Saul Friedländer

xvii, 228 p. 23 cm

The enactment of the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews depended upon many factors, including the cooperation of local authorities and police departments, and the passivity of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. Necessary also was the victims' willingness to submit, often with the hope of surviving long enough to escape the German vise. The Years of Extermination, the completion of Saul Friedlander's major historical opus on Nazi Germany and the Jews, explores the convergence of the various aspects of this most systematic and sustained of modern genocides. In this unparalleled work — based on a vast array of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices from diaries, letters, and memoirs — the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive representation.

"Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, Friedländer returns with [Where memory leads] bridging the gap between the ordeals of his childhood and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. After abandoning his youthful conversion to Catholicism, he rediscovers his Jewish roots as a teenager and builds a new life in Israeli politics. Friedländer's initial loyalty to Israel turns into a lifelong fascination with Jewish life and history. He struggles to process the ubiquitous effects of European anti-Semitism while searching for a more measured approach to the Zionism that surrounds him. Friedländer goes on to spend his adulthood shuttling between Israel, Europe, and the United States, armed with his talent for language and an expansive intellect. His prestige inevitably throws him up against other intellectual heavyweights. In his early years in Israel, he rubs shoulders with the architects of the fledgling state and brilliant minds such as Gershom Scholem and Carlo Ginzburg, among others. Most importantly, this memoir led Friedländer to reflect on the wrenching events that induced him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945"--

Step-by-step account of how Pope Pius reacted to antisemitic measures of nazi Germany.

Giving considerable emphasis to an immense array of recently published material and a wealth of new archival findings, Saul Friedlander describes and interprets the steadily increasing anti-Jewish persecution in Germany after the 1933 Nazi accession to power. He demonstrates the interaction between intentions and contingencies, between discernible causes and changing circumstances. Friedlander shows how Nazi ideological objectives and tactical policy decisions enhanced one another and always left an opening for ever more radical moves.

From Israel the author--who was planning to become a Catholic priest until he discovered his parents were Jews who had been killed during World War II-examines what it means to be a Jew.

"Four months before Hitler came to power, Saul Friedländer was born in Prague to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1939, seven-year-old Saul and his family were forced to flee to France, where they lived through the German Occupation, until his parents' ill-fated attempt to flee to Switzerland. They were able to hide their son in a Roman Catholic seminary before being sent to Auschwitz where they were killed. After an imposed religious conversion, young Saul began training for priesthood. The birth of Israel prompted his discovery of his Jewish past and his true identity. Friedländer brings his story movingly to life, shifting between his Israeli present and his European past with grace and restraint. His keen eye spares nothing, not even himself, as he explores the ways in which the loss of his parents, his conversion to Catholicism, and his deep-seated Jewish roots combined to shape him into the man he is today. Friedländer's retrospective view of his journey of grief and self-discovery provides readers with a rare experience: a memoir of feeling with intellectual backbone, in equal measure tender and insightful,"--Baker & Taylor.

Giving considerable emphasis to an immense array of recently published material and a wealth of new archival findings, Saul Friedlander describes and interprets the steadily increasing anti-Jewish persecution in Germany after the 1933 Nazi accession to power. He demonstrates the interaction between intentions and contingencies, between discernible causes and changing circumstances. Friedlander shows how Nazi ideological objectives and tactical policy decisions enhanced one another and always left an opening for ever more radical moves.