Mining the Press
Paul Celan (1920-1970)

Finding Poetry in the Landscape
Of Paul Celan's Bukovina
By Joshua Cohen
The Forward, February 06, 2004

The last stop on our travelogue will be Bukovina, Celan's birthplace. We moved on from Sighet, making time through dusk, night, dawn and day, racing the rising sun through mounting snow. Heading toward Ukraine, to the hometown of Paul Celan, the most meticulously transcendent of 20th-century poets, we found ourselves in a meter and a half of snow, and in the midst of his words - "Als uns das Wei�e anfiel" ("When whiteness attacked us").
When he lived here in Bukovina, he was Paul Antschel (then Ancel, then Celan, the final stage of his anagrammatizing), born on November 23, 1920. Orientation is a major theme of Celan's work - both personal and geographic - and so his poetry is an excellent guide to one of the most strange and beautiful areas of Eastern Europe. Read more

The Italian Jewish World
Explore Italian Jewish studies and culture in Italy, Israel, and the Americas. The weekly and monthly features of CPL include: Printed Matter by Alessandro Cassin, The Centaur by Franco Baldasso, Books, and Academia
To know more about Primo Levi and his work visit Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin.
Find out more on our homepage.

Centro Primo Levi Thanks:
The Viterbi Family Foundation,
 and the Cahnman Foundation,
Travel for our programs is provided by Alitalia USA.


December 2 | An Evening in Rome with Father Desbois

Casa delle letterature, Piazza dell'Orologio, 3 Roma, Italy

The program begins at 6 pm -  Admission is free

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Welcome and introduction: Maria Ida Gaeta, Casa delle Letterature del Comune di Roma


Participants:

Patrick Desbois (author of Fucilateli Tutti, Marsilio, 2009)


David Meghnagi (Universit� Roma Tre, Master internazionale

in didattica della Shoah)


Olek Mincer will read text by Aharon Appelfeld and Vasilj Grossman



From The Archives of the New York Times
By Elaine Sciolino
October 6, 2007

PARIS, Oct. 5 - His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine - as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.
They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine, shot dead and buried throughout the country.
He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style - and his clerical collar.
The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold. Read More

Resources


Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades / Les Commandos De La Mort documentary by Micha�l Prazan, France, 2009; 180m

Premiered at the New York Jewish Film Festival:
This meticulous documentary looks at the Einsatzgruppen, mobile commandos who carried out the murder of 1.5 million Jews, Roma (gypsies), Communists, disabled people, partisans, and Soviet prisoners of war. Highly educated officers delegated most of the killing to those commandos. Featuring newly discovered archival material, this extraordinary film also includes testimony from Holocaust survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators. Part I: The Mass Graves (1941-1942); Part II: The Funeral Pyres (1942-1945).

Timothy Snyder on the Forgotten Holocaust
Book review from Thruthdig.com
February 15th, 2008 - Read more

"I felt a strong desire to sprinkle my head, my whole self, with ashes, to be nothing, to be changed into dust."
-Ida Belozovskaya, quoted in "The Unknown Black Book"

Though she survived the Holocaust, Ida Belozovskaya was not invoking the crematoriums of Auschwitz. In the Kiev of September 1941 that she was describing in one of the interviews published in "The Unknown Black Book," the Germans were killing the Jews, but without the help of gas chambers. These had not yet been invented, but the Holocaust was under way. What she was trying to describe was the fear and shame of hiding in a city where 30,000 Jews could be shot in a single day, where her father had just been seized on the street. Her references jar the ones we have come to know, but her experience is just as representative, and important, as that of Jews who lived through Auschwitz. Half of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were killed by bullets rather than by gas, in death pits rather than in death camps. Some 2.2 million Soviet Jews were killed by shooting; 350,000 more were asphyxiated in mobile gas vans. Compare this to the 1.1 million deaths at Auschwitz, or the approximately 800,000 deaths at Treblinka. Even had the death camps never existed, this eastern Holocaust would have to be regarded as the most horrible of atrocities. Yet we have all but forgotten it.

Jeffrey Burds on Ethnic Memory
Cold War Studies at Harvard University

One of the greatest obstacles to understanding the history of Galicia during and after the Second World War has been that the memory of the events themselves has been constructed ethnically--which is to say, each ethnic group has recorded their own versions of the tragic devastation of that era. The postwar phenomena of diasporas and refugee cultures have further splintered memories and perspectives, and subsequently channeled them through the prisms of the Cold War, East and West.

Polish historian Piotr Wrobel has used the phrase "double memory" to identify the phenomenon of distinct and often contradictory accounts of divergent ethnic groups who share the same history. How, for instance, is one to reconcile the memories of Poles and Jews when remembering wartime Poland? Wringing his hands at the seemingly irreconcilable divergencies between ethnically defined accounts of shared events, Wrobel recently wrote with despair: "Are we destined to remain forever entombed within these two diametrically opposed visions of the Second World War? Each [ethnic memory] is so different from the other that at times it is difficult to believe that they portray the same events." Read more