Testimonies of Resistance

Nicholas Chare is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and Film Studies at the Université de Montréal.

List of Figures and Tables



Foreword

Anne Karpf



Acknowledgements

Note on Transliteration



Introduction: Testimonies of Resistance

Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams



Part I: Historical and Ethical Questions of Representation



Chapter 1. Knowing Cruelty: The Negation of Death and Burial in SS Violence

Griselda Pollock



Chapter 2. What Makes the Grey Zone Grey? Blurring Factual and Ethical Judgements of the Sonderkommando

Dominic Williams



Part II: Witnessing from the Heart of Hell



Chapter 3. Farewell Letter from the Crematorium: On the Authorship of the First Recorded ‘Sonderkommando-Manuscript’ and the Discovery of the Original Letter

Andreas Kilian



Chapter 4. To Read the Illegible: Techniques of Multispectral Imaging and the Manuscripts of the Jewish Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau

Pavel Polian and Aleksandr Nikityaev



Chapter 5. ‘Like a True Greek’: The Last Will and Testimony of Marcel Natzari

K.E. Fleming



Chapter 6. Disinterred Words: The Letters of Herman Strasfogel and Marcel Nadjary

Nicholas Chare, Ersy Contogouris and Dominic Williams



Chapter 7. The Letter of Herman Strasfogel

Translated by Ersy Contogouris



Chapter 8. The Letter of Marcel Nadjary

Translated by Ersy Contogouris



Chapter 9. The Religious Life of Sonderkommando Members inside the Killing Installations in Auschwitz-Birkenau

Gideon Greif



Part III: Retrospective Representations



Chapter 10. Doubly Cursed: The Sonderkommando in the Documents of the International Tracing Service

Dan Stone



Chapter 11. Enduring Witness: David Olère’s Visual Testimony

Carol Zemel



Chapter 12. The Sonderkommando and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum

Dominic Williams and Isabel Wollaston



Chapter 13. Early and Late Testimonies of the Sonderkommando Survivors

Gideon Greif



Chapter 14. From Special Operations Executive to Sonderkommando: Sebastian Faulks and the Anxiety of Invention

Sue Vice



Chapter 15. Out of the Plan, Out of the Plane 2: Stripping, Fourth Letter to Gerhard Richter

Georges Didi-Huberman



Chapter 16. Greeks in the Birkenau Sonderkommando: Representation and Reality

Steven Bowman



Part IV: Cinema and the Sonderkommando



Chapter 17. ‘We Did Something’: Framing Resistance in Cinematic Depictions of the Sonderkommando

Barry Langford



Chapter 18. ‘We Can’t Know What We’re Capable Of ’: Approaching the ‘Grey Zone’ in Holocaust Film

Adam Brown



Chapter 19. The Sonderkommando on Screen

Philippe Mesnard



Afterword: Tracing Topographies of Memory and Mourning

Victor Jeleniewski Seidler



Index