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Holocaust: Concentration Camps, Survivors, and Historical Documents: Theresienstadt

A research topic guide covering the Holocaust. This guide includes information on Anne Frank, concentration camps, and antisemitism.

Internet Resources

The Last of the Unjust

In Rome in 1975, Claude Lanzmann filmed a series of interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, the only "Elder of the Jews" not to have been killed during the war. A rabbi in Vienna, following the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, Murmelstein fought bitterly with Adolf Eichmann, week after week for seven years, managing to help around 121,000 Jews leave the country, and preventing the liquidation of the ghetto.

Source: Kanopy

Perspectives

I Never Saw Another Butterfly

A selection of children's poems and drawings reflecting their surroundings in Terezain Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia from 1942 to 1944."

Alice's Piano

How music provided hope in one of the world's darkest times--the inspirational life story of Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest living Holocaust survivor Alice Herz-Sommer was born in Prague in 1903. A talented pianist from a very early age, she became famous throughout Europe; but, as the Nazis rose to power, her world crumbled. In 1942, her mother was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and vanished. In 1943, Alice, her husband and their six-year-old son were sent there, too. In the midst of horror, music, especially Chopin'sEtudes, was Alice's salvation. Theresienstadt was a "show camp", a living slice of Nazi propaganda created to convince outsiders that the Jews were being treated humanely. In more than a hundred concerts, Alice gave her fellow prisoners hope in a time of suffering. Written with the cooperation of Alice Herz-Sommer, Melissa Müller and Reinhard Piechocki'sAlice's Piano is the first time her story has been told. At 107 years old, she continues to play her piano in London and bring hope to many.

Triumph of Hope

Triumph of Hope From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel Now available in English, here is the award-winning and internationally acclaimed testament of a Jewish woman who was taken to Auschwitz while several months pregnant, where she was forced to confront perhaps the most agonizing choice ever imposed upon any woman, upon any human being . so that both she and her newborn infant should not die in a Nazi medical experiment personally conducted by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. And just as vividly, Ruth Elias recounts the aftermath of her imprisonment, and the difficult path to a new life in a new land: Israel, where new challenges, new obstacles awaited. One of the most powerful memoirs provided to us by a survivor. --Indiana Jewish Post and Opinion Well-written . not only provides a remarkably honest picture of the unspeakable reality of living in ghettos and slave-labor and death camps, but also what it meant to be Jewish in Europe. in the 1920s and 1930s.. This is one of the best Holocaust memoirs I have read. --Washington Jewish Week The understated tone of this memoir adds to the author's powerful re-creation of her life as a young Czechoslovak Jewish woman during the Holocaust. --Publishers Weekly