Jewish Survivors Research Articles

‘In any case, you believe him one hundred percent, everything he says.’ Trustworthiness in Holocaust survivor talks with high school students in Germany

ABSTRACT Our study will turn to one Jewish male Holocuast survivor who visited ten high schools in Germany from January to March 2020. Based on the results of empirical and theoretical considerations of testifying, a communicative model was considered appropriate for understanding the encounter. Of special concern was to what extent trustworthiness was constructed during these talks by students. A mixed methods approach was chosen, combining testimony analysis with empirical tools in social science. The result of the study points to the students’ trust in the survivor story, which is supported by the school institution and by the survivor’s narration, his rhetorical strategies, and his personality.

Sensory Witnessing at Treblinka

ABSTRACT Employing a model of spatial analysis that examines the smells, sights, and sounds emanating from the Treblinka death camp, I chart a ‘zone of sensory witnessing’ that extended beyond Treblinka’s boundaries for many kilometers into the surrounding countryside. This research vastly expands the number of known and potential witnesses to Treblinka by putting the voices of Jewish survivors, German camp personnel, and local Polish residents in conversation with one another. This methodology privileges the fact that each person within the zone of sensory witnessing, when stripped of their relative power dynamics, possessed a body capable of experiencing similar sensory phenomena, and I explore the recollections and testimonies of these individuals to describe the process by which sensory witnessing occurred both inside and outside the camp. Furthermore, how these witnesses interpreted what they experienced – as well as how this then affected, and often changed, their daily lives for the duration of the camp’s existence – provides another example of just how widely sites of atrocity in the Holocaust actually reached. Specifically, it shows how sensory witnessing during the Holocaust altered patterns of behavior, even for those witnesses not directly targeted during the genocide. More broadly, this research offers a counternarrative to Nazi imagery presenting death camps as isolated and clean killing factories; positing instead that the reality for anyone within the zone of sensory witnessing consisted of brutal, horrific sensory experiences that were universally unpleasant, invasive, and widespread. Above all, this case study serves as a reminder that historical spaces once existed as sites of vivid, multisensorial reality, and as a result, genocide never occurs in obscurity.

The Gordian Knot of Justice: Prosecuting Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Stalinist Courts for "Collaboration" with the Enemy

The Gordian Knot of JusticeProsecuting Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Stalinist Courts for "Collaboration" with the Enemy Diana Dumitru (bio) As World War II drew to an end, a determined Soviet regime combed previously occupied territories, searching for various types of "fascist collaborators" as it reestablished its grip on a profoundly shaken society. This article focuses on one of the most unexpected groups caught in this massive punitive act: Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. The topic of Jewish "collaboration" during World War II has been extremely sensitive, and it took decades for researchers to feel comfortable approaching it. Western historiography dealt with the issue primarily by treading along the lines of Lawrence Langer's analytical model of "choiceless choices" and Primo Levi's call not to pass judgment on the Jews who served as police officers, heads of ghettos and camps, or Sonderkommando members.1 While there has been no sign of a satisfactory resolution to the enormous tension between the impossibility and inevitability of judging these victims, knowledge about the topic [End Page 729] has accumulated.2 Recently, Evgeny Finkel opened a new avenue of research by demonstrating that the prewar political regimes under which Jews lived shaped the patterns of Jewish leaders' behavior and determined the type of survival strategies they chose.3 Aside from Finkel's work, and despite a growing interest in the broader issue of collaboration in the Soviet territories, the topic of Jewish "collaboration" in the region has received relatively little scholarly attention.4 [End Page 730] Wolfgang Schneider's article on the trial of two Jewish ghetto officials from Shargorod and Vadim Altskan's case study of a Zhmerinka ghetto's leader are the only other publications on the topic, while both Tanja Penter and Pavel Polian briefly mention Jewish trials and collaboration.5 One additional study was recently published, with historians examining the trials of Jews accused of collaboration with the Nazis in Lithuania.6 Schneider and Altskan agree with scholarship on Soviet postwar trials, emphasizing the failure of authorities to account for the complexities surrounding the phenomenon of "collaboration." Altskan stresses that "the Soviet authorities were unwilling to consider the complexity of the circumstances surrounding the survival of the ghetto's inmates."7 However, Schneider took a new turn by arguing that "judicial lenience" was possible in a Soviet court, when networks of high-placed individuals supported a Jewish defendant.8 Importantly, Schneider argues that a defendant's wartime violence was a factor that weighed heavily on the severity of punishment dictated by the courts.9 This study uses the arrest dossiers of 11 Jews tried in the Moldavian SSR (MSSR) for alleged collaboration with the Romanian occupational authorities.10 [End Page 731] The Moldovan sample allows for insights into the specificities of the courts' functioning in a new Soviet territory, especially by revealing the prewar legacies that came into play during the trials. The defendants' similar structural circumstances during the Holocaust (Romanian as opposed to German occupation) and their investigation and trial within the MSSR's court system provides for a more coherent understanding of their actions and strategies displayed both during and after the war. All defendants held administrative positions in camps or ghettos within Transnistria between 1941 and 1944 and were tried by Military Tribunals in 1944–48, when thousands of survivors were still present and ready to testify. It appears that suspects were tried inside the republic of their official residence, even if the alleged crime was committed elsewhere.11 The 11 cases represent a fraction of the total collection titled "War Crimes Investigation and Trial Records from the Republic of Moldova," available in copies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). The collection comprises over 300 dossiers originating from the former KGB archive of the MSSR and pertains to defendants tried under the accusation of collaboration.12 Unfortunately, the original files, inherited by the archive of the Information and Security Services of the Republic of Moldova, are closed to historians. Hence the number of cases tried in the MSSR and the proportion of Jews among the defendants remains unknown.13 This limitation raises questions about the representativeness of the current sample, yet the small numbers of...

David Markus: From the Holocaust to the Cold War

David Markus:From the Holocaust to the Cold War Michael Rom (bio) Keywords Brazil, Cold War, Holocaust, Immigration, Yiddish press "Why do you dedicate so much space in your newspaper to the fight against communism?" asked a dedicated reader of the Rio de Janeiro Yiddish biweekly Idishe Prese (Jewish Press) in August 1951. "Do you lack other important problems that need to be addressed and elucidated, and which are no less important than the fight against communism?" continued the reader, who signed his letter "Ben Moshe, São Paulo." In a lengthy response to the letter, the Idishe Prese columnist dubbed "A Broker" did not mince words. "The struggle against communist expansion is a struggle for Jewish national existence," he wrote. "Jewish national life is impossible there, where the dictator of the Kremlin rules, or in the countries upon which Moscow exerts her influence."1 "A Broker" was the Idishe Prese's editor, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor named David Markus. Markus was only six months into his editorial duties, having arrived in Brazil the previous year, but this did not stop him from leading a determined campaign for the expulsion of communists from Brazilian Jewish institutions, along with another Polish Jewish survivor, the newspaper's São Paulo correspondent Konrad Charmatz. Through the lens of Markus's unique life story, this essay explores three overlooked aspects of Latin American Jewish cultural and political life: the renaissance of the Brazilian Yiddish press after World War II, the importance of Latin American Yiddish newspapers as arenas of communal conflict, and the vital role of Holocaust survivors in Brazilian Jewish politics during the Cold War. Born in Brok, Poland, in 1916, Markus was studying humanities at the University of Vilnius when the Nazis invaded Poland. Obtaining a transit [End Page 521] visa from Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese vice consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, Markus made his way across the USSR to Kobe, Japan, before ending up in Shanghai, which was then dominated by foreign powers and did not require a visa to enter. One of nearly twenty thousand European Jews who found refuge in the Chinese city, Markus subsisted by selling leather goods and cigarettes and also worked for a Yiddish radio program. In his spare time, he wrote sketches and musical numbers for the Jewish Literary Arts Cabaret, a Yiddish theatrical troupe led by the Polish Jewish actress Rose Shoshana Kahan, whose holiday revues included "Hamantaschen with Rice" and "Twelve Kneidlach." When the war ended, Markus returned to Poland but was unable to locate any surviving relatives, and in 1947, he immigrated to Uruguay, where two of his cousins lived. In Montevideo, he wrote for the Folksblat (People's Page), became the editor of the Poalei Zion (Labor Zionist)–affiliated newspaper Unzer Vort (Our Word), and married a Polish Jewish survivor named Lucia Weigler. He also found himself in the midst of the Cold War. In response to Soviet control over Eastern Europe, U.S. President Harry Truman pledged in March 1947 to combat the expansion of communism throughout the world. Meanwhile, the USSR launched a campaign of repression against Soviet Jewish cultural life, arresting prominent Jewish artists and intellectuals and closing Yiddish newspapers, theaters, and publishing houses. In Brazil, where Markus relocated in 1950, the Jewish Cold War was becoming particularly heated. The Brazilian Jewish community was largely the product of interwar migration from Europe and the Middle East, which occurred shortly before and partly during Getúlio Vargas's Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship (1937–45). Vargas repressed ethnic political organizations and foreign language periodicals, including shutting down Idishe Prese from 1941 to 1945. Freed of these restrictions by the return to democracy in 1945, Brazilian Jews reestablished Idishe Prese and created new Yiddish newspapers, while Zionists and communists worked together to found communal institutions such as the Jewish state federations of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which became arenas of conflict during the Cold War. After becoming the editor of Idishe Prese in February 1951, Markus added his voice to the fray. Following a contentious meeting of the Rio de Janeiro Jewish Federation in July 1951, in which Zionists and communists traded barbs over who was...

Svenska judars berättelser om flyktingar, överlevande och hjälpverksamheter under och efter Förintelsen

Swedish Jews’ supposed inactivity over Europe’s persecuted Jews during the Holocaust has been a prevalent discourse during the post-war period. This article ponders the origins of that discourse and how it affects how and what Swedish Jews narrate about aid and relief work, and Jewish refugees and survivors, when recounting their memories from the 1930s and 1940s. This investigation also examines how previous research has addressed and represented the aid efforts of the Jewish minority in Sweden and discusses what new empirical knowledge about Swedish Jewish aid and relief work during the Holocaust we can ascertain by using oral history. Hence, it is also a contribution to the ongoing debate in the research field of ‘refugee studies’, initiated by the historians Philip Marfleet and Peter Gatrell, who emphasise both the importance of working with historical perspectives and asking questions about the sources at the disposal of historians and what sources they choose to work with when writing about aid, relief work and refugees.
 
 

Work and Play: Rolf Hochhuth's The Representative in Tel Aviv (1964)

This paper probes into the 1964 Israeli performance of Rolf Hochhuth's controversial drama The Representative. Staged by Habima National Theatre under the direction of Avraham Ninio, the majority of the cast engaged in this production comprised European-born Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors. In its cultural context, the theatrical image of Jewish refugees dressed in Nazi uniforms or, conversely, staging visual, gestural or aural markers of Auschwitz prisoners imbued the drama with political meanings, triggering a debate about agency and forms of social and material participation in the aftermath of calamity. Examining the subterranean world of artists and craftsmen and women whose labour is deliberately obscured from view, I argue that the work of theatre emerges as a creative and generative energy that filters from the staged fiction into the ‘real’ world.

Sexual Violence against Men and Boys during the Holocaust: A Genealogy of (Not-So-Silent) Silence

Abstract Although far more women than men are sexually violated in conflict settings, the records indicate that sexual violence against men and boys has been routinely practised as a weapon of war and genocide. Sexual violence against men and boys during the Holocaust was likely a regular occurrence, but it has remained undocumented and under-researched. Sexual violence against men, because it does not conform to prevalent gender norms and expectations, has been subjected to cultural and epistemic erasure. As a result, it is construed on the model of female rape, making it difficult to recognize male-victim specific forms of assault. Moreover, normative and legal frameworks developed to address it do not take into account the role that the stigma of homosexuality plays in male sexual violence. This article is based on oral testimonies by male heterosexual-identified Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. I focus on the survivors’ self-presentation as adult men in light of their past abuse and on the dynamic of the interviews. I also reference one memoir (Nate Leipciger’s The Weight of Freedom) and reinterpret a chapter from Elie Wiesel’s Night in light of my findings. Revealing the extent of sexual violence against men helps delegitimize harmful gender stereotypes and conceptions of manhood and ‘homosexuality’ and expose their central role in the perpetuation of genocidal violence.

“What! Still Alive?!” Jewish Survivors in Poland and Israel Remember Homecoming

“What! Still Alive?!” Jewish Survivors in Poland and Israel Remember Homecoming

The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union, Diana Dumitru

Reviewed by: The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union by Diana Dumitru Ion Popa The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union. By Diana Dumitru. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 300 pages. $31.99 (paper). Diana Dumitru’s book offers provocative insight and indirect answers to some of the most important questions posed by the millennial problem of antisemitism: what is antisemitism; can it be resisted in a meaningful and successful way; and, how can one explain that antisemitism differs in intensity across the European continent? This highly original study looks at two regions that share important similarities and differences. Although Bessarabia and Transnistria have been central to writings about the Holocaust in Romania (see the work of Jean Ancel, Avigdor Shachan, Dalia Offer, Dennis Deletant, Radu Ioanid, and others), we have not had a comparative study of antisemitic attitudes in these regions until now. The book starts with details about the levels of antisemitism in both Bessarabia and Transnistria before the First World War. These territories had been under Tsarist rule (Bessarabia was annexed to Russia in 1812) for almost the entire nineteenth century. Diana Dumitru contrasts examples of Russian antisemitism—such as those expressed by the central administration and by cultural figures such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol—with examples from [End Page 190] Bessarabian and Transnistrean writers and journalists. She also examines intellectual circles that fought against the state-supported anti semitic campaign, including the creators of the 1890 “Declaration of V. S. Solov’ev,” signed by Leo Tolstoy among others, that protested the regime’s oppression of Jews. This first chapter draws arguments from a variety of places, from numerous archival materials to a multitude of secondary sources, in languages as varied as French, Russian, English, and Romanian. Later in the book the author uses the extensive archival collections of Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the state archives of Romania, Moldova, and Russia. Especially noteworthy is the use of numerous testimonies from both Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and non-Jewish inhabitants of these territories, some of them gathered by the author herself. At the end of the First World War, Bessarabia became part of Romania, while Transnistria became part of the Soviet Union (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). The territory of Transnistria is very different today than it was during the Second World War— the book focuses on the war-time territory, which was approximately the size of today’s state of Moldova in southeastern Ukraine. In Romania, the interwar period was a time of increased nationalism and antisemitism, while the Soviet Union was pushing for the concept of korenizatsiia—or indigenization—geared toward promoting “national equality” and “friendship of the peoples.” Diana Dumitru’s book asks whether this difference in state policy and public discourse explains the later differences in behavior toward Jews in the two regions. In the following chapters the evolution of Jewish-Gentile relations in Bessarabia and Transnistria is examined. First, the author describes the way in which Bessarabian Jews were treated in Greater Romania, where there was a combination of state-encouraged anti-Jewish policies on the one hand and grassroots continuation of pre-WWI antisemitism on the other. In fact, grassroots antisemitism became even stronger in Romania after 1918 in a context in which the state, which was mostly governed by ethnic Romanians, favored a centralized model alienating the ethnic and religious minorities [End Page 191] added as a result of the Great Union. This was coupled with the intense intellectual debates that legitimized Orthodox Christianity as the core element of Romanian nationalism and encouraged the antisemitic actions of rightwing parties and movements such as the Iron Guard and the National Christian Defense League (often called Cuziști, after the name of its founder A. C. Cuza). The book then moves to Transnistria, where the story was substantially different. The newly established communist regime intended to end centuries of discrimination and conflict between various ethnic groups by integrating them into a new socialist society under the leadership of the Communist Party. This intention was visible immediately in...

The Departed: Broken and unbroken symbols

The DepartedBroken and unbroken symbols Dinda L. Gorlée (bio) George Steiner (1929-2020) was a polyglot and polymath; indeed, he was the eminent scholar of almost everything to transform the modern world of humanities into the universe of learning from history. Born in a Viennese-Jewish family living in exile in Paris, the Steiner family had to emigrate again to the United States just before the Nazi-occupation of France in 1940. Studying at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, George Steiner was a student of literature to become the intellectually off-scale scholar of translation studies. He returned to Europe to do his doctoral work at Balliol College of the University of Oxford. In the article "Humane literacy" published by The Times Literary Supplement (1963) and reprinted in The Critical Moment: Essays on the Nature of Literature (1964), Steiner struck, as a young French-American critic, a polemical blow to all post-war literature, since for him the insufficiency of evidence cannot reach the stage of intellectual and emotional conclusions. The negative position had secret roots, with his critiques of modern literature Steiner, as a Jewish survivor, attacked the extreme "silence" of post-war language, where the cultural mood was basically oriented towards the technological future. Steiner wanted to re-educate the cultural decay of humanity into real historical research. Steiner's work started as literary journalist to review modern literature. Then, with the professorship of English language and comparative literature at the University of Geneva, Steiner progressed to the full voice of academic criticism. In his academic career, Steiner sought to find a remedy for his cultural skepsis. As an eminent scholar, he travelled around the world, working as Distinguished Fellow at the Universities of Princeton University, New York University, Yale University, and other teaching institutions. After his retirement, he became an Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College of the University of Cambridge, where he died in 2020. Steiner was an emigré thinker inspiring with exciting ideas and passionate thoughts by shifting intellectual readers between literary, historical, scientific, and cultural areas. He hunted after literary (that is, fictional) facts to explore the deeply felt irreality of cultural history and civilization, arts and science, language and politics, but the dignity of his torment was based on his Jewish faith against the secular world. The problematic but self-conscious character of Steiner's indefatigable writing-and-reading supersedes the scientific frontiers of academic departments to create one major universe for all students, taking part in art and sciences. Steiner's ultimate goal was to make from the fragmented culture divided in separate sciences—what he predicted as the future "postculture," which was learning the episodes of recent history of Europe's literature—to transform the critical thoughts into a new world. Steiner's first memory was inextricably bound up with the horror stories of cultural unhousedness and hospitability, racial inflation, and political history together with his family's struggles to survive the Nazi Holocaust. His research as a "second-hand" critic of literature was enriched by his infinite information to resolve the ignorance of the audience into his encouraging message to "the knowledge and governance of human possibility" for all readers. His skeptical concept crisscrossed the troublesome years of the Holocaust to reconstruct the art of future criticism. Steiner's self-referentiality was affected by the subliminal traumas of his malformed right hand. He suffered this disability as a tentative sign of warning or perhaps alarm. Steiner's secret disability seemed to allow him to function without difficulties and uncertainties, but still seemed to make him spiritually unable to function as an equal in a social group. Instead, his mood radiated his aloof and arrogant superiority in scholarly talent. I recollect that, in early 1970, Steiner was invited to speak at a small gathering of translation theorists at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Translation studies had just emerged from the marginal footnotes of the experiences of the literary translator to operate as "free" translation of images, similes, and metaphors. Translation had built a "fresh" language, but the mixed branch of translation studies was still an illusion for the academic community. As I recall, Steiner's performance...

Trauma Zagłady a seksualność. Wspólnota matki i córki w prozie biograficznej Helen Epstein

Holocaust Trauma and Sexuality: Mother-Daughter Relationship in Helen Epstein’s Biographical Prose In Children of the Holocaust (1979), Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History (1997) and The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma (2017), Helen Epstein shows an unusual bond created between her and her mother – Franci Epstein, a Jewish Holocaust survivor. The bond was so strong that it led to the phenomenon of identification which resulted in many negative consequences. On the one hand, it put the daughter’s experiences in danger of being appropriated by her mother, but on the other, it contributed to the developing bodily symptoms that seem to have been inspired by the camp experience of her mother. The relationship between Franci and Helen proves that the community can be seen not only as a way of restoring bonds of transgenerational communication, even if they appear as a form of postmemory (Marianne Hirsch) or rememories (Toni Morrison), but it can also create completely new traumas.

The end of War, the end of persecution? Post-World War II collective anti-Jewish violence in Slovakia

Contrary to the previous political regime of the Slovak state (1939–1945), official policy had significantly changed in the renewed Czechoslovakia after the end of World War II, but anti-Jewish sentiments and even their brachial demonstrations somewhat framed the everyday reality of Jewish survivors who were returning to their homes from liberated concentration camps or hiding places. Their attempts to reintegrate into the society where they had used to live regularly came across intolerance, hatred and social exclusion, further strengthened by classical anti-Semitic stereotypes and prejudices. Desired capitulation of Nazi Germany and its satellites resulted also in the end of systematic Jewish extermination, but it did not automatically lead to a peaceful everyday life. This paper focuses on the social dynamics between Slovak majority society and the decimated Jewish minority in the first post-World War II years and analyses some crucial factors, particular motivations and circumstances of the selected acts of collective anti-Jewish violence in Slovakia. Moreover, the typological diversity of the specific collective atrocities will be discussed.

Sprawy synagog i cmentarzy żydowskich tuż po wojnie w dokumentach Ministerstwa Administracji Publicznej

The question of property of pre-war Jewish communities was an important issue after the war for both Jewish survivors and non-Jewish inhabitants of small towns, as well as for the public administration structures, which were slowly stabilizing. While the real estate and personal effects the Jews had left behind quickly found new residents or users the buildings which had belonged to the religious communities – synagogues, cemeteries, and mikvehs – had been and still are been much more visible signs of the former multi-denominational communities of those towns. Analyzing documents of the Department of Denominations of the Ministry of Public Administration and the documents of the Legal Section of the Central Committee of Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydow w Polsce, CKŻP), the author describes the official mode of transfer of real estate, types of decisions made, and relations between the institutions of Jewish life and the central and local administration.

Den Judiska Kvinnoklubben (JKK) och de judiska flyktingarna under 1930- och 1940-talen


 
 
 
 In a Swedish context, Jewish women’s experiences and actions have gone unrecorded and unrecognised; most narratives of Swedish Jewish history offer only a partial account of their past. Marginalised or ignored, or absorbed into universalised categories of ‘Jews’, ‘women’ or ‘survivors’, the experiences and histories of Jewish women are in general not represented in previous Swedish research on the history of the Jewish minority, the Swedish Jewish response to the Nazi terror and the Holocaust or the history of the women’s movement in general. Previous research on the Swedish Jewish response and assistance for the Jewish refugees and survivors of Nazi persecution has mainly dealt with the Jewish community in Stockholm and its relief committee, where the women were absent from leadership positions. The purpose of this study is to explore if and how the Jewish women’s club in Stockholm initiated or was involved in relief activities for and with the persecuted Jews of Europe. Specifically, this is investigated in the context of how the club was established and manifested in public by examining what questions the club raised and what activities it organised in the 1930s and 1940s.
 
 
 

Red Stars and Yellow Stars: The Soviet Investigation of Klooga Concentration Camp

Abstract This study considers the extent to which Stalinist political goals influenced the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission’s information gathering about Nazi crimes on the local level. Examining the investigation of Klooga concentration camp in Estonia, the author compares the statements that Jewish survivors gave to commission investigators with these same survivors’ testimony preserved in other Soviet and non-Soviet sources. She argues that investigations took fundamentally different courses in different places due to local agendas and conditions. In cases such as Klooga, Jewish survivors and Soviet investigators worked together to document Nazi atrocities, creating the accurate record that Stalin’s government required to pursue its political objectives.

The Cowardly Jew they Forgot to Gas: The Phenomenon of Dutch Post-liberation Antisemitism and Some Continuities

This article elaborates on two antisemitic stereotypes or phenomena that show how the Shoah was turned against the Jews as early as 1945. The curse “they forgot to gas you” popped up immediately after the war, during all kind of public rows on the street with Jewish employers and neighbours. It was, so to say, the first antisemitic post-Holocaust stereotype that sent the Jewish survivor – verbally – to the gas chamber. Several Jews took cases to court. The insult “they forgot to gas you” was taken more seriously by Jews themselves and punished more severely by the court than the simple insult “filthy Jew”. The identification of “the Jew” and the gas chamber never disappeared but lives on – also within the football world, satire and anti-Israel demonstrations. It is a manifestation of what Theodor Adorno coined Schuld- und Erinnerungsabwehrantisemitismus (antisemitism based on a rejection of guilt and unwelcome memories). The same goes for the accusation that, during the German occupation, the Jews had offered no, or not enough, resistance against the Nazis. Others had to fight for them. Jews were neither fighters nor heroes; they depended on the courage of gentiles. Also this stereotype of the passive, obedient Jew would persist, for example, in a final school examination paper in 1983 and in some recent Dutch historiography on the Second World War and the Shoah. In this way the Shoah functioned as a point of fixation for postliberation – and more generally – postwar antisemitism.

Personal Experiences in Post-Shoah Greece: The Case of Isaak Menahem Rousso

In December 1971, twelve years after his first letter to the West German government, 73-year-old Isaak Menahem Rousso exclaimed: “I ask you, what did I do to you for you to destroy my wealth, my shops? You killed my parents, and now you want to pay me a pittance”? The article focuses on the individual struggle of a Jewish survivor to receive compensation from the Federal Republic of Germany, as can be traced in the personal archive of Isaak Menahem Rousso. It examines the numerous letters he sent to German officials during the 1960s and 1970s, documents and contextualises his feelings of despair, fear and anger, and elucidates upon them. These feelings are typical for the Greek Jewish survivors that sought compensation. Survivors complained that the claims evaluation process constituted an unpleasant and inhumane experience. Many found it very difficult to return to the past and remember their suffering, as some of them already felt guilt or shame for having survived, not to mention the pain that reliving these traumatic experiences incurred. Many victims suffered from post-traumatic disorders and it was not easy to revive these experiences. Through Isaak Menahems’ story, I want to explore the survivors’ feelings in their search for recognition and compensation.

Commonalities and Peculiarities of the Return to Life of Holocaust Survivors in their Home Countries: The Dutch and Greek Cases in Context

This article provides a survey of the main characteristics of the return process of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to their home countries in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, with the goal to contextualise and compare the return to the Netherlands and Greece.

“What! Still Alive?!”: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Israel Remember HomecomingMonika Rice

“What! Still Alive?!”: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Israel Remember HomecomingMonika Rice

Monika Rice. “What! Still Alive?!”: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Israel Remember Homecoming. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017. 253 pp.

Monika Rice. “What! Still Alive?!”: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Israel Remember Homecoming. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017. 253 pp.