Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 590
Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼
978-1-4422-4336-1 • Hardback • August 2015 • $70.00 • (£54.00)
978-1-4422-4337-8 • eBook • August 2015 • $66.00 • (£51.00)
Leah Wolfson is senior program officer and applied research scholar, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Maps
Readers’ Guide
Abbreviations
Introduction and Series Postscript
PART I:THE “FINAL SOLUTION” AND THE END OF THE WAR
Chapter One: The End of the War and the Last Throes of Genocide
Resistance, Rescue, and Escape
The Last Deportations, 1944–1945
The Final Days of the Concentration Camp System
Moving Jews: Death Marches and the End of the War
Chapter Two: Experiencing “Liberation”
American Jewish Soldiers Encounter the Holocaust
Responding to the Liberators: Liberation from the Perspective
Chapter Three: Adjusting to Peace, Surviving Survival
Emerging from the Holocaust: Finding a “Home” in Postwar Europe
Surviving as Children, Reclaiming Childhood: Jewish Children after the War
PART II:JEWS ON THE MOVE: FINDING AND DEFINING “HOME” IN THE POSTWAR ERA
Chapter Four: Returning “Home”: Emigration and the Search for Postwar Normalcy
Refugees and the Postwar Landscape: Borders, Citizenship, and Nationality
Creating Homeland: Aspirations for Palestine
The Other “Promised Land”: Refugees and Survivors in the United States
A Home Elsewhere: Emigration outside Palestine and the United States
Chapter Five: Jews and Displaced Persons Camps in Postwar Europe
Jewish Involvement in DP Camp Administration
The Daily Lives of Jewish DPs: Interpreting the Holocaust from the Inside
Chapter Six: Citizenship, Nationhood, and Homeland: Jewish and Non-Jewish Encounters and the Zionist Ideal
Imagining “Home:” Jewish Displaced Persons and Differing Visions of Zionism
Between Tolerance and Antisemitism: Making a Home in the Diaspora
PART III:TAKING STOCK, SEARCHING FOR JUSTICE
Chapter Seven: The Search for Relatives
Creating Lists of the Living and Lists of the Dead
“Only Sad News to Report”: Survivor Letters to Family Outside Europe
Searching for Jewish Children in the Postwar Period: The Organizational Process
Picking Up and Moving On: Grappling with Decimated Families
Chapter Eight: Punishing the Perpetrators
Official Justice: Allied War Crimes Trials
Coverage of Postwar Trials in the Jewish Press
In Pursuit of Justice: Statements of the Victims
Justice on the Local Level: Claims and Accusations
Chapter Nine: Reclaiming Possessions
Restitution in Theory and Practice: Legal Considerations
The Conversation among Jewish Communal Organizations
Restitution on the Local Level: Challenges and Roadblocks
Personal Restitution Claims
PART IV:FRAMING, DEFINING, AND REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST
Chapter Ten: Making Memory: Early Memoirs and Reflections
Early Histories of the Holocaust: An Emerging Field
Between Nostalgia and Destruction: The Role of Yitzkor Memorial Books 3
Early Postwar Memoirs and Literary Reflections
Unpublished Diaries and Memoirs in the Immediate Postwar Period
Chapter Eleven: Commemorating the Victims: Memorializing the Holocaust
Marking Graves: Commemorating the Dead In Situ
Local Memories, Local Memorials: Memorializing Individual Communities
Responding Religiously: The Formation of Post-Holocaust Theologies
Emerging Centers of Jewish History and Documentation
Memorial as National Identity: The Holocaust and Prestate Israel
Chapter Twelve: The Survivors Speak: Collecting and Defining Postwar Testimony
Interviewing the Victims: Jewish Historical Commissions
Local Testimony Efforts: Interviewing Survivors in Their Former Homes
“I Did Not Interview the Dead”: David Boder and the First Recorded Testimony
List of Documents
Bibliography
Glossary
Chronology
Index
About the Author
This impressive series provides a sense of the depth and diversity of contemporary Jewish documents while embedding them in explanatory narratives. . . . Volume V of the series aims to ‘trace and complicate’ the final year of the war and the beginnings of the postwar period. Probing a relatively large amount of Yiddish sources, a substantial number in French and German, as well as a few from a host of other languages, the volume examines how writing and commemorative practices related to the Holocaust first developed. It de-centers iconic experiences in order to reveal just how fraught and complex liberation and survival really were, and how contested the meaning of key concepts such as liberation, home, and return remained shortly after the end of the Holocaust.
— Yad Vashem Studies
A most welcome addition to an important series of source books on Jewish responses to the Holocaust. This concluding volume in the series offers a rich and wide-ranging set of documents that span the geographic, social, and ideological spectrum and are mindful of gender, class, and genre. This impressively contextualized collection of primary source material enriches our sense of this complex period. The book belongs on the shelves of all those teaching and researching the Holocaust and/or postwar Jewish and European history and culture.
— Sara R. Horowitz, York University
Combining unpublished archival sources in several languages with cutting-edge scholarship, this collection breaks new ground in exposing a wide readership to primary documents that attest to the ambiguities of survival and liberation. Covering a remarkable spectrum of Holocaust experiences, the author does justice to differing Jewish outlooks and identities, sensitively illustrating challenging attempts to come to terms with loss and destruction and to find meaning in seemingly arbitrary survival. The volume opens an invaluable window onto the multifaceted ways in which Jews reflected, interpreted, and commemorated the Nazi genocide and what lessons survivors drew from their traumatic experiences in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
— Laura Jockusch, Brandeis University