The Chosen People
It all had started in Germany. With hate, the Nazis got tough. We Jews were placed in jeopardy. That should have been enough!
Echoes of Memory provides survivors who volunteer at the Museum with a powerful outlet to share their experiences and memories—through their own writing. In these videos, survivors who participated in the workshop read a selection of their essays.
This program is one way the Museum enables eyewitnesses to the Holocaust to help new generations gain insight and understanding of Holocaust history from a deeply personal perspective.
It all had started in Germany. With hate, the Nazis got tough. We Jews were placed in jeopardy. That should have been enough!
Gregory Spinner began reading comics as a kid, but discovered serious and profound stories in graphic art that are anything but childish. At Skidmore College, he teaches graphic novels in his courses, and recently co-curated an exhibit there with Rachel Seligman called: “Graphic Jews: Negotiating Identity in Sequential Art.” Today, Spinner talks with us about the watershed comic Maus, and the evolving expression of Jewish identity through comics.
Dr. Michael Grodin has written about Nazi doctors and the ways patients were systematically dehumanized and tortured. He believes we need to beware of the subtle ways that medical ethics can be subverted in the name of research and public health.
In many of his novels, Serbian-Jewish author David Albahari challenges readers to re-examine history. Though widely published around the world, Albahari's work is not always popular in his native country, where antisemitism persists.
In February 1945, I was one of 500 women shipped from a concentration camp in Nuremberg, Germany, after it was totally destroyed by constant bombing. We arrived at Holysov, Czechoslovakia, near Plzen. Some 250 of the women were Jewish and 250 were political prisoners from Poland and Russia.
Rex Bloomstein has made many films about Jewish history and the Holocaust, including perhaps the best-known film on antisemitism, The Longest Hatred. Bloomstein's recent film, KZ, presents a modern look at the legacy of the Holocaust.
Actor Ralph Fiennes has appeared in a number of films about the Holocaust. In this podcast, he talks with journalist Bob Woodward about his role as SS officer Amon Goeth in the Oscar-winning film Schindler's List.
When Helen Jonas speaks of SS officer Amon Goeth, her voice still bears traces of the horrors she witnessed as his house servant at the Plaszow Concentration Camp. Sixty years later, Jonas met with Goeth's daughter Monika, a meeting recorded for the documentary film Inheritance.
Nechama Tec believes it's important to examine the Holocaust from many different angles. In her work, she looks at the places where antisemitism and sexism intersect, and at the particular ways in which women endured Nazi persecution.
In Plantations and Death Camps: Religion, Ideology, and Human Dignity, Beverly Mitchell looks at the history both of the Holocaust and of slavery in the U.S. to see what lessons about human dignity can be learned.