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This chapter focuses on two death camps, Treblinka and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and on documentaries filmed on these locations. Differences between the two places, with the disappearance of Treblinka and the persistence of Auschwitz, are discussed in relation to documentaries bringing survivors and members of the postgeneration back to these places. The chapter also addresses rebellion and uprisings in these death camps.

This chapter too shows how poverty among Japanese immigrants on Hawai’ian sugar plantations differed from that in Japan’s cities. It begins with the reasons for immigration and the locales from which people came, as well as the process for getting to the plantations. A section on the sugar fields focuses on how hard the work was, how cruel overseers (lunas) were, and the role played by women. The section on camp life shows the importance of baths and temples and how the coming of women and of religious and educational institutions stabilized the camps. And a section on change discusses the emergence of labor activism, the remittances sent to families in Japan, the growing diversity of jobs, the improvement health care, and the importance of education, including Japanese-language schools. The chapter concludes that change occurred more rapidly in Hawai’i than in the hinminkutsu, for reasons that were primarily structural.

This chapter constructs a historical, social and political portrait of the Palestinian refugee community in Syria since the arrival in the wake of the Nakba, paying attention to key institutions and geographic realities that have been central to the making of the community.

Military camps represent staging areas for troops, the places where they rested from previous campaigns and lay in readiness for the next campaign to begin. This study offers a view into one of the largest intact set of Civil War camp complexes in Virginia. Over the past six years, the Montpelier Foundation Archaeology Department has conducted pedestrian and metal detector surveys of wooded areas on the 2,700 acres of the Montpelier property. During these surveys, archaeologists have identified and mapped close to 25 sites related to the Confederate Army's occupation of the property during the winter of 1863–1864. Identified sites include seven regimental camps; five company camps; cavalry camps that occupy former slave quarters; specialized activity areas related to the encampments; and non-military sites that likely featured prominently during the military occupation. This paper will discuss the methodology used in identifying these sites, the rationale for their remarkable preservation, and the analysis of site function and patterned military use of terrain.

Medical personnel taken as prisoners of war were no longer on the sidelines, bound up with the usual medic-combatant binary. They faced the same privations and brutality as those who witnessed and took part in the fighting. This chapter analyses the ways in which British medical personnel in both European and Far East camps articulated their experiences in published and unpublished memoirs writing after their repatriation. In addition to their own physical and psychological struggles, P.O.W. medics often carried the primary administrative as well as medical burden for others’ survival. An examination of their writings shows the extent to which resilience rather than breakdown became crucially important not just in the camps, but also in the way these men construct their experiences after the war.

Chapter Three investigates systematic efforts to dismantle Japanese diasporic communities living on the U.S. West coast alongside the broader emergence of a U.S. wartime security or surveillance state. This chapter explores the expansion of infrastructures to control the limits of human knowledge and information, as it occurred through two interlocked and evolving movements: first, intensified experiments with mass incarceration as dominant mode of organizing public life and culture; and second, the transforming production of racial distinction through conflated languages of geopolitics and nation-state citizenship, culture or ethnicity, and moral affect. In particular, Chapter Three elaborates these movements as they unfolded within a longer history of U.S. warfare in the East Asian Pacific and as they established the physical, administrative, discursive, and subjective forms of censorship conditioning the life of paper for the “Interned.”

As interned communities were barred from normative channels of communication and self-representation, this chapter argues that the life of paper facilitated distinctive forms of both individual and collective being, in the latters’ essential dialectic. Chapter Four analyzes how this dialectic operates through the letter’s dialogical form in ways that necessarily exceed dominant Anglophonic literary assumptions and processes. With attention to how interned communities thus turned to aesthetic practices to exist through and beyond the terms of “population management,” this chapter places the life of paper broadly within pre-existing Japanese aesthetic traditions and corresponding onto-epistemologies of presence, absence, and the work of art. Close readings of letters focus on how they communicate affect to produce alternate forms of knowledge and truth-value under historical constraint: ultimately creating an archive of material for the re-assertion of social bonds, sutured through difference and across generations.

This chapter discusses arts-based research (filmic analysis and walking ethnographies) with asylum seekers and migrants waiting in border spaces, mostly in camps (in Greece, France, Jordan and Melilla) to move on with their journey. The construction of the camp as a site of containment, constraint and a border space and what this means in the lives of the people and families waiting, some for many years, is examined through narrative interviews, photographs and filmic work. The chapter examines the constitution of space through the relational, embodied and imagined experiences of migrants and the material and symbolic concept of the border and border spaces in their lives, journeys and sense of belonging.

Pieds-noirs were offered extensive assistance by the French state on the basis of their status as citizens. In contrast, harkis found their Frenchness repeatedly questioned, not just in cultural and social terms, but also at the political and legal level. The consequences of this were far-reaching as harkiswere subjected to an all-encompassing process of state control. This included placing many harkis and their families into camps and other institutional environments upon their arrival in France thus initiating a pattern of collectivisation, isolation and exceptional treatment that would continue for years. Lacking the necessary resources–both material and cultural - to mobilise against this treatment, the harki community sought refuge in silence. This left a space into which stepped a series of actors, including the French and Algerian governments, Muslim elites, French veterans and pied-noir activists, all of whom offered their own representations of the harkis. Collectively, these discourses created a simplified, essentialised and politicised portrait of the harki community that would endure until the mid-1970s.

This chapter examines the role of cinematic technologies in the performance of international justice, with particular emphasis on three films in the first set of International Military Tribunals (IMTs) in Europe, also known as the Nuremberg Trials. The Nuremberg Trials were a set of military tribunals that took place after World War II from 1945 to 1949 to prosecute a number of Nazi officials held accountable for their actions under the Third Reich. The chapter analyzes three films—Nazi Concentration Camps (screened November 29, 1945), The Nazi Plan (screened December 11, 1945), and Original Eight Millimeter Film of Atrocities against Jews (screened December 13, 1945)—and looks at how they contributed to the creation of a visual understanding of “crimes against humanity.” In particular, it considers the role of film not in producing witnesses, but as witness. It also explores how the films naturalized the images and the act of witnessing and legitimated the processes of the IMT and rule of law whose authority was not yet established.

During the cold, wet winter of 1863, troops generally waited around in camps with insufficient shelter. Many believed a Confederate victory could be achieved within the year. Spirits were lifted with the advent of Spring, and the men were eager for Rosecrans to advance on the Confederate forces. In their spare time, men diverted themselves by playing games, putting on plays, engaging with locals (some soldiers married local women), reading newspapers, competing in sports, hunting, and gambling. Some army personnel would even receive visits from their wives in camp. Beginning in May, Bragg began relentless drilling. The brutal training routines lead to a feeling of comradery among troops. This comradery was often limited to small units and did not solve the overarching problem of sectionalism and decreases in morale caused by territory losses and defeats in battle.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict undeniably provides elements for an analysis in terms of territorial and non-territorial attachment, and local and global conflict. Jihad is in this case interpreted as a resistance movement in Palestine where the religious question is superposed on a territorial and geopolitical dimension.

This chapter examines the path toward recovery of the Jewish community in the city of Munich after World War II. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a small group of German Jews settled in larger cities outside the displaced persons camps. Against all odds, these Jews began to engage in the process of restoring Jewish communal structures in Germany. The chapter considers the process of restoring and rebuilding Jewish life in postwar Germany as well as the tensions between Jewish displaced persons, German Jews, and international Jewish organizations over the question of whether to remain or to leave. It suggests that the path toward recovery of the Jewish community in the Federal Republic of Germany was made possible by the emergence of a group identity among the so-called stayers and a change in mindset regarding Jewish life in Germany within the global Jewish community.

The end of the war had a cathartic effect on the majority Sinhalese population even as it left the Tamils wondering what lay ahead. This chapter examines the factors that made Sri Lanka’s victory possible. Among these was Rajapakse’s ability to put together an international coalition that let him have his way with the war, excesses and human rights abuses included. The coalition included a wide spectrum of countries ranging from Iran and Libya to China, Russia, EU and the United States. As for the international community, including the UN Secretary General, Rajapakse was forthcoming with assurances on post-war reconciliation, which he did not mean to implement. It was a bit of a charade on either side.

This chapter addresses the transformation of geopolitical lines and borders in a globalizing world. In the Middle East, this transformation has been accompanied by severe social inequalities that have been expressed in a number of different ways: increasing limitations placed on the mobility of refugees and migrants, yet decreasing limitations on the cross-border flow of goods; a proliferation of refugee encampments and settlements (formal and informal); human vulnerability and rights violations; and expanded border securitization. In the case of Lebanon, these processes play out in especially stark fashion in big cities and border sites. This chapter focuses on one such site in an area of Lebanon: the Central Bekaa. It is important to start by looking at the context of borders and mobility in the Middle East. This chapter is based on original research that aims to provide an examination of certain aspects of borders and mobility, including the transnational circulation of displaced communities, cross-border networks, and how Syrian refugees in the Middle East—especially in Lebanon—navigate borders and deploy their own social capital in the process.