Holocaust Landscapes

by Tim Cole

Holocaust Landscapes is a book of genuine originality and imagination. The theme is the places of the Holocaust, the Holocaust as place-making event for both perpetrators and victims. Through special concepts such as distance and proximity, Professor Tim Cole tells the story of the Holocaust through a number of landscapes where genocide was implemented, experienced, and evaded--many of which have subsequently been forgotten in the post war world. Drawing on survivor's narratives, Holocaust Landscapes moves between a series of ordinary and extraordinary places and the people who inhabited them throughout the years of the Second World War.

Starting in Germany in the late 1930s, the book shifts chronologically and geographically westwards, ending in Germany in the final chaotic months of the war. These landscapes range from the most iconic (synagogue, ghetto, railroad, camp, attic) to less well known sites (forest, sea mountain, river, road, and displaced persons camp). Holocaust Landscapes provides a new perspective surrounding the shifting geographies and stories of this dark period in world history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published November 24, 2015

About the author

Professor Tim Cole is the head of the history department at Bristol University and the author of over 30 journal articles. He has published three major works on the Holocaust and has edited two academic collections. His first book, Images of the Holocaust, was awarded the Longman History Today Prize in 1999. In 2003 he published Holocaust City with Routledge, and in 2011 Traces of the Holocaust: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto.

Reviews

[Prakriti · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in the middle of a long spell of reading holocaust literature. This is a pattern now, while reading the books, I am aflame and I have so much to say, to add, to record for my own thoughts later. By the time I have reached the end, I am stunned into silence. Not able to write a word.

This is a brutally beautiful book with some decidedly new perspectives about the holocaust not being at one place and one time and it being experienced by different people at different places at different times in different ways.

Two aspects stuck out to me that I have not encountered so far.

As a novice reader, I have often had questions about why did the jews wait in their own homes to be picked up. Why didn't they run away? Why didn't they hide?

Tim Cole spends a good bit of time on the ones who ran away or hid. One of the scariest parts of the book. I have not been able to put my mind around it yet.

The second thing that has struck me was his writings around Bergen-belsen, and survivor testimonies about it being worse than Auschwitz. Because there was no work. And no control. And no logic to the deaths. This is the part that stuns one into silence.

[Michelle Holden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holocaust landscapes is about the various landscapes in which the Jewish community encountered during the time of the holocaust. Tim Cole's book starts from pre World War Two, when many Jewish residents were fleeing the east for what Jewish residents thought was a safer place to returning / leaving home at the end of the war. The chapters named for all the places within the landscapes across Europe, which Jewish people encountered from the ghettos to the railroads and finally to the camps and the roads. Holocaust Landscapes is based mainly on diaries, written artefacts and interviews with holocaust survivors and the armed forces who entered Bergen Belsen at the end of the war.
I personally found on a number of occasions, a lot of repetition of sentences, across the whole book. Whether this was down to error or the author is wanting to put across, the importance of what the Jewish people were experiencing during the holocaust.
I have read a few books on the holocaust and found Time Cole's book to have covered subjects, that I had not read about before. There are parts within the book that some readers may find of an upsetting nature. If you have an interest in the holocaust, I would recommend reading Holocaust Landscapes

[Sam Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tim Cole has written one of the finest and most impactful spatial histories that I have ever read. The details are chilling and heartbreaking, providing a more vivid and detailed view of the lived experiences of Holocaust victims. This is a heavy read, but an essential one. For history, and for human empathy, Holocaust Landscapes stands as one of the finest books I've ever read.