Description
Book SynopsisDiaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded within families. Even after the war, sole survivors often described their losses and rebuilt their lives with a distinct focus on family. Yet this perspective is lacking in academic analyses.
In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.
Trade Review"Charting how both Jewish and Romani families dealt with Nazi persecution, this volume offers a long-overdue and innovative attempt to integrate the histories of these two racially persecuted groups."
-- Ari Joskowicz * author of The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France *
In an innovatively comparative and integrated framework, the diverse contributions to this groundbreaking volume examine the variety of intimate ties that Jews and Roma built and broke in their efforts to survive the onslaught of the Holocaust. This outstanding book should top the reading list of anyone interested in the effects of genocide on the most fundamental of human relationships. -- Benjamin Frommer * co-editor of Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extreme *
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction: Why the Family?
Kateřina Čapková and Eliyana R. Adler
Part 1 - Family in Times of Genocide
The Romani Family before and during the Holocaust - How Much do We Know? An Ethnographic-Historical Study in the Belarusian-Lithuanian Border Region
Volha Bartash
Separation and Divorce in the Łódź and Warsaw Ghettos
Michal Unger
Narrating Daily Family Life in Ghettos under Nazi Occupation: Concepts and Dilemmas
Dalia Ofer
Uneasy Bonds: On Jews in Hiding and the Making of Surrogate Families
Natalia Aleksiun
Part II - Intervention of Institutions
Siblings in the Holocaust and its Aftermath in France and the United States: Rethinking the “Holocaust Orphan”?
Laura Hobson Faure
The Impact of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s Aid Strategy on the Lives of Jewish Families in Hungary, 1945–49
Viktória Bányai
‘For Your Benefit’: Military Marriage Policies, European Jewish War Brides, and the Centrality of Family, 1944–1950 Robin Judd
Part III - Rebuilding the Family after the Holocaust
‘Returning to Normality?’: The Struggle of Sinti and Roma Survivors to Rebuild a Life in Postwar Germany
Anja Reuss
‘I Could Never Forget What They’d Done to My Father’: The Absence and Presence of Holocaust Memory in a Family’s Letter Collection
Joachim Schlör
‘Looking for a Nice Jewish girl ...’: Personal Ads and the Creation of Jewish Families in Germany before and after the Holocaust
Sarah E. Wobick-Segev
The Postwar Migration of Romani Families from Slovakia to the Bohemian Lands: A Complex Legacy of War and Genocide in Czechoslovakia Helena Sadílková
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
