Books by Nicholas Chare

This book is the first to bring together analyses of the full range of post-war testimony given by survivors of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando were slave labourers in the gas chambers and crematoria, forced to process and dispose of the bodies of those who were murdered. They have been central to a number of key topics in post-war debates about the Shoah: collaboration, moral compromise and survival, resistance, representation, and the possibility of bearing witness. Their testimony however has mostly met with a reluctance to engage in depth with it. Moving from testimonies produced within the event, the Scrolls of Auschwitz and the Sonderkommando photographs, to testimonies given at trials and for video archives, and to the paintings of David Olère and the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, this book demonstrates the importance of their witnessing in the post-war memory of the Holocaust, and provides vital new insights into the questions of representation, memory, gender, and the Shoah.

In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando-the "e;special squads,"e; composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process-buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these "e;Scrolls of Auschwitz,"e; which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp's liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

The sports film is a major genre in both English-language and world cinema. This trailblazing book examines the sub-genre of sports films that centre on female athletes. It addresses how cinematic depictions of sportswomen have, at times, challenged received ideas about femininity, sexuality and sport.

Considers the way the reception of Bacon's art, including Gilles Deleuze's text on the artist, has been shaped by the Sylvester interviews - and to move beyond limiting effects of interviews, providing fresh interpretations. This title presents readings of Bacon's work, primarily based on the themes of sadomasochism and multi-sensory perception.