Bosnia and Herzegovina Print Region 18 Date 07/22/04 Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity Greogcmb Bosnia and Herzegovina

and Paul Celan. These works provide insight into how these survivors’ experiences affected their lives posttrauma as well as informed their writing. The finest examples examine the capacity of history and literature to convey both the horror of mass murder and the evil underlying it. In many cases biographies have furnished valuable added insight into the lives of acclaimed memoirists and diarists such as Anne Frank and Hannah Senesh. Two notable works that defy categorization are Maus (1986) and Maus II (1991), Art Spiegelman’s comic book portrayals of his parents’ experiences in pre-war Poland, Auschwitz, and post-war America. Blending biography and autobiography with self-conscious explorations of aesthetic representation, Spiegelman has created an original and individualized approach to Holocaust narration. In the realm of visual media many fine bio-documentaries have been made about individuals from all three groups. One example—Chaim Rumkowski and the Lodz Ghetto (1991)— paints a dramatic and unflinching portrait of the Jewish leader and Holocaust victim. Biographies of liberators (or righteous Gentiles in the case of the Holocaust) have focused primarily on the reasons such individuals risked their lives to save others. As such, they tend to emphasize the heroic as well as the personal. Two prominent subjects include Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman and diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jewish lives in wartime Budapest, and Oskar Schindler, the German businessman turned protector of Polish Jews. Both men have also been the subjects of widely acclaimed feature films—Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg (1990) and Schindler’s List (1993). The biographies of perpetrators and victims (as well as liberators) of genocide have explored issues of wide scholarly and public interest. Combining the historical and the private, such biographies have provided valuable perspective on the incalculable human toll of mass murder in the twentieth century.