Ruth Gay. Safe Among The Germans: Liberated Jews After World War Two. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. 330 pp.; Zeev Mankowitz. Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 348 pp.

Abstract

In the last decade or so, new research on Jewish displaced persons in occupied Germany has pushed the traditional boundaries of “Holocaust studies” (1933–1945) toward the postwar period. Indeed, the displaced persons or “DP” experience—the temporary settlement in Germany of the Sheءerith Hapleitah (“Surviving Remnant”) from the liberation of concentration camps in the spring of 1945 to the late 1940s—provides important insights into post-Holocaust Jewish life. The impact of trauma and loss, the final divorce between Jews and East-Central Europe through migration to Israel and the New World, the rise of Zionist consciousness, the shaping of a Jewish national collective in transit, the regeneration of Jewish demography and culture in the DP camps, and the relationships between Jews and Germans in occupied Germany are some of the many themes explored by recent DP historiography—by now a subfield of postwar Jewish history.