03 January 2012
The International Institute for Holocaust Research of Yad Vashem will award the first Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, in memory of Abraham Meir Schwarzbaum, Holocaust survivor and his family members murdered in the Holocaust to Prof. Christopher R. Browning, of the University of South Carolina, for his book Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp; and to Prof. Daniel Blatman, of Hebrew University, for The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide. The prize is awarded for path breaking scholarly research on the Holocaust.
The award ceremony will take place at Yad Vashem on January 8, 2012, at 17:00.
From the Book Prize Committee:
Browning’s book is a model of a sophisticated, methodologically aware, self-reflective use of testimonial evidence. Browning brings his signature critical, penetrating, careful, and sensitive eye to his sources in order to produce a book that is lucid, direct, judicious, sober, but propelled by anger at a miscarriage of justice - the 1972 acquittal of the area’s murderous police chief. Committee members agreed that this book will become a standard work of Holocaust history.
Blatman’s book is an important, path breaking new study on a well-known yet largely unstudied part of the Holocaust - the Death Marches of 1944-45. He examined numerous archives in eight countries, and his work is impressively thorough and scrupulous. He also used testimonies and memoirs, as well as files from postwar trials. Committee members described the book as masterly, a veritable tour de force, and truly a pioneering study and an example of outstanding scholarship.
The members of the Yad Vashem Book Prize Committee for the year 2011 were: Prof. David Engel, New York University, USA, Dr. Bella Gutterman, Yad Vashem, Israel, Prof. Dr. Dieter Pohl, Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt, Austria, Prof. Dina Porat, Yad Vashem and Tel Aviv University, Israel, Mr. Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel, Dr. David Silberklang, Yad Vashem and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and Chairman of the Committee Prof. Dan Michman, Yad Vashem and Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
