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Revolting Against Reality: How People Survived the Holocaust
Photo by freepik The ethics of survival as a Jewish refugee were never simple or clean. During the Holocaust, millions were forced to face a terrible choice: follow the morality of normal life or break those rules to see another sunrise. This struggle to live...
A Broadening Horizon: Narrative Style in Memoir-Writing
Photo by jcomp Choosing the right narrative style for a Holocaust memoir is not easy. Some people think these stories must be told in a very serious, factual way and worry that fancy writing might make the pain seem less real. But this idea misses something...
Stronger Together: The Interplay of Family and the Holocaust
Photo generated by Magnific The story of the Holocaust is often told through dates and battles, the why’s and the how’s, what happened before, and what happened after. Yet the truest history lies within the quiet moments of a Holocaust memoir from a family...
The Eyes of History: What a Memoir and a Textbook Can Teach
Photo by freepik The eyes of history are quite different in a Holocaust memoir versus a volume of history books. There is no just one way of seeing the past, for history is a collection of many views that help us understand what really happened. When we talk...
In Spite of Everything: How Jewish Families Survived the Nazis
Photo generated by Magnific Family survival under the Nazis was a perilous endeavor and often fell largely on a coin flip. If you were born into a white German family, everything would be good. Otherwise, it would be like hell on earth. When the Nazis took power in...
The Heavens and Earth as Witness: Writing About the Holocaust
Photo by pressfoto Holocaust memoir writing requires a sensitivity to the subject and a mastery of form to be written well. These personal accounts from people who survived the Nazi genocide of World War II record what happened to real individuals, families, and...
The Unyielding Human Spirit: Powerful Memoirs on Tragedy
Photo by senivpetro Most people figure that tragedy permanently wrecks a person. Just pick up a memoir like John W. Weiser's A Thousand Kisses: A Family's Escape From the Nazis to a New Life, and that assumption falls apart. Memoirs about escaping Nazis—like the...
How Memoirs Preserve History: A View from the Ground Up
Photo by ASphotofamily Let's talk about a memoir about a family escaping the Holocaust. This single document does more than just tell one family's perspective; such a manuscript offers a ground-level view that general histories find impossible to include. In short,...
The Final Solution: When Jews Had to Flee from Europe
Photo from The Times of Israel Nazism stands out among its fascist peers in its utterly homicidal and destructive ideology, which led them down the terrible path of the Final Solution: the systematic, state-sanctioned erasure of every Jewish man, woman, and child in...
The Mispucha of Old: Jewish Families Before World War II
Photo by freepik Jewish life before WWII, across Europe, in towns and cities, flourished, contributing quietly to their respective locales (in spite of millennia-old discrimination), rich with meaning, connection, and tradition. The Yiddish word for family is...