her birth against the direct orders of the Nazis, who had occupied Kovno just one month prior, forbidding the birth of Jewish children. Rescued by her parents and relatives from Hitlers action against children, during which all children under twelve years of age were taken away from their parents and murdered, Tikva began an odyssey that saw her hidden in a bunker for weeks to avoid detection by Nazi soldiers, her health so deteriorated that death, for the not-yet-three-year-old Tikva, was imminent; rescued by a Catholic Lithuanian family, who risked their lives and the lives of their two young daughters to save Tikva in a late-night exchange at the barbed wire fence, bribing a Nazi guard to secure her safety; uniting with an aunt and uncle who would take her to Palestine (which, eventually, becomes Israel) and to life on a kibbutz; making a voyage across the sea to America to be adopted by Izz and Edna Polsky of Philadelphia. Told in a straightforward narrative, unadorned and plainly conceived, Tikva Means Hope connects in a fundamental manner, hitting emotional chords straight on, with no manipulation or preconception. Meant as a tribute, it is far more a story that strikes a universal chord of survival, community, and love.

Irena Veisaitė is held in deep esteem throughout her country. This volume is an attempt to relate the difficult journey of her remarkable life against the backdrop of the complex history of Lithuania and its Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews). After being rescued by Christian Lithuanian families and having survived the Holocaust Irena Veisaitė devoted herself to study and creative work. She was a memorable lecturer, respected theatre critic, associate film director, and also founder and chairman of the Open Society Fund (Soros Foundation) which made an invaluable contribution to the process of democratisation in Lithuania. Irena Veisaitė made it her life’s work to speak up for dialogue and mutual understanding and believes that even in the most difficult circumstances it is possible to preserve one’s humanity. Having lived through some of the major atrocities of the twentieth century, her insistence on the need for tolerance has inspired many.