Dwork, Debórah 1954–

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Dwork, Debórah 1954–

PERSONAL: Born April 22, 1954; daughter of Bernard and Shirley Dwork; married Kenneth Marek; children: Miriam, Hannah. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Princeton University, B.A., 1971; Yale University, M.P. H., 1978; University College, London, Ph.D. 1984.

ADDRESSES: Home—645 Ellsworth Ave., New Haven, CT 06511. Office—Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, 950 Main St., Worcester, MA 01610-1477; fax: 508-793-8827. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, postdoctoral fellow, 1984; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, visiting assistant professor of history, 1984–86, and public health policy, 1986–87, assistant professor of public health policy, 1987–89; Yale University, New Haven, CT, visiting assistant professor, 1989–91, associate professor at Child Study Center, 1991–96; Clark University, Worcester, MA, Rose Professor of Holocaust History and founding director of Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1996–. Guest speaker at primary and secondary schools across the United States; workshop conductor. Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, member of board of trustees; advisor to other organizations. Affiliated with documentary films, including "Adolf Eichmann," in the Biography television series, Arts and Entertainment Network, 1997; Unlikely Heroes, a film directed by Rich Trank and produced by Moriah Films, 2003; Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State, a seven-part television miniseries produced by KCET-Television, Hollywood, CA, and British Broadcasting Company, 2005; and the television special Never Again?: From Auschwitz to Darfur, produced by the Nickelodeon Network, 2005.

MEMBER: American Historical Association.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellow of Wellcome Trust, 1985; grant from American Philosophical Society, 1987; fellow of American Council of Learned Societies, 1988, and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1989; grants from Lustman Fund, 1991–94, and National Endowment for the Humanities, 1992; Guggenheim fellow, 1993–94; grant from New Land Foundation, 1994; National Jewish Book Award, 1996, Spiro Kostoff Award, 1997, and Best Book Award, German Book Critics, 1998, all for Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present; cited among best nonfiction books of the year, Publishers Weekly, 2002, for Holocaust: A History; grant from Tapper Charitable Foundation, 2003–05.

WRITINGS:

War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England, 1898–1918, Methuen (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 the Present, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1996.

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

(Editor and author of introductions) Voices and Views: A History of the Holocaust, Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to books, including Resistance against the Third Reich, edited by Michael Geyer, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1994; The World Reacts to the Holocaust, 1945–1990, edited by David Wyman, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1996; Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust III: Memory, Memorialization, Denial, edited by Peter Hayes, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1999; Catastrophe and Meaning: Rethinking the Holocaust at the End of the 20th Century, edited by Moishe Postone and Eric Santer, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2003; and Letters to Sala: A Young Woman's Life in Nazi Labor Camps, by Ann Kirschner, New York Public Library (New York, NY), 2005. Contributor to periodicals, including Cardozo Law Review, Dimensions, Medical History, Maternal and Child Health, and Holocaust Studies: Journal of Culture and History.

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

ADAPTATIONS: Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe was made into a documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Company in 1991; it was also recorded as an audio book for the blind and physically handicapped by the Library of Congress. The book Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present was adapted as a television documentary titled "Nazi Designers of Death" when broadcast as an episode of the series Nova, broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service, and under the title Auschwitz: The Blueprints of Genocide when aired by the British Broadcasting Company.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Editing and annotating The Poesie Album of Marianka Zadikow in Theresienstadt; Flight from the Reich: A History of Jewish Refugees, with Robert Jan van Pelt, for W.W. Norton (New York, NY).

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."

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."

Voices and Views: A History of the Holocaust was compiled to provide, in one volume, a resource for teachers of Holocaust history who may not themselves be well versed in the field. In nearly 700 pages Dwork offers a wide variety of documents or excerpts, divided into topical sections with introductions by the editor. Though Library Journal reviewer Frederic Krome would have preferred more background material in the introductions, especially regarding Dwork's selection criteria for the contributions, he recommended the volume as a useful reference for educators. In chapters on Jews, Gentiles, and Germans before and during the Nazi occupation, the Nazi regime itself, the post-Holocaust period, and other sub-topics, Dwork covers the wide range of Holocaust studies in materials collected by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, with which she is closely affiliated. According to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, Voices and Views illustrates a "scholarly commitment to remembering the past so perhaps we can learn from it."

Dwork told CA: "In Auschwitz, my coauthor and I established the context in which historians now view that annihilation camp. We argue that Germany sought to reconstruct Central Europe in its own image, and the Germans' program at Auschwitz was key to that ambition. We drew the critically important connection between industrial killing and the daily functions of a society that believed it was involved in constructive activity.

"Thinking about the significance of Auschwitz in the context of the whole of the Holocaust prompted us to widen the lens, to try to understand the place of the Holocaust in the history of the western world. This research yielded the book Holocaust, which spans the long and broad history in which the Holocaust was rooted, from the middle ages to the middle of the twentieth century, and across the continent of Europe. The book explores how the different occupation regimes shaped the local populations' ability to respond to the genocide enacted outside their windows, and it negotiates the chasm between two histories: that of the perpetrators and that of the victims; the Nazis' push toward a 'final solution;' and the Jews' reactions and responses.

"In the course of writing Holocaust, van Pelt and I investigated the failure of the Allied to respond to the refugee crisis triggered by Nazi persecution. We thus became interested in the concept of asylum and the dilemmas of democratic governments when faced with the prospect of mass expulsions of Jews from Central European countries. Should they offer refuge to these people, and thus indirectly condone these expulsions?

"The prospect of another book opened. Still working on Holocaust, we began to note the ever dwindling choices open to the refugees, and the often painful decisions of the many people who dealt with them—consuls; immigration officers and other government officials; church, health, and social workers; volunteers; private individuals. Government policy and individual practice, and international action and local initiatives loomed large in this chapter of Holocaust history. Our new project, Flight from the Reich: A History of Jewish Refugees, is a multi-faceted study in which the refugees are central. It is also a story with which we have personal connection: both van Pelt and I are related by friendship and kinship to many people who left Nazi Europe as refugees, and to a few who had the opportunity to flee, chose to remain, and survived.

"Flight from the Reich is a study of Jewish refugees who escaped the net of Nazism through 'legal' emigration (on child transport trains, with purchased passports from neutral countries, through the efforts of relief organizations or family and friends) or 'illegal' border crossings. The aim of the book is to elucidate and analyze the efforts to leave Nazi Europe, the difficulties of obtaining permission to live elsewhere, the experiences of daily life as refugees, and the complexities of the emigrants' post-Shoah history. The book examines the networks which evolved to save Jews, the politics of emigration and immigration, the dilemmas of philanthropy, the refugee care systems instituted by the host countries, and the experiences of the emigrants themselves. The last three chapters will focus on the postwar history of all Jewish displaced persons: camp survivors, hidden persons, and refugees. This part of the book will focus on the text and subtext of assimilation, the external and internal imperative for silence, and the current phenomenon of public discourse by survivors about their war years.

"Flight from the Reich encompasses all the occupied and host countries and includes all manner of participants. We integrate the history of events with the history of people, moving back and forth between the private and the public realms, between personal memory and official history. Public events would be of no significance if they did not affect the individual lives of people, and people's lives would not have been so sharply and violently shaped as they were had it not been for the sharp and violent events of the public realm."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, April, 1992, review of Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, p. 547.

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

Booklist, June 1, 1996, George Cohen, review of Auschwitz, pp. 1669–1670; August, 2002, George Cohen, review of Holocaust: A History, p. 1915; February 15, 2003, George Cohen, review of Voices and Views: A History of the Holocaust, p. 1036.

Book Report, September-October, 1991, Shelley Glantz, review of Children with a Star, p. 59.

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, fall, 1994, review of Children with a Star, p. 138.

Choice, July, 1987, M.J. Moore, review of War Is Good 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; March, 1997, review of Auschwitz, p. 1219; November, 2003, G.R. Sharfman, review of Voices and Views, p. 598.

Contemporary Psychology, December, 1994, review of Children with a Star, p. 1103.

English Historical Review, April, 1998, Mark Levene, review of Auschwitz, pp. 532-533; February, 2004, Colin Richmond, review of Holocaust, p. 259.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), December 14, 2002, review of Holocaust, p. D16.

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, May 1, 1996, review of Auschwitz, p. 659; July 15, 2002, review of Holocaust, p. 1005.

Kliatt, September, 2002, E.B. Boatner, review of Auschwitz, p. 40.

Library Journal, February 15, 1991, Carol R. Glatt, review of Children with a Star, p. 207; July, 1996, Paul Kaplan, review of Auschwitz, p. 132; November 1, 2002, Frederic Krome, review of Holocaust, p. 104; February 1, 2003, Frederic Krome, review of Voices and Views, p. 103.

Los Angeles Times, September 22, 2002, review of Holocaust, p. 4.

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

New England Journal of Medicine, September 3, 1987, R.S. Illingworth, review of 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; August 15, 1993, review of Children with a Star, p. 48.

Politics Today Annual, 1996, review of Auschwitz, p. 100.

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; February 24, 2003, review of Voices and Views, p. 67.

Reference and Research Book News, May, 2003, review of Holocaust, p. 30.

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

Shofar, fall, 2004, Saul Lerner, "Current Perspectives on the Holocaust," p. 133.

Spectator, November 16, 1996, review of Auschwitz, p. 46.

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.

Washington Post Book World, August 4, 1996, review of Auschwitz, p.

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