Linn, Ruth: Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting.(Book Review)

History: Review of New Books, January, 2005 by Epstein, Donald B.

Linn, Ruth Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting Ithaca: Cornell University Press 154 pp., $20.00, ISBN 0-8014-4130-7 Publication Date: August 2004

Ruth Linn, the dean of the education faculty at Haifa University, has produced a slim but provocative volume concerning Holocaust historiography, Israeli politics and culture, and the generalized problem of morality under extreme conditions.

The book centers around the escape of the Slovakian Jew Rudolf Vrba (born Rosenberg) from Auschwitz in April 1944. He had been in the death camp for nearly two years, sorting out possessions of the doomed Jews in the "Canada" section. He learned all about the "final solution" from German and Jewish sources and wrote a report that he hoped would warn the Jewish...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.