This book explores the memory of the Romanian Holocaust in Romanian, German, Israeli, and French cultural representations. The essays in this volume discuss first-hand testimonial accounts, letters, journals, drawings, literary texts and films by Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Aharon Appelfeld Norman Manea, Radu Mihaileanu, among others.

This book explores the memory of the Romanian Holocaust in Romanian, German, Israeli, and French cultural representations. The essays in this volume discuss first-hand testimonial accounts, letters, journals, drawings, literary texts and films by Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Aharon Appelfeld Norman Manea, Radu Mihaileanu, among others.

“An excellent analysis of the slow, but steady, evolution of Romania from heavy Holocaust denial . . . toward a fair confrontation of its tragic past.” —Radu Ioanid, author of The Holocaust in Romania How is the Holocaust remembered in Romania since the fall of communism? Alexandru Florian and an international group of contributors unveil how and why Romania, a place where large segments of the Jewish and Roma populations perished, still fails to address its recent past. These essays focus on the roles of government and public actors that choose to promote, construct, defend, or contest the memory of the Holocaust, as well as the tools—the press, the media, monuments, and commemorations—that create public memory. Coming from a variety of perspectives, these essays provide a compelling view of what memories exist, how they are sustained, how they can be distorted, and how public remembrance of the Holocaust can be encouraged in Romanian society today. “While positive changes have taken place, a large gap exists between the historical facts and public knowledge about Romania and the Holocaust. This volume offers a fresh and nuanced understanding of the contemporary ‘battles of memory’ in postcommunist Eastern Europe.” —Diana Dumitru, author of The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust “An excellent and timely addition to European historiography. The book consists of eight chapters, most of them written by scholars affiliated with the Elie Wiesel Institute. It not only shows the challenges faced in remembering Romania’s involvement in the Holocaust, but provides an excellent comparative analysis with other countries in the region.” —Reading Religion

Mediating Historical Responsibility brings together leading scholars and new voices in the interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, history, and cultural studies to explore the ways culture, and cultural representations, have been at the forefront of bringing the memory of past injustices to the attention of audiences for many years. Engaging with the darkest pages of twentieth-century European history, dealing with the legacy of colonialism, war crimes, genocides, dictatorships, and racism, the authors of this collection of critical essays address Europe’s ‘difficult pasts’ through the study of cultural products, examining historical narratives, literary texts, films, documentaries, theatre, poetry, graphic novels, visual artworks, material heritage, and the cultural and political reception of official government reports. Adopting an intermedial approach to the study of European history, the book probes the relationship between memory and responsibility, investigating what it means to take responsibility for the past and showing how cultural products are fundamentally entangled in this process.

The first mass killings of the Romanian Holocaust in late June to early July 1941 brutally claimed thousands of victims and marked the beginning of the government's plan to "cleanse the land" of Jews. Moreover, of all the Third Reich's allies, only Romania undertook its genocide campaign without the intervention of Himmler's SS. In The Origins and Onset of the Romanian Holocaust, author Henry Eaton traces the historical path to this tragedy by examining both Romania's antisemitic history and looking at the initial mass killings in detail. First, Eaton traces the roots of the Romanian government's decision to exterminate Jews in Romania and in its annexed areas through its long and often violent antisemitic past. While the decision to target the Jews might have been ordered by dictator Ion Antonescu and his top civil and military officials, Eaton argues that it found its basis in an entrenched cultural abuse of Jews dating back to the nineteenth century. In the second section, Eaton analyzes the Romanian government's first killing operations: the execution of 311 Jewish men, women, and children at Stânca Rosnovanu by men of the Romanian 6th Cavalry Regiment; the great pogrom in the city of Iasi triggered by agents of the government's intelligence service; and the two "death trains" in which some 2,700 pogrom survivors perished in freight cars turned into ovens by the summer heat. In the final chapters, Eaton examines the victims and perpetrators in detail and addresses the possible German connections to the killings. The Origins and Onset of the Romanian Holocaust persuasively challenges the idea that Romania's adoption of murder as state policy was due to outside pressure. Eaton's volume will be illuminating reading for Holocaust studies scholars and readers interested in World War II history.

Divided societies, tormented pasts, and unrepentant perpetrators. Why are some countries more intent on vanquishing uncomfortable pasts than others? How do public and often unsightly attempts at memorialisation both fail the victims and valorize their oppressors? This book offers fresh and original perspectives on dictatorship, fascism and victimization from the bloodiest decades in Europe’s, Australia’s and Central America’s colonial and modern history. Chapters include analyses of Francoist memorials in Spain, assessments of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, the forgetting of frontier colonial violence in Tasmania, Romania’s treatment of its Roma populations in the midst of Holocaust memorialisation in Bucharest’s urban development, and whether or not the Holocaust continues to serve as an instructional model or impossible aspiration for cross-cultural genocide memorialisation strategies. In an era of ongoing political, ethnic and religious conflict, and unrepentant insurgent activity around the world, this collection reminds readers that genocidal actions, wherever and whenever they occurred, must be held to account by more than rhetoric and concrete memory. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.

Women and Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges expands the existing scholarship on women and the Holocaust adopting current approaches to gender studies and focusing on the texts and context from Central-Eastern Europe. The authors complicate earlier approaches by considering the intersections of gender, region, nationa, and sexuality, often within specifically delineated national settings, including the Czech/German, Hungarian, Hungarian/Austrian, Lithuanian, Polish/Israeli, Romanian/US-American, and Slovak. In these essays, the communist regimes after WWII often provide a productive framework for studying women and the Holocaust. This truly international volume features contributions by eminent authors, including pioneers in the field, as well as upcoming literary scholars and historians who delve into previously unmapped archives, explore cinematic representations and digital testimonies.