Holocaust Remembrance Day
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.