Train Journey

Simone Gigliotti is Senior Lecturer in History at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. Previously, she held a Charles H. Revson Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Among other publications, she is the co-editor of The Holocaust: A Reader (Blackwell Publishing).

• AcknowledgementsChapter 1. A Holocaust in trains (introduction)Chapter 2. “Resettlement”: Deportees as the freight of the Final SolutionChapter 3. Ghetto departures: The emplotment of experienceChapter 4. Immobilization in “cattle cars”Chapter 5. Sensory witnessing: Disorders of vision and experienceChapter 6. Camp arrivals: The failed resettlementChapter 7. Memory routes: Trains, tracks and destinations (conclusion)Chapter 8. Re-telling train stories (epilogue)BibliographyIndex

“…an important and, at times, harrowing book. By tackling a much-neglected topic and giving the deportees a voice in her use and analysis of their testimonies, the author does indeed succeed in finding ‘a place for them in the history of victims suffering during the Holocaust’.”  ·  Journal of Contemporary History“Gigliotti advances an original and provocative thesis that offers a fresh insight into the unfolding of Nazi genocide, and makes an intriguing case for the trains as ‘mobile chambers of death’ in themselves (122), and as ‘a prologue for the rigors of the camp world’.”  ·  European History Quarterly