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Prisoner society in the camps

Seminar questions:

How did the prisoner society compare to our society?

Why is gender still important in the camps?

What are the specifics of Millu's early Holocaust narrative?

Whose voices are missing in the sources?

Core readings:

Liana Millu, Smoke over Birkenau (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1991): 145-197.

Further readings:

Terrence des Pres, The Survivor: Anatomy of Life in Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL (London, 2014), ch. 10.

Jane Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps,” in Caplan/Wachsmann, pp. 82-107.

Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

Anna Hájková, ‘Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,’ in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38, 3 (spring 2013), pp. 503-533.

Emma Kuby, Political survivors: The resistance, the Cold War, and the fight against concentration camps after 1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

Alexis Herr, The Holocaust and compensated compliance in Italy : Fossoli di Carpi, 1942-1952 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016).

Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York, 1995).

Anna Pawełczynska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, original 1973).

Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

Maja Suderland, Inside Concentration Camps: Social Life at the Extremes (Cambridge/UK: Polity, 2013).

USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos.