Tag: holocaust

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Intertwined lives of those who experienced age of extremes

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In The City Without Jews, award-winning historian Douglas Smith,  explains what Viennese meant stepping beyond the limits of one’s identity into a cosmopolitan world of Kultur, where race and religion could be hidden behind a veil of refinement and achievement. Vienna was once a city in which Jews did not have to be Jews, and singular story of the destruction of Jewish Vienna as seen through the letters and diaries of an extraordinary woman who witnessed it all. In 1922, Hugo Bettauer published the novel The City Without Jews, a satirical critique of Austrian antisemitism. Three years later he would be … Continue reading Intertwined lives of those who experienced age of extremes

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People living in the margins of society

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Josef Koudelka, 88, one of the world’s greatest and most revered photographers of the post-war period, who photographer lives on the edge of European society.  He came to prominence  through his powerful pictures smuggled out of his native Prague after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion, first published in western newspapers anonymously under the attribution P.P. ( “Prague Photographer”). Distilled from sixty-nine journal kept over the course of fifty-plus years, Hosef Koudelka: Diaries offers a peep inside the mind and artistic process of the iconoclastic Czech photographer renowned for a life in exile and legendary projects on the Roma, and the devastating impact humans … Continue reading People living in the margins of society

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Astonishingly heroic woman

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On September 5 1951 Elzbieta Zawacka arrived home from her teaching job to find two officials waiting for her, Ransacking her tiny flat in Torun, northern Poland , they pounced upon a cotton-reel containing a $10 note, money she had given to her late mother who had never spent it. Owing foreign currency in communist Poland carried a 10-year prison sentence with torture.  She had already fought to defend Lvov , then a city in eastern Poland now in Ukraine and known as Lviv, from the Nazis and joined the Home Army – one of the largest resistance movement in … Continue reading Astonishingly heroic woman