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Holocaust: Concentration Camps, Survivors, and Historical Documents: Auschwitz-Birkenau

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

Internet Resources

After Auschwitz

"You're free. Go home." Most Holocaust films end with these words, the very words that survivors heard at liberation. But AFTER AUSCHWITZ is not a typical "Holocaust" film. It begins with these words, inviting audiences to experience what happened next.

Source: Kanopy

Bach in Auschwitz

The Auschwitz Orchestra had over 40 members, all Jewish women, all escaping death in the gas chambers because of their musical ability. All were deeply traumatised, and five decades later recall their experiences.

Source: Kanopy

Perspectives

Auschwitz

At the terrible heart of the modern age lies Auschwitz. In a total inversion of earlier hopes about the use of science and technology to improve, extend, and protect human life, Auschwitz manipulated the same systems to quite different ends. In Sybille Steinbacher's terse, powerful new book, the reader is led through the process by which something unthinkable to anyone on earth in the 1930s had become a sprawling, industrial reality during the course of the Second World War. How Auschwitz grew and mutated into an entire dreadful city, how both those who managed it and those who were killed by it came to be in Poland in the 1940s, and how it was allowed to happen, is something everyone needs to understand.

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Story

A taut, terse Holocaust narrative that is all the more powerful for its ironic reserve. -- Kirkus Reviews

Surviving the Angel of Death

Eva Mozes Kor was 10 years old when she arrived in Auschwitz. While her parents and two older sisters were taken to the gas chambers, she and her twin, Miriam, were herded into the care of the man known as the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele and subjected to sadistic medical experiments and forced to fight daily for their own survival. Through this book, readers will learn of a child's endurance and survival in the face of truly extraordinary evil. The book also includes an epilogue on Eva's recovery from this experience and her remarkable decision to publicly forgive the Nazis. Through her museum and her lectures, she has dedicated her life to giving testimony on the Holocaust, providing a message of hope for people who have suffered, and working toward goals of forgiveness, peace, and the elimination of hatred and prejudice in the world.

Auschwitz: A New History

Auschwitz-Birkenau is the site of the largest mass murder in human history. Yet its story is not fully known. In Auschwitz, Laurence Rees reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews with Auschwitz survivors and Nazi perpetrators who speak on the record for the first time. Their testimonies provide a portrait of the inner workings of the camp in unrivalled detail--from the techniques of mass murder, to the politics and gossip mill that turned between guards and prisoners, to the on-camp brothel in which the lines between those guards and prisoners became surprisingly blurred. Rees examines the strategic decisions that led the Nazi leadership to prescribe Auschwitz as its primary site for the extinction of Europe's Jews--their "Final Solution." He concludes that many of the horrors that were perpetrated in Auschwitz were driven not just by ideological inevitability but as a "practical" response to a war in the East that had begun to go wrong for Germany. A terrible immoral pragmatism characterizes many of the decisions that determined what happened at Auschwitz. Thus the story of the camp becomes a morality tale, too, in which evil is shown to proceed in a series of deft, almost noiseless incremental steps until it produces the overwhelming horror of the industrial scale slaughter that was inflicted in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Speak You Also

In 1943, sixteen-year-old Paul Steinberg was arrested in Paris and deported to Auschwitz. A chemistry student, Steinberg was assigned to work in the camp's laboratory alongside Primo Levi, who would later immortalize his fellow inmate as "Henri," the ultimate survivor, the paradigm of the prisoner who clung to life at the cost of his own humanity. "One seems to glimpse a human soul," Levi wrote in Survival in Auschwitz, "but then Henri's sad smile freezes in a cold grimace, and here he is again, intent on his hunt and his struggle; hard and distant, enclosed in armor, the enemy of all." Now, after fifty years, Steinberg speaks for himself. In an unsparing act of self-examination, he traces his passage from artless adolescent to ruthless creature determined to do anything to live. He describes his strategies of survival: the boxing matches he staged for the camp commanders, the English POWs he exploited, the maneuvers and tactics he applied with cold competence. Ultimately, he confirms Levi's judgment: "No doubt he saw straight. I probably was that creature, prepared to use whatever means I had available." But, he asks, "Is it so wrong to survive?" Brave and rare, Speak You Also is an unprecedented response to those dreadful events, bringing us face-to-face with the most difficult questions of humanity and survival.

Rena's Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz

An expanded edition of the powerful memoir about two sisters'determination to survive during the Holocaust featuring new and never before revealed information about the first transport of women to AuschwitzSent to Auschwitz on the first Jewish transport, Rena Kornreich survived the Nazi death camps for over three years. While there she was reunited with her sister Danka. Each day became a struggle to fulfill the promise Rena made to her mother when the family was forced to split apart--a promise to take care of her sister. One of the few Holocaust memoirs about the lives of women in the camps, Rena's Promise is a compelling story of the fleeting human connections that fostered determination and made survival a possibility. From the bonds between mothers, daughters, and sisters, to the links between prisoners, and even prisoners and guards, Rena's Promise reminds us of the humanity and hope that survives inordinate inhumanity.

The Seamstress

The heroic memoir of a young woman who survived a Nazi concentration camp, The Seamstress is the true story of Seren (Sara) Tuval Bernstein, born in the mountains of Romania to a large, boisterous Jewish family. She was by nature feisty, with a ferocious intelligence and an unquenchable drive.At the age of fourteen Seren angrily walked out of Gentile-run school in Budapest and apprenticed as a seamstress, determined to control her destiny. In prewar Hungary, as the Nazis encircled the country, and bombs rained down on them, Seren became her family's provider. When she was deported to Ravensbruck, it was with her beloved younger sister Esther and two close friends. By establishing a series of inviolate rules, Seren guided and cajoled, and managed to bring the four of them through the horrors of life in a concentration camp.The Seamstress is a dramatic tale of courage, intimate friendship, romance, and startlingly good fortune that will have readers cheering.Ultimately, Seren survived; she married a fellow survivor -- a tailor. They had two children, and came to the United States, where Sarah Tuval Bernstein built up a successful business -- as a seamstress.

The Librarian of Auschwitz

Based on the experience of real-life Auschwitz prisoner Dita Kraus, this is the incredible story of a girl who risked her life to keep the magic of books alive during the Holocaust. Fourteen-year-old Dita is one of the many imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Taken, along with her mother and father, from the Terezín ghetto in Prague, Dita is adjusting to the constant terror that is life in the camp. When Jewish leader Freddy Hirsch asks Dita to take charge of the eight precious volumes the prisoners have managed to sneak past the guards, she agrees. And so Dita becomes the librarian of Auschwitz. Out of one of the darkest chapters of human history comes this extraordinary story of courage and hope. This title has Common Core connections. Godwin Books

The Accountant of Auschwitz

In 2015, 94-year-old former German SS officer Oskar Groning, nicknamed "THE ACCOUNTANT OF AUSCHWITZ", went on trial in his home country, charged with complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews at Auschwitz in 1944. Groning's trial made headlines around the world as a frail old man took the stand to face his former victims.

Source: Kanopy