Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah

Running through this encyclopedic undertaking to map all the Jewish ghettos of World War II are Yad Vashem’s contentions that the ghettos did not constitute a prerequisite for the Final Solution and that they were centers of Jewish resistance. What is innovative about this reference work is the huge amount of hitherto little-known documentation from the ex-USSR.

After being readmitted to French literary heritage following the international success of Suite française (2004), Irène Némirovsky’s work provides a unique insight into the intellectual landscape of the inter-war period, particularly with regard to the crisis of the novel, the new mal du siècle and the Jewish literary renaissance. However, Angela Kershaw’s recent book on the author shows the difficulties involved in reading and understanding a book once the Holocaust has changed our perception of it.

In a text which will be remembered as his masterpiece, historian Saul Friedländer recounts the enactment of the “final solution to the Jewish question in Europe”. His book is a monumental piece of historical work, but also a choral narrative which allows the voices of all the witnesses to resonate, and a personal quest for this child who lost his parents in the Shoah.

Since its publication in 2010 and its recent translation into French, Timothy Snyder’s book, Bloodlands, has attracted many comments from historians. Jacques Sémelin provides an overview of the recent criticisms leveled at the book, and the debates it fostered.

The American historian Hasia Diner sets out to dispel a “myth:” it is mistaken, she argues, to claim that American Jews showed little interest in the Holocaust before the 1970s. This so-called silence, which a number of authors have denounced in recent years, ignores the wide variety of memorial practices that American Jews followed in the postwar years.

Is it possible to be at the same time a victim, a perpetrator, and a bystander of the Holocaust? What were the different attitudes of the Poles toward their Jewish neighbors before, during, and after the massive deportations of 1942? Relying on new sources, three recent books by American and Polish scholars throw new light on questions that are still hotly debated today.

By using statistics to study the attitudes of Jews in the face of persecution in the French town of Lens between 1940 and 1944, two historians offer a quantitative sociological analysis of the victims’ trajectories. This original approach paves the way for a social history of genocide.