Virtual Library

In recent years, discussion of the colonial period in Korea has centered mostly on the degree of exploitation or development that took place domestically, while international aspects have been relatively neglected. Colonial discourse, such as characterization of Korea as a “hermit nation,” was promulgated around the world by Japan and haunts us today. The colonization of Korea also transformed Japan and has had long-term consequences for post–World War II Northeast Asia as a whole.

Through sections that explore Japan’s images of Korea, colonial Koreans’ perceptions of foreign societies and foreign relations, and international perceptions of colonial Korea, the essays in this volume show the broad influence of Japanese colonialism not simply on the Korean peninsula, but on how the world understood Japan and how Japan understood itself. When initially incorporated into the Japanese empire, Korea seemed lost to Japan’s designs, yet Korean resistance to colonial rule, along with later international fear of Japanese expansion, led the world to rethink the importance of Korea as a future sovereign nation.

This book presents 130 letters written by Jews interned in the Drancy internment camp in the suburbs of Paris between 1941 and 1944. The letters describe the experiences of those interned, their fears, their incomprehension, and their daily routines up until their deportation to the Nazi extermination camps. 

Published in English for the first time, Refugee Conversations is a delightful work that reveals Brecht as a master of comic satire. Written swiftly in the opening years of the Second World War, the dialogues have an urgent contemporary relevance to a Europe once again witnessing populations on the move.

The premise is simple: two refugees from Nazi Germany meet in a railway cafe and discuss the current state of the world. They are a bourgeois Jewish physicist and a left-leaning worker. Their world views, their voices and their social experience clash horribly, but they find they have unexpected common ground – especially in their more recent experience of the surreal twists and turns of life in exile, the bureaucracy, and the pathetic failings of the societies that are their unwilling hosts.

Their conversations are light and swift moving, the subjects under discussion extremely various: beer, cigars, the Germans' love of order, their education and experience of life, art, pornography, politics, 'great men', morality, seriousness, Switzerland, America... despite the circumstances of both characters there is a wonderfully whimsical serendipity about their dialogue, the logic and the connections often delightfully absurd.

Triompher du silence : tel est pour Elie Wiesel, témoin et victime de l'Holocauste, le premier acte, peut-être un simple geste de survie, une parole intérieure, secrète, fragile.

Au récit de sa propre expérience succède l'évocation des disparus dont il devient le porte-parole : chants de la mémoire, dialogues avec les ombres toujours présentes des victimes et des combattants dont il dit les angoisses, les interrogations et les rêves.

Et voici qu'apparaît un autre combat. Il s'agit d'apporter aux nouvelles générations non seulement un témoignage, mais une attention, une compréhension et un savoir nés de l'histoire même. Les étapes de ce combat ? Le récit du retour en Allemagne, l'hommage aux victimes du nazisme lors du procès Barbie, la dénonciation du racisme, une réflexion sur la liberté, la guerre et l'indifférence.

Une ultime référence est faite à la Bible, dans une lecture midrashique fraîche et pleine de saveur, ferment d'une sagesse immémoriale.

Exhortation à lutter contre l'oubli et à donner la parole à tous les opprimés, ces textes sont le message d'un chercheur de paix.

In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race, " was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. "Survival in Auschwitz" is Levi's classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, "Survival in Auschwitz" remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit. Included in this new edition is an illuminating conversation between Philip Roth and Primo Levi never before published in book form.

On April 7, 1942, Hélène Berr, a 21-year-old Jewish student of English literature at the Sorbonne, took up her pen and started to keep a journal, writing with verve and style about her everyday life in Paris — about her studies, her friends, her growing affection for the “boy with the grey eyes,” about the sun in the dewdrops, and about the effect of the growing restrictions imposed by France’s Nazi occupiers. Berr brought a keen literary sensibility to her writing, a talent that renders the story it relates all the more rich, all the more heartbreaking.

The first day Berr has to wear the yellow star on her coat, she writes, “I held my head high and looked people so straight in the eye they turned away. But it’s hard.” More, many more, humiliations were to follow, which she records, now with a view to posterity. She wants the journal to go to her fiancé, who has enrolled with the Free French Forces, as she knows she may not live much longer. She was right. The final entry is dated February 15, 1944, and ends with the chilling words: “Horror! Horror! Horror!” Berr and her family were arrested three weeks later. She went — as was discovered later — on the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in April 1945, within a month of Anne Frank and just days before the liberation of the camp.

David Bellos provided the English translation of Berr's diary. 

During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself.

Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations proclaimed a new era of individualist and internationalist values, Tara Zahra demonstrates that they defined the "best interests" of children in nationalist terms. Sovereign nations and families were seen as the key to the psychological rehabilitation of traumatized individuals and the peace and stability of Europe.

Based on original research in German, French, Czech, Polish, and American archives, The Lost Children is a heartbreaking and mesmerizing story. It brings together the histories of eastern and western Europe, and traces the efforts of everyone--from Jewish Holocaust survivors to German refugees, from Communist officials to American social workers--to rebuild the lives of displaced children. It reveals that many seemingly timeless ideals of the family were actually conceived in the concentration camps, orphanages, and refugee camps of the Second World War, and shows how the process of reconstruction shaped Cold War ideologies and ideas about childhood and national identity. This riveting tale of families destroyed by war reverberates in the lost children of today's wars and in the compelling issues of international adoption, human rights and humanitarianism, and refugee policies.

Koreans constituted the largest colonial labor force in imperial Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Caught between the Scylla of agricultural destitution in Korea and the Charybdis of industrial depression in Japan, migrant Korean peasants arrived on Japanese soil amid extreme instability in the labor and housing markets. In The Proletarian Gamble, Ken C. Kawashima maintains that contingent labor is a defining characteristic of capitalist commodity economies. He scrutinizes how the labor power of Korean workers in Japan was commodified, and how these workers both fought against the racist and contingent conditions of exchange and combated institutionalized racism.

Kawashima draws on previously unseen archival materials from interwar Japan as he describes how Korean migrants struggled against various recruitment practices, unfair and discriminatory wages, sudden firings, racist housing practices, and excessive bureaucratic red tape. Demonstrating that there was no single Korean “minority,” he reveals how Koreans exploited fellow Koreans and how the stratification of their communities worked to the advantage of state and capital. However, Kawashima also describes how, when migrant workers did organize—as when they became involved in Rōsō (the largest Korean communist labor union in Japan) and in Zenkyō (the Japanese communist labor union)—their diverse struggles were united toward a common goal. In The Proletarian Gamble, his analysis of the Korean migrant workers' experiences opens into a much broader rethinking of the fundamental nature of capitalist commodity economies and the analytical categories of the proletariat, surplus populations, commodification, and state power.

Anna Seghers's Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight. 

Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers's multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel's widow, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator's "deathly boredom," bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.

W ou Le souvenir d'enfance is a narrative that reflects a great writer's effort to come to terms with his childhood during the Nazi occupation of France.

Perec tells two parallel stories. The first is autobiographical, describing his wartime boyhood. The second tale, denser, more disturbing, more horrifying, is the allegorical story of W, a mythical island off Tierra del Fuego governed by the thrall of the Olympic "ideal," where losers are tortured and winners held in temporary idolatry. As the reader soon discovers, W is a place where "it is more important to be lucky than to be deserving," and "you have to fight to live...no recourse, no mercy, no salvation, not even any hope that time will sort things out."

Perec's memory of the Holocaust and vision about its meaning has resulted in an astonishing achievement that stands with the best of his work.