Books about Treblinka from Amazon.com

“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?

Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.

Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.

.
Price: $16.15 [Notify me when price goes down.]

ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, by Charles Patterson, Ph.D., describes disturbing parallels between how the Nazis treated their victims and how modern society treats animals. The title is taken from the Yiddish writer and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, himself a vegetarian: "In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

The first part of the book describes the emergence of humans as the master species and their domination of the rest of the inhabitants of the earth. The second part examines the industrialization of slaughter (of both animals and humans) that took place in modern times, while the last part of the book profiles Jewish and German animal advocates on both sides of the Holocaust.

The Foreword is by Lucy Kaplan, a former attorney for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors..
Price: $10.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

" . . . Mr. Arad reports as a controlled and effective witness for the prosecution . . . Mr. Arad's book, with its abundance of horrifying detail, reminds us of how far we have to go." --New York Times Book Review

" . . . some of the most gripping chapters I have ever read. . . . *the* authentic, exhaustive, definitive account of the least known death camps of the Nazi era." --Raul Hilberg

Arad, historian and principal prosecution witness at the Israeli trial of John Demjanjuk (accused of being Treblinka's infamous "Ivan the Terrible"), uses primary materials to reveal the complete story of these Nazi death camps..
Price: $17.09 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Escaping Hell in Treblinka presents for the first time in English two remarkable dcouments written by two survivors of that hellish darkness.l Israel (Srul) Cymlich and Oskar Strawczynski. Both memoirs were written while the authors were still in hiding, unsure if they would succeed in evading the Nazis. Srul Cymlich's memoir is one of a handful of Jewish accounts of the Treblinka I forced labor camp. It provides a rare insight into the brutal daily life he and other inmates endured. Srul escaped in April 1943, just before he was due to be transferred to and murdered in the Treblinka II extermination camp. Oskar Stawczynski's memoir is one of the earliest written eyewitness accounts of the August 2, 1943 uprising in Treblinka. Strawczynski tells of Jewish camp officials' cruel treatment of their fellow Jewish prisoners; the viciousness of the German staff; preparations for the uprising, and life after the mass escape of the camp. Both men owed their survival and the opportunity to write their stories to their own daring and initiative as well as to the assistance they received from a variety of people, including Polish rescuers. Each wrote in order to tell his tale to the world and to his surviving family members, but at the time of writing neither author knew if he would survive,or if his account would ever be read by anyone..
Price: $15.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

How has the world come to focus on the Holocaust and why has it invariably done so in the heat of controversy, scandal, and polemics about the past? These questions are at the heart of this unique investigation of the Treblinka affair that occurred in France in 1966 when Jean-Francois Steiner, a young Jewish journalist, published Treblinka: The Revolt of an Extermination Camp. A cross between a history and a novel, Steiner's book narrated the 1943 revolt at one of the major Nazi death camps. Abetted by a scandalous interview he gave, as well as Simone de Beauvoir's glowing preface, the book shot to the top of the Parisian bestseller list and prompted a wide-ranging controversy in which both the well-known and the obscure were embroiled.

Few had heard of Treblinka, or other death camps, before the affair. The validity of the difference between those killing centers and the larger network of concentration camps making up the universe of Nazi crime had to be fought out in public. The affair also bore on the frequently raised question of the Jews' response to their dire straits.

Moyn delves into events surrounding the publication of Steiner's book and the subsequent furor. In the process, he sheds light on a few forgotten but thought-provoking months in French cultural history. Reconstructing the affair in detail, Moyn studies it as a paradigm-shifting controversy that helped change perceptions of the Holocaust in the French public and among French Jews in particular. Then Moyn follows the controversy beyond French borders to the other countries--especially Israel and the United States--where it resonated powerfully.

Based on a complete reconstruction of the debate in the press (including Yiddish dailies) and on archives on three continents, Moyn's study concludes with the response of the survivors of Treblinka to the controversy and reflects on its place in the longer history of Holocaust memory. Finally, Moyn revisits, in the context of a detailed case study, some of the theoretical controversies the genocide has provoked, including whether it is appropriate to draw universalistic lessons from the victimhood of particular groups..
Price: $19.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Village of a Million Spirits is set in what one of its characters calls "the most heavily populated quarter-square mile on earth"; the only difference, he tells us, is that "95 percent of the people were spirits " That village is Treblinka, where Jewish prisoners--the lucky ones--cooperate in their own extinction, while those who are strong enough dream of revolt. Here we meet 14-year-old Janusz, whose genius lies in being nondescript; Anatoly, the Ukrainian guard with oversize ears and a burning hatred of his German superiors; Magda, Anatoly's girlfriend, who spends the entire novel giving birth to his child; and the German officer Voss, who drinks his way into an obsession with Jewish gold. All coexist in a camp rendered with nightmarish realism, their minds fixing on almost any detail that might provide a moment's relief: meaningless coincidences, the smell of pine sap, priceless stamps dropped in the snow.

Time after time, Ian MacMillan introduces a character only to lead him shortly afterwards to the door of a gas chamber--and in one case, beyond. The technique keeps us permanently off balance; we never know whether we're meeting someone who's about to die immediately, horribly, or someone who might make it through half the book. And yet, somehow the author is getting at the fundamental challenge facing all Holocaust literature. It's the problem of scale: At what point does it all become just a parade of corpses? How does one make the suffering particular without having the reader go numb? Yanking gold teeth from the mouths of gassed Jews, young Janusz keeps himself occupied by imagining their identities. It's the only way he can bring himself to face the abstraction of death on this scale: "Each one is a person. Each has a past that is at least as complicated and abundant with memory as his own." Every 20th or 30th tooth, he pops one into his mouth, holding it there while he works and later bartering the gold for weapons.

The uprising is doomed from the start, of course, but in a way, that's not the point. Just because it will fail doesn't mean it's not necessary. At one point, Janusz watches his friend dragged off to certain death. As he goes, Adam points steadily to his temple and then his eye, and Janusz realizes that his friend is giving him an order: "that he, Janusz Siedlecki, should carry on, see, and remember, see and remember, see and remember.... All these people have been made to vanish from the earth, the reality of their existence wiped away, but for one thing: the presence of one person to see and remember." The remarkable thing is, of course, that MacMillan was not there to see or remember--and nonetheless he makes us do both. --Mary Park.
Price: $1.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

One family's extraordinary history—from their heroic feats on the battlefields of WWI to the rise of Hitler and the tragic culmination at Treblinka

Nancy's father was not like the other fathers in their northern English town. Elegantly dressed after the Eastern European fashion, an impeccable violin player, and never without a rose in his lapel, her father's entire essence alluded to a hidden and haunting past. Delving into the endless boxes of letters and diaries her father carried with him when he fled Czechoslovakia in 1939, her father's past finally comes to life.

There are times of joy—her grandparent's finding sanctuary in 1918 in a small town between Prague and the German border; their eldest son returning from the trenches of Verdune and Somme; the birth of their first grandchild; a growing family business. But there was also fear, as instability and danger was the permanent backdrop of their lives, and when Nazi Storm Troopers marched into Podersam, Nancy witness the disintegration of the family through their increasingly desperate letters.Some escape to England, others resort to suicide, while others make poignantly clear that this will be their last letter as they are marched toward Treblinka, in this intimate, heartbreaking, yet ultimately uplifting window into one family's heartache and legacy..
Price: $16.32 [Notify me when price goes down.]