Sources

The following lists of selected sources are organized according to six somewhat overlapping categories. Some of the entries have been annotated.

1) and 2) Websites and Books containing comprehensive general information about the pre-Nazi era lives of Jews in Europe, the Nazis’ rise to power, the persecution and Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators.

3) Archives and Other Unpublished Sources.

4) Personal Memoirs and/or Historical Narratives -- more closely related to the challenges and persecution confronted by the members of the extended Jellinek family from 1938 on, such as the family members’ vastly changed and dispersed post-Anschluss environments and their efforts to escape from Vienna, Brno and Lwow.

5) Literary Works that have had a particularly strong influence on the construction of this website.

6) Collections of revealing and tragic Shoah Letters.

Websites

http://www.Centropa.org brings you to the website of Centropa: the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation, headquartered in Vienna.
This organization’s research database has more than 1200 audio interviews, a 22,000 digitized photo database, films, exhibits, publications and educational materials, focussing on the lives that survivors led before the Holocaust, vs. the means of victimhood, persecution and murder.

http://www.Doew.at/english brings you to the English language section of the website of the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance DÖW). The main German language part of the website is accessed through: http://www.Doew.at.
This organization is focussed on the following aspects of the Holocaust in Austria: resistance and persecution, exile, Nazi murder crimes, concentration camps, criminal medical policies, justice system in the Nazi era.  Post-war policies for prosecution of Nazi criminals, right-wing extremism, welfare and restitution for Nazi victims are also dealt with in the DOW's activities in education, research, publishing, exhibitions, building and maintaining its archive, library, oral history collection and databases, including its database of 63,200 + names of Austrian Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

http://echoesandreflections.org is the online component of the interdisciplinary, multimedia Echoes and Reflections program. Although primarily intended to train secondary educators to teach about the Holocaust and genocide, any adult learner can benefit from this comprehensive resource.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/holo.html brings you to the Jewish Virtual Library’s Holocaust section, from which one can access various topics and subtopics, such as:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/chron.html provides an expandable Timeline of Jewish Persecution, 1932 - 1945 within the broader “Persecution” section.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/ww2/nazimaps.html provides 21 maps in the “Germany & the Nazis” section within the “World War II Maps” section, within the broader “Reference” section

Jüdisches Museum Wien (Jewish Museum Vienna)
http://www.jmw.at/de
http://www.jmw.at/en
From this Jewish Museum’s internet homepage, you can access this Museum’s Archive, Library, and Exhibitions pages.

http://www.lbi.org brings you to the website of the Leo Baeck Institute - in New York City/Berlin “... a research library [and archive] devoted to the study of the history and culture of German speaking Jewry.”
This Institute’s 1938 Projekt : Posts from the Past presents a different personal document for each day of 1938, that reveals a Jewish person or family’s suffering from the growing Nazi persecution in Germany and post-Anschluss Austria, and the struggles to emigrate and escape from there. The letters, diary entries and photographs, as well as the accompanying commentary, also show how pivotal a year 1938 was in the devolution towards war and the Holocaust. Hugo Jellinek’s letters to his daughter, Gisella Nadja, of July 26, 1938 and August 21, 1938, as well as Berta Jellinek's sisterly letter to Gisella Nadja, of August 28, 1938 represent those particular days of 1938, and can be viewed on the LBI 1938 Projekt website via the above hyperlinks, as well as in the Letters section of this ShoahLetters website.

http://sfi.usc.edu brings you to the website of The Institute for Visual History and Education of the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation.
This Institute, founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994, as the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, now has almost 52,000 audio visual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of  the Holocaust, as well as of the genocide in Rwanda.
http://sfi.usc.edu/search brings one directly to the “Search" section of the Institute’s Visual History Archive
http://iwitness.usc.edu/SFI/ complements Echoes and Reflections and contains 1300 video testimonies and approximately 200 interdisciplinary, multimedia activities.

http://www.USHMM.org brings you to the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., USA.
The following three links each enable you to directly access text on various topics/themes, as well as  historical film footage and photos, maps, images of artifacts, audio clips and personal testimony:
http://www.ushmm.org/learn/holocaust-encyclopedia brings you to the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
http://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/before-1933 brings you to articles which provide background information, as well as facts on specific events in the following period designations: 1914 through 1932, 1933 - 38, 1939 -41, 1942 - 45, after 1945 through July, 2011.
http://www.ushmm.org/wic/en/article.php?Moduleld=10007761 brings you to 1938 Key Dates. From this webpage, you can access Related Articles, which provide facts on Key Dates in all of the other years between 1933 - 1948.

http://www.YadVashem.org brings you to the website of Yad Vashem - The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, Israel.
Yad Vashem’s Holocaust Timeline:
http://yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/timeline/index.asp allows you to click for increasingly detailed information and explanations on significant events during the years 1914 - 1945.

http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org brings you to the [on-line] Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
YIVO’s  “...mission is to preserve, study and teach the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany and Russia.”
http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/maps.aspx provides 60 interactive maps of Eastern Europe.

www.TheViennaProject.org provides fascinating research, videos of oral histories, teaching lessons, and details of live public events, many incorporating social action, throughout the city of Vienna, all designed to educate and memorialize, raise consciousness and "...stimulate fresh conversations in novel formats regarding the Holocaust and National Socialism" [involving multiple Austrian victim groups in addition to the Jews, e.g., homosexuals, Roma and Sinti]. The Vienna Project was  inspired by the Project's conceiver and director, Karen Frostig's reading of her family 'Shoah Letters'; coincidentally closely akin to the inspiration for this website, www.ShoahLetters.org.

 

The following three letters, viewable now in the Letters section of ShoahLetters.org, were read publicly in the Vienna Project's city-wide Reading Marathon, as part of the October 2014 closing events: Hugo Jellinek's letter of October 14, 1938, Karl Jellinek's letter, with an estimated date of September 2 - 5, 1939, and Gisela Jellinek Schlesinger's letter of mid-March - May 1939.

Books

Arad, Yitzhak, Israel Gutman and Abraham Margaliot, eds. Documents on the Holocaust (Lincoln, Nebraska, London and Jerusalem, 1999).
Note: Document 63 - “Deportation of Jews from Austria to Nisko (Lublin), October 1939, in the Report by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, October 18, 1939,” includes the exact Nazi order which resulted in Siegfried Jellinek’s deportation from Vienna to Nisko on October 20, 1939;  Document 63 (pp. 143 - 144),  is just one of this book’s “...213 documents on the theory, planning, and execution of, and reaction and resistance to, the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jews...”
See also in this website’s Documents section, the entry on Siegfried’s Jellinek in the “List of Jews Deported from Vienna to Nisko on October 20, 1939, and Related Cover Pages.”

Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told In the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston, 1993).

Browning, Christopher R. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 - March 1942 (Jerusalem and Lincoln, Nebraska, 2005).

Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against the Jews: 1933 -1945 (New York, 1975).

Eban, Abba. My People: the Story of the Jews (New York & Toronto, 1968)
All of Eban’s eloquent writing is brilliantly insightful, but his chapter on “The Holocaust” is most directly relevant to this website.

Engel, David. The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews (Essex, England, 2000).
Note: This cogent and insightful book, which is one of the “Seminar Studies in History,” is divided into four main parts: THE BACKGROUND, ASSESSMENT, ANALYSIS and DOCUMENTS.

Fackenheim, Emil L. "The Human Condition After Auschwitz: A Jewish Testimony A Generation After." The ninth annual lecture in Syracuse University's B. G. Rudolph Lectures in Judaic Studies (New York, 1971).
Note: This 15 -page publication of Fackenheim's lecture contains  many ideas which are thought-provoking, powerful and still apt. The following are two short excerpts from p. 9  and p. 11, respectively:
"Despite all necessary attempts to comprehend, the Nazi system in the end exceeds all comprehension. One cannot comprehend but only confront and oppose."
". . . Jewish survival after Auschwitz is...in itself and without any further reasons or theological justifications a sacred testimony to all mankind that life and love, not death and hate, shall prevail."

Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews:  Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933 - 1939 (New York, 1997).

______________. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939 - 1945 (New York, 2007).

Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War (New York, 1985).

______________. Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (New York, 2006).

Gutterman, Bella, and Avner Shalev, eds. To Bear Witness: Holocaust Remembrance at Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, 2005).

Halevy, Yechiam and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Historical Atlas of World War II  (New York, 1996).
Note:  This Atlas contains 252 pages of maps and explanatory text pertaining to different European regions and time periods, including pre and post-war Europe, Nazi German conquests and administration, deportations, ghettos, massacres, killing centers, rescue and Jewish armed resistance activity, death marches and liberation. The maps of  “Eastern Europe After the German-Soviet Pact 1939 - 1940” (p. 31), and of the “German Administration of Europe 1942” (p. 33), were of particular help in our construction of Map 2 and 3 for this website.

Harran, Marilyn, et al., The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures (Lincolnwood, Illinois, 2007).

Kaplan, Marion A. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York  and Oxford, 1998).

Konner, Melvin. Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews (New York, 2003)
Konner’s chapter (with the appropriately disturbing title) “Smoke: How the Germans
Gave the Jews Graves in the Air” is distinctive in its presentation of excerpts from Rabbis' Responsa of 1941 - 2, Eli Wiesel,
Primo Levy, Paul Celan, Ruth Beker, Simon Wiesenthal, Viktor Frankl, as well as contemporary historians and rabbis.

Larson, Erik. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family [of the US Ambassador, William Dodd] in Hitler’s Berlin (New York, 2011).

Levin, Itamar. The Footprint of Robbery:Testimonies and Documents on the Looting of Holocaust Victims’ Assets (The Center for Study of Jewish Heroism - March of the Living, ca. 1999).

Longerich, Peter. HOLOCAUST: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford University Press, NY, 2010).
This "comprehensive history of the Nazi machinery of mass-murder --" starts with historical background of anti-semitism in the Weimar Republic -- and continues in five parts: I. Racial Persecution, 1933 - 1934, II. The Persecution of the Jews, 1939 - 1941, III. Mass Execution of Jews in the Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941, IV. Genesis of the Final Solution on A European Scale, 1941, and V: The Extermination of the European Jew, 1942 - 1945.
Pages 151 - 155 of Part II. provides significant information on the first phase of Deportations: "The Nisko-Lublin Plan of October 1939," in which Siegfried Jellinek was captured.

MacDonogh, Giles. 1938: Hitler’s Gamble (New York, 2009).

Rothkirchen, Livia. The Jews of Bohemia & Moravia: Facing the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 2005).
Especially relevant to Hugo Jellinek and his immediate family's experiences are: Chapter 3, THE AFTERMATH OF MUNICH and
Chapter 4, UNDER GERMAN OCCUPATION.

Wasserstein, Bernard. On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War (New York, 2012).
Note: Bernard Wasserstein includes discussion of ‘our’ Jellinek family’s post-Anschluss experiences, especially that of Hugo Jellinek’s, in this multi-faceted “...portrait of a [Jewish] world on the brink of annihilation.” [from front flap of this book’s dust jacket, italics added here for emphasis.] There are also quotes from four of Hugo’s letters and one of Gisela Jellinek Schlesinger’s, written in 1938 and 1939, as well as important facts on Hugo’s immediate family’s fate in the “Eplilogue: Fates Known and Unknown.”
(see pp. 363- 365, 425 - 426, 445).
Prof. Wasserstein writes at the end of his introduction to this book (p. XXI),  that his “...fundamental objective has been to try to restore forgotten men, women, and children to the historical record, to breathe renewed life momentarily into those who were soon to be dry bones.” This writer [P. Jellinek] believes that Prof. Wasserstein’s objective was most admirably met, and hopes that you, the viewer and reader of this website will feel moved and influenced by even just the small measure of that kind of ‘restoration’ and ‘renewed life’ here.

____________. Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (New York, 2007).
Note: Although a full understanding of the Nazis’ and their collaborators‘ murder of Jews and destruction of Eastern European Jewish culture would be aided by reading this entire massive work, the chapters most directly relevant are: “Depression and Terror 1929 - 1936,” “Europe in the 1930s,” Spiral into War 1936 - 1939,” Hitler Triumphant 1939 - 1942,” Life and Death in Wartime,” and “End of Hitler’s Europe 1942 - 1945.” (pp. 165 - 395).

 

____________. Britain and the Jews of Europe: 1939 - 1945 (London and Oxford, 1979 and revised, 1988). 
Wasserstein poses the following question in his preface to this book:  ". . . was Britain's war-time policy towards the Jewish problem the only possible one compatible with the overriding end of victory?" --- and then proceeds to give overwhelming documentary evidence to cause this reader [P. Jellinek] to form a decidedly negative answer. This book tells the true, extremely disheartening story of Britain's war-time ". . . near total ban on Jewish refugee immigration to Britain, the restrictive immigration policy in Palestine, the failure to aid Jewish resistance in Europe, and the rejection of the scheme for the Allied bombing of Auschwitz."

 

Archives and Other Unpublished Sources

 

*Please note: throughout this alphabeticized list of archival sources, the German language website, if any, precedes the English language website.

 

Archiv der Universität Wien (Vienna University Archive)

http://www.univie.ac.at/archiv

http://bibliothek.univie.ac.at/archiv/vienna_university_archive.html

A sample of the forms that Karl Jellinek was required to fill out in order to enroll each semester between 1918 - 1921, in his Doctor of Law and Political Science studies, will be displayed in the Documents section of this website in the future.

The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People
https://cahjp.huji.ac.il
The following statement about family letters (from the CAHJP website appeal to “Donate Materials”) corroborates the underlying concept of this ShoahLetters.org website:
“The letters [“...personal or family correspondence written from Europe to relatives in the U.S., Israel or elsewhere – especially for the years preceding W.W.II, but also for earlier periods...”] enable a glimpse into the real lives of the people who wrote them and are therefore of great historical significance.”
Selected image files from the Viennese collection of the CAHJP,  showing a.) key pages of the 1923 - 24 Annual Report of the Zionist fraternal organization that Karl Jellinek led, Der Lese-und Redehalle jüdischer Hochschüler in Wien (The Reading and Lecture Hall of Jewish Students in Vienna);  b.) invitations from this same organization to lectures, concerts, Hanukkah celebrations, receptions and 'dance - evenings' between the years 1923 - 25; and c.) pages of handwritten correspondence between Siegfried Jellinek and the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, Wien (the central organization of The Jewish Community, Vienna), from 1911 - [1920s or 30s?], will be displayed on ShoahLetters.org in the future.

Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes
http://www.doew.at/
http://www.doew.at/english
The key information in this organization’s Shoah-Opferdatenbanken (Shoah Victim Databank) on the births, deportations and deaths of Siegmund Jellinek, Siegfried Jellinek, Gisela Jellinek Schlesinger, Leopold Schlesinger, and Mathilde/Manzie Eckstein corroborate the epistolary and other evidence already on this website, but may still be displayed in the Documents section of this website in the future.

Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien - Matriken  (Jewish Community of Vienna - Records)
http://www.ikg-wien.at
http://www.ikg-wien.at/?lang=en
Some of the birth and marriage records of key Jellinek family members, as well as photos of the collection of IKG’s annual birth record books, which reveal the declining number of Jewish births in Vienna from 1927 - 1938, will be displayed in the Documents and Images sections of this website in the future.

Kriegsarchiv : Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (War Archive: Austrian State Archives),
(aka Die Abteilung Kriegsarchiv des Österreichischen Staatsarchiv - The War Archive Department of the Austrian State Archives)
http://www.oesta.gv.at/site/5001/default.aspx
http://www.oesta.gv.at/site/6413/default.aspx
Some of the records on Karl Jellinek’s military service during World War I, that were obtained from this archive, will be displayed in the Documents section in the future.

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv  (Austrian State Archives)
http://www.oesta.gv.at/
http://www.oesta.gv.at/DesktopDefault.aspx?alias=oestaen&init
Of the documents provided by this archive, the following will be displayed on this website in the future: the Vermögensverzeichnis (asset inventory) filled out by Siegmund Jellinek on the day before his deportation from Vienna to Theresienstadt, the Vermögensverzeichnis that Leopold and Gisela Jellinek Schlesinger were forced to fill out before their deportation, and a sampling of the 1942 - 1944 Nazi rulings regarding money owed to Dr. Karl Jellinek for his pre-Anschluss legal services.

Personal (videotaped) communication with Helene Luckerbauer and the property history record of the Oberhollabrunn, Austria building
in which Siegmund Jellinek and his family lived and in which Siegmund J. served as the synagogue Oberkantor (chief cantor), spiritual leader and religion teacher, provided by Helene Luckerbauer of Oberhollabrunn, (aka Hollabrunn) in 2008. The videotape and/or the German transcript and English translation of Mrs. Luckerbauer’s and her husband’s recollections and thoughts about the synagogue and its fate under the Nazis and afterwards, as well as the (false) property history record will be displayed in the Documents section of this website in the future.

Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv (City and Provincial Archives of Vienna)
http://www.wien.gv.at
http://www.wien.gv.at/english/
Some of the particularly informative documents obtained from this archive, that will be displayed in the Documents section of this website in the future, include: a.)“Historische Meldeunterlagen” (historical residential documents) of key Jellinek and Eckstein family members. b.)  the 1938 Nazi proposal, order and “official juridical decision” for the dissolution of (and ‘annexation’ of the possessions of) the Jewish students’ Zionist association that Karl Jellinek led and represented during some of the 1920s and 30s.

Personal Memoirs and/or Historical Narratives of Particular
Relevance to the Jellinek Family’s Experiences

Bondy, Ruth. “Elder of the Jews”: Jakob Edelstein of Theresienstadt (published in 1981, in Hebrew as Edelshtain neged ha-zeman (Edelstein Against Time); published in E. Abel’s English translation, New York, 1989.

Clare, George. Last Waltz in Vienna: The Rise and Destruction of a Family, 1842 - 1942 (London, 1981, New York, 1982).

De Silva, Cara. ed. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezín (Northvale, N. J. and London, 1996).

de Waal, Edmund. The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (New York, 2010).

Dwork, Deborah and Jan Van Pelt, Robert. Flight From The Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933 - 1946 (W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 2009).
In addition to this book’s general and specific, relevant and poignant information on the plight of all Viennese Jews, the 14th chapter’s very title, Loved Ones Become Letters, as well as many of its descriptions and observations, resonate particularly strongly with the Jellinek and Eckstein families’ experience. (pp. 245 - 263)

Fehringer, Alfred. Ihr Müsst Hier Weg: Die jüdische Gemeinde Hollabrunn von 1850 bis 1938 (You Must Get Out of Here: The Jewish Community of Hollabrunn from 1850 - 1938)(Vienna, 2008).
Note: On pp. 20, 22 - 23, there is information (albeit not always fully complete or correct) about Siegmund Jellinek’s role as the Hollabrunn community’s last cantor, spiritual leader, registrar, and religion teacher, and the person in whose house the temple was located.
Pp. 54 -55 and 59 contain information about the September 1938, Nazi-forced expulsion of Jews from Hollabrun, and Siegmund J.’s taking the Hollabrunn community registers with him to Vienna [to try to protect the identities/lives of those registered]. An account of the subsequent discovery and seizure of those records from Gisela Jellinek Schlesinger in Siegmund J.’s apartment in Vienna in March 1939 is also presented.
On page 75, in the Deportationen (Deportations) section, and on pages 101 - 102 in the chapter: “SCHICKSALE DER HOLLABRUNNER JUDEN UND JÜDINNEN” (Fates of  Hollabrunn’s Jews), basic facts are presented about the pre-Nazi era lives, deportations and the ultimate [tragic] fates of Siegmund and Berta S. Jellinek, Hugo Jellinek and Hugo’s two younger daughters, Berta and Anna Jellinek.

Gatscher - Riedl, Gregor. Von Habsburg Zu Herzl: Jüdische Studentenkultur in Mitteleuropa 1848 - 1948. (From Habsburg to Herzl: Jewish Student Culture in Central Europe 1848 - 1948) (KRAL, Berndorf, Austria, 2021).
This book expands (beyond the DAVID article reproduced in this Website’s Document section) on the context, history and activities of the Reading and Lecture Hall for Jewish University Students in Vienna, in which Dr. Karl Jellinek was an active participant and President between 1922 - 1938. The book’s second chapter: The Student “Reading and Lecture Halls” at Austrian Universities from 1848 to 1918 (pp. 39 - 63) provides the reader (of German) significant, additional, detailed and illustrated information on the historical background, as well as the multiple activities of ‘Karl Jellinek’s’ particular Jewish “Reading and Lecture Hall” and on his leadership role in it.
There is also a brief list of facts about Karl Jellinek’s education, military service in WWI, profession as a criminal defense lawyer and life-long Zionist endeavors, on p. 279. of the book’s Biographical section.

Das Jüdische Komitee für Theresienstadt  (The Jewish Committee for Thereisenstadt), consisting of Dr. Gustav Jellinek, Dr. Ernst Feldsberg et al., Totenbuch Theresienstadt: Deportierte Aus Österreich  (The Theresienstadt Book of the Dead: Deported from Austria)  (Vienna, 1971).
Note: In the Documents Section of this website, readers can see and understand this book's German language title pages and the page containing specific information on Siegmund Jellinek’s deportation to Theresienstadt.

Offenberger, Ilana Fritz. The Jews of Nazi Vienna 1938 - 1945 : Rescue and Destruction (Palgraves Studies in the History of Genocide, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, UK)

Price, Monroe. Objects of Remembrance: A Memoir of American Opportunities and Viennese Dreams (Budapest, 2009).

Sauer, Barbara and Ilse Reiter-Zatloukal. Advokaten 1938: Das Schicksal der in den Jahren 1938 bis 1945 verfolgten österreichischen Rechtsanwältinnen und Rechtsanwälte (Lawyers 1938: The Fate of Austrian Lawyers Persecuted in the Years 1938 - 1945) (Vienna, 2010).
Note: Information on Dr. Karl Jellinek, one of the approximately 1800 persecuted Austrian Jewish lawyers, is on page 191.
See also the English Summary of this book, on pages IX - XIV in this otherwise German language book.

Singer, Peter. Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna (New York, 2003).

Weyr, Thomas. The Setting of the Pearl: Vienna Under Hitler (New York, 2005).

Wildman, Sarah. Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind [in Vienna] (New York, 2014).

Wimmer, Adi, ed. Strangers at Home and Abroad: Recollections of Austrian Jews Who Escaped Hitler  (Jeffferson, North Carolina, and London, 2000).

Selected Literary Works

Glatstein, Jacob. I Keep Recalling: The Holocaust Poems of Jacob Glatstein (first published in Yiddish in six volumes of poetry, ca. 1938 - 66; English and Yiddish ed. Jersey City, New Jersey, 1993).

Levi, Primo. Se questo e un uomo (first published in Italian, 1958; published in English as Survival in Auschwitz: the Nazi Assault on Humanity, New York, 1996).

______________. Sommersi e i un salvati (first published in Italian, 1986; published in English as The Drowned and the Saved, New York, 1989).

Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces (New York, 1997).
Note: Among this book’s many powerful and memorable lines are the following: “Murder steals from a man his future. It steals from him his own death. But it must not steal from him his life.” (p. 120).

Lustig, Arnost. A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova (Woodstock, New York, 1987).

Oren, Ram. Gertruda’s Oath: A Child, A Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II ( first published in Hebrew, 2007; English ed., New York, 2009).
From the “Author’s Note” on the page before the “Introduction” on p. 1:
Gertruda’s Oath is a true story... Michael and Gertruda’s story, and the story of all those affected by the Holocaust is poignant history, and is here told as close to fact as possible.”

Weil, Jiri. Life with a Star (New York, 1989).

Wiesel, Eli. Night (New York, 1960).

Selected Books of Shoah Letters

Bacharach, Zwi, Gutman, Israel and authors of the 117 letters. Last Letters from the Shoah (Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, 2004).
Note:  Before the letters, Zwi Bacharach provides an introduction and essay entitled “The Holocaust Reflected through Personal Experience,” in which he explains the letters’ themes of “Testimony; A Sense of Doom, Despair and Hope; Wills and Last Requests; Concern for Children; Revenge, Dilemmas, Acceptance, Faith, Resistance and Suicide; The Underground and Coded language. In the summary at the end of this book (p. 387), Zwi Bacharach declares that:
“The letters in this book were written about reality, in the midst of reality, and only reality emerges from them, and indeed their words were written in blood.”

Fox, Anne L. Between the Lines: Letters from the Holocaust (Margate, New Jersey, 2005).
Note: Anne and her older brother Günter in England, were able to correspond with their parents who were trapped in Berlin. The letters began in 1938 and ended in 1943 when their father and mother were deported to Theresienstadt. Martin Gilbert’s introductory remarks on p. 7 of this book are truly apt for these letters, as they are for the other collections of letters listed here, and for the Jellinek family letters:
“One cannot overestimate the importance of contemporary letters when it comes to the story of the fate of the Jews in the Nazi era. It is through such letters that we hear the authentic voice of those who witnessed that terrible time... A letter penned on a certain day cannot be influenced by what came later. It is the raw material of history, and brings us as close as we can ever get to the moods and realities of the Holocaust.”
Anne Fox has written about her experiences escaping Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport in My Heart in a Suitcase, which has been adapted into a moving play, and in the book which she co-authored with Eva Abraham-Podietz: Ten Thousand Children. Anne has also generously worked on the translations of many of the Jellinek family letters.

Large, David Clay. And the World Closed Its Doors: The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust (New York, 2003).

Luftig, Ida. Letters From the End of a Dark Tunnel (Margate, New Jersey, 2008).

Pickus, Keith H. Our Only Hope: Eddie’s Holocaust Story and the Weisz Family Correspondence, Studies in the Shoah Volume XXX (Lanham, Maryland, 2008).