Suchergebnisse

Chroniques de guerre … et d'espoir by Norodom Sihanouk Hachette/Stock Paris 303pp L'Utopie meurtrière: un rescapé du génocide cambodgien témoigne by Pin Yathay Robert Laffont Paris 415pp Cambodge: la massue de l'Angkar by Boun Sokha Atelier Marcel Jullian Paris 256pp Before Kampuchea, Preludes to Tragedy by Milton Osborne George Allen & Unwin 197pp £5.95 Survive le peuple cambodgien! by Jean Lacouture Editions du Seuil Paris 142pp

Regular conferences on Holocaust Studies be gan in 1970. For serious study of the meanings of the Holo caust, certain ground rules are essential. Interfaith coopera tion ensures that the event will not fall victim to Jewish pre ciousness or gentile banality. The Holocaust confronts Christianity with a massive credibility crisis that Christian preachers and teachers must work through. Interdisciplinary cooperation, essential to any aspect of studies in totalitarian ism, is a second imperative. The death camps were planned, built, and operated by men and women of the modern uni versity. The modern university, with its overwhelming com mitment to technology and its scant attention to ethics and wisdom, is also called into question by the Holocaust. Inter national cooperation—especially from programs involving Israelis, West Germans, and North Americans—has devel oped extensively with the passing of a generation and with the achievement of a certain distance from the anguish and trauma of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the event confronts the individual as well as the society with a challenge that is total and not merely intellectual. In this it is an epochal event of the mass of the Exodus, Sinai, and the Destruction of the Temple.

I Ethics and the Holocaust -- 1 The Value of Life: Jewish Ethics and the Holocaust -- II The Allies and the Holocaust -- 2 The Horthy Offer. A Missed Opportunity for Rescuing Jews in 1944 -- 3 The Struggle for an Allied Jewish Fighting Force During World War -- III The Holocaust: Selected Areas -- 4 The Japanese Ideology of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust -- 5 The Holocaust in Norway -- IV Reactions to the Holocaust -- 6 In History's "Memory Hole": The Soviet Treatment of the Holocaust -- 7 Confronting Genocide: The Depiction of the Persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust in West German History Textbooks -- V Crime and Punishment -- 8 Ernst Kaltenbrunner and the Final Solution -- 9 Attitudes Toward the Prosecution of Nazi War Criminals in the United States -- Contributing Authors.

Watersheds of human history are often given symbolic recognition through radical breaks in the way we date things. Thus in Christendom reference is made to B.C. and A.D.; some Jews and Christians have agreed on a mutual resort to BCE and C.E.; while in Islam H.A. stands for the alldecisive year of Mohammed's Hijra (Migration). Perhaps 1941 is to be identified as Year One of the Holocaust (basing it upon the "killing phase" of the program against the Jews). On this reckoning the present analysis is offered in the year 34 of the Holocaust. But the symbology A.H. would mean confusion with Muslim usage. An alternative, for English usage, is BFS, before the Final Solution, and F.S., in the year of the Final Solution. (Any symbology faces the criticism of being either arbitrary or contrived. A still further alternative is B.A. and A.A., before and after Auschwitz. There are substantive objections to singling out Auschwitz, and yet there is no doubt that this name has become the single most powerful symbol of the Holocaust.)

Recent literature, particularly in Germany and the Netherlands, has provided insights into some of the most perplexing imponderables of the Nazi annihilation of the Jews. These are, first, the development of consensus among the various German elites for the purposes of the Final Solution; second, an incremental kind of German decision making which led to the efficiently implemented mass annihilation of the Jews; and third, the passive mood toward the disasters befalling the Jews on the part of the entire universe of bystanders. (In the case of the Netherlands, this resulted, in spite of an unusually low degree of anti-Semitism, in an unusually high degree of Jewish victimization—in contrast to the so-called Danish reversal.) Fourth, because of the unimaginable predicament experienced by the victims and their "governments," the Jewish Councils (such as the AmsterdamJoodsche Raad), they never had a chance to develop workable responses to such a catastrophe.