The New England Holocaust Memorial was dedicated on 22 October 1995 in Boston, Massachusetts following a process of development and design that lasted over ten years. This study examines the progress of the memorial project, and in doing so, addresses the connection between collective memory and identity. In addition, it places the New England Holocaust Memorial in the context of American Holocaust commemoration, emphasizing throughout the role of public discussion and debate in the commemorative process. Mostly importantly, this study confronts the three debates central to the memorial project: 1) the debate over whether or not the memorial was to commemorate the liberators, 2) the debate over the memorial’s location on Boston’s “Freedom Trail,” and 3) the debate over whether the memorial should represent the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust or victims of Nazi Germany in general. An examination of the history of the New England Holocaust Memorial, this study contributes to existing scholarship on Holocaust commemoration in the United States, and illustrates the importance of discussion and debate as forms of commemoration.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF document. Document formatted into pages; contains [2], 40 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 38-40).

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

<p> <i>A Dangerous Proximity</i> examines the role played by the civil society in the state-sponsored persecution of the Jews in Bukovina and Bessarabia, after Romania joined the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, in the summer of 1941. It seeks to establish different patterns of civilian complicity and discuss their significance in the context of the genocide implemented by the Romanian military authorities against the Jews living in the borderlands. My dissertation illuminates the background of the civilian accomplices, their context of involvement and the motivational forces underlying their actions. </p><p> Integrating survivor testimonies, witness accounts and perpetrator viewpoints is the methodological cornerstone of my dissertation. The evidence I present and analyze was generated during my archival research and comes from war crimes trials, oral history testimonies, official correspondence exchanged between private petitioners or denouncers and the authorities, as well as survivor memoirs. </p><p> The various collections of documents I examined at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum revealed the magnitude of the cooperation between the local population and the military authorities in Bukovina and Bessarabia. The actions of Christian locals were murderous as well as undermining or destructive in non-physical ways. People from different walks of life became involved from the very beginning of the re-annexation until late after the deportations concluded. </p><p> The complete destruction of Jewish life in Bukovina and Bessarabia after July 1941 was not informed by vertical, top-down enforcement of policy or recourse to coercive measures but facilitated by the horizontal cooperation between the military establishment and the civil society. Throughout Bukovina and Bessarabia, various Christian locals assisted the Romanian and German authorities in the search for Jews, escorted and guarded them, but also participated in their plunder and murder. They denounced the Jews who were in hiding, those exempted from deportation and petitioned the authorities against Jewish specialists brought back from Transnistria. Civilian authorities used their power to expedite the physical removal of the Jews from the two regions and to extort the victims. The civilian perpetrators differed in their gender, age, ethnic identity or occupation. The victims did as well. Both Jewish men and women, young and old, poor and rich were subjected to betrayal, torture, plunder, sexual violence and murder by their Christian neighbors. Eliminating the Jews socio-economically and physically was regarded by some as a test of loyalty to the government who put them in positions of authority. For those who were morally corrupt, it served as an opportunity for personal advancement or enrichment. However, for many it was an attitude rooted in personal conviction.</p><p>

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / Transcending Terror is a study of eight Holocaust survivors who earned advanced degrees and became professors. As Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe from 1939 to 1945 they endured terror and, in many cases, torture. For each, the postwar adaptation to normality included studying a subject that interested him or her, and which afforded a means of interpreting the world. Each narrative chapter describes the social background and circumstances that partly shaped a survivor's destiny. Also portrayed are the ind ividual's particular characteristics, perspectives, predilections, and aspirations. Michael Klein, from Janoshalma, Hungary, encountered Auschwitz at age fifteen. After the war, with great effort, he became a physicist. Jerzy Ogurek, from Upper Silesia, Poland, was ten when torn from his parents in Auschwitz. With time he settled into a "normal" life, also becoming a physicist. Ruth Anna Putnam was a half-Jewish German girl who lived with her non-Jewish grandparents, in Gotha. She eventually became a philosopher. Samuel Stern spent his early childhood in Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen. Later educated in the United States, he became a biologist. Zvi Griliches, from Kovno, Lithuania, survived a Dachau subsidiary camp. He achieved prominence as an economist. Maurice Vanderpol spent years in hiding, in Amsterdam. He resumed medical school after the war, becoming a psychiatrist. Halina Nelken grew up in Krakow, survived Auschwitz, and fulfilled her dream of becoming an art historian. Farmers in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, sheltered Micheline Federman, then a young child from Paris. Micheline loved science, and became a pathologist. I analyzed data gathered in conversations, through observation, and from relevant writings, and arrived at a plausible set of conclusions. Knowledge of the breadth of human capacities and of evil may have contributed to these thoughtful individuals' ethical stance; to their belief in the unique dignity of humanness and to their commitment to engage in activities that benefit humankind. In accepting responsibility and in exercising personal choice, these survivors gave their lives meaning. The survivor, psychiatrist, and philosopher Viktor Frankl explored the human potential to realize such positive values. His work serves as a sensitizing and conceptual framework for this qualitative study. / 2999-01-01

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2008. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Most of the Holocaust's victims were never able to tell their stories, and of the millions of victims, only a few hundred were able to write about their experiences. This makes surviving personal testimonies precious in many ways. They provide a rich resource for understanding both individual experience, as well as the ways in which the socio-historical context (i.e. region, gender, and class) greatly influenced each distinctive experience. This study examines six Holocaust diaries, of Jewish victims, taken from three different parts of occupied Europe: from Poland, Janusz Korczak's Ghetto Diary and Chaim Kaplan's The Scroll of Agony; from Holland, Etty Hillesum's An Interupted Life:the Diaries, 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork and Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl; and lastly, from France, Helene Berr's Journal of Helene Berr and Raymond Raoul Lambert's Diary of a Witness, 1940-1943. Through an examination of these six diaries, this project analyzes how the personal experience of individuals who witnessed the period and chronicled its events helps us understand both the nature of the Holocaust experience and the specific local political, social, and economic contexts. This project argues that an examination of these texts, when studied alongside the histories of their specific local contexts, can reveal both what all victims shared, throughout Europe during the period, as well as what was localized- how the different horrors experienced, by the victims, created different versions of the same hell.

This study employs qualitative methods to investigate the types of learning that occurred when students in a single school encountered the Holocaust. The study explored the experiences of 48 students, together with two of their teachers and a Holocaust survivor who visited the school annually to talk to the students. A thematic analysis was conducted to identify prevalent similarities in the students’ responses. Three themes were identified, analysed and discussed. The three themes were: ‘surface level learning’ (their academic knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust), ‘affective learning’ (their emotional engagement with the topic) and ‘connective learning’ (how their encounter with the Holocaust fitted their developing worldview). The first theme revealed that students had a generally sound knowledge of the Holocaust, but there were discrepancies in the specifics of their knowledge. The second theme revealed that learning about the Holocaust had been an emotionally traumatic and complicated process. It also revealed that meeting a Holocaust survivor had a significant impact upon the students, but made them begin to question the provenance of different sources of Holocaust learning. The third theme showed that students had difficulty connecting the Holocaust with modern events and made flawed connections between the two. Finally, the study examines the views of the Holocaust survivor in terms of his intentions and his reasons for giving his testimony in schools. The study’s conclusions are drawn within the context of proposing a new conceptualisation of the Holocaust as a ‘contested space’ in history and in collective memory. A tripartite approach to Holocaust Education is suggested to affect high quality teaching within the ‘contested space’ of the event.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, School of Behavioural Science, 2002. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 209-228).

Dissertation (Ph.D.) -- The Institute for Clinical Social Work , 1995. / A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Institute of Clinical Social Work in partial fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.