The Sephardim in the Holocaust: A Forgotten People Isaac Jack Levy with Rosemary Levy Zumwalt

Abstract

This book reprises the enduring tragedy of the Sephardim, exiled from their religion and three times from their various homelands, those remaining in Iberia burnt in the autos-de-fé of imperial Spain and Portugal, the many exiles incinerated centuries later in Auschwitz. Resettled in North Africa, Italy, the Balkans, and Ottoman Turkey, they were imprisoned during the Second World War in Italian concentration camps, slaughtered by Croats, exterminated by Germans, and saved by Albanians. After the war, most survivors joined the diaspora in the new worlds of the Americas and the British Empire, only a small remnant remaining in Greece. Isaac Levy researched and interviewed these former victims—“a forgotten people”—for some forty years, and now brings to life their accounts of the vicissitudes of the Second World War. He traces mainly the Sephardic victims across North Africa from Morocco to Libya, from Italy through the Balkans and the northern Mediterranean from...