The Calmann-Lévy co-edition

Discover the latest books from the Mémorial de la Shoah collection published by Calmann-Lévy, on sale at the Mémorial bookstore or online.

Treblinka, 1942 – 1943: a factory producing Jewish dead in the Polish forest of Michal Hausser-Gans
" Auschwitz was nothing [after Treblinka], Auschwitz was a holiday camp."
Thus spoke Hershl Sperling, one of the very few survivors of the most dreadful killing center of Aktion Reinhard. His statement may seem sacrilegious to the reader who is uninformed about Treblinka’s reality. Indeed, if the name of this site is known, its history, like that of Belzec and Sobibor, is much less so, as the Nazis took great care to erase the traces of their barbaric enterprise, liquidate the last witnesses and raze the vestiges they abandoned. Hence the challenge posed by this "impossibility of accountability". Thus, in 1943, the site of Treblinka had already taken on the appearance of a farm.
The last stop on a black road from Berlin, Treblinka, among all the killing centers, was ahead of Auschwitz in efficiency. This is where the destruction of the Jews was most expeditious: nearly a million people were murdered there in 400 days. Based on unpublished sources, Michal Hausser Gans describes in detail, since its genesis, the functioning of the camp, highlighting the transformations undertaken to perfect the death machine. Until the revolt of August 2, 1943, reported by some of the survivors who, against all odds, managed to seize the machine of this unsurpassed model of the genocidal industry. This exhaustive study makes it possible for the first time to make accessible to a wide public the confrontation with "the worst of the worst" and with this path towards the horror that Europe failed so long to decipher.


Nul droit, nulle part: journal de Breslau 1933 – 1941 by Willy Cohn

Historian, Willy Cohn is one of the major intellectual figures of Jewish Breslau in the interwar period. Preoccupied by the course of things since the advent of Hitler, Willy Cohn is for his descendants, as for posterity in the broad sense, the chronicler of the destiny of the Jews and Judaism before what he believes must be the end of a world, his own and that of his family.
He therefore devoted all his strength, up to the last hours before his deportation, to writing and making sure that a testimony which turned out to be exceptional was put in a safe place. He does it as a historian, who records restrictions on rights, dispossessions, and deprivations ; as a German Jew, who desperately cares about the Germany for which he fought during the First World War ; as a pious man who believes in the strength of Jewish history, he shares the contradictions that undermine him, his hesitations about what to do: flee or not, what to do in Palestine? He had neither the time nor the means to leave and was murdered with his second wife and their two daughters in Kaunas, Lithuania, while his first wife was gassed at Auschwitz.
With this abridged version, the Breslau Diary presented here delivers us a valuable document, which the German press has compared to the testimony of Victor Klemperer, and which had an immense echo at its publication. He makes us take an exemplary measure of what was the programmed destruction of Jews in Europe under Nazism.
Born in 1888 in Breslau, then a city of the Reich (today Wroclaw in Poland), Willy Cohn teaches history at high school and is dedicated to research on the history of Sicily during the Norman era. His works are still a reference today. Politically engaged, he notably wrote biographies on Marx, Engels, Lassalle, and wrote articles on Jewish history. He also left Memoirs.

"VICHY, THE FRENCH AND THE SHOAH – A STATE OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE"

(History of the Shoah Review, no. 212, ed. Shoah Memorial, October 2020)

under the direction of Laurent Joly (CNRS)

For its second issue, issued by the new editorial board headed by Audrey Kichelewski and Jean-Marc Dreyfus, RHS – Revue d'histoire de la Shoah, the oldest scientific journal on the subject, bears witness to the vitality and richness of international research on the Shoah. In 1945, faced with the purge, the leaders of Vichy, Pétain and Laval first, had thus justified their policy against the Jews: Vichy avoided for the Jews of France the fate of the Jews of Poland; its policy was guided by the desire to protect the French Jews, even if it means sacrificing foreign Jews to make a change; and it is thanks to this policy that the majority of Jews have survived in France...

Oneg Shabbès, Warsaw Ghetto Diary by Emanuel Ringelblum

oneg-shabbat(Translated from Yiddish by Nathan Weinstock and Isabelle Rozenbaumas)
Emanuel Ringelblum and some Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto set up an information and document collection team that meets every Saturday under the name ofOneg Shabbat (Oneg Shabbès in Yiddish), "the joy of the Sabbath." At the same time, Ringelblum kept a diary in Yiddish. Over the months, the description of the terrible misery organized by the Germans takes precedence. There is also a description (and the cold anger that accompanies it) of the treachery of part of the dominant Jewish classes, of the baseness of many, of the treachery of a handful. But the author also highlights the solidarity and vitality of cultural resistance to this martyrdom. The present translation of this manuscript found at the Liberation includes all the daily chronicles of Ringelblum.

journal-leib-rochmannJournal 1943-1944 by Leïb Rochman

(Translated from Yiddish by Isabelle Rozenbaumas, éd. Calmann-Lévy/coll. Memorial de la Shoah, February 2017)
Leïb Rochman (1918-1978), the author of the masterpiece À pas aveugles du monde, wrote his diary between 1943 and 1944 while he was hiding with his wife, his sister-in-law, and two friends behind a double partition on the farm of a Polish peasant, then in a pit dug in a barn. Leïb Rochman and his companions hear the outside world, especially their host’s conversations with neighboring villagers who bemoan the fact that they could no longer find Jews to deliver to death in exchange for a few kilos of sugar. In addition to its literary beauty, this testimony is one of the most powerful stories about the Shoah in the Polish countryside.

carnet-clandestinite-flinkerClandestinity Carnets – Brussels, 1942-1943 by Moshé Flinker

(Translated from Hebrew by Guy Alain Sitbon, éd. Calmann-Lévy/coll. Mémorial de la Shoah, February 2017)
At the age of 16, Moshé Flinker left the Netherlands with his parents and six brothers and sisters in an attempt to escape Nazi persecution. Arrived in Brussels, he began to write his diary in Hebrew. A deep-rooted expert in Jewish history, his writings are driven by the conviction that the creation of a Jewish state on ancestral land is the only possible response to an extermination attempt unique in history. His diary ends on 19 May 1943 with the words: "I feel like I am dead. Here I am." On 19 May 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz and disappeared in Bergen-Belsen in January 1945.