Dwork, Debórah

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DWORK, Debórah

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Princeton University, M.A., 1971; Yale University, M.P.H., 1978; University College, London, Ph.D. 1984.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610-1477. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer and educator. Clark University, Rose Professor of Holocaust History and Directory of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Jewish Book Award, 1996, Spiro Kostoff Award, 1997, Best Book award, German Book Critics, 1998, all for Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present; Guggenheim fellow; Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars fellow; American Council of Learned Societies fellow.

WRITINGS:

War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: AHistory of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England, 1898-1918, Tavistock Publications (New York, NY), 1987.

Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1991.

(With Robert Jan van Pelt) Auschwitz: 1270 to thePresent, Norton (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Robert Jan van Pelt) Holocaust: A History, Norton (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor) Voices & Views: A History of the Holocaust, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2002.

Dwork's works have been translated into Italian, German, Dutch, and Japanese.

ADAPTATIONS: Children with a Star was made into a documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

SIDELIGHTS: Debórah Dwork is a professor of history at Clark University in Worcester, MA. Specializing in Holocaust and Jewish history, Dwork has written extensively on the history of Auschwitz and the condition of young Jews in Nazi Europe. She is the founding director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, a teaching organization dedicated to research, public service, and training of Holocaust researchers and scholars. As director of the Center, Dwork works to provide an educational forum for examining the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and other genocides throughout the world. Dwork frequently serves as a guest teacher in primary and secondary schools across the United States, teaching Holocaust and Jewish history to students from nursery school to high school. She also conducts workshops in Holocaust education for teachers throughout the country.

Dwork has also examined the care and welfare of English children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as connections between war preparations, British medical research, and British public health systems. In War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England, 1898-1918, Dwork examines infant mortality in England and Wales at the turn of the century. Many of those deaths were caused by gastroenteritis and diarrhea as the result of poor sanitation, general ill-health, and the use of cow's milk to feed babies. Beneficial changes in the infant welfare system were not made in order to reduce child and infant mortality, but were instead brought about due to more nationalistic factors such as "the poor physical condition of recruits for the Boer War, which ended in 1902, the falling birth rate during wartime, and worries about the population needed for war and for the Empire," wrote R. S. Illingworth, M.D., in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Dwork herself, as her rather arch title tends to illustrate, begins and ends her work in the belief that war and the preparation for war speed the growth of policy," wrote John Turner in the Times Literary Supplement. Once the problems with cow's milk were acknowledged, Illingworth wrote, dramatic improvements in public welfare for mothers and children followed, including the development of clinics, home health visits, school meals, instruction for mothers in infant care and feeding, and school-based medical examinations. M. J. Moore, writing in Choice, called the book "clearly written, with many well-chosen photographs and a useful subject-name index." Illingworth remarked that it is "a well-written, well-researched book," one that is "easy to read, with a pleasant style" of writing. Although Turner expressed some reservations with the book, including Dwork's reliance on "inconsistent and conflicting contemporary statistical analyses" and limited discussion of "financial and administrative relations between central and local government," he observed that "there is an enormous amount of useful information here" and concluded, "The cumulative effect, for all that, is impressive."

In Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, Dwork examines the welfare of children from the perspective of the Jewish experience under Nazism. Using first-person narratives from adults who entered the camps as adolescents and survived the ordeal, Dwork creates a social history of children during the holocaust. "The figures with which Dwork introduces the book defy understanding: one and a half million Jewish children perished, meaning that only eleven per cent of those alive when the war broke out survived," wrote Reva Klein in the Times Educational Supplement. "After reading this book, even such a low survival rate seems miraculous, considering the myriad adversities they withstood."

Jewish children endured the ostracism and impoverishment of the ghettos, the loss of family and anything resembling normal childhood, and the brutality of slavery and extermination in the concentration camps. In the ghettoes, older children were forced to become parent-protectors for younger siblings, remarked Richard Overy in the Observer, and children became scavengers, beggars, and smugglers when food became scarce. Even so, they managed to maintain a connection with childlike behavior. "They made up games, sniggered over anti-Hitler jokes, made rudimentary toys," Overy wrote. "The resilience of children in the face of such degradation and brutality is one of the few uplifting elements in this account, and it occurred everywhere, in hiding, in the transit camps, in the ghettoes, in the slave factories." The only place where children did not maintain this resiliency, Overy observed, was in the concentration camps, where most children were put to death immediately upon arrival. "The only ones to survive, if briefly, were those who looked old and sturdy enough to work, or who were picked out by SS men as pets, to be killed later when they tired of them," Overy wrote.

Children with a Star "has a genuine dignity, which arises from the voices of the survivors themselves," Overy observed. Dwork "has achieved what she set out to do with intelligence, compassion, and, it must be said, bravery," Klein remarked. "The excellent quality of the research and the clarity of the writing make this an effective book," wrote Anne Roiphe in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "adding a point of view that is essential for us as we continue to witness the past, to wrestle with the facts."

Dwork's 1996 work, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, written with Robert Jan van Pelt, focuses on a German concentration camp that "has become synonymous not only with the Jewish Holocaust but with a particularly twentieth-century capacity to kill people in a thoroughly modern, industrially based and conveyor belt system," wrote Mark Levene in the English Historical Review. The book traces the history of Auschwitz from its founding as a Polish border town in 1270 to its emotionally charged reputation in the postwar period. Dwork's book "represents a unique and enormously significant contribution to the growing body of secondary literature on the history of the Holocaust," wrote Larry Eugene Jones in History: Review of New Books. The early history and development of the town is covered, as is the evolution of Auschwitz as a Jewish death camp and archetype of the Holocaust. Omer Bartov, writing in Tikkun, observed that "Dwork's and van Pelt's impressive and original study will be of much value to any scholar interested in this topic." George Cohen, writing in Booklist, called Auschwitz "truly the definitive history of the town and camp."

Similarly, Cohen called Dwork and van Pelt's Holocaust: A History, "a monumental work of impeccable scholarship." A Kirkus Reviews critic remarked, "So contextually enhanced, detailed, and logically sequenced is this version, though, that even readers who have previously delved into the Holocaust may be shocked at how much remains to be dealt with." A Library Journal critic stated that the book provides "what Holocaust studies desperately needs: a single volume suitable for a wide audience."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Architects' Journal, January 9, 1997, Stephen Greenberg, review of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, p. 44.

Book Report, September-October, 1991, Shelley Glantz, review of Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, p. 59.

Booklist, June 1, 1996, George Cohen, review of Auschwitz, pp. 1669-1670; August, 2002, George Cohen, review of Holocaust: A History, p. 1915.

Choice, July, 1987, M. J. Moore, review of War IsGood for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England, 1898-1918, p. 1740; September, 1991, J. R. White, review of Children with a Star, p. 178.

English Historical Review, April, 1998, review of Auschwitz, pp. 532-533.

History: Review of New Books, spring, 1997, Larry Eugene Jones, review of Auschwitz, p. 127.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, summer, 1992, Marc E. Saperstein, review of Children with a Star, pp. 180-182.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2002, review of Holocaust, p. 1005.

Library Journal, July, 1996, Paul Kaplan, review of Auschwitz, p. 132; February 15, 1991, Carol R. Glatt, review of Children with a Star, p. 207; November 1, 2002, Frederic Krome, review of Holocaust, p. 104.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 31, 1991, Anne Roiphe, review of Children with a Star, p 1, 7.

New England Journal of Medicine, September 3, 1987, R. S. Illingworth, M.D., review if War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children, p. 640.

Observer (London, England), June 2, 1991, Richard Overy, review of Children with a Star, p. 54.

Publishers Weekly, February 1, 1991, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Children with a Star, p. 74; April 15, 1996, review of Auschwitz, pp. 55-56; June 17, 2002, review of Holocaust, p. 52.

School Library Journal, October, 1991, Mary Quinn, review of Children with a Star, p. 164.

Tikkun, March-April, 1998, Omer Bartov, review of Auschwitz, pp. 85-86.

Times Educational Supplement, July 12, 1991, Reva Klein, review of Children with a Star, p. 24.

Times Literary Supplement, April 10, 1987, John Turner, review of War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children, p. 376; January 31, 1997, Iain Boyd Whyte, review of Auschwitz, pp. 4-5.

Wall Street Journal, December 31, 1996, Milton J. Rosenberg, review of Auschwitz, p. 5.

Wilson Library Bulletin, October, 1991, Judith M. Amory, review of Children with a Star, p. 126.