Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Two students from the Sassoli Promotion, Nina and Olivier, took the initiative to compile references (books, films, research) to delve deeper into the topic.
Take a few minutes, reflect and remember this dark period of European history.
FILMS
- Schindler’s List (1993) is perhaps the most famous film on the Holocaust.
- Denial (2016) portrays the 1996 Irving vs Penguin Books Ltd. Trial, and the dangers Holocaust deniers pose.
- Simone, le voyage du siècle (2021) shows how the life of former President of the European Parliament was shaped by the Holocaust.
BOOKS
- If This Is a Man, by Primo Levi, is an autobiographical account of the author’s internment at Auschwitz.
- Maus, by Artie Spiegelman - a comic book depicting the author’s interview of his father, Vladek, showing how the Holocaust lingers in collective memory. Jews are caricatured as mice, and Nazis as cats.
- The Pope’s Jews, by Gordon Thomas, shows the Vatican’s efforts to save Jewish people.
- Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder, analyses the Holocaust within the context of mass violence in Eastern Europe, delineating how regional complexities of the 1930s and 40s shaped the genocide.
- La Carte postale, by Anne Berest, traces the author’s efforts to reconstitute the deportation and murder of her family in Auschwitz.
RESEARCH
- ‘The EU Politics of Commemoration: Can Europeans Remember Together?’ –Annabelle Littoz-Monnet looks at how the European Parliament has created a unified memory of the Holocaust, and how grouping memories of Nazism and Stalinism oversimplifies historical narratives.
- Generation2Generation enables the continuation of Holocaust testimony.
- Mapping the Holocaust (fifth video down): this lecture by Prof Tim Cole takes us on a journey through different landscapes of the Holocaust, detailing how central Auschwitz-Birkenau was to the genocide.
- The UCS Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive contains 54,000 interviews with survivors of genocide.