This essay addresses survivor stories as formulations of Holocaust memory in the U.S. More specifically, it focuses on the former concentration camp at Flossenbürg in southern Germany. Compared to places like Dachau and Buchenwald in Germany or Auschwitz and Treblinka in Poland, Flossenbürg is often absent from or—if present at all—marginalized in the public and scholarly discourse of Holocaust memory. The heavily autobiographical novel Jakub’s World (2005) tells the story of Jakub Szabmacher, a Jewish boy who is taken from his home in Poland by the Nazis and is eventually interned at Flossenbürg. He survives many months of deprivation and hardship in the concentration camp until U.S. forces liberate it in April 1945; orphaned and homeless, he eventually relocates to the U.S., yet returns to the site of his suffering many times.

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