This continues, as it must, to be a central focus for the dialogue. First, now that the nuns are out of the old theater adjacent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp and moved into their new convent near the Interfaith Center for Dialogue and Information established nearby, I may mention two retrospective volumes that will be of help in assessing what, after all, actually happened in the controversy. The first is by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a Polish Catholic honored by Yad vaShem as among the righteous who is now professor of history at the Catholic University in Lublin. Bartoszewski's The Warsaw Ghetto: A Christian's Testimony (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987) remains a significant witness to the tragedy. His book The Convent at Auschwitz (New York: George Brazillier, 1991) is hard-hitting yet fair and frequently insightful into how the controversy was perceived within Poland. In Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York: Praeger, 1991) have edited the reflections of Jewish and Christian thinkers on the controversy and its larger significance. With a useful appendix of key documents culminating in the historic Pastoral letter of the Polish Catholic Bishops read in all parishes in the country on January 20, 1991, the collection includes Richard Rubinstein, Ronald Modras, John Pawlikowski, Gabriel Moran, Michael Berenbaum, the late Claire Huchet-Bishop (of blessed memory), Judith Banki, Mary Jo Leddy, Albert Friedlander, Robert McAffee Brown, and several survivors.

Two significant volumes on rescuers have been engendered by the Anti-Defamation League's Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers. These are: Gay Block and Malka Drucker, editors, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992); and Mordecai Paldiel, The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1993). The two books, both organized according to country, complement one another. The former volume transcribes and edits interviews with 49 rescuers and includes searching photographs of them, and so achieves an immediacy and intimacy with its subjects. The latter provides a more complete historical and narrative context for the individual stories it tells and therefore the phenomenon as a whole. Harry James Cargas in Voices from the Holocaust (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993) adds to our primary sources twelve interviews with survivors and rescuers ranging from Arnost Lustig and Yitzhak Arad to Dorothy Sölle and Leo Eitinger.

For an overall assessment of the literature in the field up to the time of its publication, Michael R. Marrus' The Holocaust in History (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1987) remains the best statement I have seen on the status guestionis. Some recent works pick up specific aspects of the history of the events of and surrounding the Shoah in various countries. Stefan Korbonski, a Pole honored in 1980 by Yad Vashem, wrote The Jews and the Poles in World War II (New York: Hippocrene, 1989), the dust jacket informs us, "to set the record straight." Only 136 pages in length and somewhat defensive in tone, Korbonski's account brings to bear valuable documentary evidence that deserves to be weighed in any study of the Holocaust in Poland.

Also worth taking into account, although not the last word, is Klaus Scholder's A Requiem for Hitler and Other New Perspectives on the German Church Struggle (London: SCM and Philadelphia: Trinity, 1989). The author, a German Lutheran, is perhaps more successful in dealing: with the history of his own Church community. With regard to the Catholic Church, he seems to feel the need to debunk what he felt was a prevailing Catholic self image "of a church which was almost solid in its opposition to National Socialism" (p. 157, from a 1980 article included in the volume). I think, however, that more recent documents from the German Catholic bishops' conference show that there is less need today for such debunking. With regard to France, Paul Webster's Petain's Crime: The Full Story of French Collaboration in the Holocaust (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1991) is again aimed at challenging what the author, whether correctly or not, perceives to be a rather too benign self-image on the part of the French as to the history of the Vichy government of Marshall Petain and its treatment of the Jews.

The emotional content of all three of the above books dealing with Poland, Germany and France reveals something of the rawness with which Western civilization still approaches the massive trauma of the Second World War. It may be another generation before even our historians achieve the level of balance and emotional distancing to truly "weigh" the historical evidence in any definitive fashion. Albert H. Friedlander wrestles with his personal demons of the past in A Thread of Gold: Journeys towards Reconciliation (London: SCM and Philadelphia: Trinity, 1990), a set of reflections on his journeys to East and West Germany in 1990. I found it moving and ultimately uplifting.

Also providing moving narrations on a popular level, and set into a helpfully drawn historical framework, is Trudi Alexy's The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). Though subtitled "Oral Histories Exploring 500 years in the Paradoxical Relationship of Spain and the Jews," the volume centers on the author and several other Jews who found an "unlikely haven" in Spain in World War II. It also details the stories of several rescuers (chiefly Lisa Fittko and Renee Reichmann) and follows the more recent work of the Catholic and Jewish "reformers" in Barcelona. Finally, there is an intriguing chapter on the "Crypto-Jews of the American Southwest."
We can look forward to Suzan Zucotti's The Holocaust, the French and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1993), which I have not yet read. But I remain so impressed with her earlier work on the Italians that I would urge readers to check this one out.

We Americans, we should recall, are also part of the story. Mary Christine Athans, BVM, who teaches history at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, has produced a fascinating bit of what I would call dark Americana in The Coughlin-Fahey Connection: Fr. Charles Coughlin, Fr. Dennis Fahey, and Religious Anti-Semitism in the United States, 1938-1954 (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). Athans relies on correspondence between the two priests found in the archives of the Irish Province of the Holy Ghost Congregation in Dublin, and other materials not previously available to historians, to reveal the distinctive intellectual history of Fr. Coughlin's theological antisemitism.

A book that I list with some diffidence for the sensitivities involved is the Thomas R. Nevin biography, Simone Weil: Portrait of a Self-Exiled Jew (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). I list it here because its nearly 500 pages do contain some nuggets of historical interest, for example, concerning her experiences with Vichy France.
Reconstructing and evaluating the historical events of the Holocaust is only the beginning of the task facing Jews and Christians in its wake. We must assess what to do with our shared and separate memories for the sake of our children in terms of our basic understanding of reality and human history.

Michael Berenbaum, project director for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., takes on this challenge from a Jewish perspective in After Tragedy and Triumph: Essays in Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). With the Museum now open, Berenbaum's inside perspective on the discussions and argumentation that went into it take on even greater interest. His reflections, in the light of that attempt at an institutional and American remembrance of the Holocaust, on the theories of Rosenzweig, Buber, Wiesel, Neusner, pluralism and Zionism will be of interest not only to Jews but to Christians as well. For Christian teachers, clergy and others, the Holocaust Museum's annual "Days of Remembrance: Guides for Commemorative Programs" will remain a useful educational resource for years to come.

Stephen R. Haynes attempts a Christian approach to Prospects for Post-Holocaust Theology (Atlanta: Scholars Press/American Academy of Religion, 1991) based uponoctr writings of Barth, Moltmann and van Buren. Written as a doctoral dissertation for Emory University, Haynes' study is thorough and succeeds admirably in presenting to the reader what is most pertinent for Christian-Jewish understanding in the theologies of the three Christian thinkers, although only Van Buren, of the three, has attempted a full-scale, systematic revision of Christian theology in the light of the Shoah. Haynes is least effective, in this reviewer's opinion, in his discussions with regard to Christian understandings of the State of Israel. Instead of seeing Zionism straightforwardly as the 20th century liberation movement of the Jewish people, he tends to allow its critics to frame the issue, defining Zionism rather as nationalism, which leads him to judge negatively (and I think unfairly), for example, much of van Buren's work.

This brings us to the collections of essays by Jews and Christians on the Holocaust. In the interest of fair advertising and (as we say in my town) "full disclosure," I must note that I have a contribution in each of the next four works. Alan L. Berger, ea., Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, 1939-1989 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991) comprises 21 papers presented at the 19th Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and Church Struggle held in Philadelphia in 1989. They are divided into five categories: Survivor Testimonies (H. Hirsh, E. Tanay, N. Tec); Philosophical Responses (R. Kalechofsky, R. Melson, S. Katz, R. Rubenstein, R. Smith); Religious Responses a. Fischel, G. Greenberg, P. Marcus and A. Rosenberg, R. Ross); Artistic Responses (B. Asbury, R. Brenner, S. Pentlin, I. Zarecka); and The Aftermath (Z. Garber, R. Pierard, R. Eckardt, E. Fisher, M. Rosenbloom).

Steven L. Jacobs, rabbi of Temple B'nai Sholom in Huntsville, Alabama, solicited ten Christian and ten Jewish scholars for a two volume set of Contemporary Jewish and Christian Religious Responses to the Shoah (Lanham, NY: University Press of American, 1993): S. Jacobs, M. Berenbaum, M. Ellis, E. Fackenheim, P. Haas, B. Maza, R. Rubenstein, A. Waskow, H.J. Cargas, A. Davies, A. Eckardt, E. Fisher, D. Huneke, T. Idinopolous, M. McGarry, J. Pawlikowski, R. Ruether and J. Roth.

Sr. Mary Noel Kernan, SC, has put together ten papers from the First Scholars' Conference on the Teaching of the Holocaust under the title Peace/Shalom After Atrocity Greensburg, PA: Seton Hill College/National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, 1989). These deal with educational issues such as my own, "Why Teach the Holocaust?"; Michael McGarry's "Practical Considerations in Teaching the Holocaust"; George Diestel on the Humanities; Patricia Farrant on Holocaust Literature; Roger Gottlieb on "Remembering"; Gershon Greenberg on "American Catholics During the Holocaust"; Myrna Goldenberg on "Women Remembering the Holocaust"' and Frederick Schweitzer on History and Antisemitism. Sr. Carol Rittner, RSM, has edited what I feel is a very interesting set of Christian and Jewish essays in Elie Wiesel: Between Memory and Hope (NY: New York University Press, 1990). Some highlights are the papers of Daniel Stern, Dow Marmur, Marcel Dubois, Eva Fleischner, Robert McAfee Brown, and Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger.

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