Jewish Responses to Persecution

Jürgen Matthäus is the director of the Applied Research Division at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Emil Kerenji is an applied research scholar at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Jan Lambertz is a historian and served on the research team of the Independent Historians Commission on the Role of the German Foreign Office during National Socialism and after 1945. Leah Wolfson is a senior program officer and applied research scholar at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

• Volume Introduction: From Persecution to AnnihilationPart I: Jews and the Expansion of the German Empire: January to June 1941Chapter 1: Facing Increased PressureChapter 2: Struggling in the Lódz and Warsaw GhettosChapter 3: Confronting New ChallengesPart II: Escalating Violence: June 1941 to July 1942Chapter 4: Mass Murder in the Occupied Soviet Union and Deportations to “the East”Chapter 5: Widening Circles of PersecutionChapter 6: In the Grip of Germany’s AlliesPart III: Beyond Compliance and Resistance: Interactions after June1941Chapter 7: Elites and Ordinary Jews Chapter 8: Support NetworksChapter 9: Deference, Evasion, or Revolt?Part IV: Glimpsing the Abyss: Patterns and PerceptionsChapter 10: The Role of ReligionChapter 11: Limits of LanguageChapter 12: Making Sense of the UnthinkableList of DocumentsBibliographyGlossaryChronology

This book’s numerous documents, some previously published but many translated from archival sources for the first time, include heart-stabbing expressions of pain,fear, despair, doomed hope, and innocent delusion. They flow mainly from Jewish sufferers’ pens, with none from the perpetrators’ bureaucracy. The voices are mostly Central or East European, but there are also gripping testimonies from southeastern Europe, the Netherlands, and France. . . .Otherwise, the political documents expose, though without recrimination, the self-delusion and sometimes self-serving attitudes of Jewish leaders in Allied lands, and of members of Judenräte and the Jewish Police in the ghettos. This collection puts myriad significant documents into teachers’ and students’ hands. . . .[T]hese documents illuminate individual fates in a wide range of geographical and socio-cultural settings. Reading such sources, we need not reject the challenge of fashioning a wide-ranging interpretation of Hitlerism and the Holocaust—a historical and philosophical tool much needed if the barbed wire is to be cut. At the start, however, we must recognize that individual fates possess their own existential and epistemological autonomy.