Abstract
When Jutta Lindert invited me to contribute to this volume on genocide, I recalled that I first heard the term that was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin when I was eighteen, living in Guatemala and dreaming of becoming an artist. After the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russian army in January 1945, my parents began to talk in low voices about the fate of my grandmother Pauline Davidson Guggenheim, who perished at Theresienstadt, and of my father’s brother Herbert Guggenheim, whom I loved listening to playing Chopin in my parents’ living room in Berlin and who was murdered at Auschwitz. Somehow the word “genocide,” and even more specifically the concept “Holocaust,” introduced by Eli Wiesel, helped us cope with information emerging from German death factories about the tragic suffering and death of millions of victims.
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Guggenheim, H. (2018). My Artistic Explorations of the Holocaust. In: Lindert, J., Marsoobian, A. (eds) Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Genocide and Memory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65513-0_15
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