Description
This week, for your post consider the Week 5 readings in their entirety and reflect on the experiences of surviving Jews once they managed to reach different countries– from Eastern Europe to the US, to Australia.
As our readings demonstrate, and to put it too overly simply, the experiences were often very negative – and in many cases, Jewish immigrants faced extreme hardship and even continued physical violence, abuse, and antisemitism, particularly in Eastern Europe.
Were any of the revelations in the readings about the reception of survivors in different countries particularly surprising, new or noteworthy?
What parallels can you draw between the reception of survivors in such wide-ranging geographic contexts, if any? Finally, what kinds of possibilities did Jews have to respond to such treatment once they faced these experiences? What choices did they have?
Primary Source Reading
“Jews in Postwar Hungary,” in The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide, Zoltán Vági, László Csosz, and Gábor Kádár, pp 329-341 (In folder)
Secondary Source Reading
Excerpt of Beth Cohen, Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (Rutgers, 2007) (In folder)
Jan Gross, Chapter 2: “The Unwelcoming of Jewish Survivors,” in Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (Random House, 2007) (In folder)
Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Chapter 1: “Return to ‘no home’”, Chapter 6: “Return to ‘normality’: Poland”, Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944-48 (Cambridge UP, 2014) (In folder)
Suzanne Rutland, “A Distant Sanctuary: Australia and child Holocaust survivors,” in The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime: Migration, the Holocaust, and Postwar Displacement, edited by Simone Gigliotti and Monica Tempian (Bloomsbury, 2016) (In folder)
