Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe by Bob Moore

Abstract

The academic study of Jewish survival during the Holocaust has, unsurprisingly, been an emotionally charged topic. Although the Holocaust’s death toll of six million is widely accepted, the vastly different mortality rates across Europe have long been a puzzle to historians. The fact that more than half of the Jews in Western Europe survived the War, while Eastern European Jewry was decimated, has traditionally been explained through single-country studies of who was killed. In an attempt to advocate for the agency of Jewish victims and establish the existence of Jewish resistance and self-help, more nuanced discussions of the how and why of Jewish survival have often been brushed aside. Bob Moore’s Survivors, however, seeks to shed light on who lived and why through a comparative study of nearly everymajorWestern European Jewish community. While emphasizing the importance of both escape and hiding, Moore’s book highlights the significance of interconnected Jewish self-help networks along with aid from nonJews, and uses a critical mass of painstaking national studies to argue that idiosyncratic national and local circumstances were key to determining chances of survival. In reviewing the circumstances and choices that Jews had in rescue and self-help in Western Europe during theWar,Moore looks at themes and questions that are familiar to students of the Holocaust. However, Survivors offers the depth and breadth necessary to do more than merely challenge the narrative of Jewish passivity. Moore identifies four major gaps in the history of Jewish rescue and self-help: the importance of chronological, geographical, and social contexts to acts of rescue by non-Jews, the relationship between individual acts of rescue and networks, the structure and organization of Jewish communities in Western Europe, and the interrelationship between rescue and self-help. By investigating these gaps, Moore presents a picture of Jewish self-help and rescue that is both more orderly and more chaotic than what historians have been taught to expect. Through an analysis of local and individual circumstances, Survivors shows that many Western European Jews had choices though these were limited by their nationality, language, location, finances, and community relations, among other factors. Hum Rights Rev (2013) 14:293–294 DOI 10.1007/s12142-013-0279-x