Holocaust Refugees Research Articles

Holocaust Refugees in Bolivia: Immigration Through a Postcolonial and Microhistorical Lens

Abstract Jewish refugees who escaped the Holocaust by emigrating to Bolivia formed a vibrant Jewish community of around 20,000 for two decades and maintained a presence there until the 1970s. This article examines Bolivia as a place of migration and refuge during and after the Holocaust, and asks whether Eurocentric perspectives in postcolonial contexts have perpetuated the notion that Bolivia could not truly become a home for these refugees. In supporting European immigration for colonization, the Bolivian government sought to overcome an economic crisis caused by the Chaco War in the 1930s. During the peak emigration years of 1938 and 1939, Jewish families arrived from Germany and its annexed territories intending to rebuild a normal life. By focusing on one extended family and using a microhistorical lens, the article explores complex and layered experiences of prejudice. It analyses how migrants’ willingness or reluctance to engage with others through sport and music offers insights into forms of conviviality among individuals belonging to various social groups in a postcolonial context. Using archival documents, memoirs, and the video testimonies of Jewish survivors, this article presents Bolivia as an important refugee destination, thereby redressing its omission due to persistent epistemological shortcomings that have perpetuated its invisibility in this respect.

Holocaust refugees’ experiences in, out of and nowhere in Africa

ABSTRACT Eppelsheimer’s article examines Holocaust refugees’ experiences in colonial Kenya. It draws attention to the autobiographical novels of German Jewish author Stefanie Zweig, as well as testimonies and memoirs of former Holocaust refugees who had fled to Kenya, and asks if and how refugees’ own experiences of racial persecution informed their responses to colonial racism. This article illustrates how Zweig responded in aesthetic terms to her experience in colonial spaces. It does so by examining autobiographical aspects of Zweig’s writings, highlighting the author’s upbringing in multiple cultures, literary traditions and languages, and discussing Zweig’s novels in the contexts of white British settler writing about Kenya, as well as the German ‘Africa-novel’­—both of which have shaped the images and perspectives of Kenya among millions of readers. It examines such European colonialist perspectives and discourses in literary texts as well as testimonies. In so doing, it questions whether a text like Nowhere in Africa, which is about the experiences of a German Jewish refugee family in Kenya, contributes to the silencing of African voices and the obscuring of African history by colonial historiography and literature.

‘We thought we would be welcomed with open arms’: Holocaust refugees in Dutch Caribbean internment

ABSTRACT The trajectories and experiences of more than a hundred Jewish refugees, who arrived in the Dutch colony of Suriname in December 1942, shed light on the complex connections and tensions between colonial hierarchies, Jewish heritage and antisemitism. Furthermore, De Jong's article highlights the often-overlooked role of the Dutch Caribbean during the Second World War, particularly in providing refuge to Holocaust survivors. The article first delves into the broader colonial context and the sociopolitical dynamics of wartime Suriname. The refugees, initially interned and subjected to restrictive regulations, struggled with their diminished status and the obligatory domestic chores, especially in this colonial setting. De Jong also touches on the complex interplay of racial hierarchies in the colony and antisemitism, shedding light on the refugees’ position within this new environment. Second, De Jong examines intra-Jewish tensions in Suriname through two case studies of conflict: the first surrounding a Purim celebration and the second concerning a request for a separate Ashkenazi service during the High Holidays. These conflicts reveal the challenges faced by the refugees and the established Jewish community in negotiating cultural and religious identities. The disputes were significant but eventually resolved, demonstrating the resilience and flexibility of both groups. The study provides a multifaceted understanding of the refugees’ experiences in Suriname by integrating traditional archival documents with personal narratives and oral histories. It underscores the Dutch Caribbean as a significant site of refuge and Jewish interaction during the Second World War, contributing to broader discussions on colonial spaces in Holocaust Studies

Holocaust refugees in the colonial world: an introduction

ABSTRACT In this article, Casteel and Mikel-Arieli introduce their special issue and outline its contribution to the literature on global refugee transit. By expanding the scholarly focus of discussions of global transit beyond well-documented western destinations, the special issue reveals entanglements between occupied Europe and the colonial world that significantly shaped the trajectories of Jewish refugees. Their experiences, often documented through personal writings and fiction, expose a complex interplay between European refugee history and colonial societies. The articles in this special issue unravel how Jewish refugees, initially victimized by European racial persecution, found themselves navigating colonial spaces structured by different forms of racial violence. They explore the refugees’ entanglement with colonial power dynamics, complicating conventional victim/perpetrator narratives. By weaving together historiography, literature and personal narratives, these articles emphasize the need for continued interdisciplinary investigation of the intricate histories of Holocaust refugees in colonial settings.

Imaginary worlds: Karl May and the refugees

ABSTRACT Linhard’s article shows how the imaginary worlds of German pulp author Karl May (1842–1912) appear in the memories of Jewish and anti-fascist refugees who found asylum in the Americas. Yet the refugees were not the only ones who had once been avid readers of May’s fictions: his novels were just as appealing to supporters of fascism, even, some claim, to Hitler himself. May’s novels are built on racialized and gendered imaginaries that made them equally suitable for those who saw indigenous cultures in the Americas as ultimately inferior and in need of guidance from the European characters, and those who brought with them romantic visions of still racialized, yet benevolent and noble natives. These visions bear no relationship to indigenous cultures in Latin America and instead are transposed from beliefs and tropes about the ‘Indians’ featured in the adventures of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Writers forced into exile, among them Leo Spitzer, Klaus Mann, Gertrude Duby and Egon Erwin Kisch, wrote about the ways in which reading May shaped how they once saw the Americas. The traces of May’s influence in the writings of displaced Jews and anti-fascists reveal a certain blindness to colonial racism that, while characteristic of the times when these authors came of age, was still part of world-views that many were not ready to challenge. Understanding the impact of the work of a man who called his novels ‘travel narratives’ (even though he never visited the places he claimed to be writing about) brings us one step closer to understanding more about the inner lives of Holocaust refugees in the colonial world.

Artists Behind Barbed Wire: Art Exhibitions in the Detention Camps in Cyprus, 1947–1948

ABSTRACT Between 1946 and 1949, more than 55,000 Holocaust refugees, 20 percent of them children and youth, were detained by the British in various camps in Cyprus, in order to prevent their entrance to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine). Relief organizations and emissaries from Eretz Israel were engaged in providing basic needs, occupation, and education to the detainees. Among other initiatives, art classes were organized for the young and adults alike, and occasional exhibitions were held to display their works. This paper tells the story of these exhibitions from different perspectives – therapeutic, educational, artistic, practical, and political. It exposes the politics behind the exhibits, as well as the competition surrounding them between the different political movements operating in the camps at the time. By analyzing the works of the young students in particular, and based on memories and research, the author shows how art was often used as an ideological tool as well. The youngsters had been directed to express their dreams of a wishful future in Eretz Israel, rather than their traumatic memories and losses in the Holocaust. Sculptures of Zionist leaders, models of kibbutzim, and displays of agricultural tools, among others, were common, while horrors of the war were hardly expressed in these exhibitions. One exhibition, displayed by the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, serves as a case study in this paper. This unique project, called ‘To-No’ (Hebrew initials for ‘Youth Production’) is presented here through its numerous artifacts preserved to this day in archives in Israel, and through later exhibitions of them in Cyprus (2014) and in Israel (2017), accompanied by catalogs and articles of scholarly interpretation. They carry a universal message on the power and influence of artwork and artifacts as a means of resilience and rehabilitation, and as a model of spiritual and cultural resistance.

Telling the Untold Story: Jewish Wartime Refuge in Haiti in Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s Avant que les ombres s’effacent

Abstract Literary narratives of Jewish refugees in the Caribbean uncover a forgotten chapter of wartime history. A key example is Haitian author Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s novel Avant que les ombres s’effacent (2017), which tracks the traumatic dispersion of a Polish Jewish family to Haiti, Cuba, Israel, and the US in the late 1930s. Dalembert interweaves the tale of his Jewish protagonist’s flight to Haiti with portrayals of the Haitian émigré community in Paris and the Haitian concentration camp prisoner Jean-Marcel Nicolas. Blending fact and fiction, the novel highlights the Haitian state’s little-known efforts to aid Holocaust refugees and connects those efforts to the island nation’s own revolutionary history. In this article, I argue that fiction’s unique traits as a medium of cultural memory enable Dalembert to reframe the wartime past from a Haitian perspective. Avant que les ombres s’effacent harnesses the fictional privileges of literary narrative, mediating between the real and the imaginary and combining Jewish and Caribbean memory systems in unexpected and often startling ways. Generating images of the wartime past that transform our perception of it, the novel moves Haiti to the center of the story and in so doing uncovers global dimensions of Jewish experience.

Refugiados do Holocausto em Portugal: representações da “vida nua” no corpo social português

This article deals with the representations of the passage of Holocaust refugees through Portuguese soil in the trilogy O cavalo espantado (1960) by Alves Redol, Sob céus estranhos (1962) by Ilse Losa and Sob céus estranhos: uma história de exílio (2007) by Daniel Blaufuks. Under three distinct narrative perspectives - that of “Just among the Nations”, that of the refugee himself and that of the “post-memory’s” heir (Hirsch 1992-1993) - these authors portray 1997) in the Portuguese social body. In his condition as an outlaw, the refugee becomes a privileged figure to question the “fiction originating from sovereignty” (Agamben 2002: 32). We also intend to analyze how the figure of the refugee raises reflections on the Portuguese identity, through two types of images: the “ideological” and the “utopian” (Moura 1998).

Willy Loman and Postwar Jewish Insecurity

Abstract Willy Loman’s cryptic Jewish identity, recognizable but absent, has long been considered an act of ethnic betrayal, evidence of Arthur Miller’s inauthenticity as a Jewish writer. However, as scholars recently have explored the undercurrent of anxiety running beneath the surface of postwar Jewish life, Willy’s feelings of rootlessness, and his worries over American success, seem now particularly “Jewish.” Arguing that Willy Loman represents a postwar Jewish-American identity crisis, not a suppressed Jewish essence, the article analyzes the reception of Death of a Salesman (1949) in the Jewish press, from the pulpit, and within the synagogue community. Throughout, Willy’s preoccupation with acceptance and his eventual self-destruction resonate uncomfortably with the nightmare of European catastrophe that American Jews were then processing. In this context, the article claims that Biff’s attempt to counter his father’s world of selling by laboring in Texas, an action usually interpreted through myths of the American West, may have been read by Jewish Salesman audiences through a discourse of postwar Zionism they knew well: namely, the resettlement of Holocaust refugees in the land of Israel.

From Buchenwald to Port-au-Prince: Becoming Haitian in the Holocaust: Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s Avant que les ombres s’effacent

From Buchenwald to Port-au-Prince: Becoming Haitian in the Holocaust: Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s Avant que les ombres s’effacent John Patrick Walsh Ruben Schwarzberg, the protagonist of the Haitian writer Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s 2017 novel Avant que les ombres s’effacent, is a Holocaust survivor who makes a transatlantic escape. The novel is a work of historical fiction that retraces the remarkable journey of an Ashkenazi Jewish refugee. Ruben is born in Lódź, Poland, in 1913, but, six years later, his family flees across the border to Germany after the massacre in Pińsk, when the Polish Army executed members of the Jewish community. The Schwarzbergs settle in Berlin, where the family prospers, and Ruben attends medical school. Yet the rise of the Nazis leads to renewed violence, and Ruben and his uncle Joe are imprisoned in Buchenwald. Somewhat miraculously, they are released after a former medical school professor intervenes on Ruben’s behalf. Through a series of chance encounters, Ruben makes his way to Paris, where he meets the Haitian poet, Ida Faubert, who informs him that the Haitian government has issued a decree that grants naturalized citizenship to Jewish refugees. In the fall of 1939, Ruben finds safe haven in Port-au-Prince, where he finally takes root. Ruben had long kept this story to himself. Yet, near the end of his life, the 2010 earthquake strikes Haiti, and Ruben feels compelled to speak of his past as a way to make sense of the devastation that surrounds him. Ruben’s journey is astounding, perhaps even to readers with knowledge of the Holocaust or Haitian and Caribbean history. Yet this is not the first time that Holocaust refugees have been depicted in Caribbean fiction or that a Caribbean writer has considered the legacy of the Holocaust along-side forced migrations in the Caribbean, from the slave trade all the way to the precarious journeys of Haitian “boat people” in the late twentieth century.1 As Sarah Phillips Casteel shows in Calypso Jews, such inter-diasporic reflection abounds in both anglophone and francophone contexts. [End Page 163] In her thoroughly engaging study of the connections between Jewish and black histories in the Caribbean, Casteel brings together a diverse group of writers, including Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, É douard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, and Caryl Phillips.2 Well aware of the political and critical risks of comparing the Holocaust to other historical events, even the Middle Passage, Casteel digs deep into Jewish history in the Caribbean by incorporating the expulsion of Sephardim from the Iberian peninsula in the 1490s. “Caribbean literary invocations of the Sephardic expulsion and the Holocaust merit consideration,” Casteel argues, “for what they can tell us not only about representations of Jewishness in postcolonial writing but also about the shifting preoccupations and vocabularies of Caribbean poetics” (2). One of the great merits of the book lies in Casteel’s handling of shifting historical and intercultural perspectives. However, apart from a brief analysis of Myriam Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels, Haitian literature and history is absent in Calypso Jews. Historically speaking, Haiti was not the only Caribbean country that took in refugees during the Second World War. Nor was this the sole period during which the Haitian government granted asylum to refugees. In Freedom’s Mirror, the historian Ada Ferrer brings to light two moments of early nineteenth-century Haitian history, when Presidents Alexander Pétion and Jean-Pierre Boyer invoked the principle of “free soil,” or the constitutional right to freedom and citizenship to all “Africans and Indians” on Haitian lands.3 Yet this history remains largely forgotten or unknown. These complex historical, cultural, and geographical layers inform Dalembert’s literary imaginary. As such, the entwined histories of radical conceptions of race and freedom, and migration and asylum in Avant que les ombres s’effacent complicate ongoing debates in a number of fields, including Holocaust studies, Haitian studies, French and Francophone studies, and even those outside literature and history that take up the question of migrants and refugees, such as Anthropology and Political Philosophy. This essay focuses on the literary representation of the circuitous path of Ruben’s itinerary...

Like a Barren Sheet of Paper: Rokhl Korn from Galician Orchards to Postwar Montreal

When Rokhl Korn settled in Montreal in 1948, the period she called her “years of wandering” (na v’nod yorn) finally came to an end. Yet a profound sense of dislocation marks the poetry she produced in this postwar urban setting, where a declining Yiddish culture formed a “third solitude” bounded on either side by Quebec’s hostile Anglo-Protestant and French-Catholic communities. The lush natural description and images of Polish–Jewish harmony of Korn’s prewar poetry were replaced in her postwar poetry by somber symbolism, in which the recurring motif of white paper signifies the futile attempt to recreate a vanished world. Tracing the imagistic shift in Korn’s writing from thriving trees to lifeless paper, this essay explores what Korn regarded as the transformation of Yiddish from an organic, indigenous aspect of interwar Poland to an uprooted, moribund refugee language within a culturally divided urban space. The essay thus sheds light on an underexplored Yiddish woman poet while expanding the dominant narrative of American Yiddish literature to include the unique experience of Holocaust refugees in Montreal.

Calypso Jews: Holocaust Refugees in the Caribbean Literary Imagination

This essay examines the representation of Holocaust refugees in novels by Caribbean authors John Hearne and Jamaica Kincaid. Drawing on refugee memoirs as well as calypsos from the late 1930s, it reads Hearne’s and Kincaid’s novels against the background of a little known chapter of Holocaust history in which Jewish refugees found safe haven in Trinidad and other parts of the Caribbean. It argues that Hearne’s and Kincaid’s stagings of the Black-Jewish encounter ultimately signal their ambivalent authorial positionings while also illustrating their diverging approaches to the project of connecting diasporas and histories of trauma.

Much More Than a Historical Novel

It is probably impossible to imagine ourselves in the place of the Jewish survivors of World War II and the Holocaust immediately after the war, but this is exactly the task that Yehiel Grenimann, the son of survivors, set for himself. Yanosh and Eva, his central characters, were hidden on the Aryan side of Warsaw, thanks to their connection with the Polish nationalist underground. Yosef Borowski, known as Bora, the third major protagonist, was a partisan leader during the war. The novel begins with the entry of the Soviet army into Warsaw and ends with Yanosh and Eva’s imminent arrival in Australia, where, despite pressure from Zionist activists in the displaced persons camps, they have elected to go rather than risk illegal immigration to Palestine.Unlike a historical novel based on research and imaginative projection into the past, Far Away from Where? develops information the author received from his parents. It is an effort to understand them — not as individuals, since the protagonists are not meant to represent them, but as people who shared harrowing experiences and found the courage and strength to begin life again despite enormous losses.Grenimann makes it clear that the Jews had to choose from among a very limited range of options after the war. Eva and Yanosh choose to start a family, and Eva’s pregnancy is a major element in the novel. Eva chooses to bring traditional Jewish ceremonies into their life, although Yanosh, an assimilated, antireligious intellectual, resists. Eva and Yanosh also choose to seek a better life for themselves in Australia rather than throw their lot in with the national struggle in Palestine. In contrast, Bora chooses not to lay down arms after the war, but to continue striking at SS officers and German war criminals. None of the characters has the luxury of considering attractive alternatives at leisure. They have to decide quickly, with little or no information.I have been Grenimann’s friend for decades. I also met his late father, the heroic partisan leader upon whom, to a degree, the character of Bora is based. Hence I know that he has moved along a complex trajectory from his secular Zionist background in Melbourne to becoming a Conservative rabbi who works for Rabbis for Human Rights in Jerusalem. Today this son of Holocaust refugees works with displaced Bedouins in the occupied Palestinian territories; this experience feeds his efforts to portray the inner worlds of those still looking for a stable home.You might say that John Green’s decision to leave Australia and become Rabbi Yehiel Grenimann was a reaction to his parents’ decision to go as far away as they could from Europe and the Middle East, a rejection of their prioritizing personal security and comfort over Jewish solidarity and risk. So you might expect to find a judgmental, Zionist attitude in his book. But you won’t. Yehiel is sympathetic to the desire of his protagonists, Eva and Yanosh, to lead a normal life in a hospitable country. He also makes us aware that the Jews of Poland were hardly of a piece. They entered the dreadful period of the Holocaust with diverse backgrounds and ambitions, and those who survived remained as diverse as they had been to begin with — though tragically diminished in number.Perhaps the most important lesson of this book for us today is the way it conveys what should be obvious: times have changed. The Jewish people is no longer recovering from the immediate trauma of slaughter, fear, deprivation, and doubt, although our collective loss remains beyond words. The constraints that dictated the decisions made by Eva, Yanosh, Bora, and the other characters in Grenimann’s book have dissipated. The survivors’ pain — the loss of family and friends, the destruction of the world they had grown up in, the traumatic burden that the war left in their souls — is largely in the past. We are the second, third, and fourth generations after the Holocaust. We remember, but we remember what we have heard and read, not what we have experienced ourselves. Unfortunately, many of us have not yet developed a worldview consistent with the historical changes that have taken place.The title of Far Away from Where? conveys many messages. Eva is worried that Australia is too “far away,” but Yanosh asks: What are you reluctant to be far away from, after all we have gone through? We, Grenimann’s readers, are far away in time and geography from the Holocaust. While we mustn’t forget what we are now far away from, we must acknowledge that we are, in fact, far away. Our actions, today and tomorrow, must be based on that recognition.

Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (review)

Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (review)

Wrestling with Legacy

Those of us who are children of Holocaust refugees and survivors inherit a complex, multi-faceted legacy that manifests itself in various conscious and unconscious ways at different stages of our lives. In the following pages, I share my journey toward a better understanding and integration of my parents' Holocaust experiences, and of the losses they and their extended families suffered under Nazi rule. That understanding necessitated traveling to my father's place of birth, developing relationships with Germans currently residing there, and immersing myself in the details of the demise of the Jewish community of the small rural village of Roth, Germany. Immersing myself in my father's Holocaust history was both daunting and healing. It provided me with an opportunity to wrestle with my legacy in a way that interrupted the cycle of intergenerational prejudice that I was passing on to my own children. It inspired me to create an educational exhibit that could teach the lessons of the Holocaust in a way that is personal and relevant to students, with the intent of helping visitors to understand their civic responsibility to actively protest against prejudice and social injustice.

Light from the Ashes: Social Science Careers of Young Holocaust Refugees and Survivors

Light from the Ashes: Social Science Careers of Young Holocaust Refugees and Survivors

Light from the Ashes: Social Science Careers of Young Holocaust Refugees and Survivors

Light from the Ashes: Social Science Careers of Young Holocaust Refugees and Survivors James E. Waller James E. Waller Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 17, Issue 3, WINTER , Pages 513–515, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcg029 Published: 01 December 2003

Book Reviews

Books Reviewed:Daniel Chirot and Martin E. P. Seligman (eds.), Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences, and Possible SolutionsDavid Patrick Houghton, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage CrisisYoram Peri (ed.), The Assassination of Yitzhak RabinPeter Suedfeld (ed.), Light from the Ashes: Social Science Careers of Young Holocaust Refugees and Survivors

Holocaust refugees in Great Britain and the research centre for German and Austrian exile studies in London

Holocaust refugees in Great Britain and the research centre for German and Austrian exile studies in London

In the Blood? Consent, Descent, and the Ironies of Jewish Identity

Washington Post exposed the secret history of Secretary of State Madeleine Korbel Albright's family background. Because Albright's parents were Holocaust refugees and her grandparents were victims, much of the controversy focused on the conflict between one family's desire to escape history and the public's call for Albright to remember it.' But at the center of this particular storm lay another, equally controversial issue revolving around questions of descent and consent, blood and belief. If Albright reared as a Catholic and became an Episcopalian upon her marriage, asked novelist Louis Begley, was she really honor-bound to become, in her late 50s, all of a sudden, aJew? His answer no. And he argued that whether or not Albright or is not of Jewish origin should be, in our society, strictly her own business.2 The historian David Hollinger later echoed this view, insisting that anyone can ascribe Jewish identity to Albright by regarding her as a passive object, invoking in relation to that object one or more of the criteria by which she is a Jew. But in our post-ethnic age of voluntarism, argues Hollinger, she, as a willing subject, can affiliate as a Jew, and to whatever extent and by whatever means she chooses.3 Perhaps. But only if we ignore the centrality of blood logic to modernJewish identity narratives. AsJudaic Studies scholar Lawrence