Other Resources: Books and Publications

Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library

Ben Barkow

Vallentine Mitchell, 1997

This book combines the biography of Dr Alfred Wiener, and the history of the distinguished library and research institution he founded. Alfred Wiener and the Marking of the Holocaust Library explores how, in the 1950s and 1960s the Library played a pioneering role in founding the serious academic study of the Nazi era and the Holocaust and offers a vivid portrait of the personalities and circumstances which have shaped the development of one of Britain's most remarkable research institutions.

Collect and Record!: Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe

Laura Jockusch

Oxford University Press, 2012

Collect and Record! describes the vibrant activity of survivors who founded Jewish historical commissions and documentation centres in Europe immediately after the Second World War. In the first postwar decade, these initiatives collected thousands of Nazi documents along with testimonies, memoirs, diaries, songs, poems and artifacts of Jewish victims. They pioneered in developing a Holocaust historiography that placed the experiences of Jews at the centre and used both victim and perpetrator sources to describe the social, economic, and cultural aspects of everyday life and death of European Jews under the Nazi regime.

A comparative analysis, Collect and Record! focuses on France, Poland, Germany, Austria and Italy, analysing the motivations and rationales that guided survivors in chronicling the destruction they had witnessed, while also discussing their research techniques, archival collections, and historical collections. It reflects growing attention to survivor testimony and to the active roles of survivors in rebuilding their postwar lives.

The Holocaust in History and Memory

Bearing Witness: Testimony and the Historical Memory of the Holocaust

Edited by Rainer Schultze, University of Essex, 2009

The theme of Holocaust Memorial Day in 2009 was 'Bearing Witness'. Inspired by this topic, this issue of The Holocaust in History and Memory reflects on the theme, discussing various forms of testimony as well as emphasizing the importance of providing and preserving these testimonies for future generations. The journal does not only reflect on the nature and role of testimony however, it also contains a number of survivor testimonies of difference kinds: an attempt to reflect on the individual/subjective experience by analysising it in the wider context of the group experience. 

Bearing Witness features contributions from Olaf Jensen, Michelle Langfield, Ulrike Smalley, Diana Gring and Karin Theilen, Sanja Bahun and Anthony Grenville among others. Topcs include a discussion on the Refugee Voices audiovisual testimony project coordinated by the Association of Jewish Refugees (and available to view at The Wiener Library), discussions on British war artists as witnesses and objective realists, and reflections on Jewish Holocaust survior testimony in Melbourne. 

The Memory of Pain: Women's Testimonies of the Holocaust

Camila Loew

Lopoli, 2011

This book analyses four women's literary writings on the Holocaust to examine some tenets of Holocaust studies, gender studies, and testimony. Camila Loew foregrounds each author's search for a written form to engage with their extreme experiences. She highlights the ethical dimension of testimony, which becomes a privileged form of voice trauma and symbolically explore the role of excess. 

Writing the Holocaust: Indentity, Testimony, Representation

Zoë Waxman

Oxford University Press, 2006

Arguing against the prevailing view that Holocaust survivors have come forward only recently to tell their stories, Zoë Waxman examines the full history of Holocaust testimony, from the first chroniclers confined to Nazi-enforced ghettos, to today's survivors wrting as part of collective memory.

Waxman shows how the conditions and motivations for bearing witness have fundamentally changed. She reveals the multiplicity of Holocaust experiences, the historically contingent nature of victims' responses, and the extent to which their identities - secular or religious, male or femail, East or West European - affected not only what they observed but also how they have written about their experiences. Ultimately, she demonstrates that what survivors remember is substantially determined by the context in which they are remembering.