The man who volunteered to be imprisoned at Auschwitz
In the face of evil, we tend to keep our heads down. Not Witold Pilecki.
Holocaust
In praise of Elie Wiesel
Two tributes that offer behind-the-scenes glimpses of the beloved teacher
The Holocaust survivor’s response to suffering was to create joyful children’s books.
You cannot bear witness with a single word like genocide. Yet Night describes exactly what happened to me.
Ukraine, 1941
In Rachel Seiffert's novel, the characters' fears unite them as they watch and wait.
Dreaming in Israel
In Aharon Appelfeld's novel, a teenage Holocaust survivor sleeps, remembers, and learns to speak anew.
We need to study peace a lot harder than those who are studying war.
The Holocaust was perpetrated against specific groups of people. Is this fact a crucial part of every retelling?
Two compelling novels reveal the horrors of forced displacement.
Twins with a Nazi doctor
Is it possible for two 12-year-olds to retain their innocence in a place like Auschwitz?
Elie Wiesel has died. Reading the obituaries, the thing that astounds me is the thing that has always astounded me: how young he was. Eighty-seven now, in 2016. I’ve been burying World War II veterans throughout my years of pastoral ministry. How could Wiesel only be 87?
In 1920, not long after the Great War, a little-known agitator gave a speech in Munich on the topic, "Why Are We Anti-Semites?" The speaker concluded that it was important to prevent Germany “from suffering a death by crucifixion." Of course this agitator became quite well known—it was Adolf Hitler—and we know what his antisemitism led to.
Like the Century, the Atlantic has been around a while. But they've got some much older archives posted online than we do. (We're working on it, slowly but surely.) Here's an astonishing example: from 1939, a firsthand account the Atlantic published of a German Jew's time in a concentration camp just before the war.
A Swiss bureaucrat saved hundreds from the Nazis. Yet even when picking up a cross means picking up a rubber stamp, many desert and flee.
Sarah’s Key
Sarah's Key is culled from a popular novel (by Tatiana de Rosnay) set during the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation of France. The main character, an American magazine writer (Kristin Scott Thomas) living in Paris, discovers that her husband's family acquired their home after the Jews who once lived there were sent to an abandoned stadium, where they endured three hellish days before the Nazis transported them to the camps.