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First published in 1955, with a revised edition appearing five years later, H. G. Adler's Theresienstadt, 1941-1945 is a foundational work in the field of Holocaust studies. As the first scholarly monograph to describe the particulars of a single camp - the Jewish ghetto in the Czech city of Terezin - it is the single most detailed and comprehensive account of any concentration camp. Adler, a survivor of the camp, divides the book into three sections: a history of the ghetto, a detailed institutional and social analysis of the camp, and an attempt to understand the psychology of the perpetrators and the victims. A collaborative effort between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Terezin Publishing Project makes this authoritative text on Holocaust history available for the first time in the English language, with a new afterword by the author's son Jeremy Adler.
List of contents
Part I. History: 1. The Jews in the 'Protectorate', 1939-41; 2. Theresienstadt: history and establishment; 3. Deportations to and from Theresienstadt; 4. Closed camp: November 1941/July 1942; 5. 'Ghetto': July 1942/summer 1943; 6. 'Jewish settlement area': summer 1943/September 1944; 7. Decline and dissolution; Part II. Sociology: 8. Administration; 9. The transport; 10. Population; 11. Housing; 12. Nutrition; 13. Labor; 14. Economy; 15. Legal conditions; 16. Health conditions; 17. Welfare; 18. Contact with the outside world; 19. Cultural life; Part III. Psychology: 20. The psychological face of the coerced community.
About the author
H. G. Adler (1910–88), poet, novelist, and scholar, was deported with his family to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1942. From there, they were moved to Auschwitz and then to the outlying camps of Buchenwald. Eighteen members of his family, including his first wife Gertrud Klepetar, perished in the camps. He returned to his birthplace of Prague in 1945, and then went into voluntary exile in the United Kingdom in 1947, where he wrote a total of twenty-seven books, including the celebrated Holocaust novels The Journey, Panorama, and The Wall. He received several prizes for his work, including the Leo Baeck Prize for Theresienstadt, 1941–1945.Belinda Cooper is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York and an adjunct professor at New York University's Center for Global Affairs and Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights. She has written for a wide variety of publications in German and English and has translated German scholarly books and articles for twenty-five years.Amy Loewenhaar-Blauweiss is founding director of the Terezin Publishing Project. She teaches at Bard College and is the curator of the Music in the Holocaust, Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism series for Bard's Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. She is author of the forthcoming book Songs in the Wilderness: Music in the Holocaust and Betrayal of 'Bildung'.Jeremy Adler is Emeritus Professor of German and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of German at King's College London. The author or editor of numerous books, he is a member of the German Academy of Language and Literature.
Summary
First published in 1955, with a revised edition appearing five years later, H. G. Adler's Theresienstadt, 1941–1945 is a foundational work in the field of Holocaust studies. It is the single most detailed account of any concentration camp and is now available in English for the first time.
Report
'Adler's Theresienstadt 1941-1945, completed in London and first published in German in 1955, is monograph as monument. ... A meticulous chronicle that is at once a sober and self-aware sociology of the absurd, a memoir in which the writer does not appear, and a penetrating ethnographic study. ... Both a masterpiece of scholarship and a literary event ...' J. Hoberman, BookForum
