Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath 9781978819542

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Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath

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Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath

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E d i t e d b y E l i ya n a   R . A d l e r a n d K at e ř i n a Č a p ková

rutgers u niversity press new bru nswick, camden, and newark, new jersey, and london

 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Adler, Eliyana R, editor. | Čapková, Kateřina, editor. Title: Jewish and Romani families in the Holocaust and its aftermath / edited by Eliyana R. Adler and Kateřina Čapková Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020004888 | ISBN 9781978819504 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978819511 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978819528 (epub) | ISBN 9781978819535 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978819542 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Jewish families—­History—20th ­century. | Romanies—­ Nazi persecution. | Holocaust victims’ families—­History—20th ­century. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—­Biography. | Holocaust survivors—­Biography. | World War, 1939–1945—­Influence. | War and families. Classification: LCC HQ525.J4 A35 2021 | DDC 306.85/089924—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.g­ ov​/2­ 020004888 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2021 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Individual chapters copyright © 2021 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­rutgersuniversitypress​.­org Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

 For our families

Contents

Introduction: Why the ­Family?    1 Kateřina Čapková and Eliyana R. Adler PA R T I

­Family in Times of Genocide

1 The Romani ­Family before and during the Holocaust: How Much Do We Know? An Ethnographic-­Historical Study in the Belarusian-­Lithuanian Border Region   17 Volha Bartash



2 Separation and Divorce in the Łódź and Warsaw Ghettos   42 Michal Unger



3 Narrating Daily ­Family Life in Ghettos u ­ nder Nazi Occupation: Concepts and Dilemmas    62 Dalia Ofer



4 Uneasy Bonds: On Jews in Hiding and the Making of Surrogate Families   85 Natalia Aleksiun PA R T I I

Intervention of Institutions

5 Siblings in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath in France and the United States: Rethinking the “Holocaust Orphan”?   103 Laura Hobson Faure vii

viii C o n t e n t s



6 The Impact of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s Aid Strategy on the Lives of Jewish Families in Hungary, 1945–1949    115 Viktória Bányai



7 “For Your Benefit”: Military Marriage Policies, Eu­ro­pean Jewish War Brides, and the Centrality of ­ Family, 1944–1950   128 Robin Judd PA R T I I I

Rebuilding the F ­ amily ­after the Holocaust

8 “Return to Normality?”: The Strug­gle of Sinti and Roma Survivors to Rebuild a Life in Postwar Germany   141 Anja Reuss



9 “I Could Never Forget What ­They’d Done to My ­Father”: The Absence and Presence of Holocaust Memory in a ­Family’s Letter Collection    156 Joachim Schlör



10 “Looking for a Nice Jewish Girl . . .”: Personal Ads and the Creation of Jewish Families in Germany before and a­ fter the Holocaust    173 Sarah E. Wobick-­Segev



11 The Postwar Migration of Romani Families from Slovakia to the Bohemian Lands: A Complex Legacy of War and Genocide in Czecho­slo­va­k ia    190 Helena Sadílková Acknowl­edgments  219 Notes 221 Notes on Contributors  267 Index 271

Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath

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Introduction Why the ­Family? Kateřina Čapková and Eliyana R. Adler

Lotte Weiss, born in Bratislava (Pressburg) in 1923, recalls in her memoirs the first eigh­teen years of her life amidst her loving f­ amily of eight: her parents, two s­ isters, and three b ­ rothers. Lotte was the only one to survive the Holocaust. She married another Slovak Holocaust survivor in 1947, with whom she emigrated to Australia. They had two sons and ­later also daughters-­in-­law and several grandchildren. Her book My Two Lives is framed by photos of her Bratislava f­ amily in the 1930s and her Sydney f­amily in the 1990s. The meaning of the book title is also made clear by her explanation in the text: her two lives are her two families. In her book, published more than fifty years ­after her wedding, she writes that she cannot come to terms with her loss: “­Every single night before I close my eyes I pray to G-­d to take care of my lost f­ amily.”1 František Klempár, born in 1925 in the Slovak village Veľká Lesná, was fighting as a partisan in the Slovak National Uprising in 1944. When the uprising was defeated, some partisans de­cided to stay in the forests and to await the Rus­sian army. In an interview, he recalled: Listen, I also could stay, but I am a Rom. I had a wife, ­mother, ­father, so I always wanted to go home, to go home, as a good Rom. To my parents, to my wife, to my ­children. Nothing ­else, but to go home. I wanted to be at home. Gadje are dif­fer­ent from the Roma. They liked to have a weapon, they wanted to fight, they wanted to be promoted, wanted to become officers. Not me! I wanted to be with ours.2

This volume grows out of a conviction that f­ amily played a crucial role in the experiences of victims of the Holocaust and should thus function as a ready tool of analy­sis in seeking to understand t­ hose experiences. Th ­ ese two vignettes are illustrations, but reading any witness testimony while paying attention to this perspective ­will yield further examples. Moreover, we focus on Jews and Romani ­peoples3 ­because the Nazis, in the areas they occupied, specifically targeted and destroyed their families. 1

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As ­human beings, we recognize the centrality of ­family in our lives. Even with an awareness of the ways in which f­amily is a social construct—­its definitions, roles, and relationships all shifting across time and space—it is undeniably a constitutive ele­ment of ­human society. This is perhaps best illustrated in times of trou­ ble, strife, dislocation, and loss when p ­ eople turn, with renewed commitment, to their families and to the preservation of their families. Indeed, the very fungibility of the concept of ­family allows ­people to locate continuity amidst chaos and destruction. This volume is a unique contribution to f­ amily studies, b ­ ecause it analyzes the meaning of ­family and ­family relations during genocide and its posttraumatic aftermath. All wars lead to f­ amily dissolution. In cases of genocide, however, the ­family is an explicit target. Even before the war began, the Nazi Party implemented policies that deliberately weakened and divided the families of its victims. The vio­ lence and brutality that followed was not only murderous but also humiliating and dehumanizing in par­tic­u­lar ways. Elisa von Joeden-­Forgey refers to gender-­ based attacks as “life force atrocities” and encourages scholars to view them not merely from a gendered perspective. “If we understand genocide as the intent to destroy a group specifically by destroying its source of life, the shared pattern of cruelties that we see across genocides would begin to make more sense.” 4 During the Holocaust, a period characterized by the constant danger of death, the complex network of social ties was burdened by the need to take risks to protect each other and to make extremely difficult decisions in situations where nobody knew what was coming next. During ­t hese extreme conditions, pressures, and uncertainties, the ­family was a fragile site of protection and solidarity—­and of pos­ si­ble neglect or betrayal. An analy­sis of ­family ties during such a period of physical danger reveals some key meanings and frameworks for understanding the concept of f­ amily, as well as the pressures that led, in many cases, to its decline or reconfiguration. In the postgenocide period, survivors had to come to terms with the diminution of their families and explore their own evolving definitions of ­family when deciding where and with whom to start new lives. In many cases international and transnational agencies played a crucial role in this complex pro­cess. ­These agencies tried to reconnect members of families, but the reconstruction of biological ties was not always their primary aim. A ­ fter the destruction of large f­ amily networks and social and communal structures, the postgenocide period provided an opportunity for some agencies to give preference to other criteria and to try some social experiments. This was especially the case for charitable proj­ects for ­children. The importance of this institutional intervention into ­family or partnership ties merits a separate section in this volume. The aim of this book is to analyze the centrality of f­amily ties in research on the Holocaust and its aftermath. In addition to focusing on both Jewish and Romani families, its geographic scope is concentrated on, although not l­ imited to, Eastern and Central Eu­rope. Historiographies on war and postwar, which we understand as highly interconnected periods of time, differ in methodology and focus. So too do the editors and chapter authors come from a variety of countries and diversity

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of disciplinary backgrounds. They rely on divergent sources and ask dif­fer­ent questions. They even define ­family differently. Yet they share a commitment to exploring what the ­family perspective can add to scholarship on the war­time and postwar experiences of victims and survivors of genocide. This introduction seeks to schematize impor­tant scholarship on the ­family, on the Holocaust, and on the potential synergies between t­ hese fields. Given constraints of space and the wealth of impor­tant studies, it is not pos­si­ble to mention all of the relevant work. Instead we use prominent examples to illustrate the major themes guiding this proj­ect. Its findings grow out of the rich soil of e­ arlier research on the ­family and the Holocaust and should contribute to the further development and cross-­fertilization of ­t hese fields.

Scholarship ­ ere are numerous so­cio­log­i­cal explanations and interpretations of the ­family. Th The conservative definition of f­ amily, which focuses on the heteronormative nuclear ­family with ­children, has been widely criticized since the 1970s. Feminist scholarship pointed to the structures of power in ­family relations and brought to light the significant topics of domestic vio­lence and the gendered division of ­labor. Queer theory pushed us to expand our definition of f­ amily to include the partnerships of gays and lesbians, as well as any number of non-­normative relationships. This expansion led to an emphasis on f­ amily ties as chosen relationships.5 A similar emphasis is typically found among authors who criticize ­family as an anachronistic concept, b ­ ecause, in this view, society is highly individualized and “a community of need is becoming an elective relationship.” 6 In this volume, we embrace the diversity of cultural and social understandings of the ­family and seek to allow the sources to testify to diverse definitions of who belongs to a given f­ amily. Thus, one of the broader questions to be explored is how social belonging and membership w ­ ere redefined during and in the aftermath of the vio­lence of the Holocaust. This question brings u ­ nder one analytical umbrella not only studies of nuclear and extended families but also par­tic­u­lar constructions of p ­ eople as “us” and “them” along wider lines (ethnocultural, racial, religious, national, regional). When interviewed in Vienna in 1966, Romani survivor Leopoldine Papai stated, “­There are only two of us alive out of thirty-­six ­family members; my ­sister and I.”7 Polish Jewish survivor Meyer Megdal opens his memoir with the startling fact that of the twenty-­five relatives in the building where he grew up, only he and one cousin in the Polish army survived.8 Both of t­ hese statements obviously emphasize the tremendous losses and radical aloneness of the two survivors, but additional meaning can be extracted from the diverse definitions of f­ amily and which relatives by blood and marriage fall within its scope. Moreover, as chapter 5 by Laura Hobson Faure demonstrates, interpretations of solitariness may be culturally embedded. Hannah Pollin-­Galay’s recent book, Ecologies of Witnessing, looks at variations in testimonies of Lithuanian survivors who ­were interviewed in dif­fer­ent languages

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and cultural settings. Although ­family is crucial in all of their narratives, she notes that their understandings of f­ amily differ: “in narrating the f­ amily, witnesses absorb and comment upon the notions of solidarity that surround them.” 9 According to Pollin-­Galay, English-­language testimonies recorded in the United States tend to place the nuclear f­ amily, and especially the relationship to parents, at the core. The break-up of that unit forms the central drama of ­those stories. Yiddish testimonies in Lithuania, in contrast, rely on the more flexible concept of eygene (one’s own) to encapsulate nuclear and extended ­family and other local ties. “Beyond word choice, the structure of ­t hese Yiddish-­Lithuanian testimonies gives credence to foster-­k inship arrangements, calling attention to multiple transitions rather than one central rift in the fabric of social belonging.”10 In addition to illuminating the “ecologies of witnessing” in the population she studies, Pollin-­ Galay’s work points to the necessity of the sort of contextualized local studies found herein. Any work about families during and a­ fter the Holocaust must take into account prewar understandings of the f­ amily and how they varied across the diverse contexts of Jewish and Romani communities throughout Eu­rope. Additionally, as Paula Hyman emphasizes in her introduction to a volume dedicated to the history of the Jewish f­ amily, literary and cultural imaginings sometimes differ greatly from local circumstances: “only through scholarly investigation of the Jewish ­family ­will myth and caricature give way to sophisticated understandings of a variegated historical and con­temporary real­ity.”11 Volha Bartash, for instance, opens chapter 1 with a crucial examination of migratory and familial patterns among Roma in the Belarusian-Lithuanian border regions. Differences held sway not only between dif­fer­ent countries but also within them. Class, social status, religious affiliation, po­liti­cal commitments, level of education, place of residence, place of origin, and additional ­factors all divided and brought ­people together, as well as s­ haped their differentiated understandings of what constituted f­amily and kinship ties. For some Jews in the interwar period, youth groups, hakhsharot (Zionist agricultural training farms), and po­liti­cal parties functioned as surrogate families—­providing the order, leadership, belonging, and responsibility of a traditional ­family network. In Ezra Mendelsohn’s words, “Economic collapse and violent anti-­Semitism, along with the secular, demo­cratic, and modernizing character of the new Polish state, meant that Jewish ­children ­were less likely to look to their parents or their rabbis for guidance and more likely to place their hopes in one or another of the new po­liti­cal organ­izations, both Jewish and non-­Jewish.”12 In the case of the Romani community, we lack such research on po­liti­cal activism. We can therefore only assert that, based on preliminary research, the inclusion of Roma into non-­Romani po­liti­cal movements remained a l­ imited phenomenon in the interwar period. At the same time, it seems that t­here ­were only a few larger Romani organ­izations (most notable are t­ hose in Romania, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, and Serbia) that could offer an alternative community to ­family networks.13

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Ethnographic findings uncover additional forms of support. For example, extended families have played a crucial role in times of extreme economic and social precarity in the Romani community. Rather than placing their hopes in institutions and po­liti­cal organ­izations, many Roma w ­ ere raised within wider ­family networks. Moreover, the institution of kirvipen (godparenthood) has been of key importance. Through this institution “the ­family is expanded by a representative of the ‘outside world’ who is committed to uphold the solidarity of the ­family.”14 Providing support and care for the godchild was understood as a lifelong commitment. This is why in some families a child only a few years older than the newborn was chosen to be a godparent and was represented by his or her parents during the baptism. Markéta Hajská argues, based on her extensive research in eastern Slovakia, that especially in the first half of the twentieth ­century many Romani families chose a non-­Romani godparent, often a farmer or an innkeeper, who could provide expanded opportunities not only for the child but also for the ­whole ­family. This relationship was moreover reciprocal. In many cases members of the Romani ­family (including the parents or the other siblings of the newborn child) w ­ ere expected to perform manual l­ abor for the godparent whenever needed. During the Holocaust period, t­ hese relations could become of key importance to the survival of the Romani families. When the mobility of Roma was restricted, non-­Roma godparents ­were able to save Romani families from starving. In other cases, non-­Roma became foster parents to a Romani child they ­were hiding or who had become an orphan.15 In contrast, if the godparent was Jewish, the Romani ­family was in an even worse situation as the social and economic situation deteriorated for both groups. ­Because the discrimination against Jews started ­earlier than that against the Roma, ­there ­were cases of Romani families hiding Jewish families in Romani settlements.16 In a somewhat analogous manner, some middle-­class Jewish families employed non-­Jewish maids and nannies who became part of the families to the extent that they ended up hiding the entire families or, more frequently, the Jewish ­children, during the war. Jennifer Marlow writes about the poignant consequences of t­ hese intimate bonds and changing power dynamics during and ­after the war. In many cases, t­ hose maids or nannies who made the choice to ally themselves with the families of their former employers lost or weakened their ties to her own families of origin.17 Natalia Aleksiun builds on ­t hese insights in chapter 4.18 In both cases—­kirvipen in the Romani context and nannies in Jewish families—­ the close relations between ­people of dif­fer­ent families and ethnic communities centered on the powerless ­children who called for empathy and sacrifice. Yet ­these stories have to be analyzed in the context of w ­ hole families, b ­ ecause the importance of t­ hese relationships clearly went beyond the ­children’s fate. Just as scholarship on the Jewish f­amily before the war is more methodologically developed than that on Romani families, so too is the research on their war­ time and postwar experiences. Especially regarding the genocide of the Jews, current historiography takes into account local contexts, interactions with the

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non-­Jewish population, and dif­fer­ent forms of discrimination and re­sis­tance, among other topics. ­Earlier mainstream research in German and En­glish examined primarily mechanisms of the genocide, institutional frameworks, the structure of the Nazi regime, and armed re­sis­tance. This focus privileged leaders, functionaries, officials, partisans, and soldiers: ­these men w ­ ere understood as p ­ eople in key positions whose decisions had far-­reaching impact. Only rarely did studies of ­these individuals integrate the context of their private lives.19 Early Yiddish scholarship on the Holocaust focused more on the voices and experiences of victims but reached a relatively small audience. Emanuel Ringelblum, the leader of the under­ground archive in the Warsaw ghetto, called attention to the plight of w ­ omen, ­children, and the f­ amily in the midst of the genocide. In a 1957 talk published two years ­later, the survivor historian Philip Friedman presented a list of prob­lems demanding scholarly attention, including the “destruction of ­family life and the disintegration of other social cells, and on the other hand, the setting up of new social cells, especially in the under­ground movement.”20 Yet his call remained largely unrealized u ­ ntil the advent of feminist scholarship in the 1970s that subsequently spread into Jewish Studies. Since its origins in the 1980s, historiography on ­women and gender in the Holocaust has grown into an impressive corpus with influence and visibility within Holocaust Studies. As Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman discuss in the introduction to their impor­tant collection of essays ­Women in the Holocaust, the focus on ­women’s experiences initially evoked unease from some quarters. Scholars and ­others involved in Holocaust commemoration expressed concern that highlighting the suffering of one set of victims might serve to minimize or marginalize what other victims faced.21 On the contrary, over time, the insights gathered by focusing on w ­ omen victims have not only illuminated the field more broadly but also led to renewed interest in other groups. Scholarship on female perpetrators and on male victims, for example, grows out of the methods and theories developed by pioneering feminist researchers. Vandana Joshi and Wendy Lower, among ­others, have alerted us to the ways that gender played out among German bystanders and perpetrators.22 Although most of the early research on the Holocaust relied on male witnesses and perspectives, their gender was not acknowledged. Thus, the introduction of theories and methods from ­Women’s Studies into Holocaust Studies has fostered a burgeoning interest in the uniquely gendered ways that men experienced the genocide as well.23 Judith Gerson’s work on German Jewish refugees in the United States reveals the gendered ways in which male heads of h ­ ouse­hold wrote memoirs of their experiences: “given most German Jewish men’s decline in economic and social status before emigration and the hardships upon resettlement, writing f­ amily memoirs was a legitimate way to recuperate some re­spect and authority.”24 At the same time, an alternate reading of the key texts on gender and the Holocaust suggests that many of the examples used are actually not solely about gender but relate to intimate social ties within the ­family. We can take as an example

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the excellent 2013 article, “What Do Studies of ­Women, Gender, and Sexuality Contribute to Understanding the Holocaust?” in which Doris L. Bergen argues that focusing on w ­ omen, gender, and sexuality facilitates answering key questions about the voices of the killers, bystanders, and victims. In the case of collaborators, she writes explic­itly about the importance of ­family ties as shown in standard works by Christopher Browning and Claudia Koonz.25 Bergen appeals to her colleagues to study perpetrators “in relation to the p ­ eople they loved.”26 Regarding bystanders, her key example is the case of partners from Jewish/non-­Jewish marriages whose experience not only calls into question the polarity between “Aryan” and “Jew” but whose ­family ties also gave them the courage to oppose the genocidal machinery. She cites the well-­k nown case of demonstrations in Berlin’s Rosenstrasse in 1943, in which the non-­Jewish wives protested against their Jewish husbands’ deportation. In many other cases it was Christian men who protected their Jewish wives. Lastly, in her analy­sis of the victims’ voices, she quotes the barber Abraham Bomba from Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, who described cutting the hair of w ­ omen before they went to the gas chamber in Treblinka. Bomba’s most horrifying recollection was that his friend, another Jewish barber forced to work in the antechamber to death, had to remove the hair from his own wife and s­ ister. In ­these cases, as in many ­others, the ­family perspective can build on and deepen scholarship on gender and the Holocaust. As is obvious from the secondary sources consulted in all the contributions to this volume, we are indebted to the foundational work of scholars of w ­ omen’s experience of the Holocaust. Indeed, this volume would not be pos­si­ble without the collections already cited, as well as numerous ­others.27 At the same time, it is impor­tant to recognize that, just as gendering the Holocaust revealed hitherto unforeseen insights, so too adding the lens of f­ amily illuminates new areas of inquiry. The relevance of adopting the ­family perspective is perhaps most evident at junctures requiring major life decisions. In Poland, for example, many young Jewish men fled eastward ahead of the invading German armies in 1939.28 From a purely gendered reading, this appears as if the men—­t he physically strongest members of the community—­were abandoning the most vulnerable ones—­the ­women, ­children, and elderly—at their moment of greatest need. Reading memoirs and testimonies of men and ­women reveals that such separations often resulted instead from mutual and consensual discussions within families, as in the recollections of Isabelle Choko: Bela’s husband Zygmunt immediately set out on the road ­toward Rus­sia. He would be the only member of his f­ amily to survive. My f­ ather was too ill to consider fleeing. Instead, he, and my m ­ other, Aunt Bela, her d ­ aughter Danusia and I all hurried to Babcia’s [Grandma] ­house, where the ­family held a long meeting and concluded that Aunt Pola’s husband, Natas Kowalew, should also leave, but that Babcia and the rest of us would stay.29

This is not to say that no men abandoned their families, nor that the guilt of having agreed to such decisions without full knowledge of the calamities to follow did

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not haunt many surviving men a­ fter the war.30 Rather, the f­ amily perspective sheds light on how victims of the genocide viewed their prospects, options, and priorities during the initial months of the war. It highlights the ambiguities, gray zones, and contested decisions, actions, and survival strategies of f­ amily members in the highly uncertain conditions of war and genocide.31 Survivors faced major decisions ­after the war as well. In chapter 11, Helena Sadíl­ ková uses testimonial sources to call into question the all-­too-­frequent depiction of Roma as mere subjects—­and victims—of state policies. She demonstrates how they chose internal migration to improve their situation in Czecho­slo­va­k ia, even when this meant temporary or longer-­term separation. As with the case of the men who fled the German army above, ­t here w ­ ere certainly gendered and generational aspects to ­t hese movements. Applying the ­family perspective allows us to see how even extended families engaged in decision-­making pro­cesses that revolved around more than individual imperatives. We fully embrace Bergen’s and Saul Friedländer’s32 call for an integrated history of the Holocaust and an understanding of the horrors of this genocide “via t­ hings intimate.”33 It is clear that ­there ­were times during the Holocaust when men and ­women had to function separately. Yet one may still ask w ­ hether they ever existed entirely outside the framework of their intimate relations. In the 1990s, Joan Ringelheim noted the potential pitfalls of essentializing the distinctions between men and w ­ omen by focusing on the allegedly specific roles of w ­ omen in the Holocaust.34 Lorely French comes to a similar conclusion in her analy­sis of three memoirs written by siblings. Despite the fact that differences in retelling the f­amily’s Holocaust experience ­were in ­t hese cases gender specific, she warns against contrasting them based purely on sex.35 The context of ­family enables a more flexible and open approach wherein a full spectrum of gender roles can coexist si­mul­ta­ neously and intersect with other axes of differentiation (like class or age). Moreover, it creates space for acknowledging that the fear of what would happen to their parents, c­ hildren, partners, siblings, and more distant relatives was felt by all, although perhaps in dif­fer­ent ways. Pioneering scholarship on c­ hildren as victims of the Holocaust by Debórah Dwork and, more recently, by Joanna Michlic, Tara Zahra, Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Boaz Cohen, and o ­ thers has contributed greatly to our understanding of daily life during the Holocaust and its aftermath.36 It is not pos­si­ble to write about ­children without referring to their families—­whether nuclear and biological or surrogate and reconstituted. Michlic, in the introduction to her recent volume, explains how developments in social history and gender studies have enabled this work: “Con­temporary historians realize that the exploration of ­human subjectivity allows us to understand the emotional impact and the ­human meaning of events, and that therefore the subjectivity of ­children constitutes an appropriate topic for historical inquiry.”37 She further points to the continuities between the war and its aftermath.38 Research on the postwar situation of Jews and Roma in Europe—­and especially in East Central Europe—is still dominated by the lenses of politics and ideology.

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According to such research, Jews mainly left Eu­rope ­because of their Zionist commitments, antisemitism, fear of communism, or a combination of ­t hese ­factors. ­Those who stayed w ­ ere allegedly willing to assimilate and, in the case of countries in the Soviet sphere, ­were seen as procommunist.39 This simplistic view of postwar real­ity is easily dismantled by examining the diaries, correspondence, and testimonies of survivors and by conducting interviews with them. Survivors w ­ ere ­eager to find members of their families, to join even distant ­family members who survived abroad, to re-­create a ­family. In many cases their decisions regarding where to start their postwar lives ­were dependent on the situations of their relatives and friends. Some men and ­women stayed in their countries of birth ­because they felt a responsibility t­ oward el­derly or sick relatives or b ­ ecause they had married non-­Jews. The decision of ­whether to go to the State of Israel, the United States, the West Eu­ro­pean countries, or elsewhere was in many cases not the result of po­liti­cal ideology, but rather of a search for where one had a relative to join. Similarly, f­ amily networks motivated and enabled the postwar migration of Roma within Central Eu­ro­pean states, as well as to the United States, Scandinavia, and Western Eu­rope. As in the case of Jews, many Romani families, or at least the surviving f­amily members, wanted to leave the region where they had spent the war and start a new life far away from where they had experienced humiliation, vio­lence, and the deaths of their ­family members. Contacts with relatives abroad who emigrated before or during the war became of crucial importance in the subsequent pro­cess of chain migration. In contrast to the Jews, however, Roma lacked the network of international Romani charitable and po­liti­cal institutions which would help them logistically and financially with the migration. Just as foundational scholarship on gender and the Holocaust over the past several de­cades has contributed to the field in terms of knowledge and methodology, so too has it expanded the approach to sources, helping usher in a general turn ­toward a variety of ego-­documents, including diaries, letters, and testimonies, as sources of research. Whereas in Yiddish and Hebrew scholarship the victims’ perspective remained paramount, u ­ ntil recently most of the Holocaust research conducted in Eu­rope and the United States relied almost exclusively on German-­ language sources produced by the perpetrators or on sources in the languages of their local collaborators.40 This set of circumstances was particularly detrimental to uncovering the fate of Roma and Sinti, b ­ ecause broader Nazi terms such as “asocial,” “alien blood,” “work-­shy,” and “Bandenbekämpfung” (bandit warfare) often hid the specificity of crimes against them.41 Interpretations based on such sources led in many cases to the reproduction of ste­reo­t ypically negative views. The gradual ac­cep­tance of testimonial sources, occasioned in part by the influence of gender-­focused research, has spread throughout the field of Holocaust Studies and led to productive scholarly interactions with other disciplines relying on similar sources. Diaries, correspondence, testimonies, oral histories, and individual petitions addressed to institutions constitute the core of sources in this volume. Without all of ­these contributions, we would not be able to reconstruct the intimate relations

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and decision-­making pro­cesses of ­people targeted by the genocide. ­These sources, read through the lens of the ­family perspective, make it pos­si­ble for readers to identify emotionally with the victims. ­Because ­family is a key category in ­every ­human experience, anyone can recognize the fears and dilemmas Jews and Roma had to face. Therefore research into the Holocaust and its aftermath from the ­family perspective facilitates such a difficult task as the empathetic transmission of the Holocaust experience.

About This Book The book is divided into three parts. The chapters in part I, “­Family in Times of Genocide,” relate to how dif­fer­ent families in dif­fer­ent circumstances weathered the Holocaust. In some cases, the diminution of the nuclear f­ amily led to reliance on a larger and more loosely defined network; in other cases it led only to additional loss. The following two parts relate to aspects of the postwar experience. In part II, “Intervention of Institutions,” the chapters examine the ways in which ideas about ­family inflected the aid offered by a variety of governmental and nongovernmental organ­izations to survivors of the genocide. Part III, “Rebuilding the ­Family a­ fter the Holocaust,” looks at the responses of the survivors to their postwar status. As becomes clear from reading the individual chapters, ­t here is a ­great deal of overlap between the topics. War­time chapters discuss postwar reverberations. Chapters focused on institutional interactions include individual responses, and vice versa. Nonetheless, the divisions provide a useful structure for delving into the many ways in which ­family affected the war­time and postwar experiences of Roma and Jews. The studies included in this volume, as well as countless testimonies, show that even though ­people had lived in extensive social networks with friends, colleagues, and neighbors before the war and would, in times of peace, generally not distinguish between the importance of their relationships with friends versus ­those with ­family, this often changed in circumstances of war. All their social ties, especially ­those with non-­Romani and non-­Jewish friends and neighbors, gained key importance for their chances of survival, and they are retrospectively discussed in a rather instrumental way. This was, of course, less common for survivors married to a non-­Roma or a non-­Jew and ­those who had close relationships with non-­ Jewish nannies, who w ­ ere often seen as part of the ­family before and ­after the war and played a crucial role in the rescue of Jewish ­children. Yet even ­t hose who had very close relations to p ­ eople outside the f­ amily prioritized rescuing their closest ­family members. This can be understood not only as a way to protect the basics of the home but also as being of key importance for personal identity and its continuity, ­because ­family (or the nonexistence of it), as per Lotte Weiss in the epigraph, structures the reflection of each individual’s personal life narrative. Volha Bartash in chapter 1 demonstrates persuasively, based on her extensive anthropological fieldwork, how Roma in the Belarusian-­Lithuanian border region developed strategies to save their families. She shows how Romani ­women took

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the risk for the whole—­often extended—­family, trying to get food in the villages for their relatives in hiding, while Romani men joined partisan units to gain protection for their families. In chapter 3 Dalia Ofer analyzes the ways families tried to preserve a sort of normalcy in ­family life within ghettos not only through a desperate effort to stay together and to protect each other’s health but also by creating a home: a private and safe space for the ­family even within the ghetto walls. Natalia Aleksiun reminds us in chapter 4 that the h ­ uman need for trust and intimate relationships still exists even ­after the murder of ­family members. She points to the key importance of surrogate ­family relations, with a focus on Jews in hiding in eastern Galicia. Aleksiun questions the definition of the Righ­teous Among the Nations ­adopted by Yad Vashem, which excludes ­family members, so that ­t hose non-­Jews who became partners of rescued Jews could not be nominated. That this increased importance of ­family relations in times of destruction was often felt as a burden is discussed extensively by Michal Unger in chapter 2, which is based on separation and divorce rec­ords from the Łódź ghetto. Many marriages collapsed b ­ ecause life in the ghetto entirely changed the setting in which the ­family existed, and not all families managed to adapt to their new situation. Moreover, some marriages ­were in crisis before the war, when the partners ­were living separately. When they ­were ghettoized, they had—­for practical reasons, as well as ­under pressure from the ghetto administration—to live together again as a l­egal unit. Marital harmony in such forced coexistence, surrounded by hunger and despair, had only very l­ imited chances of success. This volume demonstrates that war and the postwar situation of vio­lence and suffering fostered social experiments by rescue operations or­ga­nized by national and international institutions. Even though biological relations played such a crucial role for individual families, institutions could decide against using them as a criterion for placing ­children ­after the war, arguing that their interests would be better served in other settings. This topic, which is undeniably relevant for philanthropy and aid ­today, is examined in two chapters. Laura Hobson Faure in chapter 5 focuses on an extraordinary story of two s­ isters who became orphans during the war and who w ­ ere cared for by charitable organ­izations u ­ nder dif­fer­ent auspices: non-­Jewish as well as Jewish, French as well as American. The organ­izations differed in their strategies regarding care for the siblings, so that the s­ isters spent some time during and a­ fter the war together, but during most of their youth they ­were separated and lived with dif­fer­ent American families. Despite this separation and their dif­fer­ent coping strategies, the two ­sisters are now in frequent contact and have a close relationship. Viktória Bányai’s chapter 6 on the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s (JDC) aid to Jewish survivor families in Hungary touches on related themes. Jewish orphanages run by the JDC served not only parentless ­children but also Jewish families who strug­gled eco­nom­ically. As a result, full orphans made up only a small percentage of c­ hildren in the orphanages. Bányai analyzes the reasons parents preferred having their ­children in institutional care, as well as the responses of ­children, many of whom would have rather suffered hunger in a loving

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f­ amily environment than receive three proper meals a day in an orphanage. The strategy of the JDC to support families with ­children reduced the willingness of Hungarian Jewish families to emigrate, ­because they would lose this unique support for their ­children, and was one of the reasons why Hungary had the largest postwar Jewish population among the communist countries outside the Soviet Union.42 In chapter 7, Robin Judd also addresses institutional intervention into the f­ amily lives in the immediate postwar period. She shows how Allied military structures hindered the efforts of their soldiers to marry Jewish Holocaust survivors. In t­ hese cases, the official policies of an occupying army combined with unofficial prejudice to impede the ability of ­t hese survivors to rebuild their lives. It is no coincidence that ­t here is no chapter in part II on Romani families. The major difference between the Jewish and Romani experience in the immediate postwar period was the lack of any international charitable or ethnocentric institution that focused on the care of Romani survivors. The only exception is described by Ari Joskowicz in his article about the early postwar years in the displaced persons’ (DP) camps in Germany, where at least the International Refugee Organ­ ization (IRO) acknowledged “Gypsies” as a privileged category. The IRO argued that Roma faced systematic racial persecution like Jews, and they therefore had “compelling ­family reasons arising out of previous persecution,” which made them eligible for IRO aid. This favorable treatment of Roma and Sinti (­limited only to the DP camps) came to an end with the conclusion of IRO activities at the beginning of the 1950s.43 In chapter 8, the first chapter in part III, Anja Reuss describes the many obstacles faced by Sinti and Roma survivors in postwar Germany. Based on testimonies and memoirs she analyzes the continuation of discrimination against Roma and Sinti in many aspects of their daily lives. In contrast to Jewish survivors, Roma and Sinti could not rely on any help from an international Romani organ­ization. They only gradually built their own local organ­izations in Germany that represented them in negotiations for belated compensation for their profound losses ­under Nazism, which for many ­women included forced sterilization. The extent of the genocide of Roma and Sinti during the war varied territorially, ­because it was less coordinated than the genocide of Jews. As Anton Weiss-­ Wendt persuasively argues, “The lack of centralized decision making with regard to the Roma rarely ameliorated their situation, but rather aggravated it.” 44 The situation in the Czechoslovak state ­after the war reflected territorial differences in the genocide experience. In the Bohemian lands (­ today’s Czech Republic) the Romani community was nearly totally murdered, so that the local dialect or Romani language is considered to be a dead language; in contrast, even though the Slovak Romani community suffered intense discrimination and local vio­lence, most of ­t hese families survived the war. Thousands of Slovak Romani survivors used the opportunity to move to the Bohemian lands ­after the war, as the territory left empty by the nearly total genocide of local Roma and Sinti became a land of new hope for ­t hese mi­g rants’ families. This migration route of thousands of

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Roma from Slovakia to the Bohemian lands, which was actually a mosaic of hundreds of ­family resettlements, is analyzed in detail by Helena Sadílková in chapter 11. Migration also plays a crucial role in chapter 9 by Joachim Schlör. Using an extended correspondence, he analyzes the dynamics of a Jewish ­family from Heil­ bronn during and ­after the prewar emigration of one member and in the postwar period. When Liesel Rosenthal emigrated to G ­ reat Britain in 1937, shortly a­ fter her twenty-­second birthday—­primarily to emancipate herself from her ­family—­she was at first seen as a ­family traitor. It turned out, however, that it was only thanks to her that her parents and ­brother ­were saved. Schlör’s chapter enriches our understanding of f­ amily in two ways. First, even if ­family relationships are a source of conflict, in the face of a catastrophe many feel an obligation to save precisely their biological relatives, even if relations with friends are far less complicated. Not only is this need to save one’s closest ­family based on feelings of responsibility but it is also expected and required by f­ amily members, even if their relationships are burdened by discord. Secondly, Schlör reminds us that a refugee story of the rescue of a nuclear ­family should not be seen merely as a success story, as it is often interpreted in historio­ graphy. Based on the correspondence, he shows persuasively that this was not how ­t hese ­people interpreted their situation. Especially ­after the war, when the fate of distant f­ amily members—­aunts, u ­ ncles, cousins—­who did not manage to flee was revealed, a sense of loss and feelings of guilt grew stronger. Many Holocaust survivors ­were drawn to o ­ thers with similar experiences a­ fter the war. In the case of Lotte Weiss, mentioned at the beginning of the introduction, this preference meant that finding a partner who had also experienced Ausch­ witz took pre­ce­dence over a relationship with someone she had dated before her deportation. Her Jewish boyfriend survived in hiding in Budapest and proposed to her immediately ­after he discovered that she returned from Auschwitz and other subsequent concentration camps. Lotte recalls, “I knew I could not marry anyone who had not had experiences similar to mine. I felt I was now too old for him. I felt I was a hundred years old.” 45 She de­cided to marry another Auschwitz survivor, Ali, despite his strug­gle with depression. That many ­people not only wanted to marry somebody who survived the Holocaust but also in a specific way is shown in the analy­sis of personal ads in postwar Germany by Sarah Wobick-­Segev in chapter 10. She argues persuasively that the jarring use of Nazi terminology such as “Mischlinge” in singles’ ads should not be interpreted as an adoption of the racializing perspective. Rather, t­ hose words served as codes for ­t hose who had similar war experiences. Shared experiences of war, of vio­lence, or of inhabiting spaces of mass murder could bring par­tic­u ­lar kinds of ­people closer. It could create new proximities and affinities while also distancing and rupturing closeness and intimacies with o ­ thers. Like all novel approaches, this one yields certain immediate insights. One of the primary findings of this book is the inseparability of the prewar, war, and postwar periods. A more traditional periodization, insisting on dates and divisions,

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falls apart in the face of the way that p ­ eople discuss their familial ties. F ­ amily, however it is understood—­and despite enduring radical loss and dislocation—­bridges the time span. This is not a redemptive reading of history whereby familial love conquers all. Rather it highlights the fact that most of the contributors, having turned their attention to the ­family, found it impossible to confine their findings to a single time period. The focus on ­family (dis-)continuities led both individual scholars and the book proj­ect as a w ­ hole to think differently about periodization and to question the classical categorization of “periods.” Moreover, this observation holds true across Romani and Jewish families. The volume’s aim is not to make sweeping arguments about all families during and ­after the Holocaust. On the contrary, the narrowly focused chapters demonstrate the benefits of close analy­sis and contextual knowledge using the f­ amily perspective. It is thus particularly noteworthy when certain ideas appear repeatedly. Among ­t hese are the fluidity of time frames and the increasing importance of some sort of familiar support. This latter point contrasts with recent so­cio­log­i­cal trends critiquing the concept of f­ amily as anachronistic. In an era of individualism, biological ties are frequently viewed as inferior to elective ones. Yet, as this volume shows, in times of physical threat and social, po­liti­cal, and economic uncertainty, as well as in the posttraumatic period, f­amily relations play a decisive role. Regardless of prewar ­family relations, ­people feel responsibility for their close or extended families in times of crisis. This finding is undoubtedly relevant to other ­peoples discriminated against, marginalized, and threatened by vio­lence. Yet, as stated ­earlier, this volume aims not to reach broad general truths. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate the applicability and productivity of the ­family lens to Holocaust Studies. During and ­after World War II, numerous occupied ­peoples across Eu­rope contended with deprivation and oppression on an unpre­ce­dented scale. As is well known, the Nazi state had no re­spect for conventions of war and no pity on civilian populations. They engineered a racial hierarchy that placed Jews and Sinti and Roma p ­ eople at the bottom and slated them for total destruction. Probing how the genocide proceeded against families, and how dif­fer­ent religious, national, and ethnic groups responded as families, helps us understand the Holocaust more fully. In this introduction, we answered the question of why the ­family perspective ­matters. The individual chapters provide models of the sources, methodologies, and outcomes of this family-­centered approach. This is not a final statement, but a spur to further research and development of this conceptual approach.

chapter 1

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The Romani F ­ amily before and during the Holocaust How Much Do We Know? An Ethnographic-­Historical Study in the Belarusian-­Lithuanian Border Region Volha Bartash

In the last ten years, scholars have argued in support of including the Romani experience of the Nazi genocide in the field of Holocaust Studies.1 Following this research path, this chapter demonstrates that such an approach may be fruitful for both fields. As Michelle Kelso has recently shown in her work on Romani w ­ omen in Transnistria,2 the integration of their testimonies into scholarship on w ­ omen and the Holocaust not only yields more detailed knowledge of the phenomenon but also opens the way for new research paradigms.3 Furthermore, most methodological approaches and analytical frameworks that have been developed for de­cades in Holocaust Studies could be fruitfully adapted and applied to the Romani experience. Despite the growing scholarship on Romani histories and memories of the Nazi genocide, ­little has been done so far to differentiate their experiences based on prewar lifestyles (sedentary, nomadic, or seminomadic), ­family background, social status, age, and gender. A ­ fter Sybil Milton’s pioneering work on Roma and Sinti ­women in Nazi Germany,4 few scholars have attempted to discuss the fates of Roma of dif­fer­ent ages, genders, and social backgrounds. Nevertheless, some scholars have recently stressed the importance of a ­family framework and family-­based approach in the analy­sis of the experiences and memories of Roma. For instance, Paola Trevisan began her historical-­anthropological study of the Sinti in Fascist Italy with an ethnographic survey of Sinti families.5 Likewise, Lada Viková, a Czech anthropologist, approached the topic of Holocaust memory through the reconstruction of the genealogy and history of one Czech-­ Moravian Romani f­ amily.6 17

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From a methodological viewpoint, a family-­based approach can resolve several research challenges that arise from the underrepre­sen­ta­tion of Romani history in archival collections.7 But which experiences of Roma explic­itly call for a family-­ oriented approach? Several scholars argue for the importance of a ­family perspective in the analy­sis of Romani life and strug­g le for survival u ­ nder German occupation. For instance, Sławomir Kapralski notes that sexual vio­lence against Romani ­women was often meant to humiliate ­whole families of Roma and, in a broader sense, destroy the very code of Romani culture.8 In her analy­sis of the first-­ person accounts of female survivors from Transnistria, Michelle Kelso shows how a shift from a gender-­based to a family-­based analy­sis of sexual vio­lence broadens our understanding of this phenomenon. According to Kelso, the f­ amily members of the victims ­were targeted and affected as well, regardless of their gender. Some of ­t hose who tried to save their beloved ­sisters, wives, and ­daughters ­were physically punished or killed; ­others ­were traumatized by being forced to witness ­t hose atrocities.9 Thus the suffering of Romani ­women, which at first glance seems to be an exclusively individual or a gender-­specific experience, had a f­amily connotation as well. ­These examples demonstrate how applying dif­fer­ent analytical frameworks or looking at the fates of Roma from dif­fer­ent perspectives gives us a deeper understanding of what happened to Romani c­ hildren, men, ­women and el­derly p ­ eople. Moreover, it seems that the framework of the ­family has a unique place among other analytical categories, ­because it has the potential to embrace ­people of all ages and genders, thereby obtaining a fuller picture of the Romani ordeal and strug­gle for survival. In this chapter, I apply a ­family lens to the daily life and survival practices of Roma in the German-­occupied Belarusian-­Lithuanian border region. I first propose a more complex understanding of individual experiences and memories of the war and persecution based on the variety of ways in which Roma of dif­fer­ent ­family and social backgrounds w ­ ere affected and responded to Nazi vio­lence. In the first part of this chapter, I seek to answer the following question: What was the Romani f­ amily like on the eve of World War II? By means of a close reading of the first-­and second-­person accounts of prewar life in the border region and the reconstruction of ­family histories, I describe the main f­ amily patterns and lifestyles of the Roma. My analy­sis reveals two “typical” ways of life among the Romani families of the border region—­t he sedentary and the nomadic. The oral histories of Roma, as well as their ­family genealogies, show that ­t hese two types of families had dif­fer­ent structures and traditions. Even more importantly, the very sense of relationship, belonging, collectivity, and solidarity was dif­fer­ent for them. For example, for nomadic Roma, their “big” f­amily was their nomadic group, which could include up to fifty relatives. This means that they had a dif­fer­ent sense of belonging, collectivity, and solidarity. How did sedentary and nomadic families coordinate their actions and make their decisions? In what ways did t­ hose decisions affect individual fates?

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Depending on their lifestyle and professional occupations, sedentary and nomadic families had dif­fer­ent contact zones and patterns of interaction with the local non-­Roma population. Whereas communication with non-­Roma had a seasonal variability for most nomadic Roma, sedentary families ­were integrated into their territorial (mostly village) communities on a more permanent basis.10 Did this mean that sedentary families found themselves in a better situation during the war? Using this distinction between the plight of sedentary and nomadic families, I then analyze the ­family life of Roma ­under occupation. I am particularly interested in the following questions: How did the families of Roma respond to Nazi vio­lence? What strategies did they undertake to survive the persecution? And is it pos­si­ble to speak of a ­family survival strategy? Despite some considerable differences in their plights, Romani and Jewish families of the Belarusian-­Lithuanian border region experienced many similar war­ time experiences and postwar challenges. A ­ fter the war, the surviving members of the two affected communities strug­gled to build their new lives in the Soviet Union, where their ­family losses and ordeals ­were never acknowledged. The similarities between Jewish and Romani destinies and memory paths call for studying them in tandem.

Documenting the Romani F ­ amily: Some Methodological Reflections Any attempt to reconstruct the f­ amily structures and lifestyles of Roma in the interwar period ­will encounter methodological issues typical of any historical study of Romani populations. First of all, ­t here are a ­limited number of con­temporary sources. For vari­ous reasons, Romani histories are seriously underrepresented in the institutional archives of Belarus and Lithuania. The scope of this chapter does not allow for a detailed consideration of e­ very methodological limitation encountered in the course of writing the history of Roma in the interwar years. Therefore, I confine myself to several brief observations while placing them in the historical context of the interwar border region. What is currently the border region between Belarus and Lithuania was part of the Wilno and Nowogródek (Lida and Szczuczyn Counties) voivodeships of interwar Poland from 1921 to 1939.11 Thus, this territory was separated by the state bound­aries of in­de­pen­dent Lithuania and the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic only ­after World War II. In this predominantly agrarian region of the Second Polish Republic,12 most Roma led e­ ither nomadic or seminomadic lifestyles, negotiating their relationships with local landlords and peasants. B ­ ecause of their mobility, it is very difficult to capture the Romani population on any statistical surveys. My survey of the families of Roma from the Wilno and Nowogródek voivodeships shows that, although their nomadic routes ­were predominantly local, some families traveled to western Ukraine (Volhynia) and back within one or two nomadic seasons (approximately from April to October).

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Nevertheless, the nomadic or seminomadic lifestyle was not the only obstacle to the documentation of the Romani population of the so-­called eastern borderlands or Kresy. The Polish census of 1931 that associated ethnicity with one’s ­mother tongue did not list Romani as an individual language and therefore overlooked the presence of the Romani minority. According to official statistics, about 60 ­percent of the population of the voivodeship identified as Poles. Belarusians (22.7%), Jews (8.5%), Lithuanians (5.5%), and Rus­sians (3.5%) constituted the major ethnic minorities of the Wilno voivodeship. In western parts of the Nowogródek voivodeship, the situation was more or less similar, whereas to the east the percentage of Bela­ rusians was higher. In my research, I situate the Roma within the ethnic picture of the interwar border region while reflecting on their niche in its interwar economy and society. Again, t­ here are few written accounts of the lifestyle and traditions of Roma in the Kresy. Even though some Polish ethnographers conducted fieldwork ­t here, their studies bypassed the Romani population of the region. In my search for evidence of the Romani presence, I looked through numerous local memorial books and museum exhibitions and spoke with curators of museum collections. It is remarkable how the Jewish story of the prewar period is gradually entering local historical narratives. This is happening mostly b ­ ecause of the efforts of the Jewish communities of Belarus and Lithuania, as well as t­ hose of the descendants of local Jews from abroad. However, the Romani inhabitants of the prewar borderland continue to remain invisible, even as they are “pre­sent” in museum collections. Thus, I was able to recognize Romani ­horse traders and performers in photos of local markets from the 1920s and 1930s. In the exhibit found in the regional museum of Braslaũ (Brasław), t­ here is a photo of Romani blacksmiths standing in front of their forge. Another regional museum in the town of Vidzy (Widze, Vidzh) contains copies of partisan certificates that once belonged to the Yanovich ­family, many of whom ­were active in the re­sis­tance movement during World War II. However, no exhibit reveals the ethnicity of the ­people it portrays. For the occasional visitor, ­t hese photos remain as mere illustrations of the “old” life in his or her home place, while silencing the p ­ eople in focus. Nevertheless, the invisibility of Roma in the repre­sen­ta­tions of local histories has more to do with current perceptions of Roma in present-­day Belarus and Lithuania than with their prewar presence.13 The oral histories of Roma and non-­ Roma collected recently show that, despite some mutual ste­reo­t ypes, Roma ­were part of the economy and society of the interwar border region. In what follows, I reconstruct Romani ­family life “­under Polish rule” by referring to the f­amily biographies of my in­for­mants and to other available evidence, including memoirs of non-Roma townspeople from Belarus and Lithuania. When written sources are ­limited or represent an outsider’s perspective, the oral histories of Roma acquire a par­tic­u­lar importance. In my recent fieldtrips to Belarus and Lithuania, I had a chance to rec­ord the f­ amily histories of Roma in both parts of the borderland. Before I started fieldwork among the Roma population, I had been engaged in oral history research among ethnic Belarusians, Poles, and Tatars.14

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This gave me an opportunity to compare similar kinds of narratives of dif­fer­ent ethnic groups. When I came to work with the Roma of the border region, I was impressed by the depth of their familial memories. Many of my in­for­mants in the age group older than fifty years old ­were able to share the life stories of their parents and grandparents, including their travel routes, occupational histories, and episodes of interethnic relations “­under Poland.” The narratives I was able to collect, of course, differ in their narrating style, length, and emotionality. Moreover, not all in­for­mants are equally gifted narrators. However, the per­sis­tence of the Romani oral tradition seems to generally foster the preservation of memory within ­family circles. None of the ethnic groups with whom I worked before had so much re­spect for talented narrators and experts of oral tradition or valued the time spent in oral communication to such a degree. According to anthropologist Jack Goody, who devoted many of his works to the comparison of written and oral cultures, oral narration represents a completely dif­fer­ent way of expressing oneself from writing. Writing is a more individual experience, whereas oral narration always has an ele­ment of interaction between the narrator and the audience.15 When I asked my prominent in­for­ mants how they acquired their expertise in Romani tradition and histories, almost all of them replied that it came from their communication with el­derly ­people within their ­family and community circles. Oral narration remains the main method of intergenerational transmission of memory in Romani families. It happens mostly in natu­ral circumstances, such as ­family cele­brations, dinners, and tea times. An understanding of the intersections between familial memories and the collective memory of the local Romani community would not be pos­si­ble without knowledge of its structure and the main princi­ples of internal communication. Most Roma who currently dwell in the Belarusian-­Lithuanian border region are descendants of ­t hose who lived in the Wilno (Vilnius) area before World War II. They belonged to the Litoũska Roma (Rom. “Lithuanian Roma”) and Polska Roma (Rom. “Polish Roma”) groups.16 ­After the war, a segment of the local Polska Roma community repatriated to Poland as part of the Polish postwar program of repatriation from the former eastern borderlands. Many of t­ hose Roma who remained in the Soviet Union kept on traveling u ­ ntil 1956. Their high level of mobility allowed the Romani families to survive postwar hardships.17 ­After 1956 most Roma of the borderland took permanent residence in their home places. In spite of all the opportunities for mobility that existed in the Soviet Union, most Roma families never used them and moved around mostly locally and for f­ amily reasons. According to official statistics, ­t here are currently 2,115 and 7,079 Roma in Lithuania and Belarus, respectively. Despite the new state bound­aries and visa regulations since 1991, the Roma of the borderland have, thus far, managed to maintain their cross-­border relationships and collective memory. ­Because of their relatively small number and their close relationships, their history consists of a number of ­family histories. All together, ­t hese histories shape a major narrative of Romani suffering and strug­gle for survival ­under the German occupation.

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Again, an oral culture played a crucial role in the shaping of collective memory and post-­Holocaust identity of the local Roma community. “News” within the Romani community is still disseminated mainly by means of oral communication or through the so-­called Romani mail. Romani homes are always full of Romani (and sometimes non-­Romani) visitors who travel for economic, f­ amily, and other purposes, spreading the news in the community. It is likely that the “Romani post” functioned in the same way in the early postwar years. As one of my in­for­mants explained: Old p ­ eople did not like to recall the war. They never talked about the war on purpose. But when two old ­people met, one of them would say: Did you know that man or w ­ oman before the war? Yes, I knew her well. She was killed near . . . ​[some place]. And thus they would talk about all their relatives and acquaintances who perished and who survived, and they would cry, but keep talking ­until the dawn.18

Indeed, many Romani families of the borderlands ­were greatly affected by the war and genocide. However, it was not an easy task to destroy an entire Romani ­family that could have as many as fifty or more members. In most cases, several ­family members would find a rescuer, flee from a killing site, or simply avoid certain places during an “action.” ­After the war, surviving ­family members usually traveled to the killing sites and talked to eyewitnesses. Some families ­later reburied the remains of their loved ones at their local cemeteries. This is how the families of Roma accumulated knowledge about their own b ­ itter past. Even though a lot of information has been lost along with the last survivors of Nazi persecution, community-­based research still provides valuable insights into the plight of Romani families u ­ nder occupation. In many cases, my subsequent archival research was inspired by my “field” findings, for instance, about mass killing sites and the presence of Romani families in Soviet partisan units.

The Nomadic ­Family in the Interwar Period As the oral histories of Roma and the ethnographic data show, most local Roma ­were ­either nomadic or seminomadic. This means that they traveled seasonally—­ from early spring u ­ ntil the first autumn frost. In my interviews, I included questions on the geography of their travel patterns and nomadic routes. According to my data, only a few families traveled for long distances. For instance, the Marcinkewich f­amily from Ejszyszki (Eišiškės, Eyshishok) in eastern Lithuania traveled through southwestern Belarus (the towns of Prużany/Pruzhane and Kobryń/ Kobrin) before they ended up near Równe (Rivne) in northwestern Ukraine. On their way, the Marcinkevichs ­stopped at county markets where they traded and exchanged ­horses. Such a round trip could last up to two years. If the f­ amily could not return home the same year, they searched for winter accommodation among Ukrainian peasants. Their time spent in Ukraine resulted in new contacts with the

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local Romani groups and non-­Roma population. Eventually, several f­ amily members married local Roma and l­ ater settled in Ukraine.19 Nevertheless, this case cannot be considered as typical. A long-­distance travel route was very complicated to arrange: it required local networks of contacts and fluency in vernacular languages, even though Polish functioned as the lingua franca in the Kresy. Therefore, most Romani families traveled locally (within the current Lithuanian-­Belarusian-­Polish border region) and seasonally. F ­ amily routes could often be traced to the places where ­family members ­were born, for instance, among the extended families of Roma from the borderland deported to Auschwitz in 1943–1944. ­Those deportees had the same f­ amily names as my current in­for­mants, and, in some cases, I was able to meet their relatives. An “average” f­ amily of Romani deportees from the border region consisted of one or two ­people of se­nior age, as well as several married ­couples with c­ hildren, who often had been born in dif­fer­ent places in the borderland. For instance, the extended Rutkowskie f­ amily, which arrived in Auschwitz-­Birkenau concentration camp in 1943, consisted of eleven female and eight male prisoners of dif­fer­ent ages. Antonie Rutkowski, 69, born in Lida (present-­day Belarus, Lide) was the oldest in the group. At the time of arrival, he was married to one of the ­women in the group, as was Stefan Rutkowski, 57, also born in Lida (presumably, Antonie’s ­brother). ­There w ­ ere four adult w ­ omen in this f­ amily group: Janina Rutkowska, 50, born in Kraków (Kroke), Poland; Salomaia Rutkowska, 50, born in Mereż; Alexandra Rutkowska, 50, born in Lida; and Hanna Rutkowska, 56, born in Michałowo (Michalowa), Poland. They had twelve unmarried ­children from the age of 6 to 32 years, most born in dif­fer­ent places in the Belarusian-­Polish-­Lithuanian border region: Lida, Kamenetz (Kamianiec, Kamenits), Dworecz (Dwarec), Różana, and Wilno. On their arrival at the concentration camp, the ­family was identified as “Polish Roma,” in accordance with their country of birth. It could also be that Polska Roma was their self-­identification.20 Of course, t­ hese data do not allow us to gain a more detailed account of the ­family’s past. It is hard to say what happened to the Rutkowskie ­family before they ­were put on a transport train to Auschwitz. A clue to the ­family’s experiences came from my fieldwork in Eišiškės, Lithuania, where I met Barbara Gasparowich from the Polska Roma group. Barbara’s m ­ other was a descendant of the Rutkowskie ­family, which had been traveling in the district of Lida at the beginning of the German occupation. Her m ­ other’s immediate relatives (parents and siblings) w ­ ere killed in the forest near Lida in 1941, along with other nomadic families from the surrounding area (more than eighty persons altogether).21 Presumably, the Rutkowskie Roma in Auschwitz-­Birkenau ­were the remaining ­family members who ­were l­ ater murdered in the death camp. As I have noted in my ­earlier publications, a seminomadic lifestyle meant seasonality not only in lifestyle but also in relations with the non-­Roma population.22 Historically, the lifestyles and professional occupations even of nomadic Roma in Belarus and Lithuania w ­ ere closely connected to local economies and socie­t ies. In other words, the local Romani community was quite flexible in lifestyle and

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strategies, adapting to respond to any social, po­liti­cal, or economic changes. In neighboring Soviet Belarus, where the Soviets had launched programs of industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, some nomadic families had already taken up permanent residence. The Wilno and Nowogródek regions, in contrast, remained almost completely unaffected by Soviet transformations in the prewar period. From 1921 to 1939, when the region was part of the Second Polish Republic, t­ hese lands remained a “rural paradise.” The peasant economy dominated the countryside. Peasant ­house­holds, however, suffered from a lack of land and overpopulation. Th ­ ese issues w ­ ere aggravated by the state policy of colonization of the region: thousands of osadnicy (Pol. “settlers”) from central and western Poland (most of them families of retired military officers) received land in the eastern borderlands.23 A pro­cess of rapid Sovietization that began ­after the Soviet occupation of so-­called Western Belarus (1939) and Lithuania (1940) led to the repression of po­liti­cal opponents, clergy, and well-­off farmers, but not to structural economic and social change. ­Because of ­t hese state policies, ethnic relations in the Kresy ­were, to a large extent, or­ga­nized eco­nom­ically. When I took part in Belarusian oral history proj­ ects at the beginning of the 2000s, the el­derly p ­ eople from western regions of the country still recalled local noble families and new landlords being sent t­ here from Poland. Many c­ hildren from poor families w ­ ere handed over to the osadniks’ ­house­holds, where they served as shepherds and domestic servants. Where ­were the nomadic Roma in the pattern of ethnic, social, and economic relations in the Kresy? It is worth mentioning h ­ ere that some landlords w ­ ere, indeed, sympathetic to nomadic Roma, even though this was sometimes ­because of their exotic appearance. In the exhibits found in the regional museums, t­ here are many photos of nomadic Roma with their local landlords who came to their encampments. In exchange for the landlords’ generosity, the Roma sometimes played ­music and performed in their homes. One of my prominent in­for­mants who came from a respectable and old Romani rodo (Rom. “lineage”) of Bajronki (Rom. Bajro—­big, major) managed to describe nomadic life in the Kresy in several sentences: For example, our ­people [V. B.—in the sense of extended ­family] would hear that in some place ­t here was a generous pan [Polish landlord] who let Roma set up tents and graze h ­ orses on his land. So they—­only our p ­ eople!—­gathered together and set up tents on his territory. They met in marketplaces with ­others [Roma from other lineages]. During winter, they went on kwartiry [Russ. “flats,” often used in the sense of renting any kind of property]. They often paid cash for the kwartiry. They had money—­t he ­women told fortune and ­were paid for it.24

This quotation is an apt reflection of both the seasonality in the nomadic way of life and the structure of a nomadic group that, remarkably, was also seasonal. In anthropological terms, the structure of a nomadic group or the tabor was based on a patrilineal system, in which a nomadic group normally consisted of relatives

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from the ­father’s side. This, of course, could vary, and the relatives from the ­mother’s side, as well as nonrelatives, could be accepted into a nomadic group ­under special circumstances. A nomadic group usually consisted of an extended f­ amily of up to fifty (seldom more) persons. Actually, the size of a tabor depended on the number of carts and wagons it had. While traveling, each married ­couple with ­children had its own tent, means of transportation, and ­house­hold items. For instance, a tabor of ten wagons was considered large. Personal relations within one nomadic group w ­ ere based on princi­ples of cooperation, solidarity, mutual support, and a division of ­labor according to age and gender. C ­ hildren older than 6 years of age already had responsibilities in a tabor, such as picking wild mushrooms and berries, maintaining the campfire, and baby­sitting. ­Women cooperated in cooking and other ­house­hold duties, as well as in telling fortunes and begging in villages. Men w ­ ere occupied in ­horse care and trade and w ­ ere responsible for social life, including relations with the local landlords and peasants.25 F ­ amily conflicts, crimes against Roma, and disputes between dif­fer­ent clans ­were settled by the sendo (Rom. court), an institution responsible for maintaining traditional law. To decide on each case, a group of experts in Romani traditional law was invited from dif­fer­ent places of the border region and beyond. The sendo could apply a system of penalties or punish a person by social exclusion. In the winter months, ­t hese social structures ­were reor­ga­nized. Although a tabor tried to find winter accommodation for all its members in one of the neighboring villages, this was sometimes difficult to arrange. Therefore, it was divided into a number of smaller families, but not always by nuclear families in the modern understanding. For instance, a f­ amily unit could consist of a married c­ ouple with ­children and grandparents, or a married ­couple with ­children and an unmarried sibling of one of the parents. To describe their seasonal lives, my in­for­mants often used the expression “to go on kwartiry” (Russ. “flats”), as in the interview cited e­ arlier. This, of course, did not mean renting an apartment in the modern sense, but rather renting any kind of building on someone e­ lse’s property; for instance, a bath­house or a part of a ­house. When I first heard from a Belarusian in­for­mant in 2003 about a nomadic ­family sleeping on a stove, I could hardly believe it. However, in the interwar period, most peasant families in this region lived in modest ­houses with a small anteroom and a single living space, a big part of which was occupied by a huge wood-­burning stove. The construction of the stove allowed it to be used for many purposes: heating a h ­ ouse, cooking, and storing kitchen utensils and food. The upper part of a stove could be transformed into a warm and cozy sleeping space, usually beloved by ­children. In addition to the stove, a number of furniture pieces could be used for sleeping, including a bed for adult f­ amily members and several palati, a type of wooden bench that was fixed to the wall. Once they w ­ ere let into a peasant home, nomadic Roma became h ­ ouse­hold members, helping a host f­ amily in farming and sharing daily meals, as well as holiday meals. Given that Roma in the Kresy ­were Catholic and Orthodox Christians,

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they took an active part in village festivities. Some Romani families managed to build deeply personal relationships with their hosts, which sometimes became strengthened through symbolic f­ amily ties. For instance, if a new baby was born in winter, the hosts w ­ ere often asked to be the godparents. Intermarriages also occurred, even if it was not as common among the nomadic as among the sedentary Roma (see the next section). In analyzing the winter pattern of interaction between the nomadic Roma and the local peasants, I arrived at something of a contradiction each time I tried to describe a “peasants–­nomadic Roma” relationship.26 At first glimpse, the ethnographic picture seemed quite idyllic, and most interviews with Roma, as well as with Belarusian in­for­mants, show that the two sides certainly had a pattern of relatively peaceful coexistence. Through my participation in the Belarusian oral history proj­ects, I also learned that Belarusians of an older age generally showed more tolerance ­toward Roma than did younger Belarusians. Yet, confrontations did occur. This was all the more so in folklore texts and peasant anecdotes about the cultural otherness of nomadic Roma (analogous texts about peasants ­were narrated by Roma). Some Romani in­for­mants recalled how difficult it was at times to find winter accommodations and how their families sometimes had to construct temporary winter dwellings (dugouts covered with fir tree branches) in the woods. Stories of summertime living told about open confrontations between nomadic groups and peasants. According to Romani in­for­mants, any thefts that occurred in the villages ­were associated with the nomadic Roma. As I examined the attitudes of the non-­Roma population of the border region and the role they played during the Nazi occupation, I came to the conclusion that each case was unique. A lot depended on ­whether the local peasants had experience of communication with nomadic Roma and personal contacts with them before the war. Nevertheless, more individual ­factors came into play during the war. ­Under the same circumstances, ­people became rescuers, bystanders, or assistants to perpetrators in the persecution of Roma. Some hid Romani ­children and w ­ omen ­under threat to their own lives, whereas o ­ thers closed their doors to them.

(Half-) Sedentary Families and Mixed Marriages What did it mean to be a sedentary ­family of Roma before World War II? First, it meant living surrounded by non-­Roma neighbors. In the region u ­ nder investigation, t­ here was no such phenomenon as a Romani settlement. More often, a f­ amily of Roma lived in a Belarusian-­Polish-­Lithuanian neighborhood. ­Because of their close interaction with the local non-­Roma population, mixed marriages w ­ ere quite frequent. Almost e­ very sedentary f­ amily that I interviewed had non-­Roma f­ amily members before the war. In an e­ arlier publication, I discussed the Halavackie f­ amily from the Belarusian-­Polish borderland.27 In this f­ amily, the ­father came from a sedentary ­family of hereditary blacksmiths, and the ­mother was a Belarusian orphan from Brest:

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Before the war we lived in our own h ­ ouse, almost in the same place where we live now. Our f­ amily was d ­ oing very well. Our f­ ather came from a f­ amily of blacksmiths and had his own forge. Since our parents also kept ­horses and cows, they hired workers. Our ­mother was a local girl from Brest. She was an orphan and therefore agreed to marry our dad—he did not travel and lived very well. Our f­ amily started traveling only ­a fter the war.28

I conducted this interview in 2009 in the course of field research for my dissertation on Romani culture and the transition to sedentism. My informants—­ children of the blacksmith—­told me that they had stayed in their hometown during the German occupation and started traveling afterward. At that time, my questions ­were as follows: How safe was it for them to stay in their hometown? And what made the Halavackie f­ amily travel ­after the war? As I l­ ater learned, they shared their experience with other Romani families that had e­ ither been sedentary or semi­ nomadic during the interwar period (and often during the German occupation) and practiced nomadism in the postwar de­cade. For many Romani families, obviously, the degree of their mobility changed in response to external circumstances: staying on the move allowed many families to survive postwar hardships. Nevertheless, the situation with the German occupation was much more complex. As the next section demonstrates, each ­family had its own sense of safety and reasonability. Moreover, the plight of each f­ amily was dif­fer­ent. As my research progressed, I met more Romani families with a sedentary past, though each of them had a unique history and, what is remarkable, dif­fer­ent degrees of sedentism. In the f­ amily of Pavel Yanovich, for example, a w ­ oman from the Ruska Roma group came to live on a sedentary basis with her Polish husband in the town of Brasław at the end of the 1920s. This, however, does not mean that she or their c­ hildren ­stopped identifying themselves as Roma or broke off relations with her Romani f­ amily. On the contrary, the newly married c­ ouple periodically traveled with their Romani relatives and engaged in traditional Romani occupations, such as h ­ orse trading. The ethnicity of their m ­ other, however, greatly determined their familial choices during the German occupation (for more on the Yanovich ­family, see the next section). The ­family of Maria and Franz Tychina from Ejszyszki had a similar story. Maria came from the Romani ­family of Rutkowskie, which traveled near Lida, and married Franz Tychina, a Pole. Before the war, they owned a ­house and a plot of land in Ejszyszki. However, this did not keep them from engaging in short-­term summer mobility, which sometimes extended to hundreds of kilo­meters. While they ­were traveling, Franz Tychina’s Polish relatives took care of their home.29 Likewise, the f­ amily of Pasevich, in which both parents w ­ ere Roma, owned land and had a cottage on the Neman River. Their offspring, who currently dwell in dif­ fer­ent parts of the borderland, are still proud of their high social status before the war, as well as their good connections among the local landlords and in Warsaw. Nevertheless, the Paseviches also practiced short-­term travel, temporarily joining their nomadic relatives.30

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­These examples demonstrate that dif­fer­ent Romani families practiced dif­fer­ent types or levels of sedentism and patterns of relationships with their nomadic relatives. They also speak against the established ste­reo­t ype of Roma as poor vagrant ­people, who lacked dwelling places and never owned land. It is obvious that ­t here could be ­people of dif­fer­ent social and material statuses within one circle of Romani relatives, even though such stratification might affect many relationships. Some Romani families of higher social status indeed tried to integrate into circles of local nobility and to acculturate. It is also worth mentioning ­here that not all nomadic Roma ­were poor, although their concept of well-­being was dif­fer­ent from that of the sedentary population. Families with a high-­quality means of transportation, such as purebred ­horses and covered wagons, spacious tents, and expensive carpets, could be considered well-­off. For many local peasants, such luxuries remained beyond their means.31 It would prob­ably be a ­mistake to assume that all Roma who ­were married to a Gadjo (non-­Roma) stayed in contact with their own communities. At that time, the Romani community was quite conservative, and marrying a Gadjo was not viewed as a norm, especially among nomadic Roma. Not all ­couples (even ­t hose where the bride and groom ­were both Romani) managed to receive their parents’ approval and some had to e­ ither submit to their parents’ w ­ ill or leave their nomadic group. Moreover, the position of non-­Roma relatives could also function as an obstacle. For instance, Pavel Yanovich mentioned that his grand­father was at first very much opposed to his son’s marrying a Romni (Romani ­woman), though he eventually accepted her. Apparently, not only cultural but also social ­factors came into play in the ac­cep­ tance of ­others. During my recent fieldwork in Belarus, I came across the story narrated by Darja Marcinkevich of her experiences before the October Revolution when the border region was still a part of the Rus­sian Empire. A tabor of the Marcinkevich ­family from Lithuania was then staying near Siebież, in the Pskov region of Rus­sia, where Mikhail, one of the ­family members, met a young Rus­sian girl by the name of Darja from a local middle-­class f­ amily. ­Because she knew her parents would not accept her marriage with a nomadic Rom, Darja eloped with her beloved. Darja, who had blue eyes and blond hair, quickly learned the Romani language and tradition. Before the onset of war, she had given birth to thirteen ­children. In 1941 several of her ­children w ­ ere already adult and married off. Ironically it was their “non-­Roma” appearance inherited from their ­mother that enabled some of them to survive the Nazi genocide; for instance, Darja’s ­daughter Maria changed her name and worked in a factory in Lithuania. The younger c­ hildren and Darja herself ­were much less fortunate, b ­ ecause they stayed in the Belarusian forests with their tabor. They ­were murdered by the local police near Vidzy in autumn 1943. Only one of Darja’s young c­ hildren—5-­year-­old Anna—­survived the action and was ­later ­adopted by an Orthodox priest.32 The fate of t­ hose Roma who left the community for a variety of reasons is very difficult to reconstruct, b ­ ecause they are no longer part of the communal memory and narrative. Likewise, ­t here are almost no sources that shed light on the fate of

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the so-­called magirdo (Rom. impure), t­ hose excluded from the Romani community for breaking traditional morals (for instance sexual taboos) or committing a crime against other Roma (such as theft). In the course of my fieldwork in the border region, I met several in­for­mants who had a magirdo ancestor from “abroad.” For instance, one of my in­for­mants spoke about his grand­father from a Ruska Roma group in Rus­sia who, for some reason, had to leave his home place and moved to the remote Belarusian provinces of the Rus­sian Empire u ­ nder another name. Unaware of his past, the local Romani community welcomed him.33 Lev Cherenkov, a prominent Soviet and Rus­sian linguist and expert in the Romani language and culture, described the magirdo status in his autobiography in an in­ter­est­ing way.34 The Romani part of Cherenkov’s f­amily had roots in the Polish-­Lithuanian border region. Although the events he described took place before the Rus­sian Revolution, they give us a clue about relationships between well-­ off and educated Roma and the non-­Roma community. Born and raised in a middle-­class f­ amily that was well integrated with the local “noble” society and had friends among the local intelligent­sia, Cherenkov’s grand­father Alexei Musovsky did not imagine another f­ uture for himself than to become a doctor. However, the Lithuanian Roma had quite strict “professional” prohibitions for members of their community: some professions, namely that of policeman and medical doctor, ­were considered magirdy. In the case of a doctor, the occupation was obviously associated with the impurities of the ­human body. ­Because he still regarded himself as belonging to the Roma community, Alexei Musovsky de­cided to study far away from home, at Kazan University. However, the Lithuanian Roma became aware of his f­ uture occupation and excluded him. Alexei then searched for a new home in northern Rus­sia and l­ ater in Kazakhstan. He married Maria Reinchardt-­Fabian, a Romani girl from East Prus­sia where nobody was aware of his “shame.” For Maria, it was a lucky decision, ­because not a single one of her relatives survived the Nazi persecution.35 The ­family life of Roma in the interwar period was much more diverse than it may seem at first. Although their lifestyles may be characterized as nomadic, seminomadic, and sedentary, t­ here was some flexibility between the sedentary and nomadic patterns, and sedentary families sometimes joined their nomadic relatives for summer travel. However, t­ here ­were also considerable differences between nomadic and sedentary families. Whereas the sedentary Roma returned home from their short-­ term travel, their nomadic relatives had no place to return to and had to look for places to stay among the local peasants. The level of integration into their territorial communities was also higher among sedentary families, who w ­ ere perceived as neighbors rather than tenants. The structure of ­these families was closer to a nuclear ­family in the modern sense. Sedentary Romani ­house­holds usually consisted of parents and several c­ hildren, whereas nomadic c­ ouples had up to thirteen c­ hildren.36 Another impor­tant question regarding the life of Roma in the Belarusian-­ Lithuanian border region on the eve of World War II remains open: How did the Soviet invasion of 1939 and Soviet policies affect the Romani f­ amily? According to interview data, Sovietization did not appear to have had any direct impact on the

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traditional ­family values and structures of Roma. As mentioned ­earlier, the time period was too brief to permit any structural changes. However, I do won­der how many Roma fell victim to Soviet repression. It is quite likely that both groups—­ sedentary families and nomadic Roma—­could have been affected. ­After 1939 the new authorities started a po­liti­cal campaign against po­liti­cal opponents, Catholic priests, and former Polish officers, as well as local authorities and landlords. Even though Romani families w ­ ere not targeted specifically, they could have suffered from Sovietization in at least two ways. First, my in­for­mants recalled that some well-­off families gave up their property and joined nomadic groups to avoid deportations. Likewise, the lifestyle and traditional occupations of nomadic Roma, such as trading in the market, h ­ orse bartering, and fortune-­telling, became illegal ­under Soviet law. More research is needed to determine what concrete repercussions the new policies had on Romani families. Nikolaj Bessonov has documented the repression of nomadic Roma in the Soviet Union that started with the confiscation of property (horses and wagons) and the deportation of thousands of nomadic Roma from the major Soviet cities in the first half of the 1930s. According to him, this policy changed to a more individualized persecution when Romani men and ­women ended up in Gulag camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan a­ fter 1937.37 Ironically, the Roma who had not been affected by prewar repression w ­ ere ­later affected by the Nazi genocide.

The First Wave of Vio­lence and Nomadic Roma In this section, I analyze how dif­fer­ent families responded differently to German vio­lence depending on their lifestyle, interactions with the local non-­Roma population, and other circumstances. What determined the f­ amily choices of Roma ­under the German occupation, and is it pos­si­ble to speak of ­family survival tactics or strategies? In my analy­sis, I draw on a number of f­ amily biographies, some of which w ­ ere discussed in the previous sections. When war broke out between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in June 1941, many Romani families of the borderland ­were on the move: it was the peak of the nomadic season when even some sedentary families joined their nomadic relatives. ­Family memories of Roma still include episodes that took place at the beginning of the war. For instance, one member of the Pasevich ­family mentioned ­earlier described the retreat of the Red Army from his ­family’s perspective: When the war began, they moved eastward, following the retreat of the Red Army. The ­whole big ­family of my m ­ other—­her parents, first and second cousins (about forty wagons)—­gathered all together and moved in the direction of Belarus. Near Hudahaj they saw a fight between one Soviet and several German fighter bombers. The Soviet pi­lot shot one plane down, and then crashed. The Romani carts ­stopped, and they ran to see what happened. The pi­lot had a bag with documents, decorations, and pictures of his ­children. They took his bag and ­were ­going to bury the pi­lot. Then they saw Soviet soldiers and handed the bag over to them.38

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­After the Red Army’s retreat, it took the Germans less than a week to occupy Lithuania. Vilnius was occupied on June 24, 1941, and four days ­later, German troops entered Minsk, the capital of the Belarusian Soviet Republic. ­Needless to say, the population of the Belarusian-­Lithuanian border region, including the Roma, did not have time to evacuate and join the stream of refugees. Only the families of party elites and officers whose rescue was a priority managed to evacuate. Likewise, only an insignificant number of men from the western regions of Belarus and Lithuania ­were drafted into the Red Army, despite the urgent need for more soldiers. So far, my research has not uncovered any cases of Romani men from the border region fighting in the ranks of the Red Army, although many Roma from other parts of the Soviet Union did.39 Nevertheless, many Romani w ­ omen and men from the border region ­later took part in the Soviet partisan movement and fought the Nazis. In post-­Soviet scholarship, ­there is a widespread belief that Roma from the western regions of the Soviet Union did not associate the German invasion with any threat to themselves. For instance, Bessonov, who conducted many interviews with Roma in the 1990s and early 2000s, noted that in 1941 the el­derly still remembered the German occupation during World War I, and ­t hose experiences ­shaped their expectations. Taking into account the fact that most Roma from the border region did not have any contact with Sinti and Roma in Germany and German-­occupied Eu­rope, this argument seems reasonable. Not only Roma but also many ­people of other ethnic backgrounds, especially in the Soviet west, hoped for a return to pre-­ Soviet times. For instance, one of Bessonov’s in­for­mants of nomadic background from Rus­sia said, We thought that we would live like in the old days u ­ nder the tsar; that trade would be permitted again, and we would have markets and trade in ­horses ­there. The ­people who fled abroad would return . . . ​a nd every­t hing would be clear again. We thought that the Germans would throw the Bolsheviks out and every­ thing would be the way it had always been.40

From ­today’s perspective, such reflections on the German occupation may seem quite naïve. However, it is impor­tant to consider that “ordinary” ­people tend to see the ­f uture in light of their lived experiences. It is very probable that the Roma of the border region could have had similar attitudes at the beginning of the occupation. Like other populations, they ­were exhausted by the Soviets’ rapid transformation and terror. Thus, some Romani families told me that “first, the Germans ­were not as bad as they w ­ ere l­ ater,” ­because they invited Romani musicians to perform and gave choco­lates to their ­children. Musical per­for­mances by Roma in occupied Minsk ­were mentioned in the local press in April 1942.41 Though it seems quite striking in light of the persecution that followed, a romanticized image of Roma (which could even result in the appreciation of Romani art) did not necessarily exclude racial hatred ­toward them. Perhaps the scenes of executions, at which Roma families ­were forced to sing and dance, are the most striking example of this dual opposition, which added a cultural dimension to their physical destruction.42

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The plight of nomadic families was, however, much more precarious. In the summer of 1941, nomadic Roma kept on traveling and tried to earn a living by making their traditional crafts and providing ser­v ices for the rural population. As they moved from one village to another, they could not avoid contact with the mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen), whose members surveyed the surroundings for partisan and Soviet propaganda activities. The killings of nomadic Roma ­were regularly reported by the Einsatzgruppen, which operated in the Baltic States and Belarus.43 Thus, nomadic Roma found themselves among the first victims of the German occupation. The logic of the perpetrators was quite clear: as a ­people based in the woods and traveling in the countryside, the Roma could disseminate information and become engaged in the re­sis­tance movement. The very lifestyle of nomadic Roma and their traditional occupations became a crime u ­ nder the new order. The social “unreliability” of nomadic Roma and the “terrorizing of the local population” ­were common excuses used by the Nazi police to exterminate tabors. Already in late summer and early autumn 1941, several or­ga­ nized mass killings of nomadic Roma took place in the Belarusian-­Lithuanian border region. As mentioned ­earlier, more than eighty nomadic Roma ­were arrested and killed in the woods near Lida in August–­September 1941. Lithuanian volunteers assisted the local police in the shooting.44 From the perspective of the Roma’s nomadic lifestyle and its seasonal variability, it seems logical that the persecution of nomadic groups increased with the autumn frost. Normally, it was the time when nomadic groups would search for winter accommodations among local peasants. It is probable that the “meteorological” conditions w ­ ere used by Nazi police forces for their own purposes. Even though many families of Roma ­were taken in by peasants, their presence in the countryside could not stay unnoticed by the village administration for very long. Throughout the war, the tabors w ­ ere captured in the countryside or while they w ­ ere on the move.45 In the woods near Hlybokaje (Głębokie, Glubok), mass killings of nomadic Roma took place from autumn 1941 ­until spring 1942. According to eyewitness testimonies and memoirs of Jewish survivors, more than a thousand nomadic Roma, including disabled persons and c­ hildren, ­were murdered ­t here.46 They ­were brought from the local countryside in groups to Hlybokaje. This is how the Rajak ­brothers, Jewish eyewitnesses, described the torture that Romani families underwent in the extremely cold month of December 1941: If some of the village peasants ­were punished for “specific crimes,” the neighboring Gypsies, just like the Jews, suffered simply ­because of the fact that they ­were Gypsies, and not for any crimes. It was ­because their skin color did not appeal to the “chosen race.” . . . ​They w ­ ere also exterminated on a mass scale in the last months of 1941. The local police tried to find them in the surrounding area, in the neighboring woods and villages, bring them into the city, and murder them. Once, in December 1941, they brought in a group of more than 100 Gypsy ­people. Before shooting them they ­were stripped naked and kept that way for a

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long while in the b ­ itter winter cold. Their c­ hildren ­were seated naked on the ice. They turned blue, their ­faces got twisted, and they ­couldn’t even cry. The cold froze them, and they stiffened/ossified. They died soon thereafter. Other c­ hildren held on longer and this prolonged their suffering. The parents of the ­children, especially the ­mothers, cried, screamed, wailed, tore their hair from their heads, fell in a faint, and pleaded with the executioners to shoot them fast rather than make them watch the suffering of their ­children, who ­were ­dying from cold lying naked in the snow. One ­mother, a Gypsy, became insane from the torture. She began to laugh, sing, dance, and do other odd ­things. A chill passed through the body and the blood froze in the veins as we watched the horrors, the terrible scenes.47

The Rajak b ­ rothers described horrible scenes of the mass shooting, emphasizing the cruelty of the local collaborators, who used the most sophisticated ways to humiliate and torture the Roma families. The vio­lence against Roma families is prob­ably one of the defining features of the Nazi genocide of Roma in the Soviet Union. ­Family members ­were seldom separated from each other. Instead, Romani parents ­were made to watch their c­ hildren die, while ­children and husbands w ­ ere exposed to sexual vio­lence against Romani ­mothers and wives. Young p ­ eople w ­ ere forced to sing and dance in front of the corpses of their f­ amily members. Even ­those who had managed to survive remained deeply traumatized by the very experience of witnessing or simply being aware of the torture being carried out on their loved ones. ­Those traumatizing scenes, sometimes without an exact localization and time, continue to exist in the memory of several generations of Roma. Almost ­every f­ amily told me about the exceptional cruelty against infants and pregnant w ­ omen. As Sławomir Kapralski emphasizes, vio­lence against Romani families may have a cultural reading too, ­because it was perceived by Roma not only as a personal or f­ amily tragedy but also as the destruction of the Romani tradition itself.48 Perhaps the term “­family killing” best characterizes the murder of nomadic Roma in the border region where the killing of tabors continued throughout the war. However, the apogee of persecution seemed to be in the summer and autumn of 1942. To date, I have collected information about the shootings of Romani families in four locations in the borderland in this time period. It is likely that the intensification of police activities against Roma was connected to anti-­partisan actions in the Belarusian woods. ­There ­were two main ways of detecting and exterminating nomadic Roma: e­ ither on their way to villages, where they hoped to gain provisions, or at their forest encampments. Neither would be pos­si­ble without denunciation by locals. For instance, in July 1942 a nomadic group of fifty ­people was captured in an encampment in the woods between Hudahaj (Gudogai) and Losha, close to the Vilnius–­Minsk railway. Likely, it was the f­ amily of Lubov Pase­ vich, the only survivor of her tabor. Their ­family narrative illustrates well the plight of nomadic Roma ­under occupation: They made an encampment in the ­middle of a meadow near Hudahaj. It was daytime. They w ­ ere sitting and cooking meals. Suddenly, a cow ran into the tabor.

34

V o l h a B a r ta s h They ­were happy to tie it and milk it. ­After half an hour, a shepherd appeared. He started speaking Polish to them. The men from the tabor said: “We should not let him go. He ­w ill lead the Germans ­here. We should kill him.” But my grand­father [a group leader] was too ­human and took pity on the boy . . . ­After an hour, the Germans and locals with shovels arrived. They [the Roma] ­were ordered to dig a pit for themselves. A ­ fter that, they fixed wooden boards on the opposite side of the grave. They [the executioners] started killing ­people. They [the Roma] w ­ ere falling down into the pit half-­a live and whispering . . . My ­mother and her ­father ­were the last in line. The Germans went a ­little bit aside to smoke. The pit was on a hill with a forest and bushes beneath. Her f­ ather told her: “­Daughter, you should live.” With ­these words, he pushed her down with all his force. She hit her head and rolled down into the bushes. . . . ​W hen she awoke, t­ here was no one ­t here.49

When Lubov Pasevich lost her ­whole ­family, she was 16 years old. In several other cases of child survival that I have identified, the survivors w ­ ere even younger. For instance, four survivors of the ­family massacre in Navasiady (Novosiady) included Galina, age 4; s­ ister Katja, age 10; b ­ rother Kostja, 6; and s­ ister Luba, 2. All of them survived thanks to a local peasant w ­ oman, their m ­ other’s acquaintance, who had the courage to rescue the c­ hildren and hide them on her farm.50 Five-­ year-­old Anna was the only survivor of her nomadic ­family shot in the forest near Vidzy. Anna’s f­ ather played the role of her rescuer—­unnoticed by the guards, he ordered the girl to sit quietly ­under a fir tree.51 While analyzing the patterns of individual and f­ amily survival among Roma, I came to a paradoxical conclusion. On the one hand, ­children ­were particularly vulnerable to Nazi vio­lence and often became objects of unpre­ce­dented cruelty. On the other hand, survival rates among ­children and teen­agers ­were apparently higher than among adults. ­Children’s physical characteristics, along with their ability to quickly adjust to the changing environment and mingle with o ­ thers (peasant ­children, for instance), enhanced their chances of survival. Likewise, young ­people who spoke the local non-­Roma languages fluently found work on farms and small enterprises in Lithuania and Belarus, using false identity papers and passing as Poles, Lithuanians, or Belarusians.52 I am particularly interested in the evolution of ­family survival strategies (if any) over time, but have been able to trace t­ hese dynamics only partially b ­ ecause of the sparse evidence. It seems that ­going into hiding was the most common response to Nazi vio­lence among nomadic Roma. ­After the first mass shootings in the fall of 1941, nomadic families tried to avoid dangerous encounters. In par­tic­u­lar, they avoided traveling to bigger towns and villages that remained u ­ nder German control. Nonetheless, Romani w ­ omen of dif­fer­ent ages continued to fulfill their homemaking and breadwinning tasks. They tried to obtain food from peasants in exchange for fortune-­telling ser­v ices and bartering their few possessions. Even though the ­women tried to be careful (the Germans rarely controlled areas close to the woods), their daily tasks ­were very risky. A Romani ­woman, often pregnant

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or with a baby on her back, may have found herself a focus of the fighting parties’ attention. ­Because they communicated with the locals and learned of recent news, they w ­ ere seen as desirable in­for­mants for Soviet partisans, who w ­ ere also based in forests and whose protection Romani families often sought. In contrast, their local mobility was seen as a threat by the Nazi police. With each new field trip I have made, my oral history collection has been replenished with stories of w ­ omen who w ­ ere killed in the countryside while trying to secure their families’ survival. Marianna Orlovskaja was in her fifties when she was killed in a village in the Braslaũ region. She left a f­amily hideout in the forest to visit her old acquaintances and ask them for food. According to her f­ amily, who spoke with the local residents of the village afterward, Marianna was received as usual. She told her acquaintances’ fortune, and they fed her and provided her with some food for the c­ hildren. However, what seemed to be a good day turned into a ­great tragedy. On her way back, Marianna ran into local policemen who took no pity on her, despite all her prayers and crying.53 My in­for­mant Nadezhda was brought up in a Soviet orphanage ­after her m ­ other, pregnant with her fourth child, was killed near Astrashicky Haradok (Gródek Ostroszycki).54 Near Ashmjany (Oszmiana, Oshmene), a local peasant man tried in vain to rescue two Romani ­sisters, one of whom was pregnant. Instead, the man was forced to dig a grave for them.55 In addition to ­t hese examples of familial and individual vio­lence, the German occupation affected nomadic families in many ways, particularly b ­ ecause they w ­ ere separated from their traditional sources of income and left roofless in winter. When Nazi vio­lence against the rural population escalated in the form of reprisals and “pacification” actions, such as setting entire villages with their inhabitants on fire, nomadic families did not dare leave their hideouts in the local forests. Despite their strong survival skills in a familiar natu­ral environment, this cost them many lives, especially ­t hose of the el­derly and ­children who died in Belarusian forests from starvation, cold, and viral diseases.

­Family Responses to the Occupation among Sedentary Roma At the beginning of the occupation, some sedentary families of Roma hoped to find employment on local farms and factories and thus to adjust to the new order. Many of them, however, recall their shock at witnessing the first massacres of the Jewish population with the participation of the mobile killing squads in the summer and autumn of 1941. At that time, most Roma did not realize that they would eventually share the Jews’ destiny. However, it is likely that individual killings of sedentary Roma took place at the beginning of the occupation. Thus, the ­family of Matusevich, from Eišiškės, recalls that several Roma from the region w ­ ere caught and killed together with the Jews in September 1941. However, t­ hese ­family members attribute this fact to the “ignorance” of the SS killing squad that did not know how to tell a Rom from a Jew and rounded them up by m ­ istake.56 The Romani f­ amily of Vera Yanovich was among ­t hose killed in Hlybokaje in fall 1941. The ­bitter news reached Vera in Braslaũ, where she lived with her Polish

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husband and four ­children. From my interview with the ­children, it is difficult to say ­whether it was the news about Vera’s ­family or a threatening local situation that determined the f­ amily decision to go into hiding. According to the ­children, Alexander Yanovich felt pity for his wife, who had “a very Romani appearance” and was pregnant with her fifth child. In early 1942, the c­ ouple made a decision to leave their home and go into hiding. For some time, the f­ amily found shelter on a farm belonging to their ­father’s acquaintance, an Old Believer.57 As soon as they managed to acquire information about a Soviet partisan unit in the nearby forest, they made their way to the Kaziany woods, south of Braslaũ. The ­family was lucky enough to be accepted into the so-­called civilian camp that functioned as an attachment of the Zhukov partisan unit operating in the area. In the civilian camp, Vera gave birth to her son Pavel. All their ­children survived the occupation. The ­father and the oldest son Ivan ­later became active in the partisan unit and took part in actions.58 Yanovich’s story of survival in a Soviet partisan camp is not unique. Many Romani families, as well as individuals who had lost their families, found refuge in Soviet partisan units. Stanislav Kasperovich, who as a teenager had witnessed the tragic end of his own ­family, ­later fought in a partisan unit in Belavezhskaya Pushcha (Białowieska Puszcza), one of the most ancient forests of the borderland region.59 Likewise, Lubov Pasevich, the only surviving member of her nomadic group, found safety among her relatives in a civilian camp u ­ nder partisan protection in the Minsk area.60 Finding refuge with Soviet partisan units was a common survival strategy in a region with vast forests and swamps. Many of its inhabitants, including Jews who fled from ghettos and peasants who lost their homes, went to the woods to seek protection from Soviet partisans.61 Nonetheless, the issue of interaction between the partisans and the nomadic groups requires deeper engagement. According to information provided by Nikolaj Bessonov, nomadic Roma often did not have a choice ­whether to collaborate or not. In the beginning of the war, nomadic Roma ­were asked to hide wounded Soviet soldiers who found themselves in the occupied territories and, l­ ater, partisans. This is how Lubov Akulova, one of Bessonov’s in­for­mants and a former partisan, described the situation: “How was it pos­si­ble to refuse? Armed ­people ­stopped us. They demanded placing a wounded fighter into a horse-­drawn cart, with ­children on the side. ­W hether we wanted it or not, we covered the wounded with a blanket and transported [him].” 62 It goes without saying that their collaboration with Soviet partisans increased the vulnerability of Roma to the Germans and other military and paramilitary organ­izations that w ­ ere active in the region and fought against the Soviets (e.g., Lithuanian partisans and deserters from the Red Army). Yet the Soviet re­sis­tance movement was the only force that was ready to accept Roma into its ranks and could guarantee some level of protection for them. Therefore, most survivors and their ­family members speak of the Soviet partisans in a positive way. Not all sedentary Roma, especially ­t hose in mixed marriages, seemed to feel threatened in their home places as did the Yanovichs. In an ­earlier section, I men-

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tioned the Halavackie f­ amily, which stayed in their hometown throughout the war. The Tychina ­family, which had a very similar background to the Yanovichs (one Romani and one non-­Romani parent, and a “flexible” lifestyle before the war) chose a dif­fer­ent strategy. At the beginning of the occupation, Franz Tychina with his wife Olga and several young c­ hildren moved from Ejszyszki to Dubichi (Dubichaj, Dubizhi), about thirty-­five kilo­meters away. Th ­ ere the f­ amily started a new life, working on a local farm and living on the farm own­er’s property. It was the only half-­Romani f­ amily in the village, but it had a Polish ­father, and its members spoke perfect Polish. Moreover, the ­family possessed farming skills; before the war, it had worked its own land in Ejszyszki. From an outsider’s point of view, the Tychina ­family looked like the perfect peasant f­amily. All of this helped them obtain the protection of their hosts and stay unidentified as Roma u ­ ntil the end of the war. Their d ­ aughter Barbara told me during the interview: “They did not touch us ­because our ­father was Polish. If he was a Rom, they would kill us all.” 63 In a certain sense, Franz Tychina could be regarded as the rescuer of his own f­ amily—­t he strategy he undertook saved his Romani wife and ­children from the persecution that they would prob­ably have experienced in their hometown, where every­one was aware of their ethnicity. Indeed many Roma from their hometown w ­ ere used as forced ­labor in Lithuania, placed in a concentration camp in Pravienishki (Pravieniškės, Praveniskiu), or deported. Barbara’s experience of the occupation did include several life-­threatening episodes, but they w ­ ere shared with all the other inhabitants of the village. According to Barbara, the entire population of the village, located close to the forest, faced the risk of annihilation twice, which seems hardly surprising given the context of ongoing confrontations between the Germans and Soviet partisans. It seems that Roma families that demonstrated a certain flexibility in their lifestyle before the war and had one non-­Romani parent had a greater potential of adapting to the changing environment, which enhanced their chances of survival. This, nevertheless, does not mean that all of them remained unaffected by Nazi genocidal policies. Before the war, the Vantsevich ­family lived in Kaunas (Kovno, Kowne), where they owned a ­house. Their ­father was Lithuanian and the ­mother a Romni from a sedentary ­family in Minsk. The ­family had four ­children (see the previous section). ­A fter the outbreak of war between Germany and the Soviet Union, the f­ amily de­cided to move eastward together with their m ­ other’s siblings and their families. My interview with Galina, who was a young child at that time, does not reveal exactly what motivated the ­family to move; it could be that the Vantseviches de­cided to move in the direction of Minsk where they had relatives. Many p ­ eople from occupied Lithuania moved eastward at the beginning of the war, just following their survival instinct. Since the first days of the German occupation, the situation in Kaunas was very dangerous for the civilians. Starting with Jewish pogroms in late June, Nazi vio­ lence escalated into the infamous Kaunas massacre in October 1941, the largest single episode of killing of the Jewish population in Lithuania. One way or another, the Vantseviches, who found themselves separated from their relatives in Minsk,

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sought refuge in the Belarusian countryside, remote from any major roads and cities (eight kilo­meters from Ashmjany). They found work in peasant ­house­holds; the w ­ omen helped their hostesses with h ­ ouse­keeping and milking cows. Nonetheless, the presence of an extended Romani ­family in the countryside could not remain unnoticed for long during the war. According to Soviet sources, “in November 1942, the Germans had been carry­ing out raids and caught forty-­t wo Gypsies and one Jew in Navasiady. They w ­ ere shot at the forest edge and buried ­t here.” 64 Galina and her siblings, who had miraculously survived the execution, ­were subsequently raised by their ­mother’s f­ amily in Minsk.65 Lithuanian ethnographers who interviewed the Romani survivors in the early 2000s described their temporary transition to sedentism as a common survival strategy that emerged in response to Nazi persecution of seminomadic Roma. Aušra Simoniukštytė wrote about families that had managed to e­ ither purchase or rent properties and find work on farms and enterprises in occupied Lithuania; for example, in the paper factory in Grzegorzewo (Grigiškės).66 Based on the o ­ rders and reports of dif­fer­ent police departments in occupied Lithuania, historian Arūnas Bubnys stressed that the police made a clear distinction between the treatment of sedentary and “vagrant” Roma, meaning that the persecution of the first was rather occasional.67 My own interviews in Lithuania, including some of the ­family biographies discussed ­earlier, show that taking permanent residence indeed proved to be lifesaving for some families. Nonetheless, many sedentary and seminomadic families in Lithuania and Belarus suffered from Nazi persecution to no lesser degree than did the nomadic Roma. Each f­ amily’s situation depended on such f­ actors as their level of integration in the local communities and relations with neighbors, including village heads who had to regularly report the situation of their villages to the Germans. Even though many sedentary and seminomadic families managed to avoid the first wave of persecution, they remained a focus of the police, and any complaints from neighbors could result in their arrest. The ways in which sedentary Roma experienced persecution w ­ ere sometimes dif­fer­ent from ­t hose of their nomadic relatives. In par­t ic­u ­lar, when in­for­mants describe their plight as “a l­ittle bit better,” they often mean that sedentary Roma ­were not killed on the spot. Nevertheless, many ­were used in forced ­labor and placed in concentration camps, where they also experienced f­ amily vio­lence and death. For instance, many Romani families ­were prisoners of the concentration camp in Pravienishki. Although t­ here ­were prisoners of dif­fer­ent nationalities in the camp, only Roma w ­ ere placed ­there as w ­ hole families, including young c­ hildren. Along with ­others, Romani laborers worked in peat extraction, an exhausting form of l­abor. At least several ­family killings of Roma took place in the camp. For instance, Lithuanian guards killed the Marcinkevich ­family of two parents and three c­ hildren in the early summer of 1943.68 Since the killing took place during lunch time, other prisoners saw how the ­family was escorted to the forest. All Roma who w ­ ere unfit for work, namely young ­children and the el­derly, ­were shot as well. Several eyewitnesses recalled that in May 1944, Romani ­women returned from

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work only to find their ­children missing from the barracks. One eyewitness recounted the despair of the Romani m ­ others: “­Because of that, they ran around the camp, whispered, jumped on the barbed wire and pulled their hair out.” 69 It seems that discussions of the “Gypsy issue,” as reflected in the documentation of the German police, did not fully determine the situation on the ground. In the Belarusian part of the General District of Lithuania (Generalbezirk Li­ tauen),70 the persecution of sedentary Roma escalated a­ fter summer 1942. For instance, more than forty Romani residents of Ashmjany ­were gathered together and killed near the village of Asinaũka (Osinowka) in July 1943.71 This fact is still remembered by the Roma population of the town. In 1943 hundreds of Roma from Belarus and Lithuania w ­ ere deported to Auschwitz-­Birkenau. Many adult members of the deported families from the borderland had “worker” or “land worker” listed as their main occupation, which means that they could have been sedentary at the moment of deportation.72

Conclusion In this chapter, I show how applying a ­family lens can lead us to a better understanding of the Romani experience of Nazi genocide and survival in the occupied territories. Indeed, for many of my Romani in­for­mants in Belarus and Lithuania, their individual experiences and memories of suffering and strug­gle for survival are hardly separable from ­t hose of their families. As my analy­sis has shown, sedentary and nomadic Roma experienced the Nazi persecution and vio­lence as families. Moreover, their individual fates w ­ ere often determined by their f­ amily needs and priorities. For instance, many Romani ­women sacrificed themselves for their families, carry­ing out daily breadwinning tasks u ­ nder threat to their own lives. Likewise, Romani men enrolled in Soviet partisan units as active fighters to gain protection of the partisans for their families. The “­family” does not only have an analytical but also a methodological value for research on the Romani experience of genocide. Nevertheless, an oral history study or­ga­nized around ­family networks and based on ­family biographies has its limitations. Such an approach does not allow us to trace the fates of the ­people who, for what­ever reasons, found themselves outside of Romani ­family structures and whose narratives are no longer part of communal memory. For t­ hese reasons, it is difficult to reconstruct individual and ­family histories of the ­people who left the community before the war and no longer identified themselves as Roma. The main question motivating my research was how the families of Roma responded to Nazi persecution, depending on their prewar lifestyle and experiences of interethnic communication in the border region. I found two main patterns of ­family life—­t he sedentary and the (semi)nomadic—­a lthough many families ­were flexible in their lifestyles. In contrast to a sedentary ­family, which was closer in structure to a modern nuclear ­family, nomadic Roma had a broader understanding of the meaning of “­family.” Their nomadic group, which included relatives of several generations and dif­fer­ent degrees of relationship, was often perceived by

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them as their “­family.” Nazi genocidal policies and the subsequent sedentarization campaign in the Soviet Union challenged the extended ­family of Roma, making it conform to an “average standard.” Though sedentary and nomadic families ­were all targeted by Nazi genocidal policies and suffered as a consequence of them, considerable differences between their plights can be observed. Nomadic groups w ­ ere the first to fall victim to Nazi persecution and ­were often killed on the spot—­either in the countryside or in the woods. Therefore, ­going into hiding and seeking protection from Soviet partisans ­were common f­ amily responses to German vio­lence among nomadic Roma. The experiences of sedentary families ­were often dif­fer­ent. A few of them ­were able to survive the war passing as other ethnic groups. O ­ thers w ­ ere deported for forced ­labor and placed in concentration camps as ­whole families. At the same time, the ­earlier observations on the differences between the plight of sedentary and nomadic families w ­ ere sometimes challenged by concrete lived experiences. The real­ity was that the situation of each f­ amily was unique, and each f­ amily was led by its own logic when making decisions. In conclusion, let me highlight questions that remain beyond the scope of this chapter and can serve as the basis of inquiries for further research. So far, not much research has been conducted on how the Romani ­family tackled the aftermath of the Holocaust and postwar hardships, such as parentless ­children, broken families, and a lack of housing and resources. It remains unclear in what ways all t­ hese hardships affected the Romani ­family—­its traditional forms, structures, and lifestyles and how it changed ­after World War II. Tracing the fates of Romani families in the longue durée—­from the interwar period to the first postwar decades—­could potentially fill ­these lacunas in our knowledge. For this purpose, it would be extremely helpful to transfer methodological and theoretical approaches from studies on the Jewish f­ amily in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The interconnectedness of the Jewish and Romani experiences and memories is another theme that deserves more detailed study. The memoir of the Rajak ­brothers quoted in this chapter is not the only eyewitness account that shows the murder of Roma through the eyes of Jews. For instance, Hinda Daul, a Jewish teacher from Ashmjany, mentioned the presence of Roma in the local ghetto in autumn 1941. According to Daul, they ­were murdered along with the ghetto Jews at the end of 1941.73 A similar testimony was given by Yulian Farber who, together with other young Jews, was forced to work in the so-­called Leichenkommando (corpse unit) in the mass killing site in Ponary (Paneriai, Ponar). In his postwar interviews and testimonies, Farber repeatedly recalled a nomadic group of fifty ­people murdered in Ponary in spring 1944: “All of that made such a power­f ul and oppressive impression on us [V. B.—­members of the corpse unit]. Someone even proposed to attack the guards, take their arms away and kill at least one SS man.”74 Likewise, the oral histories of Roma often mention the murder of Jews in their home places. For instance, the memory of the mass murder of Jews of Druja and Ejszyszki is still alive among the local Romani communities. The Romani families

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that I interviewed did not concentrate on their own sorrow exclusively but demonstrated a high level of compassion for Jewish families. The memories of Jewish–­Romani war­time encounters ­were not ­limited to recollections of mass killings, ghettos, and concentration camps. The stories of survival, to an even greater extent, demonstrate the awareness of each other’s destiny and readiness to help. For instance, Wanda Stankiewicz, a Romani ­woman from Ejszyszki, rescued a Jewish girl who had lost her parents in one of the early massacres in 1941.75 While hiding in the woods, Jews and Roma often stuck together, sharing food and warning each other of danger. The poetry of Papusza (Bronisława Wajs), considered to be one of the earliest accounts of the Holocaust of Roma also sheds light on the connections between Roma and Jews in the Volhynian forests (current Ukraine). Papusza and the members of her community ­later recalled the Jews who w ­ ere hiding together with their group; many verses of her poetry are dedicated to the plight of Romani and Jewish w ­ omen and c­ hildren, who w ­ ere particularly vulnerable to the harsh conditions of the natu­ral environment.76 Survivor accounts indeed show that a Jewish and a Romani f­ amily in hiding faced similar challenges. Although it was relatively easy to enter a Soviet partisan unit and obtain the partisans’ protection for both Roma and Jewish individuals, large families w ­ ere not welcome to the same extent. At best, they w ­ ere allowed to stay in the forest zones controlled by partisans. In spite of this, Soviet partisans ­were the only armed movement that generally played a positive role in the survival of Roma and Jews. The similarities between Romani and Jewish experiences of the German occupation are indeed fascinating, as are the intersections between the memory paths of Jews and Roma. As a result of their common destiny, the Romani and Jewish communities of Belarus and Lithuania currently share a number of memory sites (some along with other victim groups). ­After the fall of the Soviet Union, ­there has been a gradual increase in the number of commemorative initiatives. How the Romani and Jewish communities of both countries coordinate their commemoration proj­ects represents another potential line of inquiry for further research. It is in­ter­est­ing that the Belarusian Jewish community has supported a number of Romani commemoration efforts. For instance, Romani and Jewish victims of the Kaldychava (Kołdyczewo) concentration camp have been commemorated together in one memorial complex.77 Yet not all shared sites of memory commemorate Roma victims.

chapter 2

v

Separation and Divorce in the Łódź and Warsaw Ghettos Michal Unger

On December 21, 1941, the following petition was submitted to the Divorce Council of the Łódź (Litzmannstadt, Lodzh) ghetto: I request a divorce ­because my husband completely refuses to support us. We are a f­ amily of five, not long ago we used to be six, my 13-­year-­old d ­ aughter died of starvation. Have mercy on my three ­children, ­because we have no desire to live. We d ­ on’t receive any allotment [social welfare allotment that the unemployed received], ­because he [the husband] works in the carpentry ressort [workshop]. For two years now I have been suffering, ­because ­t here is no peace in our ­house. ­Every day only arguments and blows, I cannot bear it any longer. I ask for quick help, ­because I have no way to save my life. I have four empty walls. Again, I request urgent assistance and mercy.

The authors of the Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, who cited this petition, emphasized that they w ­ ere quoting it word for word, b ­ ecause it “sheds characteristic light 1 on the relations that prevail in the ghetto.” The tribulations of ghetto life put the nuclear ­family ­under severe duress and on an existential trial. For some, the suffering led to a closer bond, amid stubborn efforts to preserve a normal domestic life, even u ­ nder unbearable circumstances. This closer bond was manifested chiefly in forms of solidarity and mutual responsibility, sometimes to the point of self-­sacrifice. For other families, the bond was irremediably broken. This real­ity is described in the Łódź Ghetto Encyclopedia—­another document composed in the Ghetto Archives from late 1943 through 1944—in an entry titled “Familienleben” (­Family Life), written by Dr. Peter Wertheimer (1890–1944)2: Jewish ­family life, which is rightly appreciated, is seriously challenged in the ghetto. The existence of the f­ amily itself that lives in such high population density in the ghetto is called into question. . . . ​In the ghetto rooms . . . ​t hey can-

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not have privacy even in the most h ­ umble of accommodations, but have to share them with other unfortunates, who—as foreign ele­ments—­frequently constitute a source for friction. It is obvious that the intimacy among partners suffers u ­ nder ­these conditions. In addition, maintaining the principal purpose of marriage, the continuous blessing of ­children, is rendered extremely difficult, which lowers the birth rate to the absolute minimum. . . . ​Destitution and hunger do their destructive work. That leads to a gruesome real­ity that transcends the limits of imagination. However, we should also remember that love often enough overcomes all ­those difficulties and makes the heart glow. Parents, ­children and even more distant relatives sacrifice their health, even their life, for one another.3

Jewish f­ amily solidarity and the changes in the ghettos of Eastern Eu­rope during the Nazi occupation have been studied from a variety of ­angles.4 However, in the absence of adequate data and other ­factors, no study has examined the question of divorce, which, ­after all, is a classic manifestation of ­family failure. This chapter focuses on the less familiar and underresearched aspects of separation and divorce and, in ­doing so, adds another layer to the study of the f­ amily.5 It is worth noting that I have not yet found original documents relating to this subject from other ghettos. ­There is a ­great disparity in the quantity and quality of primary sources on this subject across the vari­ous ghettos ­because of the dif­fer­ent circumstances that prevailed in each. Survivors w ­ ere often reluctant to testify about conflicts within their families ­because of the sensitivity of the subject, especially ­because most of their relatives ­were murdered. In this re­spect, the Łódź ghetto is exceptional. The Germans had not managed to destroy the ghetto and the extensive documentation that was stored or hidden ­t here before it was liberated by the Red Army on January 19, 1945. As a result, historians have at their disposal a trove of invaluable documents, such as diaries, rabbinic responsa and rulings, transcripts of court sessions, excerpts from the Chronicle, articles contributed to the Ghetto Archives, and statistical data, including a handful of survivor testimonies.6 Unfortunately, only a few similar documents relevant to the subject are available from the Warsaw ghetto, which I include in my discussion. How did the hardships of ghetto life affect the nuclear ­family? Was ­t here a change in the balance of power between husbands and wives? If so, why? W ­ ere ­t here any changes in divorce patterns compared with the prewar period? How did the Jewish administration in the ghettos cope with this issue? Th ­ ese are the main questions addressed in this chapter.

Divorce in Jewish Society in Eastern Eu­rope in the Modern Period Separation and divorce have been common phenomena among Jewish families throughout all historical periods, despite the idealized image of the Jewish f­ amily as a stable unit.7 In Eastern Eu­rope, ­until the beginning of the modern era, a small elite of scholars and parents in well-­to-do families made the decision about when

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and whom their sons would marry. The practice of the “arranged marriage” or “child marriage” was usually assisted by matchmakers. The partners ­were very young, both to preserve their sexual innocence and to maintain the families’ economic and social status. The newlyweds lived with the bride’s ­family, who took care of all their needs (kest) ­until the husband had completed his Torah studies. Then the c­ ouple usually moved into their own h ­ ouse. Most of the men found jobs, while the ­women ­were responsible for the domestic affairs and the c­ hildren’s education. A small number of men continued to study Torah all their lives; their wives worked to support the ­family. ­These early marriages, imposed by the parents, often caused friction between the spouses, who often w ­ ere not well suited to each other, and between the ­couple and the bride’s parents. Some marriages broke up when the partners reached full maturity.8 But most Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews ­were poor and belonged to the urban lower class, where the division between the traditional roles of w ­ omen and men was less sharp. The men ­were usually petty traders, craftsmen, shop­keep­ers, and the like. The ­women also worked to help support the families. The involvement of parents and matchmakers was more minor than with well-­off families, ­because economic and social f­actors ­were less impor­tant. Many c­ ouples met, fell in love, and married. If t­ hings did not work out and they agreed to separate, they would appeal to a rabbi to arrange a divorce.9 The penetration of the Eu­ro­pean Enlightenment and modernization into the Rus­sian Empire, starting in the nineteenth ­century, had a profound effect on Jewish society, which for the most part remained strictly observant in the Pale of Settlement and Congress Poland. However, the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment movement) soon began to make inroads. Its proponents, the maskilim, criticized Orthodox Jewish society and the traditional Jewish f­ amily. They saw the many divorces among the Jewish elite as a product of outdated marriage customs and sought to modify them.10 In the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury, Jewish ­women in Eastern Eu­rope began to attend high schools and universities. ­There was a parallel increase in the number of working ­women. Some of ­t hese educated ­women lived in­de­pen­dently, moving away from Jewish tradition and religious observance. Some joined po­liti­ cal movements, including revolutionary parties, in which they worked alongside non-­Jews.11 Although most maskilim favored the education of ­women, they ­were not willing to allow them equal rights with men, believing that men’s intellectual and physical abilities surpassed t­ hose of ­women. Neither ­were they happy with the modern Jewish ­woman, who was too in­de­pen­dent for their taste; instead, they wanted to maintain the traditional Jewish ­family, in which the ­woman was modest and faithful to her husband, honoring him and seeing to all his needs. Some of them w ­ ere opposed to ­women working outside the home, where they might be overly exposed to modernization, and believed that a w ­ oman’s role was to oversee the h ­ ouse­hold and see to the ­children and their education. Nevertheless, many ­women in enlightened families ­were permitted to work, w ­ hether in the ­family business or elsewhere.12

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The growth of the Haskalah movement in Eastern Eu­rope led to an increase in the age of marriage and to higher spousal expectations, which sometimes led to disappointment and divorce.13 Indeed, the divorce rate among Jews in the Rus­sian Empire in the late nineteenth ­century was higher than in ­earlier periods and also higher than among their Catholic and Rus­sian Orthodox neighbors, whose churches prohibited divorce or made it difficult to obtain. As the gender distribution of tasks within the ­family started to shift, the increase in the number of working w ­ omen changed their lives and that of the f­amily. Being less eco­nom­ically dependent on their husbands than in the past, it was easier for w ­ omen to choose divorce as a way out when a marriage faced a crisis.14 In the last third of the nineteenth ­century, a severe economic crisis in the Pale of Settlement led to a surge in antisemitism, manifested in a wave of pogroms. The result was the mass emigration of nearly three million Jews, mainly to North and South Amer­i­ca. The pro­cess continued from the last third of the nineteenth ­century ­until the United States effectively shut its doors in 1924. This mass migration changed Jewish demographics all over the world and also had an effect on Jewish ­family life. Often the men left first to get established eco­ nom­ically before bringing over their families. Many ­women, some of them burdened by young c­ hildren, ­were abandoned by their husbands and had to support themselves. Some of ­t hese w ­ omen remained agunot, or “chained w ­ omen,” ­a fter their husbands dis­appeared. W ­ hether it was b ­ ecause the husband did not bother to grant them a divorce or, in the event that he had perished, two valid witnesses who could testify to his death (as required by Jewish religious law) could not be found, ­t hese w ­ omen could not remarry. The rabbis of the talmudic era of Judaism had established a procedure for conditional divorce. According to the Talmud, “every­one who went out to the wars of the House of David wrote a bill of divorce for his wife,” which would allow a wife to remarry should a husband fail to return.15 During World War I, when many Jews ­were conscripted into the Rus­sian Army and then during the Polish-­Soviet War in 1919–1921, when Jewish soldiers fought on both sides and many ­were killed, the number of agunot reached into the tens of thousands. In 1917 the rabbis of Poland began looking for ways to permit ­t hese ­women to remarry. Between the two world wars, the Rabbis’ Council in Warsaw set up the Central Bureau to Release War ­Widows, which operated u ­ ntil the outbreak of World War II ­under the presidency of Rabbi Shlomo David Kahana. One of the issues it discussed was the conditional bill of divorce.16 ­These prob­lems, along with the modernization that Rus­sian authorities attempted to impose on the Jews, strongly undermined Jewish communal institutions and the rabbinate, which was itself weakened by internecine squabbles between Hasidim and their opponents, the Mitnagdim. Traditional society had lost its authority during this difficult period, and this too contributed to the higher divorce rate.17 In her book, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Rus­sia, ChaeRan Y. Freeze pre­sents statistics about the number of divorces in sixteen provinces of the Pale of Settlement for the years 1857–1869. She found a total of 1,734 divorces and

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11,773 weddings (a rate of 147.3 per thousand)18 in a population of 1,046,136 Jews. ­These w ­ ere average rates. In the large cities with substantial Jewish communities, such as Wilno (Vilnius, Wilne), Kishinev (Chișinău), Kharkov (Kharkiv), Berditchev (Berdychiv), and Odessa, nearly half of all Jewish c­ ouples divorced.19 The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a decline in the Jewish divorce rate for vari­ous reasons, including the difficult economic situation in the Rus­sian Empire at the turn of the c­ entury, pogroms, the rise in the age of marriage, mass emigration, assimilation, and conversion. As mentioned, this period also saw a decline in the authority of rabbis, which made it more difficult for a ­woman to receive a divorce from her husband. As a result, many c­ ouples separated without securing an official divorce.20 The most common reasons for divorce in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ­were as follows: disputes about supporting the f­ amily, the absence of love between the c­ ouple, vio­lence, infidelity, arguments about adhering to religious tradition, conversion to Chris­t ian­ity, the illness of a spouse, infertility, the taking up of work by w ­ omen, and the desire of many wives to f­ ree themselves of economic dependence on the husband, which sometimes undermined the husband’s status and image as the ­family breadwinner. Divorce had harsh repercussions for the f­ amily. For that reason, many c­ ouples put it off for as long as they could, holding out ­u ntil the situation had become unbearable or they had a desire to remarry. F ­ actors that deterred men from divorcing tended to be economic, notably the desire to avoid having to pay the w ­ oman her dowry and marriage settlement, followed by alimony and child support. Many ­women w ­ ere deterred from seeking divorce by fear of social ostracism or concern that they would not be able to support and raise their ­children on their own. According to the Imperial Rus­sian Census of 1897, t­ here ­were three times as many divorced Jewish ­women as men: 3,975 men versus 12,589 ­women. The a­ ctual number of already divorced men was higher, b ­ ecause many had remarried. Jewish society encouraged second marriages, but significant gender discrepancies existed in patterns of remarriage. This statistic points to the change in w ­ omen’s mindset and status, as well as the fact that it was more difficult for w ­ omen to remarry than it was for men, who had a larger pool to select from, including single w ­ omen without ­children.21 Child custody and visitation arrangements and support ­were a bone of contention among c­ ouples that ­were about to divorce. According to Jewish religious law, the m ­ other is entitled to exclusive custody over sons ­until the age of 6, at which point they are transferred to the ­father, who is responsible for their education. ­Daughters remain with the ­mother ­until marriage, and the ­father is required to support all of his ­children for as long as they remain at home. In practice, however, many divorced ­fathers found it difficult to pay child support or evaded the obligation. Many ­women waived financial support from their ­children’s ­father on condition of retaining custody, no ­matter the child’s age. Bigamy, too, was widespread. B ­ ecause of dire economic straits, many men ­were not willing and perhaps also not able to pay their wives’ dowry and marriage set-

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tlement when they wanted to divorce. Th ­ ere was no shortage of cases in which men left their home and ­family without securing an official divorce and subsequently remarried in a dif­fer­ent place. When ­these men ­were caught by the authorities, they ­were tried and sent to prison.22

In­de­pen­dent Poland between the Wars (1919–1939) In interwar Poland, although Jews w ­ ere officially citizens with equal rights, they continued to suffer social and economic discrimination—­and, in the second half of the 1930s, statutory discrimination as well—­accompanied by harsh antisemitism. The economic crisis greatly affected the Jews’ socioeconomic status. One result was a further increase in the age of marriage, b ­ ecause men—­and to a lesser extent w ­ omen—­wanted to be eco­nom­ically stable before starting a f­ amily. We have data from the Polish censuses of 1921 and 1931. Even though they did not ask about the age at marriage but only about current f­ amily status, we can deduce a steady rise in the marriage age. According to the 1921 census, hardly anyone married before the age of 17. In the big cities, such as Warsaw, most of the ­women (58.6%) and men (59.1%) w ­ ere married by the age of 25–29. According to the 1931 census, more men and w ­ omen married in their thirties or even their forties. The time needed to acquire an education and trade was another reason that both men and ­women put off marriage. Nevertheless, the percentage of traditional marriages among Jews remained very high, and the percentage of the unmarried was low. The technical term for this phenomenon is “universal marriage.”23 The ­later marriage age contributed to a decline in the birthrate before the war. According to the 1931 census, about one-­t hird of Jewish ­women held a job. It may be assumed that the Jews’ worsening economic situation in the second half of the de­cade caused even more ­women to enter the workforce.24 In in­de­pen­dent Poland, the divorce rate dropped b ­ ecause of the economic crises: it was hard to pay alimony and child support, so many c­ ouples separated without obtaining a formal divorce.25 This decrease can be tracked in the divorce register of the Jewish community of Łódź. In 1913, before World War I, when the Jewish population was 205,000, 209 c­ ouples divorced. The number of divorces then plummeted in in­de­ pen­dent Poland. In 1923, for example, only 36 divorces w ­ ere granted in a community of 160,000 Jews. Subsequent years saw a slight rise in divorces; in 1929, 133 ­couples divorced out of a population of 190,000 Jews.26

Divorces in the First Period of World War II We find references to divorces already at the start of World War II, mainly of intermarried ­couples.27 In his writings for the Ringelblum Archives (known at the time ­under the code name “Oneg Shabbat”), Rabbi Shimon Huberband (1909–1942) mentioned the story of a Polish Jew who had settled in Germany and married a Christian ­woman who had converted to Judaism. The c­ ouple had a 19-­year-­old ­daughter. They ­were expelled from Germany in 1938 at the time of the Zbąszyn

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(Bentschen) expulsion and settled in Warsaw. When the Germans arrived in 1939, the husband fled to Białystok (Bielastok, Balstogė), leaving his wife and d ­ aughter ­behind. When they contacted the German authorities to request welfare benefits, ­because t­ here was no one to support them, they w ­ ere told that assistance would be forthcoming only if the ­woman divorced her husband (a pro­cess recognized by the Nuremberg laws). Huberband wrote, [The husband] made a special journey to Warsaw in order to give his wife a Jewish writ of divorce. Heartbreaking scenes took place during the divorce. Husband, wife, and ­daughter wept and sobbed profusely. Immediately ­a fter the divorce, the husband left the rabbi’s ­house and returned to Bialystok.28

Similar cases could be found in Lwów (L’viv, Lemberg), the third-­largest city in prewar Poland, with 100,000 Jewish inhabitants. The local rabbinate was abolished during the Soviet interlude, and the rabbis ­were persecuted. The city was occupied by the Germans on June 29, 1941. In the following months, a number of rabbis ­were abused and murdered, and religious rituals ­were outlawed. At the end of autumn, when life in the city had settled down to some extent, the rabbinate resumed its activities on an unofficial basis. Rabbi David Kahane, who was a member of the board of rabbis, wrote in his diary about the divorce prob­lem: The prob­lem of divorces was particularly painful and tragic. The . . . ​divorcées ­were Aryan ­women who had converted to Judaism, married Jews, and left their past ­behind. . . . ​Suddenly the insane race statutes become the law of the land and demanded that they divorce their husbands—­other­w ise they would be required to enter the ghetto and wear the identifying armband. In all divorce proceedings, however, I saw only a handful of w ­ omen who agreed to part from their Jewish spouse.29

The situation was tragic. The Jewish husbands (generally it was w ­ omen who converted) tried to persuade their wives to accept the divorce in order to protect them and the ­children from the fate of the Jews and confinement in the ghetto. Some gave in, but o ­ thers joined their spouses and shared the tribulations of the period with them. Much of the same happened in Kovno (Kaunas, Kovne).30 Among ­couples where the spouse had not converted, ­t here was a similar prob­lem; we find some (mainly w ­ omen) who joined their Jewish partner in the ghetto. A total of sixty-­one Christians resided in the Łódź ghetto in January 1941, of whom fifty-­two ­were Christian w ­ omen, most of them married to Jews. By the end of 1942, only twenty-­six non-­Jewish w ­ omen remained.31

Conditions in Ghettos That Led to Separation and Divorce The policies of the German authorities at all levels created abject misery in the ghettos. Tens of thousands of ghetto residents w ­ ere perpetually hungry and died of severe malnutrition. Most of the conflicts in the families and between husbands

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and wives in the Łódź ghetto w ­ ere triggered by acute hunger, impossible overcrowding, exhausting forced l­ abor, and unending tension and anxiety. Hunger was the most difficult existential prob­lem in the Łódź ghetto throughout its existence (March 1940–­August 1944); it claimed the lives of nearly 44,000 Jews out of the 205,000 who lived in the ghetto—­about 21 ­percent. The Germans conducted a policy of deliberate starvation. ­Because virtually no food was smuggled into the Łódź ghetto from the outside, the Germans ­were almost the sole providers of food. Most of the residents lived exclusively on t­hese supplies, which ­were of very poor quality (sometimes rotten) and in a quantity less than the minimum needed to survive. The Warsaw ghetto was established in the m ­ iddle of November 1940 and liquidated in mid-­May 1943. Its inhabitants too faced severe starvation, to which 80,000 of its 450,000 Jews, or more than 17 ­percent of the population, succumbed. However, in Warsaw, unlike Łódź, a massive food smuggling effort from the outside provided around 80 ­percent of the ghetto’s food supply. Nevertheless, the death rate remained high, ­because most of its residents could not afford to purchase this food. Overcrowding was another serious prob­lem in both ghettos. The area of the Łódź ghetto was less than 4 km2, but the residential area was only about 2.4 km2 (the rest was taken up by the cemetery, public institutions such as schools and hospitals, and an open area, used in part for agriculture). The ghetto contained 3,361 buildings, with a total of 48,102 livable rooms. Of ­t hese, 42,551 had electricity. No private lavatory was to be found among 30,624 of its residential units; only 613 of them ­were connected to the sewage system. In addition, only 294 apartments had ­running ­water, sewage connections, and private toilets.32 The density was 75,000 persons per square kilo­meter—­seven times what it had been in the same area in 1931. An average of eight to ten ­people lived in each room: men, w ­ omen, and ­children; the old and the young, the sick and the healthy; and frequently strangers to one another lived together. ­These conditions led to inevitable tension and conflict between the tenants and more or less made any marital intimacy impossible. The Warsaw ghetto originally covered 3.5 km2, but its bound­aries ­were changed several times. It contained less than 14,000 apartments, with an average density of six to seven persons per room.33 ­Here, as in Łódź and other ghettos, the crowding and physical conditions w ­ ere unbearable, causing tension and fights and negatively affecting ­family life. Even for ­couples whose love for each other remained strong, painful outbursts could puncture the relationship. As Jakub Poznański from the Łódź ghetto wrote in his diary on February 4, 1943, Three years of suffering and agony, three years of abnormal life, three years of hunger . . . ​as well as living in a single room . . . ​have had a bad effect on all of us—my wife, my d ­ aughter, and myself. E ­ very silly ­t hing irritates us. My wife is

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Micha l U nger particularly sensitive. . . . ​Sometimes words are spoken that w ­ ere never heard between us before. I am aware of my wife’s state so I do not assign much importance to ­t hese words. I understand very well that she cannot be blamed for them.34

In some homes, however, the harsh realities of life undermined the normal concept of the f­ amily as a unit with common interests and solidarity, responsibility, and mutual affection. According to an entry in Chronicle for September 22, 1942, ­ fter three years of war, the concept of f­amily has been erased. . . . ​Instead of A families, ­t here are only “­family housing collectives” where all food commodities are weighed and doled out to ­family members, where strong ­family members deprive weaker ones of their food and set the stage for interminable f­ amily quarrels and conflicts.35

Relationships frayed to the breaking point; the fierce quarrels often led to the total breakdown of the f­ amily unit. A Jew from the Łódź ghetto, who reached the Warsaw ghetto in mid-1942, told the staff of the Oneg Shabbat Archives about the ­bitter fights among f­amily members in the Łódź ghetto: “The scanty food [supplied to the ghetto] plays a key role. Even in leading families t­ here ­were cases in which ­mothers and c­ hildren fought over a crust of bread. The situation led p ­ eople to behave like animals.”36 A study of original documents from the Łódź and Warsaw ghettos suggests three main patterns of be­hav­ior by ­couples in conflict.

Keeping Up Appearances, despite the Collapse of the Relationship The author and poet Isaiah Spiegel, in his short story “Bread,” wrote about a f­ amily that consisted of a f­ ather, ­mother, and two c­ hildren, who lived in a derelict wooden hut on the edge of the Łódź ghetto, abutting the fence that surrounded it. Neither of the parents was employed. The ­mother would get up very early and stand in queues for long hours to obtain food and soup for her f­ amily, while the husband remained at home with the ­children, sitting entire days wrapped in his prayer shawl and learning Torah. The hunger was oppressive. Spiegel describes the ceremonial distribution of a loaf of bread ­every eve­ning, when the ­mother cut it into thin slices, allowing the ­family to gain a short respite from the gnawing hunger. She would then wrap up what was left of the loaf and hide it so that no one would be tempted to take an extra piece. One day her husband found himself unable to withstand his ravenous hunger; he looked for and found the hidden bread and ate some of it. When the ­mother came home that eve­ning, She found both ­children lying in a corner famished. . . . ​She recognized the situation in his [the husband’s] downcast eyes. She let out a squawk like a slaughtered chicken: “A ­father, eh? A fa—­t h—er, is it? Murderer” . . . ​a nd from that moment on the m ­ other went around concerned and worried. Till she found a solution: she sewed l­ ittle sacks out of shirts, stuffed the sliced portions of bread

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into the sacks, and in that manner she walked the streets, with both sacks hanging on her heart.

The distraught f­ather never forgave himself and could not understand what had overcome him: At that moment a tornado stormed his heart. It could not have been his very own hands that in the darkness of the chamber stuffed the ­children’s bread into his own mouth. . . . ​That ­wasn’t the ­father any more . . . ​[that was] some kind of accursed dybbuk.

The ­father could not look his ­children in the eye. Day ­after day he sat staring at his books, from time to time emitting a deep sigh. By chance or not, the husband was deported from the ghetto during the first roundup, which was carried out in the ghetto streets in mid-­January 1942 at the beginning of the deportations to the Chełmno (Kulm) death camp.37 His act of selfishness was a one-­time moral slipup caused by intense hunger. The f­amily continued to live together ­until the ­father was deported, but the relations between husband and wife ­were undermined and their trust damaged beyond repair. In her memoirs, poet and writer Sara Selver-­Urbach referred to a similar case that involved her own relatives. Isser and Henia w ­ ere a young and loving c­ ouple whose two young c­ hildren had died in the dysentery epidemic in the ghetto in the summer of 1940. Their bereavement triggered a deep depression, and a barrier gradually arose between husband and wife. Unable to cope with the hunger, one day Isser stole Henia’s ration. Afterward, like the f­ ather in Spiegel’s story, he could not make his peace with this moral dereliction and was glad to be sent to a forced ­labor camp outside the ghetto: He would no longer have to contend with his horrible conflicts. [He would be] finished [with] his daily strug­gle with hunger, his shameful succumbing to the temptation to steal Henia’s bread. And he would no longer cause Henia harm. The deportation was deliverance; it would carry him far away from his unbearable dilemma. He would escape his suffering as well as his own self.38

­ ings ­were even worse in the ­family of Dawid Sierakowiak (1924–1943), a stuTh dent of a Jewish high school before the war and in the ghetto, who was active in the communist youth movement in the ghetto ­until his death. His diary entries make frequent references to altercations over food in his f­amily. The f­ather, who found it impossible to still his hunger pangs, often ate part of his wife’s and ­daughter’s rations, as recounted in Dawid’s entry for May 30, 1942: The “internal situation” at home is becoming extremely tense again. . . . ​L ast Thursday and again yesterday he [his f­ ather] devoured his w ­ hole loaf of bread, and ­today on top of it, half a kilo from Mom and Nadzia. I also d ­ on’t know why he hoards all the money. He takes away all of Mom’s and Nadzia’s pay, and ­doesn’t want to give us money for anything. ­Today he bought our ration of sausage and

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Micha l U nger ate over 50 grams of it on the street . . . ​so every­one’s share of sausage was short. . . . ​I take my portion of bread to the workshop with me now. ­Father also bought his w ­ hole portion of meat t­ oday, and having received a liter of whey at the dairy store for the ­whole f­ amily he cooked it only for himself and lapped it all up. As a result, the rest of us have nothing to cook at home anymore, and are g­ oing to bed without supper. . . . ​Mom looks like a cadaver, and the worries at home are absolutely killing her. If only he seriously wanted to leave! No, no way, though.

The ­mother was deported during the Sperre39 of September 1942 ­because of her poor physical condition. Dawid blamed his ­father, who had made no attempt to save his wife and even seemed glad to be rid of her. The boy mourned his beloved ­mother’s fate: Dear ­mother . . . ​whose entire life was one of sacrifice for ­others, relatives and strangers, who might not have been taken away ­because of her exhaustion had it not, been for ­Father. . . . ​With fatalism and with heartbreaking, maddening logic, she spoke to us about her fate. She kind of admitted that I was right when I told her that she had given her life by lending and giving away provisions, but she admitted it with such a b ­ itter smile that I could see she d ­ idn’t regret her conduct at all, and although she loved her life so greatly, for her ­t here are values even more impor­tant than life, like God, ­family, ­etc. She kissed each of us good-­ bye . . . ​and left quickly to her horrible fate.

The ­father’s condition deteriorated. He neglected his appearance and hygiene and became quite apathetic to his surroundings. Young Dawid, who did not forgive him for his be­hav­ior and treatment of his m ­ other, refused to give him part of his bread ration when the f­ ather was hospitalized. On January 14, 1943, he wrote, “He is not the kind of ­father worth giving up our health for, as our unfortunate ­mother did.” 40 The ­family of Israel Aviram, who survived the Łódź ghetto, continued to live together despite the tense relationship between his parents. In this f­ amily of Gerrer Hasidim, the ­mother was extremely pious. She was meticulous about eating only kosher food and absolutely refused to touch the meat that was distributed in the ghetto. His ­father, by contrast, told the ­children to eat the meat and did so himself, ­because staying alive was a greater precept than kashrut. This issue highlighted the contrast between husband and wife and led to a falling out that naturally affected the c­ hildren. “All through the war,” Aviram wrote in his memoir, “I was a witness to their heartbreaking attempts to mend the rift, but it continued ­until the b ­ itter end.” 41 Did they continue to live together all ­those years, ­because both of them needed to be with their c­ hildren and protect them? Was it perhaps b ­ ecause of a desire to keep up the pretense of f­ amily life on account of social conventions, despite the abnormal situation? Another possibility is that it was a result of the severe housing shortage. To move, one needed a certificate from the Judenrat (Jewish Council) housing department, which refused to provide accommodations to ­t hose who ­were still officially married.

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The Łódź ghetto’s first murder took place in an estranged ­family. In April 1941, a man was arrested for d ­ oing away with his wife and 17-­year-­old son. They w ­ ere murdered in February, but the man hid the bodies for two months so that he could keep drawing on their food rations. The ­couple had been at loggerheads before the war and lived apart. ­Because of the housing shortage in the ghetto and the fact that they ­were still married officially, they ­were not assigned separate accommodations and ­were forced to move back in together. This naturally augmented the friction between them and led to the tragedy.42

Separation without a Formal Divorce Separation was another option, if conditions favored it. This was the route followed by a certain K. R., an observant w ­ oman with two small c­ hildren, whose identity remains unknown. She was one of sixteen ­women of vari­ous social classes interviewed by the journalist and translator Cecilia Slepak in the Warsaw ghetto from the winter of 1941 ­until the spring of 1942, in the context of a proj­ect to document ghetto life and its effect on individuals and the community, conducted by the Oneg Shabbat Archives.43 Before the war, K. R. ran a vegetable stall in the marketplace. Her husband also had a job, and their combined incomes kept the f­ amily in relative comfort. When the war began, they lost their home and property and w ­ ere forced to crowd into a tiny kitchen in her b ­ rother’s home. K. R. continued to operate her stall in the marketplace and support the f­ amily, while her husband remained at home with the two ­children. He was afraid to go out, ­because he had been traumatized by the abuse he suffered when the Germans seized him for forced ­labor; he was thus unable to support his ­family. K. R. suffered in the crowded living conditions and wanted to move into the flat where her two ­sisters lived. Her husband refused. ­After much vacillation, K. R. de­cided to leave him ­behind and take the ­children to her ­sisters’ home. She became the head of the ­family and its breadwinner. It was an aty­pi­cal step for an observant ­woman and m ­ other of young ­children, especially in war­time. Her situation had become much worse when the ­family moved into the ghetto, but she never gave in. Together with her ­sisters, she began selling bread, the commodity most in demand in the food-­deprived ghetto. They ­were barely able to support their families, but they at least had bread to feed their c­ hildren. ­After the death of her ­sisters during a typhus epidemic that swept the ghetto in the summer of 1941, she found herself alone with six ­children ­under her care (her own two plus four nieces and nephews). Still, she did not despair, but instead showed initiative, took on difficult physical tasks, and somehow managed to cope and protect the ­children. She was zealous in the defense of her honor and in­de­pen­dence and never depended on charity or ­favors.44 The interview does not include any information about how the ­couple had got along before the war, so it is pos­si­ble that not all was harmonious between them then. In normal times, however, even if a ­couple is sometimes at odds, the friction does not necessarily cause them to separate. In this context, it was prob­ably the extraordinary battery of ­trials that K. R. experienced

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in the war that led her to decide that her marriage was no longer ­viable and to separate from her husband. We learn from several divorce petitions from the Łódź ghetto that quite a few ­couples had been living apart for years before they ­were locked up in the ghetto. On December 10, 1940, for example, a ­woman contacted the Łódź ghetto Rabbinical Council and recounted that she had married five years before the war and had a ­daughter. But she had not gotten along with her husband and so had returned with her small ­daughter to her parents’ home. During the first months in the ghetto, she continued to live with her parents, but they could not afford to take care of her ­daughter and her. Faced with no other choice, she turned to the Rabbinical Council with a request to arrange a divorce from her husband in order to force him, at the very least, to pay child support.45 We can assume that separations without a formal divorce, a common phenomenon in previous periods, continued and may even have become more widespread. Economic circumstances permitting, many c­ ouples whose marriages fell apart in the ghetto separated without bother­ing to divorce. U ­ nder such harsh circumstances, the formal pro­cess of divorce became less impor­tant to many. In the Łódź ghetto, the rabbis themselves, as we see ­later, approved separation in some cases, as the statistics make plain.

Divorce A Rabbinical Council was established in the Łódź ghetto on July 17, 1940, as a unit of the Rec­ords Department. It comprised nineteen of the se­nior rabbis in the ghetto. In ­matters of marriage and divorce, it worked in tandem with the Department of Vital Statistics. Divorce cases ­were heard by a special Divorce Council established in November 1940 as part of the Rabbinical Council, consisting of two rabbis and a representative of the Department of Vital Statistics. In February 1941, the makeup of the Divorce Council was modified to include a judge and two rabbis.46 The Rabbinical Council also had a mediation office, in which its rabbis tried to effect reconciliations between the spouses and, if unsuccessful, referred the file to the Divorce Council.47 Between January 1941 and June 1942, the Divorce Council heard a total of 134 cases and granted 45 divorces, prevented divorce in 71 cases, approved a formal separation in 9 cases, and rejected 9 petitions. At the start of 1941, the population of the ghetto stood at 154,000; by June 1942, it had fallen to 104,000.48 From November 1940 to June 1942, a total of 881 weddings took place in the ghetto. If we calculate the divorce rate on the basis of the petitions filed, rather than of divorces granted—­because it is the former that reflects the breakdown of the ­family—we arrive at a divorce rate of around 15249 for a population that averaged 125,000 during this period. This rate is very high in comparison with that of the Pale of Settlement in 1857–1869.50 ­After the Rabbinical Council was dissolved in September 1942 at the order of the local German authorities, divorce cases ­were adjudicated by a special three-­ judge panel of the civil division of the ghetto court. Between October 1942 and

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November 1943, it heard 102 cases. Of this number, twenty-­five cases w ­ ere concluded, of which sixteen granted divorces and nine petitions ­were rejected.51 From October 1942 to November 1943, t­ here ­were 636 weddings in the ghetto, and the divorce rate was 160. In ­these months, the ghetto population declined from 89,000 to 83,000. Once again, the number of petitions submitted to the civil division of the ghetto court was higher than before the war.52 The rabbis issued divorce decrees only when both husband and wife consented or when the situation was clearly beyond repair.53 Several under­lying reasons, most of them economic in nature, explain the ­great disparity between the number of divorce suits filed and the number granted. First, as we have seen, was the shortage of apartments. Second was the severe hunger. Many families divided the tasks of collecting their rations and cooking the food. Sharing food was more efficient and eco­nom­ical and increased a ­family’s chances of survival. It is plausible that this was one consideration that led the rabbis and judges not to approve divorces. Fi­nally, some of the rabbis and judges denied divorce requests when their impression was that the marital discord was caused primarily by the conditions of life in the ghetto. They hoped that when the war was over the relationship between the spouses would improve and make divorce unnecessary, especially when a c­ ouple had c­ hildren.54 The result was that many c­ ouples had to continue living together, which actually made m ­ atters worse and had a bad effect on their ­children. We can see, for example, an in­ter­est­ing ruling issued by the court on February 22, 1943. The judges ruled that ­t here ­were adequate grounds for granting a divorce. However, given the conditions in the ghetto, the divorce would not take effect ­until one month ­after the end of the war. ­Until then the ­couple would have to keep living in the same flat but in separate corners. They would receive their rations together, but would have to cook separately, as strangers forced to live together often did. The husband was ordered to pay two-­t hirds of the cost of food for the wife and son, and the wife the other third. The husband would also have to pay 15 ghetto marks55 a month to them, purchase coal, pay the electric bill, and so on. Custody of their son was granted to the m ­ other. The court ruled that a party that ­v iolated the decree would be compelled to move out of the apartment and pay a fine.56 Additional divorce cases culled from diaries and the court rec­ords preserved in vari­ous archives are able to shed more light on this phenomenon. One case to reach the Divorce Council was that of Irena Hauser, a 41-­year-­old refugee from Vienna, who was transported to the Łódź ghetto with her husband and 6-­year-­old son in the fall of 1941. She kept a diary from June 15 to September 8, 1942, two days before she and her son ­were deported to Chełmno, where they w ­ ere murdered. Hauser’s painful text paints a picture of her troubled relationship with her husband, who could not cope with the ongoing deprivation and would not share his rations with Irena and their son. He sold their few remaining possessions so he could buy himself food and cigarettes. The situation got worse from day to day. They quarreled frequently and sometimes he beat the child.

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On July 9, 1942, she wrote, “I am disgusted with life, ­because he ­doesn’t take care of the boy the way he should. . . . ​We w ­ on’t survive much longer. E ­ ither we must go or he goes.” On July 15, she continued, ­ oday I have to gather my forces to escape death by starvation, for the boy’s sake. T His f­ ather d ­ oesn’t help him; he only has cigarettes . . . ​on his mind. He d ­ oesn’t know how to or­ga­nize his food and I ­can’t influence him. With him ­we’re lost. . . . ​ ­He’ll let us die. . . . ​The boy cries ­because he is hungry, the ­father wants cigarettes, and the m ­ other wants to die. That’s f­ amily life in the ghetto.

She came to feel a deep hatred for her husband and even longed for his death. She tried to leave the apartment with her son and found a small room where she hoped her life would improve. But she was forced to go back to her husband ­after he threatened to take custody of their son, something to which she could not agree, b ­ ecause she was sure he would use the boy for his selfish needs. She filed for divorce in the hope that the rabbis would force her husband to move out of their apartment. But she was deported and murdered before the case was ever heard.57 The dozens of divorce hearing rec­ords that survive in the archives reflect the crumbling of ­family life in the ghetto. Most of the cases ­were sparked by fights about food and lack of support of the ­family. For example, on November 5, 1940, when the first divorce case took place, the c­ ouple mentioned the interminable quarrels and vio­lence in their home. The wife asked to retain custody of their 7-­year-­old son and the ­father agreed, as long as he did not have to pay child support. In this case, a divorce decree was issued, and the husband moved out of the apartment. In many cases, ­women continued to be responsible for their ­children, while men surrendered their parental rights due to the privation and their anxiety about dealing with raising c­ hildren.58 The fact that many more ­women in the Łódź ghetto held jobs than before the war had an effect on their status in the ­family. In the first period in the ghetto, in the years 1940–1941, only one-­t hird of the w ­ omen worked. When transports to the Chełmno extermination camp started in 1942, ­women’s proportion in the working force increased significantly, b ­ ecause ­those with a job had a much better chance of not being deported. By April 1942, ­t here was virtual parity: 31,286 ­women versus 32,985 men held jobs. In June 1944, two months before the ghetto was liquidated, ­t here ­were 42,486 working w ­ omen and 28,945 working men. More than 90 ­percent of the ­women remaining in the ghetto ­after the 1942 deportations took jobs and formed a substantial proportion of the ghetto’s l­ abor force. In its last two years, the ghetto was effectively one large l­abor camp, but with the major difference that Jews continued to live in their ­houses and their ­family life continued.59 This situation altered w ­ omen’s lives and had a serious impact on the divorce rate. In addition to working, most ­women still bore the traditional responsibility for the ­house and ­children. Thus, the load they had to bear was heavy. Some expected their husbands to be more considerate and to share the burden with them. When they ­were met with indifference, which did not spare their c­ hildren, many saw no reason not to file for divorce, now that their dependence on their husband was mini-

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mal. For example, in the rec­ords of one divorce hearing, submitted by a ­woman age 25 against her 30-­year-­old husband on May 14, 1944, the w ­ oman charged her husband with physical abuse and not giving her money to support their 6-­year-­old child. When she came home a­ fter her ten-­hour workday, she asserted that he made her life intolerable and that their quarrels affected the child. The husband countered that, when he returned from work, he had to start cooking and d ­ oing laundry for himself and stand in line for his rations, ­because his wife would not do anything for him.60 In another case of a ­couple in their forties, heard on April 30, 1944, the ­woman asserted that as long as her husband was working, he remained calm and never struck her and the ­children. But ­after he lost his job, he began to beat them and even harmed himself. The husband acknowledged ­these facts and stated that, since he had become unemployed, he had to satisfy himself with only one bowl of soup a day; it was therefore his hunger that caused ­these uncontrollable outbursts of vio­ lence. In another case, heard on May 7, 1944, the ­woman said that her husband of sixteen years had begun beating her and was ­doing nothing to help support the ­family. In this case, both spouses worked, but the wife earned more than her husband. The ­daughter, age 16, said that the atmosphere in the ­house was intolerable and that she had seen her ­father get up at night and steal their food.61 In many cases, the men had lost their traditional role as the main breadwinner and sometimes had no income whatsoever. This change frustrated them, damaged their self-­ esteem, and made them violent. And often the wife and the c­ hildren paid the price. Many marriages in the ghetto w ­ ere motivated by economic considerations. On May 16, 1943, the divorce suit of a man who married in April 1941 was rejected. In addition to his claim that he did not get along with his wife, who did not function as a w ­ oman and homemaker, he said that he wanted a divorce so he could build a better ­f uture for himself. In their reasons given for rejecting the suit, the judges wrote, “Neither civil nor religious law permits divorce purely ­because the husband is looking for a better ­future for himself. . . . ​To grant a divorce in such a case would mean submitting to the immoral arguments of individuals who view marriage as an unimportant and trivial commercial agreement.” 62 In another case, adjudicated on June 3, 1944, both spouses wanted the divorce. Both w ­ ere widowed and had married in the ghetto in 1943 in the hope that a life together would improve their lot. But they got along poorly and found themselves cooking and eating separately. ­Couples who had married for purely instrumental reasons had no reason to stay together if their interests w ­ ere not served.63 Infidelity was another reason for divorce. On October 19, 1941, a w ­ oman filed for divorce from her husband ­because he had a mistress. At the time of the hearing, the husband was in jail, where he had been sent by Chaim Rumkowski, the chairman of the Łódź ghetto Judenrat, on account of the wife’s allegations and his refusal to grant her a divorce. The condition for release was that he divorce his wife. The Divorce Council ruled that the ­couple be divorced provisionally ­until the man was released from jail.64 A similar suit was heard on May 14, 1944. This time it was

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the husband who filed for divorce. He was a car­ter and had a girlfriend. Some car­ ters in the ghetto, ­because of their work, had access to food, and they ­were considered to be a power­f ul group. The ­woman objected to her husband’s abandoning the f­amily to hunger; he reacted by insulting and beating her. He did not give her and their 6-­year-­old son money for food, and so their lives had turned into a living hell.65 In addition to t­ hose divorce applications in the Łódź ghetto motivated by economic considerations or infidelity, ­t here ­were also petitions for less common reasons. In its edition of December 1, 1941, the Chronicle makes reference to a c­ ouple charged with bigamy. The wife claimed she had divorced her first husband but could not produce the document. The man was on trial b ­ ecause he had failed to adequately investigate his wife’s situation before they married. As we saw, bigamy had become more widespread since the turn of the c­ entury. The note in the Chronicle suggests that bigamy was becoming fairly common again ­because of the realities of the war and occupation.66 Let us briefly turn to the theme of divorce in the Warsaw ghetto. In August 1941, the leadership of the Warsaw ghetto established a Department for Religious Affairs, which included the Committee of Rabbis as one of its units. On it sat eight rabbis, each responsible for a dif­fer­ent part of the ghetto, who performed weddings and divorces. In addition, 129 rabbis resided in the ghetto, of whom 89 had originally come from outside Warsaw; they too ­were authorized to conduct weddings and arrange divorces.67 Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the introduction, as far as I know, no documents relating to divorces in the Warsaw ghetto have been found yet, except for a brief reference made by Rabbi Huberband in the Ringelblum Archives.68 He mentioned two divorce cases in the Warsaw ghetto, in which the ­legal grounds ­were adultery on the part of the wife. In the first case, a man of about age 30 had been sent to forced ­labor outside the ghetto during Passover 1941. Huberband related the story: When he returned home, drained of all his energy, he found a stranger in his bedroom. His wife wept and expressed regret. P ­ eople told her that every­one who had been taken to the ­labor camp had died ­t here. Had she known that he was alive, this never would have happened. She wept, he wept; and the divorce was carried out.

The second case involved refugees from Germany. In December 1940, the husband was sentenced to a year in prison for failing to wear the yellow star. When he was released, he too found a strange man living in his h ­ ouse. The ­couple divorced. Huberband was scathing in his criticism of ­t hese w ­ omen. For him, their conduct symbolized the widespread phenomenon of the moral decline of the Jewish ­woman during the war. He was more forgiving of errant men. When the husband cheated on his wife he was accused of infidelity, whereas the ­woman was charged with adultery.69

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Divorces during the Deportations In January 1942, when the deportations from Łódź to the Chełmno death camp began, “the Rabbinate has been authorized to grant divorces in a simplified fashion, that is, by bypassing the Divorce Collegium in cases where the parties w ­ ere subject to resettlement. ­There has been an influx of such cases to the Rabbinate.”70 The rabbis followed this practice mainly when a ­couple was already separated and one of the parties was about to be deported. They cut the red tape in such cases to avoid creating agunot among the w ­ omen or bigamous situations among the men. For example, on May 10, 1942, at the height of the deportations, a man applied to the Divorce Council, writing, “I have de­cided to divorce my wife. I ask you to approve this divorce at once, b ­ ecause I want to travel outside the ghetto already ­today. I note that my wife agrees to the divorce.” The application was signed by both husband and wife, and the rabbis approved the divorce.71 When World War II began, the subject of agunot was revived. The chief rabbi of Palestine, Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog, in concert with Rabbi Shlomo David Kahana, who was able to escape Poland and reach Palestine in 1940, suggested that rabbinic experts in the laws of divorce convene in ­every Jewish community in Eu­rope and issue “conditional divorces” for soldiers on active duty, containing the provision that the divorce would become final if the man did not return within a year ­after the end of hostilities. According to historian Ester Farbstein, the Rabbinical Council in the Łódź ghetto took up the issue as early as 1941 (she does not cite her source for this, however). Similarly, Isaiah Trunk reports a testimony by a certain Binyomin Frenkel, who claimed that Rumkowski and the Jewish court declared all deportees to be legally dead and permitted their spouses to remarry. U ­ nder Jewish law, a single witness suffices in such extreme cases. We have no other sources that can confirm ­t hese statements.72

Conclusion ­ ecause most of the divorce cases referred to in this chapter ­were in the Łódź ghetto, B this final section focuses on the situation t­ here, which was unique in many re­spects. As we have seen, the Łódź ghetto was sealed off and almost hermetically isolated from the outside world, which meant that its Jews, unlike ­t hose of other ghettos, could not obtain food and other impor­tant items from beyond its fences. ­Because of the near-­total dependence on the Germans for provisions, the hunger in Łódź was more extreme than that in other ghettos. Dr. Oskar Singer (1893–1944), another impor­tant diarist in the ghetto and one of the main contributors to Chronicles of the Łódź Ghetto, wrote in his diary in May 1942, “Sorrow breaks iron, but hunger breaks steel. Is any steel stronger than the ancient Jewish law, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself?’ . . . ​How did extreme hunger affect this moral dictate?”73 Some of the residents of the Łódź ghetto w ­ ere indeed broken by its conditions, which tragically exacerbated the harsh conflicts that undermined

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families. The severe hunger subjected marriages to a severe test and led, in many cases, to fierce fighting that sometimes caused the f­ amily to disintegrate. As we have seen, separation and divorce ­were common in Jewish society before the war. A comparison of the main grounds for divorce in the ghetto and previous periods shows that they w ­ ere not significantly dif­fer­ent. But ­there was one essential difference: the Germans deliberately created inhuman conditions that trapped the residents of the ghetto in a sort of pressure cooker of terrible starvation, overcrowding, and backbreaking forced ­labor that few have experienced in history. The Germans had no concern for the Jews’ domestic life as long as they could extract some profit from them. Some ghetto residents, their spirits broken, had extreme reactions that led ­couples to separate or divorce. The firsthand data available from the Łódź ghetto—­extensive not only in terms of the large number of divorce cases but also the information about what motivated men and ­women to end their marriages—­make it clear that many families disintegrated and that more separations and divorces took place in comparison to previous de­cades. It was by no means a marginal phenomenon in ghetto ­family life.74 Studies of divorce reveal a gender difference in how ­couples reacted to the situation. To generalize, ­women seem to have adjusted and endured better than men did, as manifested, inter alia, in their lower mortality. In normal circumstances, ­women have shown a longer life expectancy than men, which appears to have been even more so ­under ghetto conditions. The impression one gets from testimonies and diaries written in the ghetto is that w ­ omen displayed a greater ability to deal with starvation than did men and adjusted better than men to ghetto conditions. For vari­ous reasons—­conscription into the Polish armed forces, the escape of more men to the General Government and territory ­under Soviet control, and the fact that more men than ­women ­were murdered during the first months of the German occupation—­t here ­were more w ­ omen than men in the Łódź ghetto from the very outset: 120 w ­ omen for e­ very 100 men. The realities of the ghetto exacerbated the numerical disparity. The Chronicles of the Łódź Ghetto noted on July 22, 1941, “This is b ­ ecause the mortality rate of men is almost twice as high as that of w ­ omen.”75 The numerical in­equality of the sexes grew steadily. In 1941, ­t here w ­ ere 123 ­women for ­every 100 men; by 1944, the ratio was 137 ­women for ­every 100 men. In the 20-­to 40-­year-­old cohort (prime working age), the disparity was even greater: 151 ­women per 100 men in 1941, and 196 per 100 in 1944.76 The defining feature of the Łódź ghetto was the Jews’ forced ­labor for the German war economy. This explains its protracted existence and status as the last surviving ghetto on Polish soil. As we have seen, initially only one-­third of the ­women ­were employed, but ­after the transports to Chełmno death camp began in mid-­January 1942, the situation took a dramatic turn: 90 ­percent of the ­women living in the ghetto w ­ ere employed. By 1944, the percentage of w ­ omen in the l­abor force exceeded that of men. This development affected the traditional gender roles in families. In ­earlier periods, the men ­were almost always the ­family’s main breadwinner, whereas the

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­ omen ­were responsible for the home and the ­children. Starting around the turn w of the ­century, an increasing number of ­women went out to work, and in 1939, as mentioned, about one-­t hird of all Jewish ­women in Poland held jobs outside the home. But before the war, men remained the economic mainstay. ­Women’s enhanced status in the ghetto as an equal and sometimes sole provider for the f­ amily—­while also coping with other hardships of ghetto life, often without assistance—­eroded the traditional bonds holding the f­ amily together. Men ­were deeply frustrated by their inability to support their families and provide for their basic needs. For their part, some of the ­women who became full partners in supporting the ­family ­were frustrated by the refusal of their husbands to do some of the work of r­ unning the ­house and caring for the ­children. As is evident from dozens of petitions, more w ­ omen filed for divorce than did men. The acute repression and economic exploitation affected the division of roles in the f­ amily and strengthened w ­ omen’s status to the point that they took responsibility for their own fate and challenged the key convention of Jewish tradition: the f­ amily and its preservation. In general terms, we can say that w ­ omen in the Łódź ghetto bore greater responsibility for their families, especially the ­children. They ­were willing to waive alimony and child support and other arrangements as long as they received custody of the c­ hildren. As we have seen, the situation was similar in periods of hardship at the end of the nineteenth c­ entury and in interwar Poland. This does not mean that ­fathers loved their ­children less and did not care for them, but only that over a number of generations, including the early period in the ghetto, child care remained chiefly the w ­ omen’s job. Some of the men w ­ ere hard-­pressed to deal with the dramatic change in the nature of ­women’s employment. In most of the transcripts I examined, they agreed for the ­women to be awarded custody of the ­children. As noted, I based my research on the divorce files from the Łódź ghetto, as well as a few, not necessarily typical cases, from the Warsaw ghetto. It is most likely that ­t here ­were similar cases in other ghettos and wherever the Jews had to cope with the extreme hardships of daily life. But in the absence of sufficient documentation, we must not generalize. Studies of separations and divorces serve as an impor­tant source for a deeper understanding of daily life in the ghetto and the impossible moral crisis that many faced due to German racial policy. Perhaps it is best to give the last word to the entry on f­ amily life found in the Łódź Ghetto Encyclopedia: And so, it is the eye of the beholder that decides if, in light of the abundance of evidence, he focuses on ­t hose ele­ments that paint Jewish ­family life ­under the unnatural, artificial atmosphere of the isolated ghetto, in an utterly glorious or in a most shameful way. The noblest tragedy and the most horrible distortion frequently collide.77

chapter 3

v

Narrating Daily ­Family Life in Ghettos u­ nder Nazi Occupation Concepts and Dilemmas Dalia Ofer

A Conceptual Framework The goal of this chapter is to pre­sent a number of major issues and dilemmas that families faced in their effort to pursue their daily routines in the ghettos u ­ nder Nazi occupation. The major characteristics of the Jewish families in the ghetto ­were ­shaped both by Jewish tradition and religion and by the modern middle-­or lower-­ middle-­class ideals that had influenced Jewish homes since the late nineteenth ­century. The term “daily routine” refers to the ordinary chores of parents and ­children in the seed f­ amily, including preparing food, cleaning the home, and maintaining the physical well-­being of f­amily members. It also relates to the economic endeavors of earning an adequate living. To maintain the well-­being of the ­family, the cooperation of both husband and wife in their economic efforts was of paramount importance. In this context, the emotional and m ­ ental state of mind of ­family members was key and affected the ability to establish a normative f­ amily environment. The major characteristics of the Jewish family were shaped both by the longtime Jewish tradition and religion, on the one hand, and the modern middle or lower middle-class ideals shaped in Jewish homes in the late nineteenth century. The documentation left by f­amily members about their families or t­hose of their friends sheds light on the daily routine in the ghetto. It falls into two categories: (1) private individual ego-­documentation and (2) public information on the situation of families written by authors in the ghetto, as well as reports of the Judenräte (Jewish Councils), self-­ help organ­ izations, youth movements, and more. Historians’ efforts to reconstruct the daily events of ghetto life should incorporate the thoughts, emotions, and interpretation of the events as reflected in 62

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con­temporary documentation and include private documentation such as memoirs and oral history written a­ fter the war. Patterns of conduct of the local German authorities and the non-­Jewish population also had a g­ reat impact on the daily life of Jews in the ghetto. The frequency of raids in the ghetto, unpredictable checking of ­people at its entrances, and the intense scrutiny of workers returning to the ghetto greatly influenced daily life. The character of negotiations between the Jewish ghetto authorities and the Germans also had an impor­tant effect, as did the economic benefits gained by the local German authorities from ghetto production. The willingness of the local population to engage in forced ­labor and comply with German regulations in exchange for food supplies and other economic initiatives affected the ability of the ghetto population to survive. From the internal Jewish point of view, we should take into account the diversity of the population: the ghetto community comprised Jews of dif­fer­ent social classes and cultural backgrounds, including escapees and deported Jews from other parts of the country or from other Eu­ro­pean countries. The leadership of the Jewish Councils in most ghettos (often appointed by the Germans) also changed during the war. Usually, the first generation of leadership was from the local population, though not necessarily from its original leadership. However, over the course of a few years, in many ghettos the Germans, for a variety of reasons, replaced the council heads and often murdered them, frequently appointing refugees to replace them who ­were not connected to the community. ­Every ghetto, however, was an enforced society. Local Jews or ­others did not have ­free choice, and coercion was the name of the game, even when enforcement originated from the Jewish Council. Th ­ ese ­factors greatly affected the daily routine of the Jews.1 However, much depended on the central decision makers in terms of Jewish policy during the dif­fer­ent phases of the war, and thus we are witness to g­ reat fluctuations in the course of the years of ghetto existence. When full authority was transferred to the SS commander, negotiations with the authorities became more difficult and complex. Reading the sources, both private and public, enables the scholar to view the events through the lens of ghetto inmates as they oscillated between arbitration, oppression, hopes for the end of the war and German defeat—to mass murder. Often, they demonstrated a qualified perspective, viewing the situation in a continuum that ranged from the worst evils—­deportation and murder—to lesser ones of persecution and theft and ­toward a kind of regular routine. Thus, the basis of the historical description of ghetto life lies in the tension between the quest for normality and the ­great gap between ghetto real­ity and normality. Families’ quest for normality u ­ nder ­these abnormal conditions included the desperate search for means to provide basic nutrition, to offer schooling for the ­children, to alleviate adults’ fear for their security, and to address the uprootedness of a large part of the ghetto population. Living in constant uncertainty in an environment characterized by both radicalization and periods of relative calm resulted in a constant psychological state of trauma and post-­trauma, when they

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returned to a routine for a short period of time. U ­ nder such circumstances, maintaining the solidarity and cohesion of families demanded unimaginable effort.2 This chapter analyzes ­family life in the ghetto but with ­limited data and resources. It is difficult to discuss individual relationships between f­ amily members, b ­ ecause I do not have enough information about their lives before the war and their internment in the ghetto. Moreover, social differences and varying attitudes t­oward modernization among Jews before the war resulted in divergent approaches ­toward the education and raising of c­ hildren. Families of dif­fer­ent social and economic classes chose dif­fer­ent forms of formal secular education and Jewish supplementary education for their c­ hildren. Attitudes ­toward physical punishment as discipline, the role of play, and appreciation of the psychological well-­ being of the child w ­ ere strongly marked by social class and ideas about modern education. ­These issues ­were often the subject of contention and represented a generational gap between the youngsters and their parents. However, ­under ghetto conditions, ­every ­family’s social and economic status declined, and the vast majority focused on the basic priorities of acquiring food, maintaining cleanliness, and just holding on.3 The number of families without a male head of h ­ ouse­hold increased b ­ ecause of raids, illness, and deportation to forced l­abor camps. This was particularly true among the impoverished, b ­ ecause well-­to-do families ­were able to exchange their forced l­abor obligations with poorer families, whose male members replaced them. M ­ others, who ­were not always capable of providing for the ­family, had to find a source of income to replace that of their husbands. Diseases did not bypass ­women, so a ­family whose ­mother had fallen ill found it particularly difficult to take care of the ­house­hold and earn a living. When reviewing diaries, letters, or any other kind of ego-­documentation, it is necessary to analyze their content in terms of the social and economic status of the f­ amily members who wrote them. I therefore incorporate into my analy­sis ­those concepts rooted in the social and economic differences in the par­t ic­u ­lar Jewish community discussed in the sources. A useful tool for analy­sis is the theoretical approach of William J. Goode to the division of roles within the f­amily, which he asserts is rooted in the culture and historical tradition of the group of which the f­ amily is a part.4 The social and economic status of a f­ amily in the ghetto depended on its means and ­whether it was at the center or in the periphery of ghetto authority and production. The social network connections of the ­family to institutions and ­people of authority influenced its ability to survive. P ­ eople with means and social connections with the central authorities of the ghetto ­were relatively safer from deportation to forced ­labor and had better housing and a chance to provide for their families (all in ghetto terms). ­People who had the means and social connections on the “Aryan side” w ­ ere more likely to find ways to move or to hide t­ here. Nevertheless, reservations are in order concerning t­ hese generalizations, b ­ ecause instability and arbitrariness ­were the rule of the day. It is therefore impor­tant to understand that any general description of f­ amily life in the ghetto w ­ ill be inaccurate to some extent.

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In this chapter I address four major issues that confronted the f­ amily a­ fter the German occupation and in the ghetto. The first relates to the issue of togetherness. Jewish families in Central and Eastern Europe—­based on their experiences of migration, emigration, and World War I and its associated vio­lence—­a lready had firsthand knowledge of the tolls of f­ amily separation. Second, relationships between spouses and the complexity of ­family relations w ­ ere of key importance to the everyday life of families. Third, crucial for the everyday life of any ­family was the maintenance of its physical well-­being. Last, but not least, is the notion of “home.” My home is my fortress, as the proverbial expression goes. Could this attitude be sustained in the ghetto? To illuminate t­hese issues, I cite narratives written in the ghetto by inmates from dif­fer­ent social classes. Before examining ­those issues, I map out the economic and social conditions of many Jewish families in Poland and other countries of Eastern Eu­rope in the years preceding the war and their confinement in the ghettos.

A Brief Historical Background Before World War II, the vast majority of Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews belonged to the lower class or the lower ­middle class. A large number, up to 40 ­percent, of ­women worked a­ fter marriage. Nearly e­ very f­ amily in Eastern Eu­rope went through harsh times during World War I. Nearby b ­ attles, deportations, starvation, and anti-­Jewish vio­lence brought many families to the brink of desolation. The number of orphans increased, and many communities had to rebuild, as Jewish communities experienced the transformation of previously imperial territories into separate nation-­ states. From a po­liti­cal and economic perspective, Jewish life ­u nder the Second Polish Republic in par­tic­u­lar changed from bad to worse as a result of the hardships imposed by the Polish state. Reading autobiographies of Jewish youngsters written in the mid-­to late 1930s, some who in one way or another had experienced the ­Great War in their childhood, demonstrates the dismemberment of families and efforts to re­u nite and reconstruct their lives.5 Autobiographies written by youth of the lower and lower-­ middle classes describe extreme poverty and g­ reat desperation. Many are deeply critical of their parents, revealing a wide generational gap. Even when they understand the difficulties faced by their parents, they are unable to identify with their helplessness and feel that they themselves are trapped. How to get out of this trap was a major issue for many. However, one should not conclude that t­ here w ­ ere weak emotional ties between ­family members. Despite the difficulties and conflicts, ­family connections ­were strong, and mutual responsibility among the core and extended ­family was an impor­tant value. Youngsters looked for the means to improve their lives. Some found solace in Zionist youth movements and the hope of emigrating to Palestine. ­Others put their trust in the Bund and its vision of equality and a well-­f unctioning national order in Poland. Communism was a refuge for young Jews, despite its being illegal in

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Poland, whereas o ­ thers a­ dopted ideals from lit­er­a­ture that called for universal solidarity through Esperanto. Many just followed the routines of daily life, adjusting and hoping for a better f­ uture. The pre­sent seemed dismal and sad. Unemployment among the young reached a level of 30–40  ­percent during the 1930s, increasing their dependence on the parents. Many had experience working as ­children but w ­ ere unable to find a job as young adults. C ­ hildren worked from the age of 12 or younger for nine to ten hours a day and ­were paid only 4–5 zloty per week, in contrast to youth ages 17–20 who received up to 15 zloty per week.6 This increased the motivation of employers to hire young c­ hildren rather than teen­agers.7 Jewish workers and members of the lower-­middle class ­were ­under severe economic pressure ­under the Second Polish Republic. Poland suffered from an almost continuous economic crisis, with only a short lull at the end of the 1920s, shortly before the ­Great Depression. During the 1920s, and particularly ­after the death of Józef Piłsudski, the increasingly antisemitic policies of the government marked Jewish businesses for boycotts. About half of the three million Polish Jews lived in small towns and shtetls, whereas approximately one-­quarter lived in the five big cities of Warsaw, Łódź, Wilno (Vilnius, Wilne), Kraków (Krakau, Kroke), and Lwów (L’viv, Lemberg); another 25 ­percent lived in villages. Some 80 ­percent of the Jews w ­ ere artisans or engaged in small commerce. Sixty-­four ­percent ­were self-­employed, mostly in small ­family ventures that did not employ any outside ­labor. Only 8 ­percent of employed Jews did not engage in physical ­labor. In the 1930s, the economic situation deteriorated further. In 1931, 27  ­percent of the artisans w ­ ere unemployed, along with 14 ­percent of the employees in commerce. According to estimates of the mid-1930s, about one-­third of Jewish ­house­holds ­were unemployed. More than one-­third of ­women worked in textile and cottage industries or in a ­family venture. While ­doing the same work, ­women earned as much as one-­third or 40 ­percent less than did men.8 Artisans, such as shoe­makers and tailors, and merchants in small stores did not earn the minimum of 35 zloty per week for a f­ amily of four that would provide for housing, food, and other basic f­amily needs. Surveys among Jewish peddlers reported an income of 10 zloty per week. Many families of the working and lower-­ middle class w ­ ere unable to provide the minimum nutrition, and even the support of Jewish self-­help organ­izations could not enable them to meet their nutritional needs. Thirty p ­ ercent of the Jewish population in Poland, for example, was supported by Jewish welfare organ­izations, most of whose funding came from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). As a result, very often the ­family became an economic unit that ­children and parents worked hard to sustain, often to no avail. Housing conditions, too, particularly in the cities, w ­ ere very poor. More than half of the ­people surveyed in 1926 and 1930 reported an average of six persons per room.9 The number of ­children in Jewish families between the two world wars declined, and the delayed age of marriage ruled out larger families. Economic conditions, the transition into a more modern society, and the hope for upward mobility also

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led many families to limit the number of c­ hildren and invest more in the well-­being of each child. All of this occurred in an anti-­Jewish environment that became more radical and violent in 1935 a­ fter the death of Piłsudski. Alongside the majority of the Jewish population that lived ­under ­t hese difficult conditions w ­ ere Jews who managed quite well eco­nom­ically, among them merchants engaging in export and import, ­owners of industries, and white-­collar professionals. Their youngsters tried to acquire a university education, ­either in Poland or abroad. In Polish universities, they experienced anti-­Jewish attitudes, and young educated Jews ­were discriminated against in the job market: many believed that they had no chance of establishing themselves in their country of birth. This was the condition of many Jewish families when the Germans attacked Poland in September 1939. ­Because the devastation of the early years of war and Nazi mea­sures against the Jews before their forced relocation to ghettos, the majority of Jewish families entered the ghetto impoverished and with a lengthy experience in how to make ends meet.

Dilemmas of Families in the Ghetto Keeping the F ­ amily Together The fundamental assumptions under­lying f­ amily life are togetherness and the need to assist and shelter each other in stormy days. Protecting c­ hildren—­both young ­children and adolescents—is a fundamental sentiment held by parents. In times of danger such as war, the sense of security changes for both adults and ­children. Uncertainty dominates any evaluation of the situation, and the ­family’s security usually takes a turn for the worse. Each ­family faced the challenge of keeping itself together from the early days of the war and throughout the ghetto period, deportation to the camps, and rescue efforts. Was the fundamental wish to stay together the right strategy of survival a­ fter the occupation and in the ghettos? How should the unequal danger to ­family members be considered when planning daily routines and tactics of endurance? How was the danger evaluated from a gendered perspective, and how did experiences of World War I influence the thinking of f­ amily members? The First Months of Occupation During the first weeks of war and the first months of occupation, the fear that men ­were endangered more than w ­ omen led m ­ others to encourage their older male teen­agers and husbands to escape. They thought that the Germans would not target ­women and ­children and that the war would soon be over: You go, ­you’re in danger, it’ll blow over, the war ­will come to an end, you’ll come back and every­t hing w ­ ill be all right. What ­w ill they do to me, a ­woman with two l­ ittle ­children; w ­ ill they do anything to me?10

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And so during the chaotic first weeks of occupation in September 1939, a wave of escapees swept the country. Some ­were following the order issued by the Polish government that hoped to establish a second front, which never materialized. Some families left their homes hoping to reach relatives in towns that w ­ ere not occupied. ­These flights became a kind of uncontrollable movement as ­people followed one another. Often during the flight, families lost touch with some of their members; sometimes they re­united ­after reaching relatives. Young men and ­women fled eastward hoping for better fortune ­under the communist regime. Some of the escapees ­later reflected that they ­were not even sure why they had fled but that it had been a good decision.11 At times the attempt to cross the border failed; occasionally only one party succeeded, and the other remained b ­ ehind. Some escapees maintained contact with their ­family, sending money and food parcels, o ­ thers returned when the escape of their partner failed, and many just dis­ appeared without any information about the rest of the ­family. In the Slepak Report, written in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, we read accounts of interviews with Mrs. H. who worked in a textile factory. Her artist husband failed in his attempt to escape to Lithuania and returned ill and wounded; it took him a long while to recover. They then stayed together, trying hard to support each other.12 The account of Mrs. K. R., a waitress in her parents’ restaurant who was married a few weeks before the war broke out, tells of the effort of both spouses to escape together. Her husband succeeded in crossing the border, but Mrs. K. R. was caught and returned to Warsaw alone. Her husband then sent a courier to assist her in another crossing that once again proved unsuccessful. Mrs. K. R. returned to Warsaw alone to live with her parents and support them as long as they w ­ ere alive. Her husband never came back. Some ­women felt abandoned when husbands de­cided to leave, and they pleaded with their spouses to stay. Raquel Hodara quotes from the memoirs of Leib Reiser from Grodno (Hrodno, Garten) who, despite his wife’s pleading, de­cided to leave by himself, ­because he did not think that a ­family with a 5-­year-­old child would be able to escape together: “No, ­don’t run away, w ­ e’ll stay together”—­she sobbed—­“whatever happens to every­body ­w ill happen to us.” And when he tried to explain to her that he had no choice and ­every minute counts, she asked, “And what ­w ill become of us? To whom are you abandoning us? W ­ ill I see you again?”13

The majority of families stayed together. During the early months of the war in Poland, efforts focused on avoiding deportation to forced l­abor camps and ­going on with work and business. Men avoided unnecessary outdoor activities, fearing kidnapping, while w ­ omen and ­children populated the public sphere more than in regular times. Deportations to Other Cities, to the Ghetto, and to Death Camps A ­g reat challenge to the unity of the ­family occurred when families ­were transferred from neighborhoods in the city to the designated area of the ghetto, or from

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one town to another, or to a Jewish area. The move to the ghetto was carried out among big crowds of p ­ eople on foot carry­ing heavy rucksacks, with small ­children and older ­people unable to walk. On entering the designated area, desperate efforts began to find a place to live. During t­ hese early days, the unity of the f­ amily could be shattered, e­ ither through physical loss or through the emotional inability to confront the chaotic and uncertain situation. The difference between the poor and ­t hose of low income, who ­were unable to hire a carriage or any other form of assistance, and ­t hose who had the means to do so, was ­great. The description by Noemi Szac, from Warsaw and a member of an upper-­ middle-­class f­ amily whose ­father was an engineer and owner of a factory, is telling. She felt annoyed at her f­amily’s forced departure from their home and embarrassed at the commotion that it caused. Neighbors w ­ ere looking, nodding their heads, and p ­ eople stood in the street close to the carriage examining its load. She wrote emotionally that, while the carriage was being loaded with their belongings and she awaited the last check of their deserted home, she called out, “Let’s move, let’s go [I called the car­ter] to stand in front of the ­house, as part of this per­for­mance is unbearable.”14 The ­family w ­ ere able to remain together by moving to another apartment with an aunt and u ­ ncle, members of their extended ­family. Yitskhok Rudashevski from Wilno, a 15-­year-­old child of a middle-­class ­family, describes the “mass” of moving deportees and himself differently:15 I go around with bleary eyes among the bundles, see how we are being uprooted overnight from our home. Soon we have our first view of the move to the ghetto, a picture of the M ­ iddle Ages—­a gray black mass of p ­ eople goes harnessed to large bundles. We understand that soon our turn w ­ ill come. . . . ​The w ­ oman stands in despair among her bundles and does not know how to cope, weeps and wrings her hands. Suddenly every­one around me begins to weep. Every­one weeps. . . . ​The street streamed with Jews carry­ing bundles. The first g­ reat tragedy. ­People are harnessed to bundles, which they drag across the pavement. P ­ eople fall, bundles scatter. . . . ​I walk burdened and irritated. The Lithuanians drive us on, do not let us rest. . . . ​Fi­nally I am on the other side of the gate. The stream of p ­ eople flings me into a gate blocked with bundles. I throw down the bundles that cut my shoulders. I find my parents and ­here we are in the ghetto ­house.16

Rudashevski and his parents found each other. O ­ thers, however, w ­ ere not so fortunate, he writes: “One has a f­ ather, another a m ­ other, a third a child. Families have been torn apart. One left to save his life, a second was carried off by force.”17 The fear of separation, on the one hand, and sometimes the need to separate, on the other, emerged as a major issue in the l­ater stages of ghetto life when t­ here ­were mass deportations to forced l­ abor camps, as well as in the last stages of ghettos when they ­were being dismantled. Some ghettos, such as Kovno (Kaunas, Kovne), as the final destruction neared, turned into one big l­abor camp, with men and w ­ omen

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being separated. Fear of the ­labor camp engulfed every­body, a major reason being the dismemberment of the ­family. Thus, the f­amily became a seismograph of the chances of iberlebn (survival).18 Adopting the image of the seismograph can assist us in understanding the initiative taken by some parents to separate from their c­ hildren in the hopes of saving them. Slepak quotes from the interview with R3, the wife of a printer who became the janitor of a h ­ ouse in the ghetto that was close to the wall, and how they helped deliver a baby boy to his grandparents in Warsaw. The baby was smuggled from Lublin when his parents realized that the deportation had begun. They never ­imagined that the Warsaw ghetto would also be subject to deportation and sent him t­ here in hopes of saving him.19 In the Vilna ghetto some families had to separate from their ­children, ­because a Nazi order ­limited the size of the ­family. To comply, they registered their ­children with a childless c­ ouple or a smaller f­ amily. Parents who did not have the right shayn (work permit) placed their c­ hildren with adults who had one. This separation could happen during the registration pro­cess before deportations, and the Jewish leadership encouraged t­ hese acts, sometimes even initiating them.20 Parents also moved their c­ hildren to a f­amily on the “Aryan” side to save them. This was a radical separation, with l­ittle prospect for each part of the f­ amily of ever seeing the other again. It was a very difficult decision taken when the end seemed very near. The nurse Sabina Glozerowa from Warsaw, who worked in the Czisto Hospital, testified that she delayed the decision to send her ­daughter to the Aryan side ­until January 1943 when danger seemed imminent. She managed to keep her f­ amily together while working for long hours in the hospital, while her 9-­year-­old d ­ aughter stayed home alone, ­because her husband had been among the forces defending the city in September 1939. He returned and they moved to the ghetto as a f­ amily. Her ­daughter joined her at the hospital from time to time. When Glozerowa wanted to send her d ­ aughter to a f­ amily on the Aryan side, the child, then 11 years old refused, saying, “I do not want to be a happy orphan.” ­Because it was difficult for Glozerowa to separate from her child, she accepted that refusal. Having her ­daughter with her was difficult, but it also greatly helped them sustain one another. However, at the very last moment, before the deportation of January 18, 1943, she fi­nally sent her off. Saving her d ­ aughter was her highest priority, and therefore she was ready to sneak out of the ghetto ­after the deportation of January 18, despite feeling guilty that she had deserted her colleagues. When she, too, reached the Aryan side, she was unable to be with her d ­ aughter ­because it was unsafe.21 Calel Perechodnik, a policeman in Otwock, wrote his memoirs while in hiding in 1943. He described the recurring deliberations between him and his wife about sending their 2-­year-­old ­daughter Annushka to a Polish ­family—­until it was too late. Both he and his wife w ­ ere unable to make the final decision to send their ­daughter away, even ­after they had made quite concrete arrangements with a Polish friend whom they trusted. For Calel Perechodnik, the final separation was trau-

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matic. It was his own miscalculation that brought his wife and ­daughter to their deaths in the mass deportation of August 1942.22 On several occasions, we read of parents who tried to move their teenage ­children to a “safer” side during the deportations or during a march to the assembly area. This was an unplanned separation, in an abrupt manner, in the hopes of rescuing their teens. Masza Rolnik described one such case during her ­family’s deportation from the Vilna ghetto, when she lost her m ­ other, b ­ rother, and ­sister forever: We proceed to the gate . . . ​what happens at the gate? . . . ​They let pass through a tiny door, only one person at a time. ­Mother is scared that we ­shall lose each other. She tells me to cross first. A ­ fter me Ruvale w ­ ill cross, a­ fter him Ra’aya, and ­mother ­w ill be last. So she w ­ ill see each of us. I go out. A soldier grabs me and pushes me aside. No cars around. I turn around to tell that to my m ­ other but she is not around. . . . ​Suddenly I hear m ­ other’s voice screaming that I should not come to her, and she asks the soldier not to let me cross to their side, I am still young she tells him and I can work well. . . . ​She screams to me in a strange voice, “Live my child, at least you ­w ill live and take revenge for the kids.”23

The tragedy of separation was also the lot of ­t hose who left their ­children on the doorsteps of institutions or handed them over to a monastery to save them. ­These cases represent a state of awareness of the ­mother, f­ ather—­and perhaps also of the child—­t hat separation, no ­matter how painful, was the only chance for survival. Peretz Opoczynski described the situation of ­t hese m ­ others as follows: ­ ere is no doubt that ­these ­mothers do this only ­after anguished self-­searching. Th No doubt their hearts are torn within them as ­under cover of darkness they sneak away, leaving their babies on the stairs of a CENTOS corridor or the community council building, or just out on the street. The Judenrat together with CENTOS established a home for abandoned c­ hildren, but their numbers increase ­every day.24

­Family Relationships The relationship between ­family members is complex and based on a set of values connected to the ­family’s cultural tradition and social milieu. In Jewish tradition, relationships between f­ amily members are based on a hierarchy relating to the role of each member in the nuclear and extended ­family and to highly defined gender roles. ­These, however, went through changes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Eu­rope. In Eastern Eu­rope, where w ­ omen ­were involved in providing for the f­ amily, they acquired relative in­de­pen­dence, which was reflected in the way they managed the home. Among families in which the men w ­ ere studying, the ­women w ­ ere in control of the f­ amily. Shaul Stampfer defined such a relationship as ­women being responsible for the husband’s life in this world, while the husband was responsible for his wife in the world to come.25 Loyalty to each other was fundamental to the cohesion of the f­ amily, and responsibility in dire situations was a

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major component of f­ amily values.26 Nevertheless, cases of divorce w ­ ere not rare in Jewish society, and their numbers increased in the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see chapter 2). New families ­were usually established through an agreement between members of the same social group. Affinity and affection in the partnership w ­ ere not preconditions for the c­ ouple; it was assumed t­ hese feelings would develop through the experience of living together. However, during the late nineteenth c­ entury and in twentieth-­century Poland and Eastern Eu­rope, more young c­ ouples married out of love—in greater numbers among the lower-­middle and lower classes than among the bourgeoisie. But even among the upper m ­ iddle class and very religious families, arranged marriages did consider affection between the ­couple and expected love to be an impor­tant f­ actor in their relationship and for the f­ uture development of an intimate relationship.27 The specific conditions of the ghetto influenced relationships within the f­ amily in diverse ways. As mentioned ­earlier, only ­limited information is available about the f­ amily and the bonds between f­ amily members before their ghetto experience. Although hardships in the ghetto affected all families, the strength of a f­amily’s ties depended on its solidarity and ability to cooperate in an extreme situation. This, too, depended on the other ­factors of class and economic status noted ­earlier. The sources at our disposal demonstrate a wide spectrum of interactions between ­couples, between parents and young ­children, and between adult and married c­ hildren. ­Because so much of the ­family routine was disturbed with the move to the ghetto, efforts to reestablish some semblance of a daily routine emerge in many con­temporary sources. The economic situation and housing conditions w ­ ere crucial ­factors in the ability to accomplish and or­ga­nize a ­family routine. A major cause of mounting tension was the lack of food and the difficulties in providing adequate nutrition. The other major issue was health and the lack of basic conditions—­ soap, hot w ­ ater, laundry facilities, and more—­needed to keep the ­family healthy. ­These conditions ­were necessary to prevent transmittable diseases, such as typhus, or a variety of illnesses in the digestive system, such as dysentery. For most families in the ghetto, crowded homes led to a lack of intimacy that affected the life of ­couples. In addition to the ­g reat anxiety caused by constant uncertainty, ­people became ner­vous and easily cross at one another. All ­t hese changes undermined the traditional balance of power and authority within the ­family. Wives and ­mothers often felt helpless and incapable of providing for minimal survival, despite efforts not to neglect their regular h ­ ouse­hold obligations. Men felt unworthy as husbands and ­fathers when they ­were stripped of their vocation or profession and ­were unable to provide for the ­family. For both husbands and wives, providing for the ­family and taking care of the ­house­hold ­were their basic prewar responsibilities. In several instances, the deterioration of the f­ amily caused by the death of a parent or a sibling, together with the daily hardships, ruptured the ­family routine or opened up new ave­nues between the two extremes of ­either parting or stronger solidarity. Frequently, role reversal and role extension occurred as c­ hildren or adolescents became the major providers or when a f­ amily member

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got ill or recovered from illness, was deported, or came back from forced l­abor. Often, reading the sources provides insights about the level of flexibility or inflexibility on the part of both adults and ­children in reversing or extending their function in the ­family.28 Relationships between Spouses The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto reported about the Czosnek f­ amily that lived on 25 Limanowski Street, apartment 7. The husband, a shoemaker, and his wife did not live together before the war. However, some six months a­ fter their move to the ghetto in November 1940, Mr. Czosnek moved into his wife’s apartment. Why? No information is provided. On April 22, 1941, the Chronicle reported a failed attempt by Mr. Czosnek to commit suicide and an awful discovery thereafter: the bodies of Mrs. Czosnek and her 17-­year-­old son w ­ ere found in the basement of the apartment building. They w ­ ere in a state of decay. Apparently, Mr. Czosnek had murdered his wife and son a few months e­ arlier, prob­ably in February. The report did not include the motives for the crime, but offered more information about Mr. Czosnek. Neighbors related that he had threatened to kill his wife and son, and for a few months, he sold their food stamps to other ­people and pocketed the money. Thus Mr. Czosnek, the report indicated, gained some economic advantage from the crime.29 More remains concealed than meets the eye in this scant information. We know that the c­ ouple was at odds before the move to the ghetto, so why did they get back together? Could it be that ghetto regulations enforce this move? Was the husband vicious enough to plan the murder before he moved in? Alternatively, perhaps the ­couple thought that together they would cope better with the ghetto hardships. Why did Mr. Czosnek try to commit suicide? Did he feel guilty about the murder he committed, or did ­people with whom he traded the food stamps come ­after him? We s­ hall never know, but we learn about this situation in which ghetto life destroyed the relationship of a c­ ouple, leading to a criminal act and a tragic end. The sad story of Irene Hauser of Frankfurt, Germany,30 is another case in point. Irene was 40 years old when she was deported to Łódź in October 1941 with her husband Leopold (age 43) and their 5-­year-­old son Eric. Her diary contains entries from June to the day in September  1942 that she was prob­ably deported to Chełmno (­t here is no information about the fate of the ­family). The diary testifies to extreme poverty and terrible hunger. To acquire food, the adults sold all they had brought with them from Germany and ­were left with nothing to sell or exchange. Within a few months ­after his arrival in the Łódź ghetto, Leopold lost twenty kilograms and Irene lost ten. Irene tried to earn some money by knitting and sewing for a w ­ oman. Leopold worked in a ressort, the term used in Łódź for small ghetto workshops, but according to Irene’s account he showed complete indifference to her and their son. He was obsessed with smoking and ready to do anything to get a cigarette. Irene described with frankness how her husband was so weak that he could hardly climb the stairs to their apartment or climb to cross the footbridge to get to work. She

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felt abused and wanted to leave him and move out of the ­house. Irene applied for a divorce, but would it improve her situation? ­Were they a happy c­ ouple in Germany? We may justly assume that they did not suffer from hunger and cold then as they did in the Łódź ghetto. Irene reports that she wrote to her f­ather and s­ ister about her difficulties and despair. Where w ­ ere they? We lack this information. Michal Unger in chapter 2 claims that the number of requests for divorce in the Łódź ghetto was higher than before the war. The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto includes statistics of divorce and stories of ­women who filed for divorce, such as the following: I ask to divorce my husband, ­because he is not ready to support his ­family. We are a ­family of five. A short time ago we ­were six—my thirteen-­year-­old ­daughter died of starvation. I beg for mercy for my other three c­ hildren, since we are unable to live like this. My husband is working in the carpenters’ restore and we get no allowances. For the last two years t­ here is no peace at home—­fights and battering occur e­ very day. I cannot bear it any longer. I plead for help; I have no other way to save my life.31

Peretz Opoczynski wrote that relationships between ­couples ­were becoming increasingly tense. He described the fate of Moshe Papugai, who tried to hold out in the ghetto and did all kinds of ­things, trading in anything to survive. A few times he managed to f­ ree himself from forced ­labor deportation. But one day he had an argument with his wife, and to spite her and wishing to hurt her, he volunteered for forced ­labor. No one knows what happened to him. ­These days, Opoczynski wrote that husbands and wives fought over any minute m ­ atter.32 In contrast, we learn of many acts of devotion to and sacrifice for the spouse. In the Slepak Report we learn of a ­woman, Mrs. H. from Warsaw, who worked in the stocking department of a textile factory before the war and was married to an artist. Slepak told us that she was from a lower-­middle-­class Jewish f­ amily, was 30 years old, and looked like an “Aryan.” Having an artist spouse had a g­ reat impact on her approach to life. Her husband left the city along with most of the men, perhaps following the order of the Polish government to open a new front in the East. Left alone, she spent her time assisting in cleaning ruins and helping the newly arrived refugees. She was part of the civil guard and was satisfied with her contribution. On September 25, her h ­ ouse was hit directly by a bomb. She saw with fear how her apartment was consumed by fire, yet managed to save some objects, including a few of her artist husband’s paintings. When narrating to Slepak her ordeal to reach her mother-­in-­law’s home, she described the last three days of the constant bombing of the city and the ­great fire that destroyed a large part of Warsaw. Only when the fire died down did she manage to reach her ­mother-in-law’s home and found to her surprise and happiness that her husband was ­there and alive. The sentence Slepak quotes from her narrative is the following: “now [that her husband is alive] I have a reason to live.”

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The ­couple sought a way for the husband to continue to produce art. Mrs. H. worked hard to provide for the ­family, and her spouse went on making art. A ­ fter a while, she was offered a job in the Judenrat office. She gave this job and the working permit from the Judenrat to her husband so that he would be safe and would have more time to engage in art. At this point in her narrative, she told Slepak that his return to art “brought a smile back to my lips.” She engaged in a variety of activities to provide for the f­ amily and to assist her extended f­ amily. When her husband became ill with lung disease, she managed to get permission for him to go to Otwock for rehabilitation.33 Mrs. H. and her husband are an example of middle-­class families who lost their homes and possessions in the bombing and fires during the siege and had no assistance or prospect of recovering them. The moving spirit was the wife, and her endless initiatives and willingness to take serious risks with ­great determination to survive resulted in a strong feeling of solidarity between her and her spouse. She continued to believe that the hard days would come to an end, Slepak stressed in her narrative, while defining survival as e­ ither endless daring or sinking into the abyss. If we continue along the social continuum, we encounter the Wajnkranc ­couple, Noemi Szac and her husband Yurek. They w ­ ere young and loved each other dearly. Both came from well-­to-do families and ­were also very close to their extended families. They w ­ ere open with each other and shared their thoughts, feelings, and concerns, while mutually respecting the other’s values and needs. Both Noemi and her husband worked in the ghetto and somehow managed to survive, though meagerly. However, tension arose in relation to the support of their parents, who needed extra care and supplies of food, which they lacked. The ­couple was unable to openly discuss this issue: it was too delicate and emotional. Noemi criticized her sisters-­in-­law who did not work but demanded many luxuries. We do not know what Yurek thought about Noemi’s f­ amily or what he did not tell Noemi. Noemi wrote with sadness and some feelings of guilt: “This is the first secret between us, the first point of division. If I told him, he would have been unhappy: ‘you give every­thing to your parents.’ ”34 Although her relationship with her parents was supportive and trustful, Noemi and Yurek escaped to the Aryan side, thus abandoning her parents. Noemi felt like a traitor, despite the t­ hings she sent them from time to time. Her parents, for their part, she wrote, treated their departure positively. They wanted their ­children to be out of the ghetto and to have a chance to save themselves. This was another demonstration of parental devotion to their ­children, in this case ­those who w ­ ere grown up and in­de­pen­dent. Throughout her recollections, a close and trustful relationship between the young ­couple is evident. Sadly, Yurek was caught on the Aryan side and sent to Trawniki. Noemi acted with extreme daring to save him, putting herself in ­great danger, and was almost caught herself. Unfortunately, she failed to rescue him. Complexity of F ­ amily Relationships and Their Interpretation I conclude this section on ­family relations by illustrating the complexity of ­family life with diary entries of an anonymous girl from the Łódź ghetto. We know very

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l­ittle about her f­ amily’s socioeconomic status before they ­were ghettoized. In the ghetto, both parents ­were employed in the workshops, and her ­brother and 17-­year-­old ­sister worked as well. ­Because the writer was too young to work, she was responsible for all the ­house­hold chores: she ran all the errands, stood hours in line for food and coal, cleaned the apartment, and did the washing. Having four working members of a f­ amily seemed to improve chances of survival in the Łódź ghetto. Yet the daily routine of hard and long hours of work, having to prepare meals in the eve­ning, and constantly being hungry caused much anxiety within the ­family. The two s­ isters fought a lot, and the parents never seemed to intervene. The girl referred to her ­sister in the diary by writing “she was like a stranger to me.”35 She also fought with her f­ ather and felt like the black sheep of the f­ amily. She adored her hardworking m ­ other, who prepared the food for the f­amily and did embroidery ­until the ­middle of the night to earn some extra money. The ­mother never complained and treated all members of the ­family fairly. Despite the girl’s quarrels with the ­father, he seemed to understand the needs of his youn­gest child for more food. He made an effort to bring her extra food from his workplace, and she appreciated that very much.36 Even with all the difficulties she endured at home, she was horrified by the conditions in the home of her friend: At twelve ­o’clock I went to R. Wajs, my former friend. What a disgusting home they have. I got all my worst habits from them. They are loathsome. The ­father and ­mother fight all the time. The ­mother is called “a lunatic,” even in the presence of strangers. They treat her worse than a dog. She is sick in bed. Her face and legs are swollen, but they ­don’t care.37

In ­t hese diary entries, we read of a complex ­family relationship and routine from the point of view of a girl in early adolescence. No doubt, psychological explanations for her mood and her conflicting feelings related to her stage of life could be offered. However, her moving and intelligent text does not allow for a comprehensive understanding of her or the f­ amily, b ­ ecause we lack their voices. Yet we do have access to her voice, which demonstrates anger, desperation, hope, remorse, conciliation, and g­ reat loneliness. Her be­hav­ior, despite ­t hese conflicting emotions, shows that she understands her tasks and her responsibility as part of a ­family that is trying to survive. She sees other ­people suffering and concludes that she and her f­ amily are still holding out. Even though she appreciates her parents’ sense of responsibility for the well-­being of the ­family, she still bemoans the fact that she has no one to guide her. Above all, the major ­factor influencing her daily routine is hunger. It is devastating and threatens to destroy every­t hing. Is this a description of an average f­ amily, all of whose members are working and that seems to have some connections with p ­ eople of authority, such as ­those who run the public kitchen? We have no choice but to leave that question unanswered.

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Maintaining the Physical Well-­Being of ­Family Members Physical well-­being depended on many facets of daily life in the ghetto. It required being aware of any risk while in the streets, being careful about curfew hours, being wary of surprise raids, and wearing the yellow star as demanded. Ensuring adequate nutrition and caring for the health of the f­ amily w ­ ere no longer the responsibilities only of parents but ­were the tasks of all ­family members. As mentioned ­earlier, the shifts in and extension of gender roles, as well as changes in the responsibilities of the c­ hildren, turned caring for well-­being into a mutual task of every­ one in the ­family. Hardships of ghetto life, however, often challenged the ­family’s ability to coordinate responses and efforts, and many times they could not live up to their own interests of supporting each other. On May 15, 1940, some eight months ­after the occupation of Poland and before the ghetto in Warsaw was established, a memorandum presented by Jewish physicians to the German health authorities established the reasons for the deterioration of health among Jews. The memorandum was written in response to accusations that the Jews had spread typhus among the general population. The Jewish physicians explained the c­ auses of the difficult health situation and presented the increase in typhus among the Jewish population as due to the following ­factors. The destruction of the city’s infrastructure and the occupying powers’ regulations forbidding Jews from repairing their homes and businesses led to hygienic prob­lems. Jewish workers ­were prevented from continuing to work and earn money, resulting in the pauperization of many Jews, including tens of thousands of deportees. Malnutrition and even starvation then further weakened the body. High food prices deprived many of essential nourishment. ­These ­were the reasons for the increasing number of Jews—5,555 men and w ­ omen—­who died of typhus between November 1939 and March 1940. The memorandum asserted that ­these numbers ­were higher than ­those for non-­Jews.38 The nurse Regina Wajlowna left us a report of her experience. She was asked by a member of the ­house committee where she lived to administer a camphor injection to a sick 3-­year-­old child living in the basement of the apartment building. In her report, Wajlowna recorded what she found in the f­ amily’s dwelling and her own feelings.39 It was already eve­ning when she was asked to give the injection. Since she had experience serving in poor homes, she sterilized the needle in her own room before leaving. Poor homes, she wrote, did not have hot ­water or the facilities to boil ­water. Wajlowna suspected that the child had come down with pneumonia. She wrote the following: A ­women guide accompanies me and I am surrounded on all sides by complete darkness. Fi­nally, I arrive at my destination—in a basement. Th ­ ere are no lights but a paraffin lamp glows in a far corner. For the moment I cannot see nor hear the child. Somebody takes the lamp out of the corner and shines it t­ owards the bed. Now I can look at the child. It is lying on a bed with no bed-­linen, dressed

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No adult was in the room; a number of ­children who ­were also dirty lay on the floor. The m ­ other was away d ­ oing the laundry for a better-­off ­family. She returned for a moment, and the nurse asked her for a piece of cotton, a difficult task: “The ­mother tries to give me a piece of black wool from the child’s old mattress pad. I am becoming annoyed and that obviously helps, as a moment l­ ater I am handed a piece of cotton wool and even some iodine.” 41 The procedure was accomplished, and the child received the injection. Wajlowna wrote in relief that his condition was not as bad as she thought: it was not pneumonia. The nurse asked the ­mother to inform her the next morning of the l­ittle boy’s condition; she would come to administer a second injection and she left the needle t­ here. When Wajlowna received no information by the next morning, she felt obliged to go and check on the child before g­ oing to work. She found the l­ ittle boy lying in his own excrement, and the m ­ other, who appeared for a few moments, seemed unable to clean the child with a dirty rag. The nurse became very angry when she discovered that the needle she had left t­ here was broken, but gave the m ­ other money to get a new one. She ended her report as follows: “I have had enough. I find a clean spot and give the injection.” Wajlowna left the place in desperation. Does this report describe a situation of neglect by a ­mother who had to work hard to provide for the ­children and was unable to run a home? The hidden text tells about a burdened ­mother, with no mention of a ­father. ­Doing laundry was a very difficult task b ­ ecause of the lack of hot ­water and the necessary detergent. Did she report to the h ­ ouse committee about the sick child and ask for help? We do not know, but we can assume that she did. I suspect the intention of the m ­ other was to help her ­children hold out, but the difficult situation of the ­children testifies to her ­limited success. A more positive story was recorded by Slepak about a refugee ­woman, Mrs. Z., who lived in Krośniewice (Mittelstadt, Kroßwitz), three kilo­meters from Kutno.42 Her village had been annexed to the Reich, and the Jews ­were stranded in the ghetto one month ­after the occupation. For a while, their situation was not too bad: they continued to work, and despite the uncertainty, life followed a rather quiet path. Her husband was a locksmith and was able to provide for the ­family. In the spring of 1941, she gave birth to her first child. At the beginning of January 1942, notices ­were posted in the ghetto ordering the registration of all men. The ghetto fell into a state of g­ reat anxiety. Her f­ ather, b ­ rother, and husband went to be registered and never returned: all men, except the el­derly, shared this same fate. They w ­ ere interned for a few days on the outskirts of the village and ­were then sent to an unknown destination, never to be heard from again. The remaining Jews in Krośniewice prayed and fasted twice a week, hoping to save the men, and ­after ten weeks of fasting and praying, an order came for the ­women to pay a poll tax and be sent to Bessarabia. Since she did not believe the

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Germans, Mrs. Z. de­cided to flee with her nine-­month-­old baby to her s­ ister in Warsaw. She wanted her ­mother and sister-­in-­law to join her, but they w ­ ere afraid, 43 so she left alone with the baby. Her flight was difficult and dramatic. She passed as a Pole and succeeded in crossing the western border to the General Government, arriving safely with the child she had heroically protected all along the way. During her flight, she received information about the deportation and death of her ­mother’s ­sister and her sister-­in-­law. She was desperate but felt that it was her duty to survive and save her child. She reached Warsaw, entering a new stage where she had to go to work while continuing to protect her baby. ­After a short period of being depressed from the infor­ mation about the death of her m ­ other and the rest of the f­amily, she realized that she had to get active. The difficult situation of her s­ ister who was a seamstress but had only ­little repair work and the low income of her brother-­in-­law who was a policeman required her to find work. For the first few weeks she worked from 7 a.m. ­until 9 p.m. as the ­house­keeper of a well-­to-do ­family. However, this was too difficult, leaving her no time to take care of her child. She told Slepak that during the last two weeks, she had found employment as a cashier in a café owned by a relative; she was working eight-­hour shifts that left her time for her baby and the chores of her own home. Since her s­ ister was not very well, she felt obliged to support her too, and at that stage she was satisfied with her decisions, hoping to emigrate to the United States a­ fter the war.44

A Home or a Dwelling? As a space of belonging and alienation, intimacy and vio­lence, desire and fear, the home is invested with meanings, emotions, experiences, and relationships that lie at the heart of h ­ uman life.45 Many dif­fer­ent disciplinary perspectives relate to the concept of a home. I consider the issue of home from the perspective of a historian and contextualize it within the history of the Jewish ­family and its efforts to survive in the ghettos during the Holocaust. Thus, this discussion focuses on the location and space of the home in which the f­ amily developed its internal relationships and where the patterns of authority and bonding evolved. Emotions, interests, and responsibilities of ­family members are central for understanding their attitude t­ oward the home. Encounters and partnerships, love and competition, jealousy and cooperation all reign together in the home. However, for a home to function, solidarity and coordination are necessary. The members of a ­family expect fairness and practical justice to guide the arrangements for sharing responsibilities and obligations. The hierarchical relationship between parents, ­children, and siblings should contribute to each member fulfilling his or her obligations. Often, external pressure is a ­factor that strengthens solidarity, but in extreme situations it may also cause alienation.46 A home bears cultural significance in relation to ­family traditions and values. In Jewish tradition the responsibility of both parents to establish a “good” home, one that would ensure the transmission of traditions and continuation of the next generations, was extremely impor­tant. Still, the nature of each individual f­ amily

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in its home arrangements and atmosphere plays an impor­tant role. Each ­family’s nature is influenced by the personalities of its members, class, economic condition, and gender perspectives.47 I use the word “dwelling” in contrast to “home” to emphasize the spatial and territorial aspects of the place in which the ­family was located and managed its daily routines before relocation. I also ask which of the emotional attachments and ­family patterns are projected onto the dwelling. Can it be replaced following the forced relocation into the ghetto, and would the new place of residence bear the characteristics of a home? The forced relocation to the ghetto was a demonstration not only of the power of the oppressor but also responses to it ­were influenced by power relations and social gaps among the oppressed Jews. Social differences surfaced in the search for a place to live. In many ghettos, ­t here was a clear differentiation between the accommodations of better-­off families and t­ hose of poor families. Families who came to the ghetto as deported refugees from other cities often lived in public buildings or in basements of larger apartment buildings; they never had a private space of their own. Would they be able to establish a sense of a home in their new dwelling? It is impor­tant to note that well before moving into the ghetto, the homes of upper-­class Jews had already been looted by the Nazis. To furbish apartments for the large administrative staff of the occupation authorities, the Nazis confiscated Jewish homes and took furniture, rugs, art works, pianos, valuable dishes, and more. The looting of Jewish homes became a regular routine for ordinary German soldiers.48 The transfer of Jews into the designated areas and the ghettos often necessitated the relocation of the non-­Jewish population, which had to move out to create a firm barrier between Jews and non-­Jews. Middle-­and upper-­middle-­class Jews who lived in higher-­quality housing in the cities before the forced transfer to the ghetto endeavored to exchange their homes with ­t hese non-­Jewish middle-­and upper-­ middle-­class families who w ­ ere forced to move out to ensure the complete isolation of the Jews. In the case of a successful exchange, the families had a rather secure place to which to move. Nevertheless, agreements detailing what furniture would stay in the apartment and what w ­ ere the terms of exchange w ­ ere emotionally difficult to write and w ­ ere accompanied by g­ reat feelings of loss. For middle-­class Jews, organ­izing a home was a lifetime pro­cess of collecting and cherishing articles that provided it with meaning and atmosphere. Shorn of many of their belongings that represented their long and meticulous efforts to collect nice furniture, paintings, a piano, good linen, and expensive h ­ ouse­hold goods, they felt deprived. Consciously or unconsciously, the hope was to turn their new location in the ghetto into a home that would shelter the f­amily during an uncertain f­uture. Yet, with time, as many of the well-­to-do before the war experienced transformation of their status and economic condition in the ghetto, the pain of their material losses

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receded. Solidarity in ­these dire conditions could become a delicate ­matter. Providing for the basics of life required ­great emotional effort. This is clear in the diary of Noemi Szac Wajnkranc, referred to ­earlier. She described leaving her home, together with that of her aunt and u ­ ncle. They found a Polish ­family of a former officer in the Polish Army with whom to exchange homes. They took only part of their belongings, left much of their furniture, and in return received furniture from the Polish ­family. They looked sadly on the home they w ­ ere leaving and wanted to imprint e­ very detail in their minds and memory. They reached the apartment in the ghetto, conversed shortly with the Polish officer about some details, and signed the final agreement. Looking around, their thoughts went back to their home and each felt bewildered. Noemi’s aunt was angered that the Polish f­ amily had left only a small amount of coal in the cellar, despite promising in the written agreement to leave a large amount. Many families ­after concluding the exchange and completing the move found that real­ity differed greatly from the terms of agreement. The coal incident represented just the tip of the iceberg of sorrow and disappointment experienced in the move. Reacting to the angry remarks of the aunt, Noemi’s f­ ather said, “It is good that we found a roof over our head.” The f­ ather acted as the head of the ­family, who desired to restore order. His remark emphasized that the apartment served as a physical shelter, despite its clear contrast to the home they had left, which had been filled with spirit and emotion, years of mutual experiences, and some pride in cultural and material achievements. A g­ reat sense of loss struck many whose middle-­class dreams seemed to be submerged into the depths of the ghetto. Shortly ­after their arrival, another ­family arrived to occupy one of the rooms. Each f­ amily lived in one room, and they shared all con­ve­niences. Was this part of the agreement? Did the housing department of the Judenrat send the new ­family? ­Were the Wajnkrancs even consulted, or w ­ ere they able to choose the dwellers with whom they would share the new residence? No information is provided in the diary. Documentation from ­every ghetto describes a chaotic situation during the move in and the rush and despair to find housing. Far fewer non-­Jews had to leave the designated area than the number of Jews who moved in, so they had to crowd into available housing. Often, the Jewish Council’s assignment of apartments and rooms to several families led to clashes and negative feelings. What would now become the ­family home: the one room assigned to each ­family or the apartment’s three rooms that now extended the one-­family unit? This dwelling/home still called for solidarity and coordination of everyday operations. Its members would have to negotiate a routine and might develop positive or negative emotions. Noemi was practical, and she took a first step in organ­izing coordination by hanging a sign on the front door: “One bell ring for Scheinberg, two bell rings for Wajnkranc, three bell rings for Arjyecen.” 49 Jews who lived in the designated area before the establishment of the ghetto took the uprooted families into their apartments. True, they received some rental money, which contributed to their livelihood; however, their home turned into a dwelling

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for many strangers and often gave rise to much tension. Did they feel that they ­were still in their own home? Fifteen-­year-­old Yitskhok Rudashevski, whom we also met ­earlier, describes a chaotic picture of settling down in the ghetto and the packing up of his home as a very frustrating and desperate experience: ­ eople are packing in the h P ­ ouse. The ­women go back and forth. They wring their hands when they see the ­house looking as if ­a fter a pogrom. I go around with bleary eyes among the bundles, see how we are being uprooted overnight from our home. . . . ​I feel that I have been robbed, my freedom is being robbed from me, my home, and the familiar Vilna streets I love so much. . . . ​We ­settle down in our place. Besides the four of us ­t here are eleven persons in the room. The room is a dirty and stuffy one. It is crowded. The first ghetto night. We lie three together on two doors. I do not sleep. In my ears resounds the lamentation of this day. I hear the restless breathing of ­people with whom I have been suddenly thrown together; ­people who just like me have suddenly been uprooted from their homes.50

It is clear that the forced relocation to the ghetto was a traumatic experience for the teen—­t he lack of space and the social and interpersonal environment caused stress.51 However, as weeks passed, Rudashevski grew more emotionally attached to the place he and his parents moved into. But then the f­ amily was expelled to a smaller ghetto and returned ­after a few days to their place only to find it devastated. “­After staying three days in the second ghetto we return to the gate of the first. We are not checked. In the ghetto ­t here is devastation. Overturned doors, torn-up floors. We come home. Every­t hing is gone to wreck and ruin,” he wrote.52 A short time ­later, the ­family had to move again, this time to a street block that was designated for workers in the workshops.53 The image of a home ­a fter a pogrom repeatedly emerges in Rudashevski’s description. It is always an expression of stress and agony illustrated through the devastated space and the h ­ ouse­hold items of a destroyed home. He expressed his attachment to the place in which he lived, to the furniture, and to the s­ imple home items. In the ghetto, Rudashevski was in charge of taking care of the home, cleaning, and cooking, b ­ ecause both of his parents worked long hours. Did t­ hose responsibilities help him relate to the one-­room apartment as a home? Can the sense of a home as providing a semblance of solidarity and partnership in the ghetto contribute to a sense of normalcy? His quest for normalcy emerges in his description of the ghetto on Rosh Hashanah 1942. He described the appearance of ghetto h ­ ouses as homes filled with warmth and a sense of festivity. Was home just a place to live, a dwelling, or where friends and families celebrate the holiday? Cleanliness reigned in the midst of the poverty of the homes, he wrote; p ­ eople dressed up and crowded in the streets. ­Were the appearance of the homes and the dressed ­people walking in the streets the image of the normative f­ amily and community festivity?54 Indeed, ­after more than one year, even the ghetto provided some feeling of a home.

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Space—­not only of his home and its arrangements but also the wider space of the neighborhood in which he was living—­played a decisive role in Rudashevski’s understanding of his environment.55 The ghetto was a coercive space that narrowed the horizon and thus ­limited the sense of home. When a few more streets ­were added to the ghetto, he hastened to walk ­t here, hoping for an illusion of freedom, an extended home, and a sense of release. However, his buoyant sense of freedom dis­appeared instantly when he saw the devastated h ­ ouses in the added section. Home meant ­people, interrelationships, a h ­ uman give and take, and a sense of belonging; destroyed ­houses meant murder and ruined homes, so even the new space did not provide comfort.56

Conclusion In the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned the methodological difficulties in narrating the daily life of the ­family. In my conclusion, I add a note about the personal difficulties of conducting this study. Reading the personal sources of ghetto inmates is an emotional trial. Young adolescents, young adults, mature adults, and older ­people all left narratives of a plight that is hard to comprehend. While reading them, one confronts the humanity and inhumanity of the protagonists in the same instance: they stand up as both heroes and antiheroes. One confronts the paradox of the greatest egotism and cruelty combined with the greatest love, compassion, and sacrifice—­appearing in the same person, in dif­fer­ent personalities, and dif­fer­ent narratives. All are ordinary p ­ eople of dif­fer­ent ages, who focus their efforts on staying alive, but sometimes give up. In the context of the ­family, the narrative expresses the burden and the privilege: the burden of holding on and supporting loved ones and the inability to accommodate the cruel real­ity. In between ­these ends, all options are relevant. ­People of dif­fer­ent ages express t­ hese conflicting emotions and often torment themselves as they make the decision ­either to stay with their ­family or depart. Each decision is demanding and may come at the expense of o ­ thers. We heard the feelings of guilt of Mr. Leib Reiser from Grodno, who left his wife and 5-­year-­old child and fled to the East when the Germans advanced, echoing the dilemma of togetherness and safety. We followed the fear and uncertainty of Mrs.  Z. from Krośniewice, who left her m ­ other and sister-­in-­law and walked with her nine-­ month-­old baby to Warsaw in hopes of a safer haven. We heard the pain of Irene Hauser, who asked to divorce her husband who neglected the ­family and cared only for himself. She was so desperate that she could not save her son Eric and herself from the constant hunger and was ready to end it all, but was unable to leave her son to the merciless fate. We read of Sabina Glozerowa from Warsaw, who realized that separation would be the only way to save her ­daughter, but her ­daughter did not want to be “a happy orphan.” Thus, the diversity of ­human personalities, conditions, and situations presented in this chapter testifies to the difficulty of generalization. At the same time, it is

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obvious that although each person voiced in this chapter was a unique individual, many shared similar and nuanced feelings. This is true also for the multitude of voices that we are unable to hear. In this re­spect, although none of ­t hese cases is a case study, this kind of micro-­description enables us to relate to a broad spectrum and to make some qualified generalizations. Nevertheless, I did not cover the w ­ hole range of issues pertaining to the daily life of families. Major topics such as education, how to earn enough to support the ­family, networking of families for assistance, and the role of the extended ­family all call for further discussion. Documentation confirms that individuals and families moved along two divergent paths: ­those who ­were incapable of acting versus ­those who gained some mea­ sure of resilience from the pain and loss they experienced to go on and save the rest of the f­amily and their own life. Along this obstacle-­fi lled road, families e­ ither acted contrary to their past relationships or conformed with and strengthened them. ­Others wavered as they traversed this path. Most w ­ ere murdered when the Nazis approached the last stage of their “Final Solution.”

chapter 4

v

Uneasy Bonds On Jews in Hiding and the Making of Surrogate Families Natalia Aleksiun

­ amily networks emerge as one of the central themes in Holocaust accounts from F Eastern Eu­rope. In their diaries, testimonies, and memoirs, Jewish men and w ­ omen of all ages and social backgrounds reflect on the role their families played in their daily lives and how relatives lived together in overcrowded ghettos, shared resources, strug­gled and hid together during roundups, and underwent se­lections together. But as biological families ­were forced to separate, and siblings, spouses, parents, and ­children w ­ ere murdered, ­family units ceased to exist. Instead, surviving relatives forged new bonds with individuals outside the ­family. In the ghettos and camps or in hiding, new family-­like relationships provided much-­needed emotional and physical support. New nonbiological bonds helped the bereaved overcome a sense of anguish and powerlessness and develop—­even if only briefly—­ survival strategies. One such example comes from the diary of Samuel Golfard, who described his own strug­g le for survival and the fate of the Jews in Eastern Galicia. In the aftermath of the deportation of Jews from Przemyślany (­today Peremyshliany in Ukraine) in the summer of 1942, Golfard mourned the death of his younger s­ ister Mania, who had been driven away with hundreds of Jewish men, ­women, and ­children. He presumed his parents and other s­isters in Radom had also perished. Initially, he succumbed to grief and self-­loathing. Writing in January 1943, he noted, I could not forgive myself for living, for eating. A friend pulled me out of the room. He proposed that I share his living quarters with him. I went to live with him, taking mementos of my ­sister. He began bringing me back to life, suggested joint rescue plans, demanding that I become active. Although I did not like him and reacted to all his ideas with antagonism, my renewed contact with life must be credited to him. I turned from loneliness to the other extreme. Making the

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N ata l i a A l e k s i u n rounds of homes all day long, I eagerly sought the com­pany of ­people. I could not be alone for a minute. And I lulled myself to sleep by contriving rescue plans.1

Golfard perished in the summer of 1943, leaving b ­ ehind his Polish diary in which the friend, who had provided him with emotional support at the time of paralyzing sorrow, remains unnamed. But his account, filled with details of the persecution of Jews in Przemyślany and of Golfard’s despair over their helplessness, raises questions about the role of ­family and ­family networks in the midst of the Holocaust. ­There is a vast lit­er­a­ture on the so-­called surrogate families in concentration camps and their role as one of the impor­tant strategies of survival. It has been argued that as the camp system separated families, the creation of new bonds helped inmates by providing them with a network of mutual support. In her memoir Still Alive, Ruth Klüger recalled movingly a “foster ­sister” Susi, an orphan from Theresienstadt. Klüger’s ­mother Alma ­adopted her in Birkenau, and they remained a f­ amily ­after the end of the war. As Ruth and her ­mother, who had been deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in May 1944, w ­ ere moved from the ­family camp to the w ­ omen’s camp, Susi “sort of ran along with us, the way a stray animal, a dog or a cat, ­w ill show up at your doorstep and stay.” Alma invited the girl to join Ruth and her, and thereby “decreed without any fuss that this girl belonged with us, as if it was the most natu­ral ­thing in the world.”2 Another female camp survivor, Cesia Brandstatter, concluded her testimony about her experiences in a concentration camp by acknowledging the centrality of bonding among ­women: Being with the other ­women helped us survive. You have somebody to turn to, to cry on somebody’s shoulder, which we did. We helped each other that way. A good word, a ray of hope, something. To be lost and not to trust . . . ​if you are with strangers, you ­can’t trust. We ­were very lucky that we ­were together.3

Arguably, many w ­ omen imprisoned in camps bonded in this way, caring for one another and thereby increasing their individual chances of staying alive. In par­tic­u­lar, “camp ­sisters” have been described as a source of material and psychological strength in place of parents and biological siblings.4 Indeed, the scholarship on familial relationships in the camps points to how much survival could be a function of having a relative present or being able to create family-­like relationships. In her pioneering 1984 essay, Sybil Milton pointed to “membership in a supportive group” as one of the crucial ­factors determining chances of survival in concentration camps and considered “bonding and networks” as “­women’s specific forms of survival.”5 According to Milton, Small groups of w ­ omen in the same barracks or work crews formed “­little families” and bonded together for mutual help. . . . ​­These small families, usually not biologically related, increased protection for individual internees and created networks to “or­ga­nize” food, clothing, and beds, and to help cope with the privations and primitive camp conditions.6

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In her collection titled ­Mothers, ­Sisters, Resisters, Brana Gurewitsch included a section of accounts of power­ful bonds among biological s­isters and also among ­women who on their arrival in the camps de­cided to share food and supported one another.7 Nechama Tec concluded that “no ­matter what part of Eu­rope they came from, no m ­ atter what camps they ­were transferred to and when, w ­ omen formed cooperative groups.” 8 Indeed, scholars need to expand their understanding of kinship during the Holocaust to include nonbiological f­amily relations of all types. Surrogate families played a variety of roles for Jewish men, ­women, and c­ hildren. Some relationships came to replace lost families, providing support and meaning during and a­ fter the war, whereas other family-­like arrangements served as protective covers for Jews from the outside world. But ­t hese pragmatic understandings or “fictive kin” could also shift to become emotional bonds that w ­ ere formalized ­after the war.9 This chapter pursues the question of bonding beyond the camp context. It explores vari­ous family-­like relationships and their role in the moral and psychological economy of hiding in Nazi-­occupied Poland. Based on early testimonies and diaries, as well as memoirs and oral interviews recorded de­cades ­a fter the Holocaust, it interrogates the influence of gender, class, and age on the ways in which Jewish men and ­women formed new relationships while hiding in forests, bunkers, and vari­ous urban shelters or passing as non-­Jews. Was it easier for ­women to form surrogate bonds, or ­were they particularly vulnerable in the context of hiding and therefore more prone to seek t­hese relationships, both with men who offered them protection and with other w ­ omen?10 How did the urban and rural settings affect extended ­family relations and the need to forge new familial bonds? While raising questions about the role of family-­like relations, this chapter discusses the methodological challenges of mapping out this intimate aspect of Jewish experience during the Holocaust that makes a fleeting appearance without fully elucidating the intricate and emotional ties that defined t­ hese relationships and their meaning to individuals and to Jewish survival writ large.

Methodological Challenges Like many aspects about Jewish daily life during the Holocaust, emotional relationships are hard to reconstruct and interpret. We may use personal accounts to map them out, but the character of t­ hese relationships often remains unspoken or merely alluded to, especially when t­ hose relationships do not conform with social, cultural, and religious norms.11 In the early testimonies, much of the emotional aspects of the experiences remains unspoken as survivors focus on documenting the destruction of Jewish communities and crimes committed against the Jewish population. But even in l­ ater accounts, including oral interviews and memoirs, survivors do not always elaborate on what nonbiological families meant for them during the Holocaust. Indeed, except for the category of “camp s­ isters,” a profound silence about relationships with nonfamily members often characterized the fabric of daily life.

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In some testimonies, bereft individuals join larger groups in hiding. Although they likely formed some form of bond to facilitate their survival, testimonies gloss over this aspect of their experience entirely. Nuta Gruber—a tinsmith—lost two ­children and his wife in Kamień Koszyrski in Volhynia (­today Kamin-­Kashyrskyi in Ukraine). He joined the partisan group of Diadia Pietia (Anton Brińskij) in the Grywowski-­Kraśnieński forests, where he was in the “camp of the civilian population.”12 This vital detail comes at the very end of a lengthy testimony recorded as early as 1944 that gives us no details about Gruber’s experiences in the camp. Chana Barasz from Białystok lost her husband, toddler d ­ aughter, and a b ­ rother in the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1943. She jumped from the train to Treblinka and hid in the forests near Szepetówka (Szepetiwka) and Wysokie Mazowieckie (Mazowieck). In her 1945 testimony, she mentioned several Jewish men and ­women with whom she built bunkers, shared food, and fled constant danger. But the account gives no names or details regarding their life together, let alone of pos­si­ ble emotional or sexual bonds.13 Estera Rubinsztejn wandered in the countryside and hid on the “Aryan side” of Warsaw along with a young ­woman with whom she bonded, ­after both had crawled out of a mass grave in Poniatowa. Both lost their entire families. Having spent months together, ­these two young bereft ­women de­cided to separate in the fall of 1944, in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising. Rubinsztejn did not rec­ord the name of her companion.14 In her diary written in hiding in Lwów (­today L’viv in Ukraine), Rózia Basseches-­ Wagnerowa describes daily life on the outskirts of the city, where she was placed by her husband before the final liquidation of the ghetto in the hope that he and her siblings would join her. She lived ­t here with another young ­woman Niusia B., whom she referred to as her “companion” (współtowarzyszka), whose b ­ rother paid for both ­women’s upkeep. They spent almost two years together, living in a hole ­under the floor during the day. Niusia was also supposed to have been followed by her sister-­in-­law, but the Polish ­family refused to take any additional “boarders,” given the ­limited space. Rózia barely noted Niusia’s presence on the pages of her diary. She mentions for example that, ­toward the end of summer 1943, the conditions ­were such that “one of us was always busy watching the child [the Polish ­family had three small c­ hildren, including a newborn], while the other one was busy with ­house­keeping work or guarded by the win­dow.”15 Rózia wrote about her own despair, her prayers for a miracle that would rescue her husband and ­sisters, her fantasies about postwar revenge. Did the two young ­women talk when it became clear that they would be sharing the hole together without their dear ones?16 It seems that being a “companion of fate” (Schicksalsgenossen) did not necessarily lead to the formation of surrogate ­family bonds. Moreover, personal accounts point to the often fleeting aspects of t­ hese chance encounters, b ­ ecause they w ­ ere formed on the run. Jewish men, ­women, and ­children hid together, helped one another, but seldom had the opportunity to see the liberation together. A ­ fter all, few p ­ eople stayed in only one hiding place; a good deal of movement was connected with attempts to survive. Further, they constantly

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faced an unyielding mortal danger. Michał Mirski (Michael Hauptman) describes bonding on the edge of a mass grave with another Jewish man, an attorney. They exchanged looks, a few quick words, their trembling shoulders touched, and they tried to run together to escape execution. But unlike Mirski, the other young man did not know the Schodnica (Skhidnytsia) forest well enough, was caught, and was literally chopped to death.17 As in the case of Golfard, mentioned in the chapter opening, we can only speculate what vari­ous relationships indicated in his diary would have developed into. Last but not least, for p ­ eople in hiding and on the run, it was too emotionally taxing to become attached to someone who might be ripped away from them at any time. Fear of connection and another loss may have also ­shaped some of t­ hese relationships as primarily utilitarian and nonemotional. But the methodological challenge of examining war­t ime bonds also has the opposite temporal dimension. Relationships, arrangements, and understandings between Jewish and non-­Jewish individuals could cast a long shadow beyond the immediate aftermath of liberation. Surrogate families did not necessarily dis­appear ­after the war; they lingered for weeks, months, and years and at times ­were transformed into a formal f­ amily setting by means of marriage or adoption. For example, Ruth Klüger remained connected with her surrogate s­ ister a­ fter the war. The afterlife of war­time relationships allows us to investigate the complexities of ever-­ changing emotional entanglements. Do only ­t hose bonds that began during the Holocaust but lasted into its aftermath deserve to be included in the category of surrogate families?

Surrogate Jewish Families: Spouses, Siblings, Parents Among the bonds that came to replace murdered families w ­ ere new relationships that resembled sibling relations, spousal liaisons, and foster parenting. In some cases, Jewish c­ hildren who w ­ ere orphaned or whose parents had placed them with non-­Jewish families formed strong bonds in t­ hese ersatz homes. In 1943, 6-­year-­old Dolek Ruder found shelter in the small village of Woroniaki, near Złoczów (­today Zolochiv in Ukraine), in Eastern Galicia when his parents left him with a peasant ­family, while they attempted to survive separately first by hiding and then in a ­labor camp. Together with the boy, nine Jews from the area hid in a stable. His f­ather Mendel sent Dolek packages with food and letters. Dolek, however, was dependent on the good w ­ ill of the peasant ­family and the other Jews with whom he hid. As he noted in his undated postwar testimony recorded in Polish and Yiddish and collected by the Jewish Historical Commission, “I am very young, and I did not know to read.”18 Still, letters from his f­ ather w ­ ere read to him; members of his group also washed and fed him. For several months, t­ hese individuals effectively took over the role of parents for this young boy. Although the group included men and ­women, Dolek did not mention precisely who served as his surrogate parents. Still, his account suggests that the new relationships formed in hiding played an essential role in his survival. His daily experience in hiding relied on nontraditional

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relationships: taking care of him may have been a “group effort” that did not resemble the two-­parent ­house­hold. It was not ­until four months before liberation in July 1944 that Dolek’s ­father was able to join his son.19 Some of ­t hese relationships continued ­after liberation, whereas o ­ thers proved temporary, as was the case with Dolek, whose f­ ather claimed him near the end of the war. Although Dolek’s account does not provide specific information, it suggests that his war­time caretakers did not feel a par­tic­u ­lar connection to him but voluntarily stepped in to fill ­t hese parental roles out of a sense of general duty. If this reading is correct, it mirrors relationships formed when the Jews in Borysław (­today Boryslav in Ukraine) prepared to escape to the neighboring forests in the last months before the impending arrival of the Soviet Army. In this case, adult caretakers ­were randomly assigned to bunkers that w ­ ere to be used by Jewish orphans with whom they had no personal ties. H ­ ere, again, we do not have enough information to comment on the gender of ­t hose caretakers, although—­given the perseverance of traditional gender roles among Jewish men and ­women in hiding— we can assume that the designated foster parents among ­those hiding together ­were ­women rather than men.20 Some bereft Jewish parents, whose own ­children had been killed, developed bonds with and began looking ­after other Jewish ­children. Abraham (Bumek) Gruber, who lost his wife Blima and young ­daughter Lilka in one of the roundups in a ­labor camp near Drohobycz (­today Drohobych in Ukraine) “lost his ­w ill to live. He de­cided he would not hide if ­t here was another Aktion.” But a few weeks l­ater he found a Jewish girl playing in the camp and became acquainted with her m ­ other Tusia, whose husband had been mobilized into the Soviet Army and was presumed dead. According to his nephew, Bumek “warned her to hide the child and they talked about their misfortunes. . . . ​L oneliness in their situation was especially depressing so Bumek and Tusia began to see each other. He helped Tusia and her ­daughter, Fela, by giving them food and companionship.” Moreover, Bumek then convinced a Polish non-­Jewish ­family—­t he Sawińskis, who had known him since childhood—to hide the w ­ oman and her child. He told them that “he could not take Tusia and Fela back to face certain death and so the Sawińskis agreed to let all three of them stay.”21 ­After the war, Tusia discovered that her husband was alive ­after all, but after some hesitation and turmoil, de­cided not to return to her husband. Gruber’s emotional investment in Tusia and her d ­ aughter, as well as his decision to include them in the group of blood relatives taken into a hiding place, secured their survival. For Jewish w ­ omen seeking to hide in the countryside, finding a male partner proved an invaluable survival strategy.22 In his testimony, Yehuda Tenenbaum described his experiences in Mościska (today Mostyska in Ukraine) where he survived roundups and deportations. He married a local Jewish ­woman whom he met through a Zionist youth movement before the war. He recalled the horrible details of hiding with his “wife” for twenty months in villages and forests, assisted by a non-­Jewish left-­wing peasant. Only ­later in his oral account did Tenenbaum clarify that his wife and young son had been murdered before he went into hiding and that

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he had been hiding with another w ­ oman. Indeed, the female companion in hiding became his second wife a­ fter the war, but their bond likely began as a relationship of con­ve­nience. According to Tenenbaum, he met Bella b ­ ecause he had a stove and she had a fish, and she approached him about letting her use it. She understood, in Tenenbaum’s account, that “I have some money and she offered me to go to this goy.”23 Tenenbaum revealed very l­ittle about his own emotions or the shift in their relationship or indeed about the extent to which they may have become a ­couple already in hiding. It seems they emerged from the hiding place exhausted both physically and emotionally. We lack Bella’s account and her perspective on the bartering that served as the basis for her involvement with Tenenbaum.24 Another model of surrogate familial bonds emerges from the close relationship between Maria Rosenbloom and Blanca Rosenberg (Nebenzahl). The two young ­women came into contact and became close friends in Kołomyja (today Kolomyia in Ukraine), Eastern Galicia; u ­ nder the German occupation, their lives became inextricably linked. Maria was born ­there in 1918 to an affluent Hassidic ­family, and Blanca arrived in the town before 1939 with her husband Wolf Rosenkranz, who had hoped to practice medicine in his hometown.25 It was occupied by the Germans in the summer of 1941, and Maria stayed close to her parents and married s­ isters. As the Jews in Kołomyja w ­ ere rounded up and executed, and t­ hose left ­behind suffered from disease, starvation, and forced ­labor, Maria’s f­amily pressured her to try and save herself by escaping to Lwów and passing as a non-­Jewish w ­ oman. Although she resisted their demands for a time,26 while Blanca left the Kołomyja ghetto in October 1942 ­after her ­brother and young child died and tried to pass as a non-­Jewish w ­ oman.27 On Christmas Day 1942, Maria herself left the ghetto, her parents supplying her with a Ukrainian sheepskin coat and fifteen dollars.28 The two young ­women re­united in Lwów with the help of Edward Rothman—­another Jew who was passing on the “Aryan side” as a Polish aristocrat, Stanisław Glac, assisted by his non-­Jewish German wife.29 Despite emotions ­running high during this reunion, they had to restrain themselves for fear of raising suspicion. In the words of Blanca, ­ fter smiling our way through the introductions, we closed the door. Mati [Maria] A and I collapsed into each other’s arms. Edward stood aside and gave us our moment of closeness. But then he urged us to keep our emotions and our voices ­under control. . . . ​We let go of each other, sat down, and began to tell our stories.30

With their Aryan papers, the two young w ­ omen rented a flat together. They continued to pass as Christian Poles first in Lwów and then in Warsaw, where they both refused to leave the other b ­ ehind.31 When Maria became ill, Blanca brought her food she had received from relief organ­izations for unemployed Poles.32 Blanca found employment r­ unning the ­house­hold of a German accountant who was working for the administration of the Generalgouvernement in Warsaw and then incorporated Maria into the same ­house­hold. ­Later, ­after Blanca moved to Heidelberg, Maria was able to join her friend, and they continued working as maids in a German ­house­hold.33 Blanca remembered Maria’s arrival as an emotional turning point:

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N ata l i a A l e k s i u n From the time Maria came to Heidelberg, time passed much faster and far less painfully. To begin with, we had each other, and this made ­every burden lighter. True, we still had to work hard keeping our employers happy, but when eve­ning came we took comfort from each other’s presence, sometimes in contented silence. We managed to get the same days off and took to strolling the wooded paths I had discovered e­ arlier. Sometimes we ended up at the c­ astle, listening to an open-­air concert and holding hands like a pair of lost but happy ­children.34

Both Maria in her oral testimony and Blanca in her memoir To Tell at Last credit their friendship for their survival. They provided each other with continued support and kept each other’s spirits up when the other one lost the w ­ ill to fight. In the eve­nings, they created a secret life in which they could talk about their dear ones and take a brief respite from the false identity they had to live by during the day. They wrote letters to each other when they w ­ ere briefly separated.35 The two ­women relied on each other and stayed loyal to each other. Rosenbloom described their bond in Warsaw in the summer of 1944: At one point, we heard that Kołomyja was liberated and this came through the radio, the British radio; no, another city, I’m sorry. On the British radio, on that radio we heard l­ater in Germany. So we celebrated each time, quietly. We had such a double life, an official life and a life between each other. We [with Blanca] ­were extremely close. I would say, in a very intimate kind of relationship.36

When Blanca went to work as a maid for another German official’s f­ amily in Heidelberg, she experienced the separation very painfully: “My world collapsed around me in a way I never expected. I would have to leave my only ­family—­Maria, my friends—­t he world built up out of so many sacrifices.”37 Indeed, in the New York Times obituary for Rosenberg (she died in 1998), the two ­women are noted as describing themselves as the “Thelma and Louise of Nazi Poland”—in reference to the 1991 Ridley Scott movie. What do we make of this account of a bond forged during the war between two w ­ omen who had lost their respective families? How can we categorize it since neither ­woman called the other “­sister,” but they remained in close contact following their immigration to New York, where they both had distinguished ­careers as social workers? ­There is an ambiguous, almost romantic, component to this relationship—­and the reference to Thelma and Louise years ­later only strengthens this aspect. Positioning it in a lit­er­a­ture about sisterly bonds helps contextualize this intimacy and minimize its ambiguity. Yet neither Rosenberg nor Rosenbloom presented their bond as sisterly. Their relationship seemed like an entirely positive commitment and, in contrast to sisterly bonds, not fraught with tension. Another account of sisterhood that connected Jewish ­women who ­were not related to one another comes from the testimony of Lusia Grossman. She left the Lwów ghetto at the beginning of 1942 and escaped to her close relatives in Stryj (today Stryi in Ukraine), where conditions ­were better. ­After eight months she de­cided to pose as a Pole with Aryan papers, and left with Poles and Ukrainians,

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who ­were taken to Germany for forced l­abor. In the transport, she met two other young Jewish ­women: Jadzia Cichońska (Regina Farb) from Kołomyja and Wanda Hecht from Lwów. “From that moment on we stuck together,” wrote Lusia in her postwar testimony. For t­hese young ­women, staying together was a choice that carried some risk. It could put them in harm’s way, drawing attention to them while they w ­ ere passing for non-­Jews ­because of their lack of experience and their “Semitic” looks. The transport arrived in Metz where the three ­women stayed together.38 A ­ fter working in a sugar factory in Frankenthal, Lusia was rewarded by the man­ag­er by being sent to Vienna to work as a domestic for his ­family. She wrote that separating from her “­adopted ­sisters was very painful. But this was a higher power.”39 When letters from her u ­ ncle in Stryj ceased to arrive in 1943, Lusia understood that her ­family had perished and that she was “alone in the world.” Still, letters from Jadzia and Wanda kept her spirits up: “In the letter they informed me about the po­liti­cal situation in the West. Their words ­were soaked with hatred of the Germans [Szwaby].” Their correspondence continued through 1943 and 1944, bringing her a sense of hope.40

New Families with Non-­Jews New familial bonds emerged also between Jews and non-­Jews. ­These included relationships in which non-­Jews consciously created a cover story seeking to protect the Jews who turned to them for help. That was particularly true for non-­Jewish families who took in Jewish ­children. Jewish parents entrusted their ­children to non-­Jews, planning to return and claim them ­a fter the war.41 In August  1943, Zosia—­a young w ­ oman who had worked as a maid for Emil Rattner and his ­family—­left Lwów with Wiktor, the young son of her former employers. She planned to place Wiktor with her ­sister near Przemyśl. But the child could not be sheltered t­ here, and the desperate ­woman turned to a friendly janitor in a nearby factory. She gave him 500 złoty and an ultimatum: ­either help the boy or kill him with an ax. Bronisław Zajdel placed the boy with Maria Zagórska—­his aunt, a retired el­derly ­woman who lived by a train station in Sielce in a small ­house with a small fruit garden. She knew only that the boy was the son of a Polish officer who had to hide and whose m ­ other was also hiding to avoid being sent to Germany. The boy was equipped with a birth certificate as Wiktor Krasicki. The servant who posed as the child’s ­mother sent money and visited; the child called her “mommy,” and he referred to the el­derly ­woman as “grandma.” In his postwar testimony, the child declared, “Grandma loved me very much, better than her own [the latter part of the statement was crossed out from the protocol].” She received help from Social Ser­v ices ­because she was old, and the boy kept an eye on the ­house. Whenever guests arrived, he was hidden ­behind a curtain, ­because she believed the Germans ­were searching for him. She also taught him to pray. Is it pos­si­ble the ­woman did not suspect she was sheltering a Jewish boy? We only have the boy’s testimony, which clearly reflects the strong emotional bond that had grown between him and the w ­ oman. In August 1944, with the front

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approaching, they hid together in a cellar. “I told grand­mother to take every­t hing downstairs. Grand­mother lost her hearing completely, despite the fact that I blocked her ears with cotton. Then she lost consciousness. I looked through the keyhole and thought that the h ­ ouse was about to burn.” 42 ­After liberation, Wiktor learned that his ­family had been killed. Despite his grief, he continued to live with his ­adopted grand­mother, even though he was bullied by other c­ hildren, who called him a Jew. In the spring of 1947, Jews located the boy and took him to the Jewish orphanage. When they paid Bronisław Zajdel for helping rescue the boy, Wiktor insisted on his sharing the money with his aunt Maria Zagórska, his “grand ­mother.”  43 For some gentile families who harbored Jewish c­ hildren, emotional bonds persisted ­after the war, even when the ­children ­were returned to their biological families. Other war­time caretakers became ­legal parents of rescued ­children and raised them ­after the war as their own, at times without revealing their Jewish origins.44 For most, however, bonds ­were severed when the ­children ­were removed from ­these families, and not all relationships that offered Jewish ­children shelter even continued through the end of the war. In some cases, ­children ­were rejected when the non-­Jewish adults discovered their true identity. At age 15, Ludwika Barb wandered around the streets of Lwów with her younger b ­ rother. With both of their parents dead, they relied on food given to them by their ­father’s non-­Jewish acquaintances. In the first months of 1943, they slept in gateways and attics. But the two siblings seemed to get lucky when Ludwika’s l­ ittle b ­ rother caught the eye of one w ­ oman who had a store and who wanted to raise him as her own son. [My] ­brother told her that he had a sick ­sister. She allowed me to come as well. I washed myself and changed my clothes, and she went with me to a doctor who diagnosed me with chickenpox in my head. ­After three days in the bath, she found out that my b ­ rother is a Jewish child and chased him away immediately.45

Jewish men and w ­ omen on the run forged relationships with non-­Jews who initially at least ­were not aware of their partners’ true identity. Berta Trinczer tried to use a family-­like relationship as a cover story to protect first her ­daughter and herself, and ­later her husband. She left Stanisławów (­today Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine) in September 1943 as its last remaining Jews w ­ ere being murdered. She walked out with her 3-­year-­old ­daughter, equipped with a false birth (or baptism) certificate and 1,200 złoty. In Lwów, she became acquainted with a German secretary who had worked for a construction com­pany and managed to convince the woman to hire her as a maid. Her husband visited them, and Berta felt secure enough to even send her d ­ aughter with one of the German women for vacation to the Hartz Mountains.46 When the child returned they both—­the German ­secretary and Berta—­taught the girl to call the German ­woman “­mother.” “I considered it safer for the child,” stated Berta in her postwar testimony. After the girl made a ­mistake when asked about her parents, a terrified Berta hit and scratched her, ordering her “to claim that the German w ­ oman is her m ­ other and I am only a

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maid.” 47 To make the situation even more complex, the German secretary fell in love with Berta’s husband, yet Berta insisted that this was a strategy of survival. According to Berta’s testimony, “it was a ­great opportunity for us, my husband even led her on, promising that in Warsaw he would reciprocate her feelings, if only she would come with us. She ­didn’t even suspect she has a crush on a Jew.” The testimony does not detail the sexual nature of the relationships in Warsaw, only noting that in July 1944, ­after they all moved to Warsaw, they lived together in two rooms with a kitchen.48 Some rescues w ­ ere made pos­si­ble by adults posing as c­ ouples or siblings. Born in 1922 in Jarosław, Helena Rauch was in Lwów when the German occupation began in the summer of 1941. Within a year, her ­mother, ­father, a 29-­year-­old ­sister, ­brother, brother-­in-­law, and her husband and their two ­children ­were killed. She began helping her aunt, who owned an inn on Gródecka Street. Th ­ ere she met a non-­Jewish man, Stanisław Robak, a circus artist by profession: “When he saw me weeping a­ fter my tragic experiences, he suggested that I go with him to Warsaw as his supposed wife and promised to train me to be his partner.” 49 Six months pregnant at the time, Rauch accepted his offer, and Robak gave her invaluable au­t hen­ tic documents that belonged to his s­ ister. They went to Warsaw together, where he registered her as his wife. Th ­ ere Rauch gave birth to a son. In the testimony they recorded together a­ fter the war, the nature of their relationship is not clear. Robak’s cooperation was key to her last attempt to re­u nite with her remaining ­family members: I was very sad and felt alone, so Robak offered to go to Lwów. ­After I left the hospital, he went, but [my] ­sister did not want to go [with him], ­because she ­didn’t trust him and had qualms about leaving the apartment, and she d ­ idn’t anticipate what happened afterwards. So he returned alone.50

In hiding, Jews who had lost their spouses formed relationships not only with other Jews but also with ­those who assisted them. Born in a village near Przemyślany, in 1930, Joanna Borkowska came to Lwów, where she ran a restaurant. In 1940, she met Rudolf Reder, who used to frequent her restaurant, together with his ­daughter and son-­in-­law. When Reder was forced to move to the ghetto, the non-­ Jewish Borkowska stayed in contact with his f­amily. In November  1942, Reder surprised her by showing up at her apartment, with “his clothes torn, broken teeth, swollen bones and entire body covered in bruises.”51 At ­great personal risk, she hid him in a shed in the yard ­until the arrival of the Red Army in July 1944. Joanna and Rudolf left Lwów and settled in Kraków where they married in November 1949. Reder’s own account adds ­little detail to the emotional nature of their relationship that emerged out of his desperate request for help: instead, his court testimonies focus on his experiences in the Bełżec death camp and his escape.52 In his 1945 testimony, Reder simply stated, “My Polish lady lived in the area. I came to her and begged her to give me shelter. This dear lady took a terrible risk and hid me and fed me for 20 months, u ­ ntil the Red Army liberated this part of Poland in July 1944. It took more than a year for my sores to heal.”53 Reder

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confirmed that he married his rescuer a­ fter the war, and together they left Lwów for Poland and ­later for Canada.54 In the early testimonies, the nature of many of the relationships remains blurred. ­Were they based on romantic attachments or sexual barter or both? What did ­these relationships—­which assumed a recognizable ­family form through marriage ­either during or ­after the war—­mean in terms of the extent of Jewish partners’ agency in forging them? Some seemed to start as means of survival and over time morphed into a love relationship and marriage. When Sonia Katzman details the destruction of the Jewish community in Brody, she focuses on the roundups and deportations; her own survival attempts are of secondary importance. But she does note that ­a fter the first roundup in Brody in September 1942, she attempted to escape to the countryside with her m ­ other. ­After being maltreated t­here, both w ­ omen returned to Brody: “It was then that I met a colleague, Tadeusz Żak (son of a pharmacist, once an anti-­Semite, l­ater helped Jews selflessly). He is the first to suggest I should have Aryan papers issued and leave.”55 Although her 1945 testimony did not provide details about her rescue, she recorded it ­under the name of Elżbieta Żak, suggesting that she took on Tadeusz’s name and used it in the immediate postwar period.56 The relationship, however, did not last. In her ­later account, written in Hebrew in 1997, Katzman mentions she had befriended Żak during the Soviet occupation of Brody. Moreover, she describes him as a son of a Polish m ­ other and a Jewish ­father, whose ­father had been deported to Siberia, ­mother died, and whose stepmother was Jewish as well. According to Katzman, when the German occupation began, Żak de­cided to assist Jews. He used his contacts as a member of the Home Army and took on the position of a forester, which helped him in preparing a hiding place in the woods for Katzman.57 He also created false identity papers for Sonia, brought her ­mother from the ghetto, and saved her life by bribing a local policeman who had arrested her.58 In the spring of 1943, for several months, Sonia and Tadeusz provided food for thirty-­four Jews hiding in a bunker. ­After the bunker was discovered and all ­those Jews, including Sonia’s ­mother, ­were killed, Żak and Katzman had to leave the area.59 Accounts of hiding indicate that, for both Jewish ­women and men, their dramatic vulnerability while living on the “Aryan side” may have led them to use or possibly seek out intimate relationships with non-­Jews. Some non-­Jews saw proposing marriage to a Jew as a generous offer to protect an individual on the run. Yet, despite the undeniable power imbalance, Jews ­were not completely lacking agency in ­t hese arrangements. Hiding in Warsaw together with her ­mother and younger s­ ister, 18-­year-­old Janina Bauman received a marriage proposal from a much older member of the Polish under­ground. She had flirted with Edward before, causing friction with his middle-­aged partner Vala, who was hiding her. But ­after Vala died following an unsuccessful surgery, Edward was ready “to take us to his own rough place, to hide ­Mother and Sophie t­ here and marry me, so that I could live as his legitimate wife, without having to hide. He stared at me tenderly, tears coming to his eyes. It took my ­mother’s subtle skills to explain without hurt to this gentle, single-­minded man that his offer could not be accepted.” 60 Given such power

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imbalances, ­t hese relationships ­were fraught with ambiguities that are impossible to untangle: they wove together not only ele­ments of barter, exploitation, and coercion but quite possibly also compatibility, gratefulness, and fondness.61 Some of t­ hese relationships morphed into formalized ­family bonds ­after the war. Fajga (Fanny) Ginsburg (died 1992) survived the war in Lwów, protected by a Polish Catholic, Tadeusz Kobyłko (1913–1975), who had helped her make the difficult journey from the small town of Stary Sambor (­today Staryi Sambir in Ukraine) to Lwów and offered to hide her on the “Aryan side”. He also brought to Lwów her young niece Itta Keller (born in Lwów in 1939) ­after her parents ­were murdered. As a result of their relationship—likely ­based on barter—­Fajga became pregnant and in December 1943 gave birth to Kobyłko’s son Adam. Although his parents ­were not formally married, the child was baptized and registered by the local Catholic priest as the child of Tadeusz and Maria Kobyłko. ­After liberation in August 1944, they made the decision to register as a married ­couple in the city’s vital rec­ords. With two ­children, they moved to Bytom, along with thousands of Polish and Polish Jewish repatriates. But in August 1946, this young Jewish w ­ oman de­cided to leave her husband and began her long journey that ended in Palestine, taking along both young ­children.62 On her way to Palestine, Fajga wrote to Tadeusz regularly. In her heart-­wrenching letters, she tried to reason with him and explain her decision, ultimately revealing her despair during the war, which is what made the marriage pos­si­ble in the first place. In one of her letters, written in July 1947 in Marseille, France, she implores him, “Please try to understand me at least now, b ­ ecause if you understood me, you would not have treated me the way you did. I wanted to be every­t hing to you, but I was nothing. Can you try to comprehend how a ­woman feels when she is at her husband’s mercy?” 63 She reminds him of their differences in age, background, and education. Although she does not mention a difference in social class, this may have also been the case. Indeed, she was raised in a traditional middle-­class Jewish ­family.64 She writes of her gratitude but also acknowledges that it was only the war that brought them together. Fajga’s account reflects the emotional turmoil of the aftermath of the Holocaust for Jewish survivors, who faced many vital questions about their immediate f­ uture; they had to rebuild their personal and communal lives, while coming to terms with the scope of loss, seeking relatives and justice, and reclaiming property. But it also sheds light on the question of war­time surrogate families, which in the Kobyłkos’ case turned into a legally recognized marriage with two ­children. In 1946, she de­cided that from her perspective this f­ amily was no longer v­ iable. Many more testimonies indicate that Jewish men and ­women faced complex decisions ­after the war about staying in relationships that often defied prewar norms in the Jewish community.65 These bonds w ­ ere based on shared traumatic experiences and—in the case of Jewish w ­ omen such as Sonia Katzman (Elżbieta Żak) and Fajga Ginsburg (Maria Kobyłko)—­were fortified by a sense of de­pen­dency and gratitude to the men who had played a crucial role in their survival. Although we do not have insights into their most intimate musings, we can still glean from testimonies,

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diaries, memoirs, and oral interviews how survivors coped with war­time relations ­during the war and after liberation.

Conclusions In ghettos, in camps, and in hiding, biological f­amily networks played a central role for both nuclear and extended families: parents, siblings, and cousins strug­ gled to provide emotional and material assistance to one another and seek rescue together. Although the “camp s­ ister” paradigm is impor­tant, it does not adequately explain the many other scenarios of surrogate ­family relationships in hiding: surrogate parents, surrogate spouses, and surrogate siblings. Some of t­ hese relationships also involved non-­Jews, further complicating not only notions of a traditional Jewish f­ amily to include non-­Jews who played a role in saving Jewish lives but also our understanding of the Righ­teous Among the Nations. The definition of Righ­ teous Among the Nations a­ dopted by Yad Vashem excludes ­family members; that is, biological and Jewish blood relations. A close reading of Jewish testimonies pertaining to hiding suggests that surrogate families played a key role in the daily lives of Jews who attempted to pass as non-­Jews or who went under­ground. As their f­ amily members ­were murdered, surrogate relationships strug­gled to fill the emotional void and to provide pragmatic assistance. In both urban and rural settings, ­t hese new bonds offered companionship, material aid, and emotional support. For Jewish ­children and adults, relationships formed in hiding and while passing as non-­Jews increased the chances of survival. When surrogate families included non-­Jews, t­hese bonds and networks could prove particularly lifesaving. The non-­Jews with whom they became involved had the resources to include them in larger hiding parties or provide them with cover on the “Aryan side”. ­These new bonds included stepping into the role of murdered spouses, parents, c­ hildren, and siblings; taking on responsibility; sharing and providing resources such as food and money; and providing a degree of protection, sexual relations, and emotional comfort. Lit­er­a­ture on family-­like bonds in camps has tended to focus on w ­ omen, suggesting implicitly that ­women had a par­tic­u­lar capacity for bonding as camp ­sisters. But recent scholarship has raised questions about how unique ­these strategies ­were among female inmates.66 Moreover, scholars have questioned this perception, pointing to the fact that the ­family and responsibility for a ­family member in the camp w ­ ere also perceived as burdens.67 ­These new perspectives can point to a productive way of approaching the survival strategies of Jews in hiding. One could focus on ­women when analyzing surrogate families and explore the ways ­women functioned as surrogate m ­ others, sisters, and how they became surrogate wives. However, as this chapter suggests, men in hiding seemed to have used similar coping strategies when forging surrogate familial bonds. Still, just as gender influenced Jewish be­hav­ior in the camps, so it ­shaped the experiences of Jewish men and ­women in hiding and how they implemented ­t hose strategies.

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From reading personal accounts on new family-­like bonds forged during the Holocaust, several patterns emerge. First, survivors seldom elaborated on the nature of the surrogate relations, even when we can assume that bonds ­were formed. Second, bonds that replaced f­amily members seem to have been forged between individuals who had some preexisting relationship. ­There appear to be more accounts of surrogate families forged by w ­ omen and about w ­ omen—as s­ isters, ­mothers, or spouses. In addition to personal relations coming across as more impor­tant to ­women, the men seem to have moved around a lot, whereas ­women may have been more stationary. Alternatively, perhaps men simply did not write about close male bonding relationships. The Holocaust thwarted ­family and social ties, forcing ­people to make difficult choices without knowing their consequences. Th ­ ese accounts of surrogate families reveal to us the tension between intimacy and fear, trust and distrust. Inevitably, when reconstructing surrogate families, we face the limitations of ego-­documents: testimonies, diaries, and memoirs seldom elaborate on the precise nature of t­ hese relationships, possibly conditioned by their gendered notions of what constituted normative be­hav­ior. It is up to the historian to bring ­these fragments to light and offer a careful reading of what they may tell us about support networks that grew beyond ­family networks and traditional relationships. By studying surrogate families, we gain a glimpse not only into the daily lives of Jewish men, ­women, and ­children but also into the universe of their emotions. The anguish of their strug­ gle for survival was also reflected in a sense of powerlessness and loneliness. Surrogate families guarded them against disorienting grief and preserved their sense of self. Last but not least, in a close reading, sometimes between the lines, testimonies about nonbiological kinship allow us to better understand the contours of gender and gender roles in Jewish families.

chapter 5

v

Siblings in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath in France and the United States Rethinking the “Holocaust Orphan”? Laura Hobson Faure

Examining the f­ amily as a central f­ actor in Jewish decision making during the Holocaust leads naturally to questioning how siblings faced Nazi persecution and survival. Although the historical lit­er­a­ture has considered families in the ghettos and camps, ­little attention has been paid to families outside ­t hese extreme environments, and even less consideration has been given to siblings as surviving ­family units.1 Indeed, we tend to consider surviving “orphans” as individual cases, and if the child or “Holocaust orphan” is now an established figure in Holocaust history and repre­sen­ta­tion, his or her “aloneness” is often taken as a given. The notion of the “Holocaust orphan” was central to Jewish discourses on post-­Holocaust reconstruction. In Eu­ro­pean Jewish communities, helping Holocaust orphans became a collective task, b ­ ecause ­t hese ­children w ­ ere assumed to be completely alone, as well as malleable material for rebuilding the Jewish ­f uture.2 Our image of Holocaust orphans is also s­ haped by the individualized nature of Holocaust testimony, which has treated survivors as individual subjects, not as members of groups or families.3 It is further linked to how socie­ties, especially American society, have privileged the child as the primary vector of Holocaust repre­sen­ta­t ion.4 ­These ­factors have largely oversimplified our image of c­ hildren’s experiences during the Holocaust and its long aftermath. This chapter, based on oral history interviews, orga­nizational case files, and private and orga­nizational archives, proposes a more complex vision by focusing on one pair of siblings, the Z. s­ isters, who ­were expulsed with their parents from the Palatinate region to the Gurs internment camp in southern France in October 1940. The s­ isters survived the entire World War II period in France and ­later emigrated to the United States.5 The theme of separation and staying together guides my 103

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analy­sis of their past, first by questioning their separation from their parents in war­time France and then by looking at their postwar lives in the United States. My primary goal is to understand what value the c­ hildren, parents, and caretakers placed on keeping this ­family together. Fi­nally, I address the con­temporary period and how each sibling has approached her past. Why did some individuals become “Holocaust survivor activists” in the con­temporary United States, whereas ­others preferred to leave the past in the past? I argue that t­ hese Holocaust orphans w ­ ere not entirely alone. Even if they had lost their parents, surviving siblings did indeed rebuild their drastically reconfigured families. Two individuals do not constitute a representative sample. However, the microhistory approach sheds new light on the long-­term effects of persecution and rescue on Jewish c­ hildren and families by highlighting the dynamic pro­cesses that form meaning and incite action.6 This detailed approach, over a long period of time and in transnational perspective, highlights impor­tant differences in the practices of Jewish welfare organ­izations. Furthermore, it reveals impor­tant differences in how surviving siblings approach and interact with their pasts, suggesting a link between war­time and postwar experiences and ­later memory work. It is in­ter­est­ ing to note that I did not initially set out to study siblings in the Holocaust. This topic emerged from my research on the migrations of Jewish ­children from France to the United States during and a­ fter World War II.7 Through oral history interviews, I soon realized that this was an impor­tant theme to t­ hose I was studying. For ­t hose I interviewed, siblings formed a precious form of social support and source of comparison.8

Separation from Parents and War­time Experiences in France Lea and Rachel Z. ­were born in Mannheim and Walldürn, in 1937 and 1939, respectively, into a religious ­family. Their f­ather was a traveling salesman. On October 22, 1940, the f­ amily was expulsed to the Gurs internment camp along with the rest of the Jews of the Palatinate region.9 Once in Gurs, the men ­were separated from the ­women. Some 500 ­children u ­ nder the age of 15 ­were interned ­t here in January 1941.10 The Union OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, OSE) and other humanitarian organ­izations fought to evacuate young ­children, and in January 1941, Rachel and Lea w ­ ere sent to a Jewish nursery in Limoges, La Poupon11 nière. On arrival, Rachel, then only 15 months old, lost four of her teeth.12 According to a letter written a­ fter their arrival, 3-­year-­old Lea soon asked, “Now that I am ­doing better, can you bring me to my ­mother?”13 Rachel’s tooth loss and Lea’s piercing question provide rare insight on how the ­children, who ­were too young to produce written sources or even memories of their separation with their parents, experienced this event. According to their OSE case file, Lea and Rachel stayed at the nursery u ­ ntil it was closed in fall 1943; however, the details on the older s­ ister’s war­time placement are often contradictory. According to a letter from her parents, Lea was transferred to a f­ amily on May 1, 1942, having aged out of the nursery.14 Lea recalls being placed

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in a convent at that time, but her OSE case file instead states she was placed with a Christian ­family in Limoges.15 On September 7, 1942, Rachel was placed with a Christian ­family in a village near Châteauroux, where she recalls feeling safe and happy.16 In one entry, their OSE file states that the girls w ­ ere in the same Christian ­family, yet more evidence shows they ­were separated from 1942–1944. In their joint interview, Rachel recalled their reunion: This is what I remember, this l­ittle girl comes up the walkway holding a pear, and she’s walking t­ owards me, and right away I d ­ idn’t like her ­because she looked like me A, and B, she was ­going to take my one poupée [doll], I called her my YaYa. She was g­ oing to take it away from me, ­because that’s all I had, was my YaYa and a ­little carriage. . . . ​I ­didn’t like her right away. It took a while for us to like each other. B ­ ecause we ­were two years apart. 22 months.

Her ­sister added, “Plus, we ­didn’t know one another. . . . ​I first met her. . . . ​I just remember, I took a train, and they told me: ‘­You’re g­ oing to meet your s­ ister.’ I said: ‘Oh, what can I bring her?’ And they gave me a pear. I said: ‘Oh, good, I’ll bring her the pear.’ That’s all I remember coming.”17 The s­ isters recalled this event taking place when they w ­ ere age 8 and 6. They lived together in the Christian ­family, most likely ­until late 1945,18 when they ­were placed in an OSE home in the Paris region. A ­ fter two years, they w ­ ere transferred to a second OSE home where they stayed ­until 1951, when they emigrated to the United States. In this account of their war­t ime experiences, this ­family’s strategy is almost imperceptible: the forced nature of their expulsion from their home left l­ ittle room for displays of agency. Nonetheless, the girls’ parents provided the authorization to evacuate their c­ hildren from Gurs. The parents and u ­ ncles also corresponded with f­ amily members in the United States and described in detail how they w ­ ere coping with the separation from their c­ hildren. Just ­after the ­sisters w ­ ere removed from the internment camp, the ­children’s ­uncle wrote that their ­mother “believes that somehow she w ­ ill get to the home [where her d ­ aughters w ­ ere].”19 In April 1941, their ­mother wrote, “The dear c­ hildren have been in Limoges for three months. They are well and well taken care of, but missing them is terrible. They write positively but we are not with them. I would be the happiest of ­women if we had the dear ­children with us again.”20 In January 1942, she wrote, “From the dear c­ hildren, we have good news. Only dear Lea is homesick and cries that she wants dear Mama. That I can well imagine a­ fter such a long absence. Just imagine, in January, it is unhappily a year that we are separated from our dear good c­ hildren, and nobody can feel this pain for us.”21 Letters, in addition to their functions of maintaining a ­family connection and exchanging vital information, w ­ ere also a means for the parents to convince their relatives, now in the United States, of the urgency of their situation. The letters also document their attachment to their c­ hildren and may have helped them deal with this separation. Not all parents ­were able to cope: some requested their ­children to be returned to the internment camp. In the case of Lea and Rachel, the ability

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of their parents to endure separation helped save the c­ hildren’s lives. ­Those who remained in the camp w ­ ere deported: the c­ hildren’s two ­uncles w ­ ere deported to Auschwitz in August 1942. and their parents, David and Lydia Z., w ­ ere sent ­t here on November 4, 1942, on convoy 40.22

Departures and Arrivals: The Immediate Postwar Period As orphans, the Z. s­ isters’ postwar f­ uture was open to debate, and their case exemplifies the dif­fer­ent values and practices of French and U.S. Jewish social ser­v ice agencies. In France, where persecution had blurred the lines between po­liti­cal engagement and social work, Jewish social workers often saw themselves as replacing missing parents. In the postwar emergency period, French Jewish priorities ­were about finding food, shoes, and clothing for the ­children and locating the Jewish ­children who had been living as part of Christian families. French social workers placed a ­great value on ­family and sought to re­unite the remnants of families or create new ones for their wards.23 U.S. social welfare practices contrasted sharply with ­t hose practiced by the OSE in France. In the United States, professional distance had long been seen as essential to the fair, “scientific” evaluation of a social case. Emotions and compassion w ­ ere associated with outdated charitable practices.24 The U.S. social work agency that oversaw the care of unaccompanied Jewish c­ hildren, the German Jewish C ­ hildren’s Aid (­after 1941 known as Eu­ro­pean Jewish C ­ hildren’s Aid; EJCA) often separated siblings, placing them in dif­fer­ent foster homes.25 This is especially surprising given the preference for f­ amily placements over institutionalization that was then predominant in the United States.26 If ­children had acquired the right to a (foster) ­family, how ­were separations with siblings justified? How w ­ ere they experienced by the c­ hildren? Before answering ­t hese questions, it is impor­tant to understand the par­tic­u ­lar circumstances that made pos­si­ble the emigration of Lea and Rachel Z. to the United States. At the end of the war, Lea and Rachel w ­ ere transferred from their Christian foster ­family in the center of France to an OSE group home in the Paris region; they ­later moved into a religious group home, also run by OSE, in keeping with their parent’s Orthodoxy. OSE social workers then set out to reconstitute a ­family for them. It was soon learned that the c­ hildren’s parents had been deported and murdered, but that the s­ isters had surviving ­family members living in New York: a maternal aunt and a paternal ­uncle. The paternal ­uncle showed ­great interest in the c­ hildren and provided an affidavit for the girls to emigrate to the United States.27 However, he too was in a fragile situation. As a German refugee, he was struggling to make a living, and his En­glish was ­limited. In addition, the u ­ ncle’s ­family of three was also providing lodging to his wife’s ­mother and ­brother in their small home and, at times, had to ask for financial help from other ­family members in the United States. In light of this situation, the u ­ ncle told the American Committee of OSE in 1947 he could take one ­sister, but not both.28 Four years ­later, ­t hings had changed. According to a U.S. social worker who knew the case, the u ­ ncle’s

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interest in the girls was genuine and he could not imagine their being separated, but at that time he was unable to take e­ ither one.29 In 1947, OSE in France set out to find an adoptive ­family for both ­sisters, ­because it judged that it would be “most unsocial to separate the two ­sisters who are very fond of each other.”30 A first ­family, identified by the ­uncle and based in the United States, showed interest in adopting the ­children in 1947, but required extensive evaluations of their health and intelligence. They ­were also concerned about the role the u ­ ncle would play in the c­ hildren’s lives.31 Indeed, if the war had created orphans now eligible for adoption, potential adoptive parents displayed ­little tolerance for ­children who w ­ ere considered damaged by war. This first adoption attempt fell 32 through. A second adoptive ­family, also based in the United States, quickly surfaced.33 This ­family met the girls in late August 1947 when they took them around Paris, creating an occasion so memorable that Rachel still has the photos of that day in her ­album.34 The f­ amily de­cided to adopt the girls, provided an affidavit, and began preparing for their arrival. However, right before their departure from France, their ­uncle categorically refused to permit the adoption.35 OSE continued to plead with him, arguing that it would be a “moral crime to separate the two ­sisters who are very attached to each other.”36 In April 1948, the ­uncle fi­nally agreed to the princi­ ple of adoption, but preferred the adoptive f­ amily to be American.37 It appears that this adoptive f­ amily, although living in New York, was possibly French or Eastern Eu­ro­pean, a fact that displeased the ­uncle and caused this option to fall through. OSE kept trying to find an adoptive f­ amily for the girls and, in 1949, brought two ­women who w ­ ere interested in adoption to the girls’ c­ hildren’s home. The c­ hildren put on a show to impress the ­women and another American c­ ouple who ­were also looking to adopt. According to the OSE, “the two Z. girls w ­ ere at their best, they ­were well dressed and participated in the show.” The OSE social worker remained pessimistic, nonetheless, in light of the pickiness of potential adoptive parents: “It ­will be difficult to plan an adoption of ­t hese girls by ­people from abroad. . . . ​Visitors who come from abroad usually are wealthy and for the most part, quite cultured, and one can see right away that neither one or the other [of the girls] are destined for an intellectual c­ areer.”38 This anecdote speaks volumes on c­ hildren’s hopes for ­family, as well as the postwar power dynamics between American and Eu­ro­pean Jews that led to escorted shopping trips for ­children. Such dynamics, I have argued elsewhere, deeply s­ haped ­children’s lives.39 The c­ hildren ­were stuck between a possessive ­uncle, unable to care for the girls but unwilling to relinquish his rights, and choosy adoptive parents with no concept of the effects of trauma on child development.40 To decide the c­ hildren’s fate, a legally binding commission (commission de l’enfance) was held in February 1950.41 In the meantime, in the United States, the ­children’s u ­ ncle continued receiving help from his local Jewish social ser­v ice agency, which encouraged him to place the ­children with the Eu­ro­pean Jewish ­Children’s Aid (EJCA), the central organ­ization responsible for overseeing the care of unaccompanied minors in the U.S. Jewish

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community. This solution was encouraged by a JDC staff member who had attended the commission hearing in Paris; it was eventually approved by OSE.42 It was de­cided that the ­children “would join their ­Uncle ­t here who would take care of them together with the EJCA.” 43 ­After this decision was made, it was amended: the EJCA would be solely responsible for organ­izing the care for the c­ hildren.44 It is unclear to what extent OSE knew about this change in authority and communicated it to the ­children. To this day, the girls insist they ­were told they would be living with their aunt and ­uncle.45 American social workers, working with the u ­ ncle, de­cided it would be better for him not to receive the girls at the boat; they felt not seeing him would facilitate the girls’ ac­cep­tance of their situation. And so, on arrival in 1951 the girls ­were greeted by Lotte Marcuse, the EJCA placement director, a seasoned social worker with a very clear idea of her profession and the distance it required.46 Marcuse described the scene in a letter: They ­were a sorry sight when they came down the gangplank, Lea crying for all she was worth—­and keeping it up for an hour and a half—­and Rachel completely immobilized, listening, but not responding in any way. I ­don’t know which was worse, but through my helper’s excellent work, we ­were able to get them into the station wagon. . . . ​If you try to picture for yourself the coming into port on a day on which you c­ ouldn’t see any of the buildings, on which it snowed and stormed, . . . ​t hen you would feel with us that it ­couldn’t have been a worse day and a worse reception. Lea screamed her head off ­because she said she never wanted to leave France and she only did it ­because she was persuaded her ­uncle wanted her. Now since her u ­ ncle was in New York, why d ­ idn’t we let her go t­ here? It is quite pos­si­ble that the agency abroad [OSE] tried to explain all of this to them, but that Lea just ­didn’t accept it, but it is also not impossible that they ­didn’t even make the attempt ­because they ­were afraid that they would then refuse to go altogether.47

This letter shows the U.S. social worker assumed the OSE knew, yet intentionally hid this information in order to get rid of the ­children. However, the French agency showed no indication of wanting to force the girls’ emigration. By 1951, EJCA was an experienced organ­ization that had already resettled about 250 ­children who had been ­under the auspices of the OSE in France.48 Marcuse therefore had a clear idea of what would work best for the girls’ first placement: a group setting. This was not ­because she favored collective placements. On the contrary, Marcuse preferred ­family placements and sought to avoid the pitfalls that could sabotage them: Knowing that c­ hildren from France have a particularly difficult time to accept ­people and conditions in the United States and are suffering from home sickness for months ­a fter their arrival, furthermore that they tell every­body they meet how they hate it h ­ ere, we have long ago de­cided that it is much better to accept ­t hese ­children, as well as displaced ­children from any one country, into

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a small institution unit in which the staff can accept all ­these expressions of their unhappiness and dislike and where the c­ hildren, b ­ ecause they can express anything they wish, can gradually work out their unhappiness about the change.49

Marcuse also planned on introducing the girls to another set of French c­ hildren who had experienced a similar disappointment with their relatives and ­were now living in an institutional setting. The Z. s­ isters were placed together in the same collective home. If current standards might frame Marcuse as insensitive, her approach did take into account the need for ­children to express their emotions, as well as the difficulty of foster parents in understanding the ­children’s expressions of emotion. Her plan paid off: in 1951 the ­sisters wrote to Madame Masour, their primary OSE caseworker, in phonetic French, “We are now in a ­children’s home but it’s very good.”50 This initial group placement would lead, however, to the separation of the ­sisters. Marcuse was clear from the beginning: “It is understood that if ­t hese girls can accept a new set of parents, that ­every effort would be made to place them in permanent homes, possibly even with a f­ uture to adoption. . . . ​I made this plan, not ­because, but in spite of the fact that t­ hese girls have relatives in and around New York.”51 This strange formula, “not b ­ ecause, but in spite of” the relatives, shows the negative view this American social worker held of the c­ hildren’s extended f­amily, despite her agency’s pro-­family placement policy. Unlike the French social workers, who strove to reunify Jewish families, American social workers, perhaps ­because of so many failed placements, saw remaining f­ amily members as potential barriers to stable foster care placements and, at best, a headache.52 Just before the c­ hildren’s arrival in the United States, their maternal aunt offered to take them in, to the seemingly ­great annoyance of Marcuse: Mrs. R. came to see me this morning. She is the maternal aunt, and she wept a ready tear before she had sat down. She must care for t­ hese youngsters. What does she know about them: she saw the older one when she was a year old; she had never in ­these years since liberation, written a line to them though she knew they w ­ ere in agency care: actually she did not know where they w ­ ere, and her ­daughter foolish [sic] let out that they thought they might have been h ­ ere for some time past. . . . ​I asked how they proposed to care for them and found that what they ­really wanted was to have money for one of their rooms which they now find difficult to rent, and which the ­children could occupy. . . . ​Let us take our time before we introduce this sorry ­woman into the lives of ­t hose girls.53

Placing themselves between the child and their extended ­family, the social workers attempted to protect the ­children and facilitate their own placement efforts, at the expense of reunification. Most significantly, the EJCA and the OSE differed in the value they placed on keeping siblings together. ­After roughly one year, the ­sisters ­were placed separately in a series of foster families.54 Lea expressed pragmatism when asked, in our 2015

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interview, about her separation from her s­ ister: “First of all, I understood that it was very difficult to have a ­family to want two ­children. Most families d ­ idn’t.”55 She was placed in the same city as her ­sister, with a ­woman whose nephew, living downstairs, continually made unwanted advances. Lea recalled, “I told the social worker ‘I want to leave.’ And I remember ­t here was this . . . ​her nephew was living downstairs and he was ­after me. I was fourteen, you know, he sort of made overt motions that he liked to see me. I said ‘No, I d ­ on’t want to be with him.’ ”56 ­After six or seven months, Lea was transferred to a new placement. However, this placement did not work out ­either. According to her ­sister Rachel, the foster ­father was jealous of the fact that his wife was devoting her all of her attention to Lea. The ­family asked Lea to leave. Lea seems to have internalized the idea that she did something wrong: “I did a foolish t­hing, like I would get out of the shower, and use powder, and put powder on the [floor].”57 She was then placed in a ­family in a nearby town, with three boys. She recalls this placement with sarcasm: “And I said, ‘Sure they want me. I’m ­going to be the babysitter and watch over them.’ Which I was.”58 She stayed for three years. ­After high school, she de­cided to attend nursing school and get married. While planning her wedding, she returned to live with her second foster ­mother, who became jealous that Lea was not more available and asked her to leave again. Fi­nally, Lea was taken in by her ­f uture husband’s ­family, putting an end to her foster care. Rachel took a dif­fer­ent point of view on her separation with her s­ ister, claiming that she was the one who chose to be separated: “I said I d ­ idn’t want to live with 59 Lea. I never lived with Lea.” Rachel’s first placement was with a ­family with a ­daughter, with whom she did not get along. She asked to leave, and a­ fter two years, she was placed in a ­family with two boys. She liked this placement better, and it seemed to have lasted throughout high school. At this point, Rachel knew she wanted to attend college and asked to “go somewhere ­else but not be on my own completely.” 60 She was placed in a group home called the Girls Club and attended Stern College, where she earned a degree in French lit­er­a­ture.

Engaging with the Past: A F ­ amily Affair? One of the most surprising ele­ments of my research on unaccompanied child refugees was that, although I asked to interview siblings individually, in three cases they came to the interview together with their siblings—­without my prompting. A second pattern quickly became clear: in all three cases, one sibling was extremely active in Holocaust “memory work,” 61 whereas the other seemed to want to keep the past in the past. Some historians have argued that key events, such as the Eichmann trial and the airing of the tele­vi­sion miniseries Holocaust, made the Holocaust a public event and facilitated the entry of Holocaust survivors into the public sphere; ­others have posited that Holocaust consciousness was t­ here all along.62 Sociologist Arlene Stein has recently argued that a unique set of ­factors in U.S. society in the 1970s played an equally impor­tant role in facilitating the emergence of a collective survivor iden-

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tity and the “listening space” their narratives required. For Stein, the rise of the counterculture and multiculturalism encouraged Jews to voice their identities more assertively, while the second-­wave feminist movement and the rise of therapeutic culture encouraged individuals to “master . . . ​trauma by speaking about it with o ­ thers”  63 through support groups, therapy, and public testimony. The study of sibling survivors provides an excellent opportunity to understand why some individuals who experienced the Holocaust ­later embraced that experience publicly, whereas o ­ thers chose a more discreet role. Stein notes, “While cultural contexts frame individual experience, we respond in varied ways. . . . ​Even within the same ­family, t­ here is a ­great deal of variation: for some individuals, this traumatic legacy is highly salient; for other, it is less so . . . ​dif­fer­ent families have dif­fer­ent emotional economies, and we pro­cess our experiences in individual ways.” 64 Psychologist Dina Wardi goes one step further in her book Memorial Candles. She argues that, for survivors and their families, remembering the past is not a “­family affair” and is usually assigned to one specific sibling. She explains that survivor parents are determinant in this pro­cess.65 If the Z. siblings—­who lost their parents at a very young age and are survivors in their own right—­confirm some of Wardi’s observations, what explained each one’s approach to the past? Was it r­ eally only a m ­ atter of personality forged in the f­amily setting? How did their experiences shape the ­sisters’ attitudes? Did separation and placement during and ­after the war influence their very dif­fer­ent approaches to their past? The case of the Z. ­sisters raises but does not answer such questions. Rachel, the younger one, has been active in Holocaust survivor groups since the early 1980s; she responded to an email sent out describing my research, stating she and her ­sister would like to meet with me.66 The s­ isters arrived dressed identically in striped shirts and shared the same wide-­set eyes and easy smiles. But their similarities ­stopped ­there. Rachel took the lead in our interview, whereas Lea, the older ­sister, who was less sure of the facts, often deferred to her younger ­sister’s knowledge. Rachel was clearly in charge of the ­family archive. She had obtained the documents on their placement history from the EJCA archives and assembled a photo a­ lbum of their past. OSE rec­ords provided a clearer version of Rachel’s history than of Lea’s experiences during the war. Lea’s memory of being in a convent during the war is not documented in her OSE file, and this lack of clarity on her war­time placement history shrouds her past in doubt, diminishing her confidence in her own memories. But this is not the only difference between the ­sisters. Both ­sisters experienced problematic placements on arrival in the United States. Yet the older s­ ister Lea clearly had a more difficult time in her three consecutive placements, whereas Rachel had only two placements,67 was not a victim of sexual advances or exploitation, and chose to terminate each of her placements. So one could state that Rachel, the “memory worker,” had an easier time in foster care. But something ­else explains the difference between the ­sisters: Rachel, while at the Girls Club, learned about a psychiatrist who might be able to help her. She was told she could not see the psychiatrist while at the Girls Club, but six months ­after

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Rachel moved out, she began therapy. She told me, “But ­really, it was therapy that ­really got me together. . . . ​She [Lea] ­won’t [go]. She [Lea] said, she said: ‘No, I go folk dancing.’ ” 68 So one s­ ister underwent therapy, while the other one did not seek out this kind of help. The s­ isters spent part of the interview discussing why. As an explanation, Lea recounted her path t­ oward marriage: “And that’s how I became [a wife]. I d ­ idn’t 69 want to spend my money seeing a therapist.”  Her ­sister Rachel countered this argument by emphasizing their dif­fer­ent experiences: “I mean, you ­didn’t go to, you ­d idn’t go to the Girls Club. I mean, we took dif­fer­ent ­t hings. So you ­were involved with, in your home, with the ­children, it was a dif­fer­ent ­t hing.”70 Unlike her older s­ ister, Rachel remained single for many years, marrying ­later in life and never had c­ hildren of her own. Dif­fer­ent placement experiences led one s­ ister to nursing school and marriage, whereas the other received a university education and therapy. Yet even before g­ oing to therapy, Rachel had de­cided to confront her past. Armed with a camera that her ­sister gave her, she returned to Eu­rope in 1961 on her way to Israel. Ten years a­ fter her departure, she sought out the OSE, stating, “You d ­ on’t realize what plea­sure it would give me to renew t­ hese ­people’s friendships a­ fter such a long separation. . . . ​Thank you for any help that you give me with this strange request.”71 ­After France she went to Germany, where she returned to her village, twenty-­one years ­after her expulsion. In Walldürn, she was greeted warmly by the local inhabitants, as she wrote in 2014: “It was as if a celebrity had come to Walldürn. They asked me if I would return to their town. I told them: I ­didn’t think so. . . . ​In retrospect, thinking about that extraordinary day . . . ​, I accomplished something for myself: I went back ­there to find more about my past—­and I succeeded. But the price I paid, in ­mental and physical anguish, was beyond mea­sure.”72 It was on her return to the United States from this trip that Rachel sought therapy. Rachel’s confrontation with her past did not stop t­ here: in the late 1960s she returned to see the c­ ouple who hid her in France; they gave her the photos that document part of her childhood. Thanks to Rachel, the ­couple was granted Yad Vashem’s Righ­teous Among the Nations medal in 1971.73 On a ­later trip to France, she learned of Serge Klarsfeld’s memorial book; reading it gave her the ability to confront her parents’ deaths: “most impor­tant to me about finding this book and finding the names of my parents and relatives was that I knew, with certainty, they ­were gone. I was able to place them in time. I could say ‘Kaddish’ for my parents. I knew they ­were real.”74 Active in Holocaust survivor groups since the early 1980s, Rachel has chosen the path of public testimony. Her ­sister’s more reserved approach is not due to indifference: ­after all, Lea did provide her ­sister with the camera that Rachel used to document her return to Germany.75 When asked about her past, Lea stated that she did not have as much of a relationship to it: “I ­don’t go back. I have not gone to the Hidden ­Children [conferences]. I have not gone to any . . . ​I, you know, I thought that, maybe if Rachel would have told me about ­going to Germany, maybe I would have. But I had the ­children. I had the husband, so, I just . . . ​my life ­wasn’t that easy to do.”76 Address-

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ing her s­ister, she said, “So . . . ​perhaps I’m a l­ittle envious that you went, you know. But I d ­ idn’t have the opportunity to go back.”77 In a l­ ater conversation, a­ fter having read a draft of this chapter, Lea asked me to emphasize the fact that she ­really did care about her past, but that f­amily obligations gave her ­little time to explore it: “I d ­ idn’t have the freedom that Rachel had, or the time. I had to be home at a certain time. It’s not that easy. I had more obligations than Rachel.”78 Indeed, my image of Rachel as the only “memory worker” proved too hastily drawn. In our conversations, Lea explained that she was the one who managed to collect the ­family correspondence from their u ­ ncle, which Rachel, in turn, had translated. Another fact, not mentioned by the ­sisters, emerged in the course of this research: in the summer of 1977, Lea did manage to return to France and visited OSE. On her return to the United States, Lea wrote to OSE in Paris and asked that she be able to see her file. In May 1978, she wrote again, explaining she was unable to write e­ arlier ­because of the demands of her job, her c­ hildren, preparing for Passover, and taking care of her home. But she still made room for the past. Writing in French, she asked, “How did we get from Germany to France? Who brought us (my ­sister and me) from Germany to France? Did we live in a camp? How w ­ ere we saved from the Germans? Also, when ­were we put u ­ nder the care of OSE?”79 Together, but with Rachel taking the lead, the ­sisters have discovered the answers to t­ hese impor­tant questions. Their case suggests that the past is indeed a “foreign country.” 80 Access is gained more easily by some than by o ­ thers, and not every­one wants to travel ­t here. A difficult placement history led to early marriage for Lea; marriage and c­ hildren allowed her a means to reconstruct a ­family but gave her ­little time and fewer resources to reconstruct her past. In her adult years, Rachel sought the answers to questions on behalf of both herself and her ­sister to create a ­family narrative. Such dif­fer­ent approaches suggest a tacit division of the l­abor of memory work and the continuity of this Jewish ­family. Families, even in times of peace, are delicate entities. Jewish f­ amily life in the interwar period has often been idealized, especially when evoked in retrospect in Holocaust testimony. Historians have tackled the “myth of the Jewish ­family,” pointing to the ­great diversity of Jewish ­family life in all periods.81 Nonetheless, ­little research has been done on Jewish families during and a­ fter the Holocaust in Western Eu­ro­pean and American contexts. Surviving c­ hildren are often not considered as members of families, even if siblings have not been entirely absent from con­ temporary repre­sen­ta­tions of the Holocaust. Dramatic reunion stories please the public and publishers im­mensely.82 Such stories mask the more banal and complex paths that Jewish individuals—­-­children and adults alike—­-­embarked on to keep families together during the war and to rekindle ties in its aftermath. Separation, deportation, and murder drastically reconfigured t­hese families.83 Putting the pieces of the puzzle back together was rarely pos­si­ble, but ­family life continued, albeit in multiple forms, with or without parents. Siblings, even when separated, sought each other out, reestablished bonds, and perpetuated the f­amily life and memory of their initial families. Or they did not.

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­Children may have taken ­great pains to maintain their families during and ­after the war, but they w ­ ere not fully in charge of making the decisions that ­shaped their ­family life. The ­children who w ­ ere the focus of this chapter ­were ­under the care of OSE in France. On arrival in the United States, they w ­ ere placed with foster families ­under the auspices of the Eu­ro­pean Jewish ­Children’s Aid. ­These organ­izations, we saw, held diverging views on what constituted proper care for the ­children and placed dif­fer­ent value on keeping families together. Migration from France to the United States therefore not only led to a new language, culture, and societal norms. For the Z. ­sisters and other ­children, it led to a confrontation with a new social system and its values. For ­these many reasons, thinking about the Jewish f­ amily in the Holocaust and its aftermath requires a reconsideration of the very definition of f­ amily, the role of the extended ­family, and what “­family life” means. Considering surviving siblings as Jewish families in the post-­Holocaust world builds on research on the Jewish ­family that sees the ­family as malleable, imperfect, divided or together and, most importantly, changing over time. Siblings, as Holocaust orphans, have very dif­ fer­ent approaches to the past and mourning their parents. Yet as we have seen in this detailed study of two s­ isters, some remained together even a­ fter their caretakers separated them. ­These Holocaust orphans ­were not alone in the universe but relating to one another—­creating a network of two—­and forming a ­family, the smallest unit that society offers for collective experiences.

chapter 6

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The Impact of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s Aid Strategy on the Lives of Jewish Families in Hungary, 1945–1949 Viktória Bányai

Postwar Hungary was home to one of the largest communities of Holocaust survivors—­roughly 141,000 Jews. This makes it understandable why it received exceptional attention and financial support from international Jewish aid organ­ izations. According to the bud­get data cited by Yehuda Bauer, in the period in question, between one-­fourth and one-­fifth of Eu­ro­pean aid sent by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) was directed to Hungary.1 It is one of the undeniable achievements of this aid operation that it managed to provide for the most elementary needs (food, clothing, and medical care) of the survivors, most of whom had been completely dispossessed. Scholars working on this period credit the fact that Holocaust survivors in the countries of Central and Eastern Eu­rope ­under Soviet occupation also survived the postwar years—­when they received only the most meager support from their respective states—to the efforts of the JDC and other Jewish organ­izations (e.g., the World Jewish Congress; WJC).2 Why was it, then, that this pro­cess went hand in hand with endless complaints on the part of many aid recipients? As we s­ hall see, t­ here ­were not only complaints—­ rightful or exaggerated—­voiced by t­ hose in need of aid but also criticism leveled against this scheme by local Jewish professionals who had some experience in social work. This chapter discusses to what extent (1) the aid effort of the JDC in Hungary took into account the special situation of the survivors in Hungary and (2) con­temporary criticism and suggestions had an impact on the functioning of the JDC. Which actors s­ haped the princi­ples and practice of aid provision? What 115

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impact did aid policy have on the life of the beneficiary families, with special regard to the parent–­child relationship? Before addressing t­ hese questions, however, it is useful to give a brief demographic overview of the Hungarian Holocaust survivor community, with a focus on three generations: ­children, parents, and grandparents. The data come from the national census of the Hungarian Section of the World Jewish Congress’s Statistical Department, which was also overseen by Hungarian state authorities. The WJC started taking the census in the summer of 1945, and it was completed in October 1946.3 To gauge the proportion of the losses, I use the official census data of 1941 for comparison.4 In 1945 Hungary, as in many other Eu­ro­pean countries, hardly any Jewish families w ­ ere left intact by the war. However, major differences can be seen in the losses experienced by three major groups within the community of Hungarian Holocaust survivors.5 The Jewish population of Budapest, which comprised 46 ­percent of Hungarian Jewry in 1941 (184,473 ­people) was forced into a ghetto but not deported. This ghettoization hardly meant complete safety for the Jewish population of the capital, but the number of deaths was considerably lower than in the provinces. Military ­labor ser­v ice killed two-­t hirds of men between the ages of 20 and 60 in this group, but almost half of the w ­ omen and c­ hildren survived.6 The highest survival rate, 69  ­percent, was found among the 60+ age group of Budapest Jews. From the perspective of the postwar ­family situation, this meant that at least grandparents w ­ ere available for many surviving c­ hildren. From the perspective of aid provision, it meant a high proportion of inactive adults, often with medical prob­lems.7 The 24,000 el­derly ­people counted in the census of 1946 constituted almost 25  ­percent of the remaining Jewish population of Budapest (96,500 ­people). Most of Hungarian Jewry outside Budapest was deported to Auschwitz in the spring and summer of 1944. In t­ hese communities, few survived in the ­under 14 and over 60 age groups—­namely, c­ hildren and grandparents. For w ­ omen, the losses ran to 64 ­percent in the 20–40 age group and 83 ­percent in the 40–60 age group. Of the men in the 20–60 age group in military ­labor ser­v ice brigades, about two-­ thirds died—­t he same proportion as t­ hose in Budapest. About 17,500 p ­ eople from the Hungarian Plains and from the Hajdúság region—­f rom the ghettos of Baja (Frankenstadt), Debrecen (Debrezin), Szeged (Szegedin, Seghedin), and Szolnok (Sollnock)—­were taken to Strasshof near Vienna and forced to work in local industrial and agricultural plants.8 In that community younger ­children and the el­derly had a higher rate of survival: all three generations often made it home together. Thus the age distribution of the provincial Jews in Hungary who w ­ ere not deported to Auschwitz was more even than among t­ hose sent to the killing camp: all three generations ­were pre­sent,9 although the total number of Jews in the provinces plummeted from 216,507 in 1941 to 47,124 in 1946. As ­t hese figures clearly demonstrate, a single statistic tells only part of the story: understanding the situation of postwar Hungarian Jewry requires drawing attention to a variety of f­ actors.

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“Collective Benefit Neurosis” For me, the year I spent at the Szenes [a home for girls aged 14–18] was even worse than the utter helplessness of the deportation.10 ­Others go home for Christmas [sic], while my ­mother says in her letter that she has no money for a train ticket and [that] I ­ought to be grateful to be ­here. . . . ​ My ­mother identifies with the role of the poverty-­stricken so much that it’s just a disgrace. . . . ​“You have overwhelming opportunities t­ here”—­she writes! While she is at the mercy of the next-­door neighbor, depending on their goodwill to hand her a jug of milk over the fence or a batch of freshly baked bread. ­Can’t she understand that I would much rather eat corn porridge at home than pasta with ground walnuts ­here?!11

­These quotes come from Mária Ember (1931–2001), a novelist and journalist born in the north of the Hungarian Plains, who was 13 when she was deported together with her m ­ other and ­sister to Strasshof in 1944. Mária (Ember is the f­ amily name) talks about the vicissitudes of this dramatic year and her ­mother’s very courageous conduct in her novel Hajtű-­kanyar (Hairpin Bend) published in 1974, illustrated with a few contemporaneous documents. Yet like many other m ­ others—­who had returned a­ fter the deportation to face the loss of all their belongings and the deaths of their husbands during military l­ abor service—­her ­mother broke down and sent her d ­ aughter to a c­ hildren’s home a­ fter the war ended. The author writes about her life t­ here in her novel published in 2002, El a faluból (Away from the Village). Thus, the picture painted by Mária Ember depicts a m ­ other unable to pull herself together and come to grips with the new situation. All but unfit to sustain her ­family, she is living on aid and charity. On the one hand, her teenage ­daughter’s physical needs are prob­ably being met (“You have overwhelming opportunities ­t here”), yet on the other hand she is abandoned to her trauma and torn further away from an already dismembered f­ amily. Similar dilemmas emerge in numerous other memoirs and recollections, both by c­ hildren from Budapest and the countryside. Two other examples illustrate the pain of c­ hildren torn from their surviving ­mothers a­ fter the war: I was very strongly attracted to Karcag [where his m ­ other lived]; I would have gladly come home to go to school ­t here, but I was only allowed to do that once, when I broke my arm. I’m not sure if I did it on purpose, so that I could go home for treatment.12 Soon I ended up in Budapest as well, in a ­children’s home in the 14th district. I was angry with my m ­ other for uprooting me from the renowned and respectable secondary school in Szeged. “I’m being trampled and even my child turns against me,” my m ­ other said. But I ­didn’t understand why she left Szeged, why we ­d idn’t have a flat, why we ­couldn’t live together, and why she kept talking about a long necklace and a bracelet with a spider-­shaped pendant.13

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­Needless to say, plenty of counterexamples to this pattern can be found; for instance, widowed m ­ others like that of another writer, Pál Bárdos (1936–2017), who supported a ­family of five (her two parents and two ­children) by sewing. It should also be taken into account that numerous ­children had lost all their relatives, including some whose identity was impossible to ascertain; therefore setting up ­children’s homes became an objective necessity. However, ­t hose who lost their entire f­amily ­were the minority among surviving ­children. The majority of residents of ­children’s home ­were Jewish ­children in Budapest who had not been deported and t­ hose who had been deported to Strasshof. Despite having lost many ­family members, t­ hese ­children usually had some surviving relatives. Although the 1946 census discussed ­earlier did provide data on the number of surviving ­children, such figures ­were often inaccurate. The f­ amily status of ­children was often hard to determine, b ­ ecause no reliable information was available about vanished parents and adoption procedures in pro­cess; we should keep t­ hese caveats in mind. The census taken by the World Jewish Congress in 1946 registered a total of 15,457 c­ hildren of Jewish religious background u ­ nder the age of 16 in Hungary: 4,428 c­ hildren in the countryside and 11,029 in Budapest.14 Among the provincial Jewish population, 12 ­percent of the c­ hildren ­were registered as orphaned and 30.4 ­percent as having lost one parent.15 As for the c­ hildren in Budapest, the same source refers to several censuses, which gave the proportion of orphans as 7–9 ­percent and almost 50 ­percent as having lost one parent in 1946. In other words, 57.6 ­percent of the tragically few provincial Jewish ­children who had survived the Holocaust had both parents compared to 42 ­percent in Budapest. In May 1946, JDC reported that of the 3,734 Jewish c­ hildren receiving daily care from the institutions it supported, about 2,900 ­were residents of ­children’s homes.16 In one of its publications, we find an even higher number of 3,500 in c­ hildren’s homes.17 We must ask why so many ­children, who had surviving ­family members, w ­ ere taken into institutionalized care. Who considered this as serving the ­children’s best interest and according to what princi­ples? The most impor­tant consideration for surviving parents—as seen in the quote from Mária Ember—­was ensuring that their c­ hildren ­were fed and clothed and lived in better circumstances than they would have at home, or at least so they hoped. The first winter ­after the war in 1945–1946 saw major food and fuel shortages in Budapest, which also resulted in much higher food prices than in the countryside. The registers of Jewish schools in Budapest clearly document that ­children ­were often absent, b ­ ecause they w ­ ere sent to stay with relatives or in c­ hildren’s homes in rural areas. However, in addition to the poor economic status of the Jews of Budapest and the entire country, the aid policies and preferences of the JDC also reinforced the placement of increasing numbers of ­children in residential care homes. From the protocols of the Hungarian Committee of JDC, we can retrace the proportions of support allocated to ­children living at home versus ­t hose who ­were institutionalized, based on aid shipments arriving in the country. On May 31, 1946, for example, a newly received shipment of 33,000 kilos of sugar and 24,000 packets of jam was to be distributed as follows: a ration of 1 kilo of sugar and 1 packet

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of jam was to be distributed per child living in institutionalized care, whereas ­t hose living with their families ­were entitled only to a half-­kilo of sugar.18 We find similar examples for canned milk, matzoh, shoes, and other aid items: typically it was a 1:2 ratio, to the advantage of ­t hose in ­children’s homes. The logic ­behind this allocation was based on the assumption that the other half of the food would be contributed by the relatives taking care of the non-­institutionalized ­children, even though ­t hese individuals often felt incapable of looking a­ fter their own needs. One of the most impor­tant ­factors that determined relatives’ decisions to send their c­ hildren to institutions was the educational opportunities that they wished to provide for their c­ hildren and that they felt institutional placement could better provide. Investment in an above-­average education was a characteristic feature of Jewish families in Hungary before the Holocaust.19 However, in the postwar years the dispossessed families who had lost their breadwinners ­were, in many cases, forced to send their ­children to work. Earning a place in a residential institution opened the path to secondary education, w ­ hether vocational or general, for the 14–18 age group. For Orthodox families residing in villages and small towns, where ­a fter the Shoah no possibility existed for providing a religious education locally, a ­children’s home could provide that as well. ­Because of a lack of rabbis and teachers of religion, not all Jewish ­children received even school-­based religious education, a compulsory ele­ment of the curriculum ­until September 1949. In the 1946–1947 school year, only eighty-­eight provincial congregations provided religious education in the country. ­Those ­children living in scattered communities therefore had to go without religious instruction.20 As we saw in the ­earlier quote, the teenage Mária Ember (and maybe the grownup novelist as well) thought that her ­mother, who “identified with the role of the poverty-­stricken,” found herself trapped in the predicament of dependence on social benefits and being cared for, even giving up the role of raising her c­ hildren. Dr. István Kulcsár (1901–1986), professor of neurophysiology and vice-­president of the Hungarian Zionist Association, described the m ­ ental state characteristic of the majority of Hungarian Jews in 1946 with a diagnosis originally intended for war veterans receiving aid: a form of “collective benefit neurosis.”21 He attributed it to the instinctive self-­protection of the traumatized soul that had lost all its self-­ confidence and self-­reliance. ­People suffering from this condition tended to make ends meet by living on charity and benefits, finding shelter in hospitals and charitable institutions. As did many of his contemporaries, Kulcsár thought that this attitude and be­hav­ior ­were created and perpetuated by the aid-­providing system of JDC, which failed to promote self-­sufficiency. He saw the potential solution in community experience and work, calling for “the organ­izing of industrial plants, agricultural units and ‘working homes’ instead of continuing to distribute alms, which only serves to perpetuate benefit neurosis.”22 Imre Heller, the head of the Work and Workshop Organ­i zation Department (Munka-­és Üzemszervező Csoport) of the JDC added some more specific points to this critique.23 His analy­sis pointed out that by autumn of 1946 the JDC had spent an insignificant amount of money—­compared to that spent on other programs—

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on restoring the livelihood of Holocaust survivors by replacing stolen or destroyed assets and helping them restart their money-­earning activities. It was indeed a smaller amount than the JDC spent on non-­Jewish charitable organ­izations and health care institutions, which amounted to 5 ­percent of the monthly bud­get, as mandated by the Hungarian government. In April 1946, ­a fter having disbursed financial aid in 253 cases, employment-­related support was cut, and in accordance with the specific request of the Eu­ro­pean chairman of the JDC, Dr. Joseph Schwartz, it was only reinstated a­ fter the appointment of two foreign commissioners (Noel Aranovici and Aaron Berkowitz). Although the Work and Workshop Organ­ization Department did support industrial plants and agricultural collectives with much larger sums, to a significant extent this actually meant financing the retraining and aliyah-­preparation sites of Zionist organ­izations. Helping widowed ­mothers reintegrate into the world of work was not a priority.24 The ­children’s homes run by Zionist organ­izations, in turn, ­were subject to complaints across the board.25 ­Here I only describe t­ hose complaints made by parents, which centered on their perception that the Zionist organ­izations in charge of the ­children’s homes regarded surviving parents as a kind of nuisance and tried to reduce their influence on their c­ hildren. For instance, having pointed out the positive side of the pedagogical work carried out by Zionist organ­izations, one ­mother, the w ­ idow of Rabbi Pál Vidor, summed up the attitude of Zionist educators t­ oward surviving parents: “It’s rather awkward that the ­children have ­these subjective relationships in their lives and it would be best to reduce the impact of t­ hese relationships to a minimum.”26 The two main areas where parental influence was seen as undesirable w ­ ere in imposing religious observance and trying to stop their c­ hildren from making aliyah. Another recurrent complaint held that ­t hese homes took in adolescents without the knowledge or, indeed, against the express w ­ ill of their parents and without official authorization to do so—­and t­ hese teen­agers ­were then made part of the Zionist movement and its illegal emigration efforts. Thus, postwar survivors w ­ ere aware of the extraordinary extent of the aid efforts that the JDC carried out in Hungary—­which was indeed among the largest ever in terms of the amount involved—­and their significance to ­people’s immediate survival. Yet many also clearly realized that in 1945–1946 this aid led to widespread dependence and helplessness, rather than regeneration and reconstruction. In the experience of many parents, c­ hildren’s homes functioned along the same lines: they undertook the care of ­children to make parents’ roles passive and distant, so that the c­ hildren’s homes had as much freedom as pos­si­ble to pursue their own ideological goals in their upbringing.

Alternative Suggestions Very soon a­ fter the JDC aid policies w ­ ere implemented, several alternative models ­were suggested that anticipated the pos­si­ble negative consequences of t­ hose policies. The earliest evidence of such plans found in the Hungarian documents of the JDC pertains to the recommendations of Géza Varsányi, who submitted them for

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approval in July 1945, barely a month ­after the Hungarian Committee of the JDC began to operate. ­These offered systematic and well-­considered answers to the prob­ lems of living conditions, including not only the pressing need for aid but also longer-­term educational needs and community building. Géza Varsányi, born in 1884, was already in his sixties at this time. He first worked as an elementary school teacher and then, from 1911, as a secondary school teacher of lit­er­a­ture, German, and history. At the same time, he played an active role in popularizing and adopting con­temporary Western Eu­ro­pean initiatives and best practices in the field of social work and community education. One of his articles, published in 1912, ­“People’s House, Settlement and Volksheim”, is still considered a valuable contribution. In it, he described three well-­run institutional models: Toynbee Hall in London as an example of the settlement movement and the Volksheim (­People’s Home) in Hamburg and Vienna. He emphasized that just giving charity would never bring about any long-­term positive change in the life of poor ­people. Such change was only pos­si­ble through a redirection in life strategies based on goal-­oriented learning and social work intervention. As deputy secretary for community culture of the first ­People’s Home in Budapest, he spent years trying to put this model into action. The P ­ eople’s House ran a f­ ree public library, or­ga­ nized courses and lectures, held theater per­for­mances, and followed the ideal of social education of the settlement model in its youth clubs. It also taught, for instance, illiterate soldiers to read and write during World War I. Varsányi’s ­career as a teacher and his participation in community life ­were both cut short following the Commune of 1919, when he was appointed head teacher by the revolutionary regime and was then immediately sacked by his municipal employer when the Commune came to an end. However, his broad experience in social work, community development, and child protection earned him a job in the Jewish community in the interwar years. Before World War II, he became secretary of the National Jewish Patronage Society. He was the editor and coauthor of a book published on its twenty-­fifth anniversary in 1936, Social Work in the Field of Child Protection. In a chapter titled “New Goals and New Methods in Social Work,” he cited commandments from the Bible to convince members of the Jewish community that the con­temporary practice of “charity” was demoralizing, irrational, and wasteful, ­because it turned ­people into beggars. He emphasized that just as the commandments of the Bible work ­toward a leveling of society, the aim of modern social work was to “stand p ­ eople on their feet and make further help unnecessary.”27 He also suggested that training of professional and volunteer social workers should be initiated, clearly seeing that ­after Hitler’s rise to power the feeling of solidarity would not be enough: ­there was a need for rational economic mea­ sures and planning. In 1945, he was transferred from the Patronage Society to the ­Children’s Department of the JDC. This outline of Varsányi’s ­career illustrates his unquestionable expertise and international experience in the field of c­ hildren’s protection, social work, and community development—­and also the fact that b ­ ecause of his age, if nothing ­else, he was a man of the “old world,” denied so fervently by young Zionist activists.

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In his alternative program submitted in July  1945, he described the orga­ nizational and staffing prob­lems of ­children’s homes as so unforgivable that “the Hungarian leaders of the JDC ­w ill have trou­ble answering to themselves and their well-­meaning American bosses.”28 The postwar period was indeed characterized by an uneven and even random allocation of aid—­dominated by “firefighting” rather than careful planning—­w ith ideological considerations often outweighing child protection princi­ples. This meant that the placement of the most at-­r isk groups—­those ­under the age of 6 and ­children with disabilities—­was the least settled issue, b ­ ecause they w ­ ere not among the target groups of Zionist movements. Varsányi summed up his views in the following statement: “despite the fact that the c­ hildren’s homes cost enormous sums to run . . . ​, they fail to produce positive results.”29 Thus, he considered the most urgent and impor­tant task to be to eliminate the system of ­children’s homes and to use the money spent on ­running t­ hese institutions to support the return of their residents to their own families.30 As he had always done, Varsányi was lobbying in 1945 for a more just and more rational allocation of financial resources. He looked at the situation of ­children within the wider context of f­ amily protection and social work. His proposed comprehensive system would include a network of ­family support ser­v ices made up of nurses, social workers, and educational counselors, as well as day care centers for ­children. The assistance provided to adults (mainly widowed ­mothers) would aim at strengthening their ability to earn a living by setting up production and distribution cooperatives and settlement-­like institutions of community education with a Zionist ideology. He ended his description of this program with the following words: “it is a ­matter of honor for Hungarian Jewry to switch from an unplanned ‘charity-­based’ economic support to an action program based on sound princi­ples of social politics and rational planning to consciously shape society.”31 He was convinced that the implementation of his scheme would begin within a few months. Instead, the system of residential homes grew dynamically u ­ ntil mid-1946, increasing the number of c­ hildren in institutional care from several hundred to about three thousand. Why w ­ ere both Varsányi, as head of the C ­ hildren’s Department, and Imre Heller, the head of the Work and Workshop Organ­ization Department, unable to carry out their programs of supporting and reconstructing Jewish families?

The Playing Field and Actors in Aid Provision Activity The answer, as always, is a complex one. It follows from the composition and inner dynamics of the Hungarian Committee of the JDC and the Hungarian national organ­ization, the National Jewish Relief Committee (Országos Zsidó Segítő Bizottság). During the early years of the postwar period, Zionists had a strong influence within both organ­izations, partly based on the moral capital they had accumulated by organ­izing illegal activities that saved ­people during the war. For example, László Révész (aka Perec Révész, 1916–2011), who had fled from Slovakia to

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Hungary, had worked in ­children’s homes u ­ nder the protection of the Red Cross during the German occupation and then was given the responsibility of overseeing the establishment of Zionist ­children’s homes financed by JDC.32 In May 1946 the Hungarian Committee of the JDC, a­ fter a long debate, de­cided to split the ­Children’s Protection Department into two—­Departments A and B—to provide two demarcated fields of action. Oversight of residential homes was assigned to László Révész, whereas Géza Varsányi became head of the department responsible for individual ­children living with their ­family members. The Zionist organ­izations that came to play such a prominent postwar role in organ­izing and heading the institutions for c­ hildren and young p ­ eople had played a much smaller part in Hungary in the interwar years. This was partly ­because laws ­under the Horthy regime hindered such activity, but it is also true that the Jewish communities of Hungary ­were not very open to Zionist ideas at the time. As the ­career of Varsányi illustrates, between the two world wars the institutional care of Jewish c­ hildren was or­ga­nized on the basis of local Jewish communities and organ­ izations. Some of the organ­izations involved in providing institutional care, such as the Girls’ and Boys’ Orphanage of the Pest Jewish Community or the Hungarian Jewish Crafts and Agricultural Union, carried on their activities a­ fter the war, even receiving funding from the JDC; yet the number of ­children in their care remained low in comparison with Zionist organ­izations. Even though ­these organ­ izations and Jewish communities had suitable facilities and a set of trained and experienced professionals, the JDC did not rely on their more traditional family-­ centered approach. This emphasis on institutional care was also ­shaped by the Hungarian communists, who w ­ ere gradually gaining power in the country; they ­were also gaining increased influence in the decision making of the Hungary Committee of the JDC. Initially, this also gave the Zionists an edge, however their interests chiefly lay in getting more and more p ­ eople to make aliyah—­especially young p ­ eople separated from the older generation. Helping ­people stabilize their lives in Hungary was not among their priorities.33 From 1945 onward, the functioning of the JDC in Hungary was also framed by requirements and conditions introduced by the Hungarian authorities.34 One such requirement was allocating 5 ­percent of its programmatic support to non-­Jewish proj­ects, the beneficiaries of which ­were not named by the JDC: it was, in effect, a form of special tax levied on the aid organ­ization that was not imposed by any other Eu­ro­pean country. From 1946 on, the Ministry of Welfare and the Interior Ministry also had the right to appoint one member each to the JDC Hungary Committee; once appointed, ­t hese members expressly strived to increase their influence. In 1946–1947, the JDC’s presence in the country was officially viewed as both eco­ nom­ically and socially beneficial, but it was still kept u ­ nder po­liti­cal supervision and control. When Frigyes Görög, who tried but failed to put a stop to this control, fi­nally resigned in February 1948, he did so as a direct result of communist pressure.35 In the increasingly tense atmosphere of the Cold War, Görög’s successor, the

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American Israel G. Jacobson, was banished from Hungary following allegations of Zionist espionage, and the significantly reduced aid operations w ­ ere fi­nally shut down in 1953. The leftist intellectuals who by then filled decision-­making positions in the country w ­ ere, similar to the Zionists, proponents of collective education. They considered the new-­fangled “progressive” institutions to be a better place to shape the new generation than their families, with their traditional ways. The pedagogical movements favoring individualism, which ­were on the rise in Western Eu­rope ­after the war as a counterpoint to fascism, had no support in Hungary.36 Some professionals working with the traumatized c­ hildren favored collective education, even for c­ hildren with surviving ­family members. One such professional was physician and child psychologist Dr. Margit Révész, who carried out a comprehensive observation of 226 war-­traumatized c­ hildren between May 1945 and June 1948, working as the on-­site psychologist of the Pax ­Children’s Home run by Lutheran pastor Gábor Sztehlo.37 She wrote that “an institution with several potential routes of education, representing vari­ous ways out of the crisis, is more suitable to solve the traumatic prob­lems of child war victims than a f­ amily, truncated even if it has lost none of its members.”38 Her observations on the therapeutic influence of the peer group w ­ ere in accord with the widely publicized experiences of Ernst Papanek (1900–1973), the Austrian-­born psychologist and socialist known for his work with refugee ­children during and ­after World War II. The few surviving c­ hildren became both symbols and assets of the entire Jewish community in Hungary. This might explain why even initiatives started by local Jewish communities focused more on collective than family-­based solutions. In 1945 and 1946, Jewish communities in Pécs (Fünfkirchen, Pečuj, Pečuh) and Győr (Raab, Jura), that ­were left with no surviving ­children, volunteered to set up smaller orphanages so that they could look ­after ­children at least collectively. Around the same time, a synagogue in Budapest was recruiting potential foster families and raising funds to cover their expenses.39 Whereas the first proj­ect was supported by the JDC as something in synch with its own outlook, t­ here is no information on the fate of the foster f­ amily proj­ect: neither in the protocols of the Hungarian Committee of the JDC nor in the monthly reports of the National Jewish Relief Committee is t­here any trace of foster parents ever receiving any support.40 It is revealing to note, however, that when it came to the placement of the old and frail who ­were left without relatives, ­these organ­izations ­were not reluctant to use family-­based care: it was only the socialization of the young that they would not leave to families.41 The relative abundance of cash is the final and perhaps most surprising ­factor favoring the institutional approach. As mentioned e­ arlier, in 1945, 22  ­percent (3,837,000 USD) and, in 1948, 27 ­percent (8,463,000 USD) of all the money spent on financial aid by the JDC in Eu­rope was allocated to Hungary.42 Including in-­ kind benefits yields an even higher percentage: according to the annual summary published by the JDC in 1946, the combined value of the financial and in-­k ind aid provision ran to 9,900,000 USD.43 Although of course many needs could not be met for lack of funding, a continuously expanding and always costly system of resi-

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dential homes did receive financing in 1945 and 1946.44 This situation only changed in 1947, when, despite the successful fund­rais­ing among American Jews for the 1946 United Jewish Appeal campaign, all the Eu­ro­pean programs w ­ ere notified of forthcoming bud­getary restrictions. Thus, the year 1947 had to be spent preparing for the new situation. Frigyes Görög (1890–1978), then the head of the JDC in Hungary, returned from a three-­month trip to the United States with the news that the Americans wanted direct financial aid to be provided for only two years. When formulating the conditions for further relief work, he articulated the princi­ples of the American tradition of empowerment: We are not to undertake the aiding of ­people capable of working. The Americans stressed that we must put ­great emphasis on our relief efforts as constructive. We ­w ill strive to make it pos­si­ble for the man in the street to set up a self-­sustaining practice, rather than providing them with commodities.45

­Because of the ensuing austerity mea­sures, considerable steps ­were undertaken in 1947 to transform the aid policy into a more cost-­effective and socially constructive system. Albeit without the supervision of Varsányi, its main points ­were identical with the program he published in 1945. Intensive reconstruction work began as a replacement for financial aid and benefits. The Reconstruction Credit Cooperative was set up, and two-­t hirds of loan recipients w ­ ere ­people who had previously been the recipients of JDC aid.46 The first efforts to unmake the network of residential c­ hildren’s homes occurred at the end of 1947. The re-­placement of their residents into their families was preceded in early 1948 by personal visits to families in and near Budapest to check on their social situations and pos­si­ble risk ­factors. In June 1948, at the end of the school year, 250 c­ hildren ­were relocated to their families, and almost the same number of ­children left the ­children’s homes to go to Israel with Youth Aliyah that year. As a result of ­t hese efforts, by August 1948 ­t here w ­ ere only thirteen residential homes ­under the supervision of the National Jewish Relief Committee, with the number of staff reduced from 378 to 203 ­people.47 Outside of Budapest ­there w ­ ere only homes in Szeged and Debrecen. The new princi­ples ­were thus announced by Frigyes Görög, but carry­ing them out was the task of Israel G. Jacobson, who came to work with the Hungarian program of the JDC in September 1947.48 Jacobson was a trained and experienced social worker, but the change in direction, as we can see, was not a result of his leadership but the relatively comprehensive change of direction by the JDC all over Eu­rope. The new program in 1947–1948 proved successful in strengthening the local Jewish community and helping with their reintegration into the texture of con­temporary Hungary, thereby gradually reducing their dependence on financial support. However, as pointed out by Kinga Frojimovics, this success was a double-­edged sword: successful reintegration significantly decreased the willingness of Hungarian Jewish families to emigrate and made them hostage to the communist dictatorship then in the making.49 The Jewish organ­izations working in the country only

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realized this strategic m ­ istake ­after the communist takeover. In April 1949, Joseph J. Schwartz, then the Eu­ro­pean head of the JDC, started desperate yet completely futile negotiations. Putting aside the neutral aid-­providing position declared by the JDC, he offered millions of dollars to the Hungarian state in exchange for making emigration ­legal again. By d ­ oing so, he could not forestall the isolation of the Jews in Hungary but inadvertently created a pre­ce­dent for the ­later strategy of some East Eu­ro­pean governments, which simply sold the Jewish communities in their countries.50 One way to consider the role of JDC in Hungary is as responding to the constant pressure to adapt to the changing local and general climate by making continuous changes in its strategies and practices. It was, no doubt, this very adaptability that made it pos­si­ble for them to set up a network of aid provision. At the same time, we also need to understand how the JDC mostly muted voices of the Jewish families, especially ­t hose of the widowed m ­ others and their ­children torn away from them. Having lived separated from their families for as long as three or four years, it was not always easy for adolescents to jump back into f­ amily life. Two of the three memoir writers quoted at the beginning of the chapter—­young girls during the Holocaust—­went back to live with their ­mothers ­a fter a long period spent in ­children’s homes. The third one, the boy who had once been so anxious to get home as to break his own arm, did not move back home, but only spent the holidays with his ­family, along with his ­brother. The breach in their ­mother–­son relationship proved lasting: If I stayed out late even when I was older, my ­mother would punish me. Sometimes she would lock me out and I would knock on the door crying, asking to be let in. . . . ​She loved me, in her own way. We shared the same bed—­t here ­were two large beds right next to one another, and we would sleep side by side, but in fact we rarely ever talked. We ­were not ­really used to one another, ­because I had been separated from her so early in life. This w ­ ill make both parties insecure.51

Considering the material and ­human resources at the disposal of the aid agency and the external circumstances at the time (expectations and pressures), the institutional setup it favored seemed a suitable solution for a period only meant to be temporary. Yet it resulted in further losses on top of the recent as yet unpro­cessed ones. Ensuring the material and existential safety of the ­children by meeting their basic physical needs failed to counterbalance the emotional loss experienced by ­t hese c­ hildren. The criticisms of the Hungarian aid policy of the JDC, the suggestions made by Varsányi, and the internal conflicts of the ­Children’s Department all can become part of a wider picture of social policy and the debate raging around it, with implications reaching as far as the twenty-­first c­ entury. At the heart of this debate is the role of f­ amily in the upbringing of c­ hildren, with special regard to so-­called dysfunctional families and t­ hose that pass on values considered inappropriate by the current powers-­t hat-be. It is still very much an open question ­whether it is more

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cost effective to support an entire ­family in crisis or to focus resources on the ­children—­t he ones with potential value for society as a ­whole. Of course, we cannot force historical parallels between families then and in l­ ater periods when t­ hese debates again flared up, yet the arguments of contemporaries and the lived experiences of ­children who went through institutionalized upbringing cannot be ignored in the current context.

chapter 7

v

“For Your Benefit” Military Marriage Policies, Eu­ro­pean Jewish War Brides, and the Centrality of ­Family, 1944–1950 Robin Judd

While stationed in Brussels in September 1944, Canadian Royal Air Force (RAF) transport driver Sydney D. met Elfriede (Friedl) H., a Viennese-­born Jewish ­woman who had fled to Belgium during the late 1930s with her ­family. Over the course of that autumn, Sydney and Friedl saw each other as frequently as Sydney’s schedule allowed, a difficult feat given that the war in Eu­rope still was waging. By December, the two had declared their love for one another, and by early January, the two had de­cided to marry.1 Yet the ­couple encountered significant obstacles. First, the soldier confronted re­sis­tance within the RAF to his betrothal. Canada’s military did not have a consistent policy concerning the marriages of soldiers to Eu­ro­pean civilians outside of the United Kingdom. ­Because no well-­defined uniform regulation had been formulated, gaining permission for t­ hese types of marriages was uneven, often relying on the advocacy of chaplains, local families, and permissive commanders. Sydney’s commander was not keen on permitting the marriage, and a friend encouraged the young driver to contact his Jewish chaplain for assistance. The Jewish chaplain, Jack Eisen, similarly expressed his concern. In his view, ­t here ­were many Eu­ro­pean ­women who seduced RAF men into marrying them in order to immigrate to Canada. According to Eisen, in rejecting Sydney’s request to marry, the Air Force was not “trying to stand in your way . . . ​what they are ­doing is for your benefit.”2 The second obstacle to Friedl and Sydney’s betrothal was equally significant: Friedl was already married. In 1942, a­ fter the deportation of Friedl’s m ­ other, ­sister, brother-­in-­law, and grand­father, she entered into what was commonly referred to as a “white marriage” or “Mariage Blanche,” an unconsummated marriage. For Friedl, marrying a non-­Jewish Belgian during the war had given her the necessary status to (temporarily) escape the deportations; she soon fell out of touch with the 128

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man whose non-­Jewish status had helped save her life. A ­ fter she met Sydney, Friedl sought to annul her marriage, but she found the Belgian ­legal system complicated, at times even overwhelmingly so. B ­ ecause Friedl technically was already married, albeit in a marriage that was not consummated, she could not legally marry the Canadian transport driver.3 The third hindrance to their marrying was geography. Sydney had been stationed in Belgium during the fall, but ­later that year, the RAF transferred him to Germany. By the summer of 1945, Friedl, a Viennese-­born ­woman, fell ­under the jurisdiction of the changed fraternization laws, which placed additional limitations on her. Even if the destroyed roads between Germany and Belgium had been intact, she still could not easily travel to her fiancé. He would have to go to her. Now, Sydney could only marry Friedl if at least three ­things occurred: she received her annulment, he was granted sufficient leave time to travel to Belgium and marry her t­ here, and they both obtained permission from the RAF. All of ­t hese conditions seemed unlikely to be met. Desperate, Sydney again turned to his chaplain, this time to ask ­whether he could marry Friedl in a religious ceremony only.4 Eisen again rejected his request, explaining that such a maneuver would cause more prob­lems than it fixed. The RAF and Canadian authorities would only recognize a marriage sanctioned by the state, and Friedl would only be allowed to immigrate to Canada if the marriage was ­legal. As a representative of the Canadian military, the chaplain could not ignore Canadian law. Eisen encouraged the driver to wait u ­ ntil Friedl’s marriage was 5 annulled. Undeterred, Sydney applied for leave. He then traveled to Belgium, married Friedl in a local religious ceremony, and promptly went AWOL to enjoy a brief honeymoon with his wife. When he reported back to the authorities, they placed him u ­ nder arrest.6 In contrast to Sydney and Friedl, Lala (Ursula) W. and Morris F. faced far fewer obstacles when they de­cided to marry. Lala and Morris met at the Hasenhecke DP camp near Kassel. A teenager in Lvov when the Germans invaded in 1941, Lala had concealed her Jewish identity, fleeing from town to town during the war. ­After the war ended, she re­united with her ­uncle, who brought her to Kassel, and they then lived in the Hasenhecke DP camp. Morris was director of the Hasenhecke camp and other displaced persons camps in the area. A rabbi who had most recently had a pulpit in Albany, New York, he had joined the staff of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to better assist the surviving remnant of Eu­ro­pean Jewry. Morris met Lala when she came to his office to see w ­ hether he or his staff could assist her with her immigration papers. Morris realized that it would take years for Lala to receive permission to enter the United States and recommended that she find a soldier to marry her so that she could “go like a war bride.” Ironically, within days, he de­cided to pursue a romantic relationship with the young refugee, and the two married nearly one year l­ ater.7 Morris and Lala did not face the same marriage regulations, l­egal difficulties, and geo­graph­i­cal challenges as did Sydney and Friedl. By 1946, the U.S. military had established clearer policies regarding the permissibility of marriages between

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civilians and members of the armed forces, and the question of the acceptability of marriage to ­women on German soil also had been resolved. Neither Lala nor Morris had been previously married; Lala’s guardian, her ­uncle in Kassel, approved of their marriage, as did the Jewish chaplains with whom Lala and Morris spoke. Moreover, Morris remained in Kassel throughout their engagement; the two lived within a short distance from one another, which allowed their courtship to develop more easily. Although the two ­couples’ engagement narratives ­were radically dif­fer­ent, their experiences hint at the ways in which the Allied Expeditionary and Occupation Forces worked to promote specific notions of the f­ amily when permitting or discouraging marriages; they also illuminate the multiple ways in which Eu­ro­pean Jews got caught up in ­t hose discussions. Thus, the documentary rec­ords of Lala, Morris, Friedl, and Sydney deepen the recent historical scholarship on fraternization and military marriages. Susan Zeiger, Philip Wolgin, Sonya Rose, and ­others have argued that fraternization and marriage policies dictated social relationships in the theaters of operation; s­ haped emerging f­ amily structures within the United States, Britain, and Canada; and reflected par­tic­u­lar visions of the ­family and gender relations. By restricting how, why, when, and who could marry, marriage laws protected an image of the ­family that promoted a specific understanding of moral character and ­family responsibility.8 The stories of the Jewish w ­ omen (and a handful of Jewish men) on the Eu­ro­ pean continent who married American, British, and Canadian military men during and immediately a­ fter World War II develop this history further. Like Lala and Friedl, the majority of ­t hese Jewish military brides and fiancées ­were part of the surviving remnant of Eu­ro­pean Jewry. Born in countries across Eu­rope, they ­were survivors of the camps, had taken part in the re­sis­tance, had hidden during the war, or had passed as non-­Jews. Other spouses had spent the Nazi years in Soviet-­ occupied territories, fleeing to Germany or Austria when the war ended and meeting their spouses t­ here. Their marriages presented a paradox; on the one hand, betrothal often meant an expansion of kinship ties that, in the face of tremendous loss in the Holocaust, represented one form of reconstruction. On the other hand, their betrothals threw their losses into relief, exaggerated their status as victims, and heightened the tensions between the idealized policies of the Allied governments and the messiness of ­actual families.

Marriage Policies Although U.S., British, and Canadian military leaders long had asserted that a deficient marriage could demean a soldier’s military unit, ­after 1943, they articulated heightened concerns that marrying foreign ­women could potentially embarrass the military and diminish men’s ability to serve.9 ­There w ­ ere several reasons for the increased interest in military brides. First, a larger number of soldiers ­were appealing for the right to marry foreign civilians, many of whom did not share cultural or linguistic affinities with their English-­speaking suitors; one subgroup of t­ hese

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wives included the Jewish brides. Second, the small number of marriages that had taken place between British ­women and American or Canadian soldiers during the early years of the war had attracted significant attention from the American, British, and Canadian press; ­there was increased pressure from laypeople and pundits concerning the “­women who w ­ ere left b ­ ehind” and the possibility of Eu­ro­ pean ­women being poor spousal choices.10 In addition, by 1943, it had come to the attention of American and Canadian officials that some of the British w ­ omen who had married American and Canadian soldiers had been pregnant at the time of their marriages, something that could be interpreted as demonstrating the brides’ “questionable character.”11 ­These anx­i­eties encouraged authorities at home and abroad to craft marriage policies whose purpose was to bring credit to the military and to the nation.12 A poor marriage, according to the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster’s Chief of Staff, could “embarrass the military ser­vice, affect relations with our allies, and bring grief and regret to the persons contracting the marriage.”13 Disreputable wives could negatively affect a husband’s effectiveness on the battlefield. A wife, according to one official, could be “subject to an influence detrimental” to her husband’s work 14 or, conversely, could prove to be a “good wife” to her husband soldier.15 In addition, ­because spouses could enter their husband’s countries as l­ egal residents or new citizens, marriages could only be approved if they ­were consistent with existing immigration laws.16 ­Because she would one day follow her husband to his “national home,” wives needed to be well vetted to guarantee that they would remain married and not become a public charge.17 To promote a specific kind of ­couple, British, American, and Canadian officials devised vari­ous forms of character checks, assigned responsibility to the chaplain to guarantee that marriages would be well vetted, and considered both the birthplace of the spouse and the location from where permission was being requested.18 The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) demanded that both members of the ­couple demonstrate that they ­were healthy, of appropriate age, and unmarried. Against the backdrop of concern with sexual diseases (and a campaign to promote prophylaxis), brides bound for the United States or Canada had to demonstrate that they w ­ ere ­free from syphilis and gonorrhea and thus had to undergo medical screenings during at least two junctures: before receiving permission to marry and again on embarking on the war bride ships or planes.19 Paperwork also was required. AEF authorities requested that potential brides provide proof verifying that they, like their potential husbands, had reached a minimum age for marriage (frequently 18 or 21), w ­ ere unmarried—or divorced or widowed if they already had been married, and, if ­u nder the age of 18 (and in some cases 21), had received parental consent.20 Moreover, although British, American, and Canadian militaries had long insisted that a soldier could marry a foreign civilian only ­after receiving permission from his commander, military officials now instructed commanders to investigate deeper into the character of the soldier and his intended bride—­perhaps even exploring their standing in their respective home communities.21 To ensure

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a thorough vetting of potential brides, commanders began to rely even more heavi­ly on chaplain interviews. A ­ fter 1943, few c­ ouples could receive permission to marry ­unless the military chaplain had approved of the betrothal.22 Chaplains, both Jewish and non-­Jewish, quickly found that vetting potential marriages consumed a surprising amount of their time. Between July 1944 and May 1945, for example, American Jewish chaplain Bert Klausner, who was stationed in both France and Germany, conducted forty-­one marriage interviews and investigations.23 American Jewish chaplains individually reported conducting an average of 7.5 marriage interviews per month during 1945; Canadian Jewish chaplains in­de­pen­dently conducted about four per month; British Jewish chaplains reported far fewer interviews, just a handful per year.24 In addition to conducting interviews of the ­couples, Jewish and non-­Jewish chaplains also weighed in on deliberations concerning ­couples whose place of encounter—or whose birthplace—­raised queries about spousal appropriateness. ­After D-­Day in June 1944, U.S., Canadian, and British forces proposed additional restrictive policies relating to the intended bride’s birthplace and current location. At first, they prohibited marriages between any British, Canadian, or U.S. soldier and any German or Austrian national or resident of Germany or Austria, even if ­t hose residents ­were not German nationals.25 By September 1945, the three militaries diverged slightly on their policies. Britain and the United States ­were the first to loosen their regulations, permitting some ­women born outside of Germany, Austria, or Belgium—­but residing in one of t­ hose locales—to marry members of the Armed Forces.26 Over the next two years, each authority established policies concerning Austrian or German citizens or residents.27

Jewish War Brides The marriages of Eu­ro­pean Jews to American, British, and Canadian soldiers heightened the tensions between the idealized policies of the Allied governments and the messiness of families. Facing restrictions concerning who could marry, when, and u ­ nder what conditions, the Eu­ro­pean Jewish w ­ omen studied ­here quickly discovered that extant marriage laws did not prevent them from creating new families, but the policies certainly made it more difficult. They and their fiancés also would learn that regulations promoting ­family responsibility pushed them to reach out to the soldiers’ families back home, to Jewish chaplains, and to the military commanders, thus engendering the creation of an even wider ­family network. Eu­ro­pean Jews and their AEF fiancés experienced the regulations concerning marriages between civilians and ser­v icemen as particularly onerous. Permission to marry frequently relied on having identification papers, parental consent, and documentation of status, all items that many Jewish brides lacked. When Gerda W., a survivor of several camps and a death march, sought to marry the man who liberated her, obtaining the necessary paperwork quickly became a m ­ atter of utmost importance. Her fiancé Kurt left Eu­rope in September 1945 before they could marry;

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Gerda needed to authenticate her identity before she could marry Kurt and join him and his s­ ister’s f­ amily in New York. Fortunately, in 1939, Gerda’s m ­ other had sent her d ­ aughter’s birth certificate to a f­ amily member in Turkey; her u ­ ncle ­t here managed to return the precious paperwork to her.28 Clara H. was less fortunate. When she and Daniel prepared to marry in Antwerp, they w ­ ere unable to locate her necessary paperwork. Despite the fact that Clara had survived alongside her ­brother, s­ ister, and ­mother, she could not easily obtain her birth certificate, residency papers, or a copy of her police report. Already feeling adrift, she and Daniel obtained a ­lawyer to assist them.29 As demonstrated in the cases of Clara and Gerda, the pro­cess of locating or authenticating one’s identity in the aftermath of the Nazi assault was difficult; for ­those who had spent the Nazi years hiding ­under assumed names, this task was additionally fraught. Lala, for example, had spent the war years “passing” as a non-­Jewish Pole. Having cast aside her false papers, she now needed to verify her Jewish “self.” Even though her fiancé’s petition to marry would be treated with leniency b ­ ecause he was an officer, she still worried about her papers. When she and Morris prepared to marry, she gathered a wide array of documents that she hoped would affirm her identity. They included her DP identification card, a sworn statement by Morris, and her travel papers.30 Just as the policy mandating paperwork reminded t­ hese survivors of their precariousness, so too did the requirement that they obtain verification of their good health and parental approval. The Jewish w ­ omen had a unique set of medical and psychological needs that had been s­ haped by their particularly horrific experiences during the war. Many of the ­women studied ­here w ­ ere hospitalized immediately ­after liberation; although medical rec­ords suggest that few (if not none) suffered from syphilis or gonorrhea, many w ­ ere recovering from typhus and tuberculosis. ­Imagined as the endemic disease of the poor, tuberculosis (TB) had long been identified as an excludable or notifiable disease in Britain, the United States, and Canada and thus served as grounds for refusal of entry. Before the introduction of streptomycin in 1946, the only treatments for TB ­were enforced rest and quarantine in a sanitorium or surgical intervention or both. If they had been ill, the ­women became engaged only a­ fter their release from the hospital, and many submitted the results from their syphilis test only. The requirement that they produce a statement of good health to marry men back home reinforced concerns that they would be sickly compared to the w ­ omen whom the soldiers would meet in the United States, Canada, or Britain. Gerda, for example, agonized over how she “could possibly mea­sure up to t­ hose American girls with whom he spoke En­glish, flirted, danced, and apparently carried on a lively correspondence. I felt sure that he must always remember me as he had found me at liberation, weighing sixty-­ eight pounds, with gray cropped hair, in rags, and not having bathed in three years.”31 The mandate for parental approval similarly could prove to be an obstacle. Many of the Eu­ro­pean Jewish ­women who wished to marry American, Canadian, or British soldiers ­were unsure ­whether their parents had survived the Nazi atrocities; ­others knew that the Nazis and their collaborators had murdered their f­amily

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members. When Helena J. and Mort H. became engaged, for example, Helena, only age 18, needed her parents to sanction her marriage. A survivor of multiple Nazi camps, Helena had no knowledge of ­whether her parents ­were still alive. To satisfy the policy, Mort asked his parents to formally sanction their marriage and confirm support for Helena if she required it. At first, Mort’s parents resisted in part ­because their son also was quite young. Eventually, they relented and sent the desired documentation.32 Marianne K.’s f­ uture father-­in-­law similarly vouched for her, his son’s girlfriend. A ­ fter hearing about Marianne from his son, the Canadian Jewish philanthropist reached out to his son’s commander and chaplain; he insisted that ­because Marianne’s parents had been murdered by the Nazis, he was best positioned to act in loco parentis. He sanctioned their marriage and promised to “care for her as if she was his own child.”33 Stripped of their families—­and about to create ­family units of their own—­these ­women and men relied on the grooms’ parents, thus extending their own f­ amily networks. In addition to trying to fulfill demands for parental approval and personal documentation, the Jewish ­women and their fiancés found that restrictions concerning place and time would prove to be burdensome. When Abe B., a Canadian transport driver, and Sala G., a Polish-­born survivor living in Germany, requested to marry in the fall of 1945, Abe’s Jewish chaplain refused. He had no choice: at the time, Canadian regulations mandated that marriages ­were “ ‘Verboten’ in ‘Deutschland.’ ”34 The British authorities similarly banned marriages between members of the military and German nationals or residents of Germany.35 Anna B. ran afoul of that policy. When the Czech survivor and her British boyfriend Karl de­cided to marry, the British authorities rejected their petition, ­because she had been listed in the municipal rec­ords as a native of Germany. It took a full year—­and tremendous lobbying efforts from Karl’s f­ amily—­until she was able to receive permission to marry.36 Similarly, Lillie R., a German ­woman born to a Jewish ­mother and non-­ Jewish f­ather, found herself unable to marry John P., a soldier mechanic whom she met when he was stationed in Germany. Despite the fact that she spent the war years in hiding and now was serving as a stenographer at a U.S. Army base, she, John, and John’s parents had to go through many channels to receive permission for her marriage and immigration.37 Residency and location mattered; in this way, the experiences of Jewish brides was, at least for some time, consistent with the paradoxical assumption that Jews who originated from Germany, spoke German, or lived in Germany a­ fter the war w ­ ere somehow part of the perpetrator community and therefore treated as such.38 In their petitions to assist the Eu­ro­pean Jewish ­women who had encountered obstacles to their marriage requests, f­ amily members and Jewish chaplains frequently emphasized the ­women’s respectability. Invoking similar language to that articulated by military leaders when setting out the importance of an appropriate spousal match, they threw into relief the ­women’s moral character and intelligence. Lilie, for example, supposedly believed in “American Demo­cratic princi­ples and is well disposed t­ oward the Peace and happiness of the United States and the American ­people.”39 Jewish chaplains described t­hese ­couples as having “serious and

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responsible attitudes t­ oward matrimony” 40 and the young w ­ omen as being of “good character.” 41 In this way, they endorsed t­ hose marriages that w ­ ere supposedly 42 appropriate. In their endorsements, Jewish chaplains and f­amily members insisted on the ­women’s status as victims and on the central role of the f­amily in helping t­ hese brides recover from past trauma. Describing the brides as “sole survivors” of their families, they insisted that permitting ­these weddings would allow for ­these w ­ omen to begin the long road of recovery.43 A wedding, one soldier remembered, was the “reward for many years of suffering.” 44 Although some chaplains certainly upheld the military policies that may have negatively affected the brides, ­others encouraged social mixing and, then, marriages in the hope that their soldiers would meet “new girl friends in the warmth of a home atmosphere.” 45

Jewish Chaplains As Jewish chaplains became increasingly involved in vetting, supporting, or discouraging marriages between civilians and soldiers, they considered a wide range of religious queries around betrothals, thus throwing into relief their idealized vision of the f­ amily and the par­tic­u­lar national character of the chaplains themselves. First and foremost, American, British, and Canadian Jewish chaplains considered the Jewishness of the spouse to be a deciding ­factor when determining ­whether they would approve of a betrothal. Charged by their commanders to determine w ­ hether a spousal match was appropriate, many chaplains prohibited marriages between non-­Jewish ­women and Jewish soldiers.46 A few, however, allowed for the marriages to move forward by remaining s­ ilent. When Canadian chaplain I. B. Rose received a request from one of his Jewish soldiers stationed in Amsterdam to marry a w ­ oman ­there, he refused to authorize the request when he learned that the fiancé was not Jewish. However, b ­ ecause the intended bride lacked any religious affiliation and b ­ ecause the sergeant had insisted that he had never been observant and had “no intention ever of observing the Hebrew faith,” Rose was willing to remain ­silent. He could not give his approval, but if the commander would permit such a marriage, he would raise no objections.47 The American Jewish chaplaincy organ­ization (CANRA) permitted marriages between Jewish soldiers and converts to Judaism, but insisted that no one be converted for the sake of marriage.48 ­Here too, however, ­there was some dissent. Some American Jewish chaplains expressed their willingness to oversee a conversion, whereas ­others flatly refused.49 Chaplain Philip Pincus, for example, worked with two German ­women who ­were converting in advance of their marriages to Americans,50 whereas Rabbi Mayer Abramowitz refused to do the same. He found the requests of German w ­ omen to convert to Judaism in order to marry Jewish soldiers to be particularly vexing. Following the decision of the Chief Rabbi of Palestine who, at the time, ruled that no conversion could take place so close to the era of Hitler,51 he expressed concern that the w ­ omen simply wanted to enter the United States. Asserting that he could see in t­ hese ­women the “gleam of hope of gaining

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entrance to the United States,” Abramowitz asserted that German non-­Jewish ­women sought out “low grade Jewish GIs.”52 Canadian Jewish chaplains took the intermarriage question one step further than their American or British counter­parts. They agreed in 1944 that they would only participate in marriages in which both parties w ­ ere “borne [sic] of the Jewish faith,” making impossible not only intermarriage but also marriages between Jews where at least one member of the c­ ouple had been born Christian.53 Despite such a declaration, a few Canadian Jewish chaplains began to approve of marriages between converts to Judaism and Canadian Jewish soldiers. One Canadian Jewish chaplain permitted such a marriage only ­after he himself had overseen the conversion and received written permission from the parents of the soldier that they would approve of their child marrying a convert to Judaism.54 A second religious issue considered by Jewish chaplains concerned marriages in which one of the parties had been previously married but did not receive a divorce according to Jewish tradition (get). American Jewish chaplains w ­ ere told to ascertain the specific Jewish religious background of the c­ ouples and make their decision accordingly. If the groom was Orthodox or the child of Orthodox parents, a chaplain should not officiate without the get. However, a chaplain should not hesitate to marry the ­couple if the groom was the son of Reform parents who would accept the civil divorce as sufficient, as long as the chaplain himself had no objections.55 Although Canadian Jewish chaplains insisted on a get, British Jewish chaplains, who ­were responsible to Britain’s chief rabbi, on a few occasions would permit an agunah (a married ­woman, no longer living with her husband, who did not undergo a Jewish divorce) to marry, provided t­ here was sufficient documentation from other nonaffiliated parties that the husband had been killed by the Nazis. Jewish chaplains also considered the format of the marriage ceremony itself. Sensitive to the fact that a chaplain might be responsible for soldiers whose denominational experience would be foreign to him, American Jewish chaplains questioned to what extent chaplains ­were to modify the marriage ceremony. The rabbis de­cided that, although the chaplain should try to follow his “own religious practice,” he should also try to adjust his ser­vice to conform to the specific Jewish religious background of the c­ ouple.56 Similarly, Jewish chaplains considered w ­ hether they ­ought to permit marriages on days or times not usually permitted by Jewish law. The American-­based CANRA set out that “marriages ­under special conditions of war­time” could take place on days that had, up ­until now, been prohibited by custom, such as the period between Passover and Shavuot (omer); however, marriages on days that had been previously prohibited by law (such as the Sabbath) would continue to be prohibited.57 Canadian and British Jewish chaplains acted more restrictively, prohibiting Jewish weddings on Jewish holidays, such as Sukkot, and continuing to disapprove of weddings during the omer.58 When Canadian soldier Percy L. wished to marry Charlotte W., for example, Chaplain Levi encouraged the soldier’s captain to expedite the wedding pro­cess, ­because other­w ise the wedding could not be solemnized.59

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For much of the war, chaplains tended to officiate at nearly all civilian–­soldier weddings60; charged with reviewing the background of the c­ ouple, affirming their religious compatibility, and solemnizing the ceremony, chaplains insisted that they did every­t hing but “pick the bride.” 61 However, with the war’s end, some military ­couples had the opportunity to bypass their chaplains and marry in civil ceremonies, ­because the United States, Canada, and Britain then recognized the l­ egal jurisdiction of vari­ous postwar governmental bodies. In 1946, for example, when Mort’s chaplain refused to permit the soldier’s marriage to Helena on the grounds that they w ­ ere too young to marry, the c­ ouple was able to circumvent him. A ­ fter receiving formal consent from Mort’s parents, Mort and Helena requested permission to marry directly from Mort’s commander and, on obtaining it, had a civil ceremony in Regensburg instead.62 Such marriages worried Jewish chaplains for an additional reason; Jewish law would not recognize ­t hose ­couples as being married. As such, two Jews would be “living in a relationship which is not sanctioned as marriage ­under Jewish tradition.” 63 Although Mort and Helena had a Jewish ceremony ­after they arrived in the United States, the chaplain could not have foreseen such a development. If Jewish soldiers wished (or w ­ ere required) to marry in local ceremonies, their chaplains urged them to go through both ceremonies. When Ray O. and Bella L. married, they did so in a way that paid tribute to both secular and religious demands: they ­were married by the mayor on Saturday and the next day they ­were married by three chaplains in a Jewish ceremony.64 In contrast, some c­ ouples pursued religious ceremonies that bypassed their chaplains. This was the case for Sydney and Friedl, described at the beginning of the chapter. Similarly, when Judith and Sam de­cided to get married, they too ignored their chaplain, received permission from Sam’s commander and sought out a local rabbi in Prague.65 ­These weddings, too, concerned Jewish chaplains (and commanders), ­because often they would not be considered ­legal in the United States, Britain, or Canada. Moreover, ­t hese marriages threatened to diminish the chaplains’ authority. American and Canadian Jewish chaplains expressed concern that they ­were being replaced by civilian rabbis, a phenomenon that could have invoked tremendous excitement about the possibility of rebirth in the aftermath of genocide, but was colored by petty complaints over turf. At a Canadian Jewish chaplains’ conference, the increasing number of marriages performed abroad was the second item on the agenda. The attending chaplains agreed that they o ­ ught to contact local rabbis or cantors and reach a gentleman’s agreement with them; they hoped to guarantee that no marriage in which military personnel ­were involved would be performed without the previous consent of the army chaplain.66 Sometimes, civilian rabbis and chaplains co-­officiated. When Lydia and Harold married, her childhood rabbi and his Navy chaplain married them. Although the Algerian rabbi and Jewish chaplain co-­officiated with ­little difficulty, other pairs found it more difficult to negotiate dif­fer­ent Jewish cultural traditions and practices.67 When Rachel K. and Mayer A. married, for example, three rabbis officiated: two local rabbis who w ­ ere living in the DP camps and an American Jewish

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chaplain in Berlin. As the chaplain began to read the opening prayer in En­glish, the other two rabbis s­ topped him, refusing to allow him to participate if En­glish was uttered under­neath the wedding canopy.68 Friedl and Sydney’s story highlights the seemingly disconnected and contradictory nature of Jewish military marriages. When Sydney and Friedl petitioned to marry, their chaplain discouraged them from formalizing their relationship ­until they amassed the necessary paperwork, got to know one another better, or waited ­u ntil Canada changed its policy concerning the marriageability of German-­or Austrian-­born ­women. The chaplain tried to convince the young soldier that the Canadian military was acting in Sydney’s “benefit,” while also recognizing that the marriage policies w ­ ere intended to protect the nation. L ­ ater, however, as Sydney and Friedl reached out to Sydney’s Canadian ­family networks and asserted their desire to create a respectable Jewish ­family unit, the chaplain offered his support.69 Concepts of f­amily, then, ­shaped impor­tant war­time and postwar choices made by the chaplains, Jewish brides, and Allied soldier husbands, despite their differences. Not surprisingly, notions of ­family continued to m ­ atter greatly ­a fter betrothal. They s­ haped choices of where the ­couples immigrated and lived, the institutions with which they affiliated, and their religious be­hav­ior. They thus ­shaped nationality, language acquisition, naturalization, and the pace of ­family reunions. ­These war­t ime marriages would continue to paradoxically represent one form of rebuilding while si­mul­ta­neously exaggerating senses of loss and victimhood.

chapter 8

v

“Return to Normality?” The Strug­gle of Sinti and Roma Survivors to Rebuild a Life in Postwar Germany Anja Reuss

In this chapter, I take a closer look at the special importance and concept of the ­family in Sinti and Roma survivor communities in the early postwar period before the two German states w ­ ere founded and gained national sovereignty. For Sinti and Roma, the f­ amily was the most significant social structure in an environment that was already hostile before the war; it became part of a survival strategy during and ­after the war. In contrast to Jews who ­were also destined to be annihilated for racist reasons, Sinti and Roma could not rely on the support of statewide and transnational po­liti­cal or religious organ­izations. Even ­after 1945, the deep-­rooted antigypsyism in the minds and actions of the majority society remained consistently high and was reflected in both official actions and social be­hav­iors of the non-­Roma community: ­these affected all spheres of Sinti and Roma everyday life. The ­family, in the broadest sense, was at the core of attempts by Sinti and Roma survivors to rebuild a life in postwar Germany, thereby representing a unique feature of this group of victims.

The State of Research and the Source Material Research on the social and po­liti­cal treatment of Sinti and Roma in Germany a­ fter 1945 is still very ­limited. Most analyses begin with the founding of the two German states and focus on racist developments in the so-­called German Zigeunerpolitik (“Gypsy” policy) since the 1950s; the period of Allied administration ­after the po­liti­cal break of 1945 is discussed only to a ­limited extent, if at all. This absence of research goes hand in hand with an insufficient historical analy­sis and discussion of the persecution and extermination of Sinti and Roma during the Nazi period.1 It was only in the 1970s that the first scholarly studies on this topic appeared. However, in contrast to the historiography of the Shoah, which was primarily initiated by the Jewish community, advocates for the discriminated minority, and 141

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not the Roma and Sinti themselves, ­were the first to deal with the history of their persecution.2 However, in their historical analyses, it was not only German non-­ Roma historians who diminished the experiences of Sinti and Roma but also Jewish historians such as Yehuda Bauer.3 At the same time, some Jewish survivors, such as Simone Veil, the former president of the Eu­ro­pean Parliament, and Simon Wiesenthal, supported Sinti and Roma in their strug­gle for recognition. The first book to deal specifically with the situation of the Sinti and Roma ­after World War II was a 1979 volume—­In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute verfolgt (Gassed in Auschwitz, Persecuted to This Day)—­edited by Tilmann Zülch, cofounder of the Society for Threatened P ­ eoples.4 Several scholarly and po­liti­cal chapters explored the continuity of the persecution and the discriminatory preconditions of restitution for victims. More importantly, for the first time, German Sinti and Roma—­the survivors themselves—­had the opportunity to raise their voices and to offer critical commentary on their per­sis­tent persecution. Their inclusion was quite remarkable, b ­ ecause the relevant works published in l­ater years—­which determined the scholarly discourse on antigypsyism and the historiography of persecution of Sinti and Roma—­predominantly represented the perspective of the majority society,5 which often spoke about the minority, with the affected individuals hardly ever getting a chance to speak for themselves. In numerous academic writings, ­those persecuted as “gypsies” form a nameless and homogeneous mass, continually defined by stigmatizing attributes and cast in antigypsyist ste­reo­types.6 The German Sinti and Roma communities have spent de­cades fighting for (po­liti­ cal) recognition as victims of Nazism. Only by po­liti­cal actions, such as their 1980 hunger strike at the memorial site of Dachau, did their plight gain the attention of the German and international public.7 ­These actions and their civil rights strug­gle more broadly prompted further research into the history of their persecution. The Sinti and Roma genocide represented the peak, but not the end, of state and social discrimination and persecution. Yet the perspective of Sinti and Roma victims on their persecution during and a­ fter World War II was rarely taken into account in academic analyses written in the 1980s and 1990s (not only in these two de­cades but also ­later on) of war­time and postwar events. Apart from this, only l­ ittle scientific research has been carried out on Sinti and Roma as Displaced Persons (DPs)8 due to a number of reasons. One reason is that ­t here was no specific category for Sinti and Roma and t­ hose persecuted as “gypsies”; most Romani DPs ­were—if at all—­registered solely by their nationality.9 This makes the search for Romani DPs considerably more difficult. Also l­ittle is known about the relationship between the Allies and t­ hose persecuted as “gypsies.” For example, ­were members of this minority among the liberators? To my knowledge, t­ here is only one reference to Roma soldiers in the British Army.10 In addition, a scholarly analy­sis of Allied policy ­toward the Sinti and Roma as a group of survivors is still lacking. Heike Krokowski was the first academic since 1979 to include interviews with survivors in her published work. Her 2001 comprehensive study of the effects of National Socialist persecution on German Sinti and Roma, Die Last der Vergan-

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genheit (The Burden of the Past),11 is the first detailed analy­sis of the long-­term effects of imprisonment and persecution of German Sinti and Roma ­under National Socialism. On the basis of her interviews with survivors, she elaborates their forms of traumatization, pro­c essing of experiences, and forms of re-­t raumatization created by ongoing persecution and discrimination since 1945. Yet Sinti and Roma survivors are still marginalized in the discourse of remembrance, being often overshadowed by the Jewish narrative in relation to Nazi annihilation policy. The historiography of the Shoah has been driven primarily by Jews themselves; the memories and personal testimonies of Jewish survivors are better documented than t­ hose of Romani survivors. Th ­ ere are many parallels between both groups of victims, particularly relating to their traumatic experiences in the camps and the importance of rebuilding ­family in the postwar period. Therefore, the experiences of Jewish survivors, which are far better documented, are applicable to Romani survivors. This chapter is based on (auto-)biographical accounts and testimonies of Sinti and Roma survivors, thus integrating the voices of the victims.12 Unfortunately, very few accounts and memories of Sinti and Roma during and a­ fter the war have been passed on. Moreover, many of the biographies and accounts of Sinti and Roma w ­ ere written by other authors. Nevertheless, t­ hese accounts can be regarded as au­then­tic and ­little modified, ­because they ­were developed in close cooperation with the survivors. In addition to Romani life histories, interviews with survivors are also used in this analy­sis.13 Unfortunately, the emphasis in both forms of self-­testimonies—­the transcriptions and the interviews—is on memories of persecution during National Socialism, with the narrative of the postwar period often treated as peripheral. Therefore, many questions remain unanswered, which ­were ­either never posed by the interviewer or ­were seen as irrelevant by the narrator.14 The narration, therefore, represents only a fragment, always subject to the narrator’s desire to bring meaning to the reported story.15 Reminiscences are necessarily selective and depend on the narrative situation, the conversation partner, and the mood of the narrator. All ­these ­factors influence what is recalled and what experiences are articulated. A testimony is a kind of reconstruction of the personality of the narrator through the narrative itself, allowing a picture to emerge that has been changed throughout history.16 Survivors often frame their persecution, discrimination, and humiliation in memory accounts in an unconscious attempt to make their experiences more tolerable for them. Some identical or similar narratives appear in vari­ous interviews and memories, indicating that they have become part of the collective memory of the group and represent the guiding princi­ples of the shared history of persecution.17 The appraisal of memory fragments regarding discrimination and persecution ­after 1945 is also subject to t­ hese caveats.

Liberation and Return from the Camps Most Sinti and Roma survivors ­were severely affected by persecution and imprisonment in the camps, where they suffered serious physical and psychological

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damage. This damage usually s­haped the lives of survivors, particularly in the early postwar years. When the Allies reached the concentration and extermination camps, the survivors ­were in terrible physical condition. This is reflected in several memories of Sinti and Roma survivors, in which they give accounts of how inmates and members of their families died in large numbers ­after liberation. The survival story of Sintizza Regine Böhmer, who was 13 at the time of liberation, testifies to the narrow bridge between life and death, as En­glish soldiers ­were able to pull the unconscious girl from a pile of dead bodies in Bergen-­Belsen and to bring her to a nearby hospital. In 1940, Regine had been deported as an 8-­year-­old with her ­mother and six siblings from Hamburg to Bełżec, ­after her ­father had already been transported to Sachsenhausen in 1938, where he was subsequently murdered.18 L ­ ater, Regine and her s­ isters came to Ravensbrück and from t­ here to Bergen-­Belsen. Her siblings, especially her older ­sister, ­were her only hold on life. Unsurprisingly, her despair was greatest when she woke up in the hospital alone: When I revived, I was in a hospital. In Celle. ­There I had just regained consciousness. I did not know where I was. They must have found me unconscious. I immediately told the doctor I wanted to go, that I want my s­ ister. “No, no, you have to stay h ­ ere,” he said. He said it a bit odd. ­After that I just ran away. And I’ve run, run, run and could not see anyone far and wide. I was 13. . . . ​I cried so bad. I was so scared, b ­ ecause I did not see anyone.19

Her fear of losing the only remaining member of her ­family was so ­g reat that, despite her very poor health, she fled the hospital to find her s­ ister. But being alone was not the only reason for her hasty flight. Regine Böhmer also had no trust in the medical staff and perceived the physician’s be­hav­ior ­toward her as “a bit odd.” Her assessment was colored by her experiences u ­ nder Nazism, in which she had learned as a child that medical staff, like many other professional groups, w ­ ere part of the apparatus of persecution. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, it was not only German doctors of whom Sinti and Roma ­were suspicious. Their view of Allied soldiers was likewise marked by mistrust and uncertainty. Many Sinti and Roma survivors report that their fears did not dis­appear even a­ fter liberation. The “liberators” w ­ ere, in their eyes, mostly uniformed men with weapons, and it was impossible for the troubled survivors to judge what they wanted.20 Most of the survivors ­were young and could only look back on a childhood and youth spent mostly in camps. Many had been interned in so-­called coercion camps for “gypsies” since 1936, had not been allowed to attend German schools, and had often been separated from their families. This was also true of an 18-­year-­old Sinto, Otto Rosenberg. He was freed by the British in Bergen-­Belsen and from the very beginning was very insecure and cautious. He recalls, I was just as afraid of the Americans, the British, and the Rus­sians as I was before of the German troops, like the SS. I had never had any contact with ­these p ­ eople.

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I did not know: Do they wish us evil or do they wish us good? I was still too young to be able to grasp this.21

Another survivor hid from the British soldiers out of fear.22 ­After years of anxiety and the daily strug­gle for survival, the survivors slowly settled into their postwar lives; yet as the initial joy of liberation and survival subsided, the thoughts of their lost ones began to surface. The Jewish survivor and ­later psychiatrist Leo Eitinger describes this growing pro­cess of awareness as an awakening from the apathy born of camp life, which for some survivors became almost worse than the physical hardships of internment.23 Feelings of emptiness and solitude gradually arose in the survivors.24 A 21-­year-­old Sintizza, Veronika Weiss, describes how, ­a fter her liberation, ­t hese contradictory feelings suddenly hit her and thrust her into a state of utter helplessness: “I was liberated, but alone. This feeling has para­lyzed me so much that I still do not know what happened to me in the next few days.”25 Enduring humiliation, extreme physical and psychological vio­lence, torture, and death, as well as per­sis­tent anxiety, had a lasting effect on the physical and psychological constitution of survivors, creating a trauma that haunted them throughout their lives.26 On their own, as homeless fragments of destroyed families, they w ­ ere released into the world outside the camps. For instance, Ewald Hanstein, who was born in 1924, had grown up in Breslau and Berlin and was deported to Auschwitz in 1943, like his m ­ other and six siblings. As a forced laborer, he was brought back to the territory of the German Reich in 1944 before the liquidation of the “gypsy ­family camp” in Auschwitz-­Birkenau. His ­mother and siblings—as far as he knew—­were murdered by gas. In the midst of the “death march” from Harzungen, a subcamp of the Mittelbau-­Dora concentration camp, as the survivors headed in the direction of Bördeland, he was liberated in mid-­April 1945 by members of the U.S. Army. Gloomy thoughts quickly came to him: ­ fter the feeling of happiness had subsided and the spirit of life was reined in, A the inevitable question came: “Where should I go?” A huge emptiness arose. Of the dear ­people with whom I had shared my life, almost nobody was left. Gradually, I became conscious of this. And ­t here was no trace of t­ hose who might be still alive. I looked around and envied the friendly American soldiers. Once their “job” was done, they would return home to their families. I had lost both. For a Sinto home is where his ­family is.27

International organ­izations, which had arrived in the country right a­ fter the Allied troops, immediately began to identify, categorize, and take care of the countless DPs in the refugee and reception camps.28 In addition to numerous American Jewish relief organ­izations such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee Organ­ization, and the Red Cross w ­ ere all dedicated to 29 humanitarian aid in war-­torn Eu­rope. The data collected about each survivor should have been the basis for a swift repatriation of displaced persons to their

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countries of origin. But out of fear of being deprived of their liberty and of being imprisoned again, many Sinti and Roma escaped from the DP camps. For example, 22-­year-­old Reinhard Florian, who was liberated by the Americans in a subcamp of Mauthausen, fled from a DP camp established for southern Eu­ro­pe­ans who ­were to be repatriated. ­Because of his dark complexion, he had been taken to this camp for southern Eu­ro­pean DPs, and the young Sinto did not dare tell the U.S. soldiers that he was actually German.30 Survivors’ thoughts ­were constantly circling around the question of ­whether their relatives ­were still alive. To attain certainty about their relatives’ fate, Sinti and Roma survivors tried to go back to their hometowns or to the places from where they had been deported. Unlike Jewish survivors, who ­were able to get in touch with Jewish members of the Allied military and auxiliary staff, ­t here w ­ ere no comparable liaisons among the liberators for Sinti and Roma. But more importantly, the Allies had no competence for dealing with Sinti and Roma survivors. Feelings of isolation in the refugee camps also arose ­because survivors had few contacts with other liberated Sinti and Roma. Th ­ ere are few data on the number of Sinti and Roma survivors among the liberated camp inmates and forced laborers.31 The return of survivors to their places of origin or to where they assumed they would find relatives was very difficult. The countryside was devastated by war and the means of transportation very restricted; the onerous trip on foot often took several months. Most Sinti and Roma did not return to their hometowns alone but ­were accompanied by other Romani survivors.32 ­These returnees ­were by no means welcomed. Daniel Strauss, chairman of the regional association of German Sinti and Roma in Baden-­Württemberg, notes that the Germans reacted to the survivors with prejudice and open rejection while feeling no sense of guilt or wrongdoing.33 ­After fleeing the DP camp at night, 12-­year-­old Hugo Höllenreiner, liberated in Bergen-­Belsen, walked together with some of his relatives to his hometown of Munich. Th ­ ere they hoped to find other f­ amily members who had been deported to other camps. The way on foot to Munich was very long and cumbersome, but taking the train was out of the question. “ ’With the Germans,’ said Mama, ‘we do not go by train any more. Even when we have to walk all the way back home.’ ”34 They saw walking as symbolic of their regained freedom as well as a form of self-­ determination. Trains, in contrast, evoked traumatic memories associated with the loss of liberty, deportation, and heteronomy. Yet many Sinti and Roma did not want to return to their hometowns. In par­ tic­u­lar, the younger survivors felt disoriented and on their own, and they did not know where to go. Moreover, Sinti and Roma from the eastern parts of Germany, which ­after 1945 became Polish and Czechoslovak territory, and also Roma from other Eastern Eu­ro­pean countries that had been liberated, could not or did not want to go back to their homes.35 ­Others de­cided not to return to their hometowns, ­because they ­were the places where their persecution had begun and where they did not expect to find any remaining f­ amily members.

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Immediately ­after liberation, the newfound freedom of movement was one of the greatest joys for the survivors, and the fear of being deprived of it again was pre­sent among all of them. When trucks approached, most of which belonged to the military, they immediately panicked: “Now they are coming to get us.”36 The fear of being arrested and imprisoned again was often stated in survivor accounts.37 This deep-­seated trauma resulted in anxious be­hav­ior in their daily lives. They did not want to attract any attention and therefore avoided situations they considered potentially unsafe. The constant feeling of inner restlessness and the lack of belonging surfaced immediately ­after liberation. In the following interview, a survivor from Lower Saxony expresses t­ hese feelings: So, and then we are, as we ­were ­free, we did not even dare to go out onto the streets, we ­were still afraid that they would come and get us. Only secondary roads, groves, country roads. And we begged sandwiches from the peasants (laughs) and could walk around freely. We w ­ ere so afraid, we w ­ ere so intimidated. . . . ​We ­were not able to think straight.38

The first points of contact for Sinti and Roma returning to their hometowns w ­ ere often the former municipal forced camps and areas for so-­called gypsies. In t­ hese locations, survivors had the best chance of finding relatives or at least of learning something about their fate from other returnees. But the most pressing question concerned their own lodgings. The homes of Sinti and Roma had all been “Aryanized” by the National Socialists, with Germans now living ­there. Even their caravans had been confiscated, burned, or sold by local police officers. When survivors returned, they ­were left with nothing, as in the case of Marie Laubinger. She returned to Neubrandenburg as the only surviving member of her f­ amily. In her absence, local farmers had turned the caravans of deported Sinti and Roma into hen ­houses and pigsties. In a bid for assistance, Marie Laubinger contacted the mayor of the town, who knew that Laubinger had been deported to Auschwitz with her f­ amily. However, he did nothing to help her—­neither to return her parents’ caravan nor to provide her with any other help or support.39 The same happened to the Höllenreiner f­ amily when they returned to their home in Munich. As they stood in front of their former home, they realized that other Germans ­were now living ­t here. When the ­mother of six tried to complain about this, the new residents let her know that the h ­ ouse now belonged to them. The Sintizza then complained to the police, who likewise remained unmoved and claimed they could do nothing about it. The ­mother left empty-­handed with her severely ill c­ hildren and found a poor-­quality shelter in the barn of an u ­ ncle. ­After a few months, her wounded husband also returned to Munich. Shocked and upset to find his f­ amily living in a barn, he forcibly took his property back. He entered his ­house using force, smashed a few ­t hings, and kicked out the German ­family. Neither the police nor the illegitimate German residents of the ­house took any action in this m ­ atter.40 Once back in their h ­ ouse the f­ amily realized that nothing was left of their former possessions, “as if we had never lived in this place.” 41 From

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this and other similar testimonies, we can conclude that only unauthorized actions allowed Sinti and Roma survivors at that time to get their property back. But most survivors did not even think of using force. Younger survivors in par­tic­u­lar feared being imprisoned again for the mere attempt to take back their f­ amily belongings. To find out more about the fate and whereabouts of missing relatives, survivors relied on informal communication channels: “We always told one another who died, who lived and so on.” 42 When survivors heard that in another city Sinti and Roma had returned from concentration camps, many of them set out to that city in hopes of some news of their own relatives: “We thought they might tell us something.” 43 Joyful reunions with ­family members and friends w ­ ere always accompanied by much bad news and grief. Hugo Höllenreiner, whose relatives regularly gathered in his ­u ncle’s barn, recalls: “Every­one was crying, the adults and the ­children. ­Because so many w ­ ere missing, ­because they had survived, b ­ ecause they could not cry before, b ­ ecause it was so terrible that they could not believe it, ­because they ­were still so afraid.” 44 Many w ­ ere so deeply moved by the reunion with their loved ones, whom they often believed to be dead, that they could not find the words to express their feelings.45 Oskar and Günther Böhmer ­were able to find their ­mother and returned to Hamburg with her. They sat day and night and talked about what had happened to them. But the b ­ rothers had a hard time telling her about the death of their younger siblings: Of course, my m ­ other asked me right away about my siblings. The first times I did not answer, I just went out. I just could not tell her that they ­were all gassed. But I had to tell her. I was the oldest; my b ­ rother Günther could not tell her. It was so terrible. She cried and cried; she was trembling all over. I thought for a moment that she was not ­going to survive this; she was so desperate.46

­ fter a time, the survivors realized that no one e­ lse was coming back. Like Jewish A survivors, they w ­ ere the only ones saved of a greatly depleted community.47 Most of the Sinti and Roma survivors w ­ ere left with nothing a­ fter their liberation. They had lost their relatives, all their possessions, homes, caravans, and, often, their homelands. Sinti and Roma did not receive any special support as survivors from the authorities, aid organ­izations, or the Allies, nor was ­there any understanding of their persecution or any consideration for their physical and m ­ ental condition. Although the Jewish survivors in the DP camps w ­ ere also worn down by the lack of attention and understanding, at the very least the Americans and international relief organ­izations ­were anxious to provide Jewish DPs with aid and support.48 Without parents, siblings, or grandparents, it was particularly difficult for younger survivors to find their way a­ fter they left the camps. Adults who had already acquired a solid conception of the world, and w ­ ere fully formed personalities, experienced imprisonment and extreme vio­lence as a direct shock to their being and developed quick symptoms of traumatization.49 In contrast, it took longer for younger survivors who w ­ ere subjected to persecutory mea­sures to show

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symptoms of posttraumatic stress, but when they did, the damage was considerable. Furthermore, psychologists and physicians observed that child survivors and adolescents, as a result of their psychological distress, had matured too quickly: they barely allowed adults to intervene or help them50 and showed an indifference ­toward every­thing, especially ­matters concerning their own existence,51 which was described as a form of “psychological anesthesia.”52 ­Whether they lived or died had become irrelevant for them b ­ ecause of their internment. Their experiences in the camps had made them emotionally dull. Otto Rosenberg remarks, “But I was due to the concentration camps not afraid at all, I was not afraid of a gun or a knife.”53 They ­were used to extreme vio­lence, and therefore real vio­lence did not scare them. However, the intense feelings that they experienced ­after liberation ­were a heavy burden and hard to cope with. In addition to the stage of life in which t­ hese experiences made their impact, gender-­specific aspects also played an impor­tant role in coping with the trauma. ­Women and girls ­were often victims of sexual vio­lence, forced abortion, and sterilization, in addition to daily mistreatment in the totalitarian regime of concentration and extermination camps. ­Because of that, feelings of degradation and humiliation w ­ ere more likely to intensify.54 Forced sterilization carried out in concentration camps had a particularly devastating impact on survivors. Many Sinti and Roma underwent this procedure before internment in an effort to avoid deportation, and although ­t hese victims suffered from repercussions for a long time a­ fter liberation, the physical damage of t­ hose who had to endure such treatment in the camps was often even worse. In many cases, surgical operations w ­ ere performed on inmates without the use of anesthetics. From 1943 on, an SS doctor, Carl Clauberg, carried out forced sterilizations using a nonsurgical treatment that he had developed through his experiments on h ­ uman beings within the camps. He injected liquid into the abdomens of w ­ omen and girls in Auschwitz, and ­later in Ravensbrück, which caused inflammation. ­After the brutal and terribly painful procedure, the heavi­ly bleeding victims ­were returned to their blocks without any medical treatment. During the “evacuation” of the camps, the SS also ordered many forcibly sterilized w ­ omen and girls to walk in the death marches ­toward other camps. In pain and usually only with the support of fellow inmates, they survived this torture. The painful forced sterilization and the experiments that many Sinti and Roma had to endure in the camps explain the reluctance of many survivors ­after the war to undergo medical treatment. Survivors who suffered such mutilations w ­ ere often confined to bed for months and recovered very slowly. In addition, such violations had a much broader impact on the lives of ­t hose affected than the terrible physical damage: their physical integrity and personal self-­determination had been v­ iolated by the mutilation. Adolescent girls (and to some extent boys as well) underwent forced sterilization during an impor­tant phase in their transition into adulthood.55 In this formative stage, adolescents ­were passing through puberty, developing a new sense of their bodies, and discovering their

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own sexuality. The drastic intrusion into their bodies and intimate sphere led to a blatant break that impaired the rest of their life.56 Moreover, the traumatic experiences in the camps led to alcohol abuse and de­pen­dency in many cases. A survivor illustrates this point in describing the time a­ fter liberation: Now I was home, t­ here w ­ ere my grandparents and many friends, and I was t­ here and was also not ­t here. . . . ​Only now do I realize how alone I was, that my parents and my siblings w ­ ere missing. Me alone . . . ​I was a stranger, even though my grandparents ­were still ­t here. . . . ​I would always run away, sit down, and cry. . . . ​I was so depressed; I could not get used to the fact that both of my parents ­were gone. . . . ​Then I realized how alone I was, how every­thing was gone. . . . ​ And then one also thought about the camp and so . . . ​I could not ­really rest. Then he arrived, and another one, and another one, and then the drinking started . . . ​ and then I was almost constantly u ­ nder the influence of alcohol. . . . ​Honestly, I wanted to kill myself. Yes, I went that far.57

Unconsciously, many survivors felt responsible for the deaths of their loved ones and regretted their own survival. They survived, but w ­ ere unable to save their parents, siblings, companions, or their own c­ hildren. Feelings of shame and guilt merged into one another.58 As physically exploitable forced laborers, many Sinti and Roma had left Auschwitz and survived, while their relatives w ­ ere gassed. ­Others ­were transported to concentration camps before the deportations to Auschwitz. When, ­a fter liberation they learned what happened to their relatives, they w ­ ere plagued with so-­called survivor guilt: “Why did I survive while the o ­ thers had to die?” Many survivors saw their own survival as inextricably linked with the deaths of their loved ones. It was an emotional dilemma that to a ­g reat extent affected many of them psychologically.59 Likewise, Otto Rosenberg was tortured by incomprehension about his own survival: Do you know what makes me think? Why did I survive? I cannot give myself an answer. The w ­ hole f­ amily, all my siblings, every­t hing that was precious to you, no h ­ uman being had the opportunity to survive. Although my b ­ rothers ­were much stronger than me. I was the smallest! I cannot understand that. They said: “Now you are f­ ree, rejoice over it.” I have not been able to rejoice so much, b ­ ecause I always missed my siblings. Then when the Fridays came, and the p ­ eople w ­ ere celebrating, or the families w ­ ere sitting together, then the inner demons and the ­mental stress came. It was very hard.60

Clearly, Otto Rosenberg experienced deep emotional stress, particularly when he saw himself in relation to his environment and missed his relatives even more. Memories of his murdered f­ amily—­especially his ­brothers who, in his view, should have had much better chances of survival than he—­overshadowed the joy of his own liberation and made him mournful. Foremost in relation to their new environment, feelings of melancholy manifested themselves in many survivors, leaving some in doubt of a hope-­fi lled ­f uture.

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Assistance and Support for Sinti and Roma Survivors During the first years ­after the war, the Sinti and Roma communities provided an impor­tant aid and support structure for the survivors. I found in my research that asking the German authorities for help was a last resort for many Romani survivors, only done a­ fter they had already exhausted all other possibilities. This was based on their experience of antigypsyist sentiments toward them such that claim procedures took a very long time and their applications were often rejected in the end. The survivors relied most of the time on ­family members who ­were still able to work and could provide support to their sick and poor relatives. For example, Zilli Reichmann got help from her older ­brother Stefan ­after returning from the camps. He was a kind of ­father figure for her. ­After the war, he worked at an airport and l­ ater made a decent living as a violin retailer. He owned several h ­ ouses in Mühlheim, where his extended ­family started to rebuild their lives. He supported many other survivors from his community ­after the war.61 Other testimonies show that even ­children had to work to earn money for the ­family. The Sinto Christian Pfeil, who was born in the Lublin ghetto in 1944, reports that he and his ­sister had to work hard to support their sick siblings and ­father.62 Regardless of his unhappy childhood marred by persecution and harm caused in the camp, he should have been able to participate in the reconstruction of war-­ torn Germany. However, he and many o ­ thers w ­ ere not physically capable or willing to do such hard work again. Yet, refusing to work or stopping for health reasons had serious consequences. Such actions w ­ ere interpreted in a racist manner, close to the ideological Nazi notion of being “work-­shy” (in German: arbeitsscheu), which led the relevant authorities to reduce the welfare benefits they so depended on. Thus the only source of real support for survivors was within their own group and the solidarity-­based system of the f­amily. Sinti and Roma traveled in large f­amily groups ­after the war for two practical reasons: ­doing so provided safety in the still hostile postwar society of Germany and made it easier for the survivors to earn a living. The Sinti and Roma community was not only reduced in number; its traditional hierarchy in which the elders held authority and determined the living together of the community had also been suspended. Most of the surviving Sinti and Roma ­were young, and the concentration camp experience made it difficult for them to return to the old order. The abolition of customary codes of conduct, which was necessary for survival in the camps, led to a loss of cultural foundations. The Sinto Lolo Reinhardt recalls that younger survivors did not follow their elders like they used to before the war: every­one went his or her own way.63 Cultural values w ­ ere further weakened by the deployment of mainly young Sinti men as “functionary prisoners” in the “gypsy ­family camp,” which was fundamentally contrary to the normal authority structure.64 Given the challenges to the minority group’s customary order, it is not clear how the Sinti and Roma responded to the altered age structure ­a fter 1945 and what impact it had on the reconstruction of the community. This aspect was not

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discussed in any of the interviews, which focused on practical day-­to-­day tasks. According to the personal accounts of survivors, f­ amily members and relatives came together almost e­ very day and talked about their ­future plans: how they could or­ga­nize food and start a new business and ­whether they should stay in Germany or move abroad.65 ­Because of many reasons—­a ntigypsyism being only one of them—­postwar authorities failed to provide the survivors with basic necessities such as housing.66 According to the testimonies, it was relatives and Romani friends who offered them shelter for a short or long period of time, who helped them recover, who took in the parentless ­children of murdered relatives, and who provided survivors with furniture, money, and utensils so that they could start a new trade or business. Yet the solidarity-­based system of the f­ amily was heavi­ly damaged by the German mass murder of Sinti and Roma. The extended f­ amily as such no longer existed ­after the war, and surviving f­ amily members adapted to this new situation by reaching out to other Romani families. As a result of their ongoing marginalization and discrimination, the survivors moved closer together, and cohesion within the group increased.

Building and Rebuilding F ­ amily Structures Many survivors w ­ ere keen to start and create new (alternative) f­ amily structures even while mourning their first families for a lifetime. In fact, building a ­family and having c­ hildren was for many a form of remembrance of their murdered loved ones.67 Sinti and Roma who ­were the only survivors of their f­ amily soon started developing new relationships. For example, Hugo Höllenreiner, who survived Bergen-­ Belsen, reported that his ­uncle, whose wife and ­children had been murdered in the camps, married the s­ ister of his sister-­in-­law ­after the war, who had also lost her husband and c­ hildren.68 Survivors of all ages quickly remarried, although younger survivors ­were the swiftest of all to build families and have ­children: ­t hese new families w ­ ere the most tangible evidence that they had actually sur69 vived. But some could not overcome the loss of their c­ hildren and de­cided not to have any more. Zilli Reichmann survived Auschwitz and was sent to work in Ravensbrück on August 3, 1944, where she learned that her entire ­family, including her young ­daughter Gretel whom she had to leave ­behind, was killed in the gas chambers. Her desire always was to have six ­children who could form a sextet band. But ­after she learned that Gretel was murdered, she promised herself not to have another child. In 1948 she got married to Anton Schmidt, who was also Sinti, but they never had any c­ hildren.70 Yet for most Romani survivors, starting a ­family was a high priority, as it was for Jewish survivors. The meaning of parenthood a­ fter 1945 was best described by the Jewish survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein.71 For her, being a m ­ other brought more advantages and allowed her to once more dive into the stream of life a­ fter the horror. It made her equal with her contemporaries and closed the gap between camp survivors and the rest of the society: caring for a child became the biggest

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equalizer in the postwar years. In addition to the desire to return to “normality,” ­family formation was also fundamental for the life of Sinti and Roma in a still hostile society. ­Family was for them the structure they could primarily rely on. For some survivors, having c­ hildren therefore reflected not just personal fulfillment and a longing for happiness but also was an economic necessity, b ­ ecause ­children could take care of them l­ ater in life and contribute to the ­family’s livelihood. To start a new ­family, however, did not necessarily mean starting a new heterosexual relationship: it also meant helping the parentless c­hildren and young ­people who survived the camps. Where pos­si­ble, Sinti and Roma took in the orphan ­children of their murdered relatives. Even as they strug­gled with their own health and financial situation, Romani survivors nursed them back to health and offered them a new home. ­After the war, Christine Strauss, born in 1906, took care of her niece Ursula, who was born in 1932, and her nephew Fritz, born in 1927. Both had survived Auschwitz with severe physical damage and had lost most of their ­family members. Christine Strauss, who had been interned in Ravensbrück and Neuengamme, was unable to work a­ fter 1945 b ­ ecause of her poor health and ner­vous condition. She had lost two c­ hildren, four ­sisters, and a b ­ rother in Auschwitz. Still, she made ­great efforts to give Ursula and Fritz a new home.72 For the victims of forced sterilization, however, starting a ­family was hardly pos­ si­ble. Deprived of their own reproductive capacity, they ­were often isolated within their own group. Newly formed ties often weakened a­ fter their ability to have ­children was ruled out. For example, Otto Rosenberg left his first wife ­after the war, ­because she could not bear c­ hildren due to her forced sterilization, and he built a new f­ amily with another w ­ oman. In his autobiography Das Brennglas (The Burning Lens), he states, But then came the break between me and my wife. She could not have ­children. They treated her badly in the camp. Since we w ­ ere not a ­family, t­ here was no real cohesion. My grand­mother was dead, my f­ ather was dead, my siblings w ­ ere dead, nobody was left. I was alone and had to make my own decisions in my young age. It was often very difficult.73

Only a few of ­t hose with forced sterilizations ­were able to build a ­family despite their impairment. A fitting example is the case of a forcibly sterilized Sintizza from Lower Saxony. In her testimony, she explains the importance to her of raising her s­ ister’s ­children: Look, and what they had done to us, the experiments. I do not have [my] own ­children. But I have a s­ ister who has three boys, and she is completely [mentally ill] due to the camp. That’s why I took the three boys, I have now had them thirty years, ­t hese are now my sons and my grandchildren. This is still the only joy I have. Now I have three l­ittle girls as grandchildren and two boys. They now say I’m the grandma, and my boys say I’m the m ­ other. . . . ​Yeah, that keeps me up. Look, shortly ­a fter the war I cried a lot, when I saw all the ­women with their families. And I was so young. All the crying and moaning, I was completely

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devastated. Yeah, but now I have left this ­behind, now I take care for my ­sister’s ­children.74

That her postwar social environment consisted of large families was a heavy burden for the young ­woman. She wanted to be part of it and felt grief over her own childless situation. Only through surrogate motherhood was this Sintizza able to overcome her own trauma. Heike Kokrowsky describes the emotional state that many forcibly sterilized ­people experienced a­ fter liberation as “chronic melancholy.”75 They ­were forced to watch from the sidelines as other survivors put all their efforts and energy into starting and restoring their families a­ fter the war, while they could neither meet their own aspirations nor t­ hose of their social group.

Conclusion As the testimonies and reports of survivors show, most Sinti and Roma ­were left with nothing a­ fter liberation. They had lost their relatives, all their worldly possessions, and often their homelands. Even though some of the survivors de­cided to return to their places of origin, they faced hatred and hostility by the majority society. They w ­ ere not at all welcome and very rarely could they reclaim their stolen property ­after the war. The search for surviving relatives was the core concern of most returning Sinti and Roma. As the memories of survivors show, the exchange of information about missing relatives took place predominantly on the basis of informal communication networks within the group. The survivors ­were usually on their own, ­after 1945, and assistance was primarily provided by ­family members or friends. Within t­hese networks, they received support by the l­imited resources of the minority group. The ­family was often seen as a safe space that offered security in a hostile environment. With traditional social and cultural structures largely destroyed, survivors w ­ ere focused on making new connections and rebuilding f­amily and communal structures. ­Because it was the younger Sinti and Roma who had largely survived, the age structure within the group was dramatically altered, which had a significant impact on the community’s cultural foundations. Parenthood was viewed by many survivors as a return to “normality” and a way out of solitude. However, this new beginning was especially difficult for the victims of forced sterilization. They w ­ ere hardly able to build a new f­amily and w ­ ere often isolated within their own group. It is striking that in much of the research on the Roma genocide, aspects of ­family and motherhood are often discussed exclusively with regard to the cultural characteristics of Sinti and Roma. Indeed, fertility, ­family, and the bringing up of ­children, based on historical reasons, are of crucial importance. Nevertheless, a purely culturalistic perspective on the living situation and personal needs of Sinti and Roma is quite limiting, ignoring the individual prob­lems and wishes of ­t hose affected. Bringing up ­children allowed many survivors, including Jews, to return

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to a somewhat normal life. The decision to have ­children again and build a new ­family could close the abyss that the German annihilation policy had created in their lives. The survivors of extermination tried to break through their emptiness and loneliness, and building a ­family was the best way to find their way back into life. To care for a child was the most direct form of self-­assurance. Thus, having ­children was not only relevant to the group but also to the individual identity of the survivors.

chapter 9

v

“I Could Never Forget What ­They’d Done to My ­Father” The Absence and Presence of Holocaust Memory in a F­ amily’s Letter Collection Joachim Schlör

In May 1937, Liesel Rosenthal, then 22 years of age, left her hometown of Heilbronn in southwest Germany and emigrated to ­England. In the course of the next two years, she managed, admirably, to find guarantors, to overcome all bureaucratic hurdles, and to get her b ­ rother and her parents out of Germany. Although t­ here ­were f­ amily conflicts, mostly relating to a change in roles between a young ­woman who experienced her emigration as an act of emancipation from home and her parents who felt a loss of authority, Liesel’s main goal was to save her el­derly ­father from further humiliation and persecution u ­ nder the Nazi regime. Eleven years ­after her emigration, in 1948, she bundled up and stowed away a huge collection of letters that had been exchanged between ­family members, relatives, friends, and her during the Nazi regime and World War II. Liesel’s d ­ aughter, Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger, gave me access to t­ hese documents some years ago, and I have written the history of her m ­ other’s emigration based on them.1 In the pro­cess, I also tried to find out to what extent history can be written “from” such a private collection of letters, how archival research could complement the study of the letters, and what are the limitations of this kind of approach. At first sight, the letters seem to tell the story of a successful escape and a new life on the British Isles. The core ­family—­Liesel herself, her ­brother Helmut, and her parents Ludwig and Hermine Rosenthal—re­united in London in spring 1939 ­after a long period of uncertainty and despair. Taking a closer look, however, the documents (or, at points, gaps within the collection that need to be filled with additional information taken from the archives) reveal news about ­t hose left ­behind: an aunt who took her own life on the deportation train to Theresienstadt, an ­uncle who had escaped to Amsterdam only to find himself and his wife caught up ­under the German invasion ­t here, a distant cousin for whom friends in ­England had already 156

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secured a visa and a job but who was never able to leave the country. Most of this news reached Liesel and her parents only t­ oward the end of the war or even ­after the liberation of Germany. It partly shatters their feelings of gratitude for having been saved and their hopes for the f­ uture, which only become vis­i­ble when, in the postwar period, they renew contacts with their former hometown. Liesel, now Alice Schwab, travels to Heilbronn, where she acknowledges the effort of her former German neighbors to come to terms with “the past”—­but, as she says in a memoir recorded by the British Library, she can “never forget what t­ hey’d done to my ­father.” In this chapter, I discuss the dynamics and the internal workings of the ­family relations in this narrative. Jan Robert van Pelt and Debórah Dwork write, “Fleeing does not write refugees out of the story [of the Holocaust]; it simply takes the story elsewhere. Indeed: it takes it everywhere.”2 This general assumption is painfully true in the case of the Rosenthal f­ amily, and their letters show how difficult it was to integrate “the story” of loss into the ­family narrative. This postcard was postmarked with 4-­, 5-­, and 6-­pfennig stamps (with Paul von Hindenburg’s portrait on them), on January 17, 1939, in Heilbronn (Neckar) and sent to “Miss Lisel Rosenthal, 25a Thurlow Road, London N.W.3, Hampstead”: Dear Liesel! First of all you must ask the Uruguay[an] consulate immediately if it is pos­si­ble for us to travel from Engl[and] to Urug[uay]. We w ­ ill of course take our own furniture with us, just as [we] would sort out our boat tickets ­here. If not then you must next try to arrange Australia for us, but I fear that this proj­ect is dragging on so long, and we urgently need a tangible, quick solution. ­There is no need to telegraph us, save your money, but please try to do more for us. Let us know as soon as you can about Uruguay, as d[ear] M ­ other may have to go to Berlin on that account next week. W[ith] love and kisses for you and Heller. F ­ ather.3

The story I write about in this chapter is about the fate of four members of the Rosenthal ­family: Ludwig, the ­father; Hermine, the ­mother; Alice (Lisel or Liesel), the d ­ aughter, and Helmut (Heller, ­later Jack), the son. It is based on a close reading and critical analy­sis of several hundred letters and postcards exchanged between the four ­family members—as well as a large number of relatives, friends, acquaintances old and new, plus vari­ous authorities and institutions—­over a period of roughly ten years between 1937 and 1947. Liesel—­only ever called Alice, her birth name, by strangers—is the focal point of all ­t hese letters. On May 17, 1937, seven days a­ fter her twenty-­second birthday, she emigrated from her (and my) home city of Heilbronn to ­England, initially to Birmingham and then to London. From ­there she attempted to get her b ­ rother and parents out of Nazi Germany. It was only a­ fter Liesel’s decision to leave Germany that Ludwig Rosenthal (born on February 6, 1880)—­a “Wine and Spirit Specialist” as he described himself on his stationery—­and his wife Hermine (born April 19, 1892, in Bad Cannstatt), a member of the Rothschild f­ amily, began to make efforts to or­ga­nize their own emigration. As this postcard shows, they considered vari­ous countries and “proj­ects.” Life was becoming increasingly difficult for them in Heilbronn, and they began to

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familiarize themselves with living conditions in ­England, Chile, Uruguay, South Africa, and Australia. They w ­ ere worried not only about their c­ hildren’s well-­being but also about their possessions, their flat, their “­t hings” (Sachen), as they say in Swabia. The letters document both world and f­amily history. The “­g reat” po­liti­cal events—­t he Nazi dictatorship, then in its fifth year; the increasing persecution of Jews in Germany and Eu­rope; the outbreak and pro­gress of World War II; even the imminent upheaval in the British Empire, including in the British Mandate of Palestine—do more than merely frame the f­ amily’s story: they actively shape it and are reflected in it. Carefully written, ­these letters put the ­family members’ relationships with each other to the test, as the phrase, “please try to do more for us,” in the postcard shows. Through specific phrases, abbreviations (“d[ear] ­Mother,” “w[ith] love”) and expressions, tone and emphasis, the Swabian dialect, and switching between German and En­glish, the letters also reveal much about each individual’s efforts to survive ­t hese global events, to preserve a sense of worth, and to justify his or her actions. Liesel was the addressee of almost all the letters; very few documents written by her have been preserved. In 1990, at the age of 75, then known as Alice Schwab, she gave an interview for the National Life Story Collection of the British Library in London; it is now stored in the archive, Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust.4 The printed summary is titled “Thank You for Every­thing.” Unsurprisingly, given how much time had elapsed—­a lthough the memoirs offer impressive insight into how Liesel looked back at her life as a m ­ other and a grand­mother to her d ­ aughter Julia and her grandchildren Harriet and Matthew—in terms of detail and chronology they are quite unreliable. In the collection of letters itself, she is, although the focal point, remarkably absent, her personality becoming (partly) apparent in the image of her developed by ­others through contact with her. Moreover, and entirely to be expected given the circumstances, the documents are incomplete: some are ripped, splotchy, and difficult to decipher. ­There are undated letters that are almost impossible to put into order, and t­ here are very private letters, of which I have used only the ones that are impor­tant in telling the story or for giving an impression of Liesel’s personality. And ­t here are many inconsequential letters, slips of paper, bills, and notes referring to daily t­ hings written by seamstresses or work colleagues: t­ hese are aspects of the correspondence that are just as much about trivial ­matters as impor­tant ones—­which makes them of par­tic­u ­lar value. In many historical accounts h ­ uman beings are portrayed as mere objects of what happens to them, and in many memoirs personal experience is foregrounded rather too prominently. In ­t hese letters, the one is inconceivable without the other.

Emigration and ­Family Dynamics Emigration is no abstract pro­cess. It has an everyday dimension, and a part of it is a change in ­family relationships. Dr. Carlos Sluzki, a ­family therapist who has worked with emigrants from Pinochet’s Chile, has written a very impor­tant essay

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on this issue, and his findings are of ­great significance for our story.5 I paraphrase them h ­ ere with regard to the Rosenthal ­family story. Initially, each individual migration represents a kind of f­ amily drama and, as such, becomes part of the ­family’s story; as time goes by, it can even become an anecdote in some cases. Migrations always have a prehistory. They often begin with a ­family member taking the first steps to prepare for his or her emigration. Letters to relatives or to authorities, visa applications, and similar documents give substance to this intention. How long this initial phase lasts depends not just on the po­liti­cal circumstances but also on the nature of the affected ­family and the relationships between its members. As part of this stage, Sluzki writes, t­ here are “up and down curves,” short periods of euphoria mixed with moments of stress, disappointment, and failure. New rules must be negotiated within the ­family discourse, during which confrontations that the ­family may have never experienced before can arise. In some cases—­particularly ­t hose that involve fleeing extreme hardship or if one of t­ hose who “stay ­behind” dies—­t he first person who leaves may possibly be seen as a traitor: “the member of the f­ amily who breaks away first from the collective ­family mourning is frequently scapegoated as a traitor.” 6 It is this person, however, who experiences the new real­ity of both the loss of the homeland and encounters with strangers, and he or she must pass this information on to the ­family. This experience of transition, which emigration and immigration represent, cannot be conveyed or negotiated within the framework of preexisting f­ amily rituals. Acting as a scout, the first emigrant must meet ­people in the new surroundings who have comparable experiences and use this circle to create a network of contacts and exchange, which t­ hose who “stay ­behind” cannot understand, ­because they cannot know what is ­going on “outside.” ’ For many emigrants, the journey by ship, to Palestine or the United States, is especially symbolic of this experience of transition, not least b ­ ecause during the passage they can strike up impor­tant social relationships. Sluzki therefore speaks of “Schiffsbrüder ­ rothers and ship s­ isters) who become a replacement und Schiffsschwestern” (ship b ­family, to the chagrin of their real f­ amily.7 Although the pioneers “share” the subsequent pro­cesses of acculturation and of beginning to integrate with ­t hose in the same position as them, they can only “communicate” ­these experiences to the members of their ­family back home. Consequently, f­ amily rules and values that w ­ ere taken for granted are no longer considered to apply or be useful to them. But it is not easy for the f­ amily to change its framework of rules. New rules for coping with this new situation and the ac­cep­ tance of new forms of communication and indeed new hierarchies must be chosen and discussed. B ­ ecause the old rules ­were often symbolic for the essence of the ­family’s understanding of itself, perhaps with regard to its national or ethnic identity, this renegotiation of the ­family structure alters its members’ perception of the world. “The specific styles, modes, values, and myths that constitute an ad hoc, family-­specific view of the world and of their own history” are challenged, and in many cases it is only the members of the next generation, or even the one a­ fter that, who find an acceptable modus vivendi.8

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Many of t­ hese findings refer to migration in the 1970s and are based on the perspective of a ­family therapist. They are, however, of ­great interest for students of German Jewish emigration in the 1930s and for our case study of the Rosenthal ­family. Emigration from the familiar surroundings of Heilbronn, where the f­ amily roots stretched back for generations, represented a dramatic event. As a pioneer, Liesel had taken on a new role. She had acquired a new group of friends, in­de­pen­ dent of the ­family, and in her communication with like-­minded ­people, she had learned new rules that clashed with the traditional rules in her parents’ h ­ ouse­hold. Preparations for Helmut’s, and then Ludwig and Hermine’s, emigration ­were extremely time consuming and required numerous specific steps to be taken in an atmosphere laden with tension and characterized by unfamiliar emotions (in Sluzki’s terms, “euphoria” and “dismay”). None of ­t hose involved had studied the emigration pro­cess, and the former rituals of understanding and exchanging ­were no longer adequate for describing the new real­ity. Global history was experienced as ­family history and understood from this perspective. Only Liesel, as the first to go, expanded her horizons to any considerable degree. Although no one would put it quite so bluntly, she was to some extent considered a “traitor” (to the formerly accepted ­family rules), even though she was also, or at least would go on to be, the ­family’s savior. While she was in London and her parents ­were still back in Germany, Liesel—­for whom emigration in more ways than one meant emancipation—­ received news from relatives and friends in Nazi Germany. When it became known that she managed, in due course, to get her b ­ rother and her parents out of Germany, she—­who had ­earlier been criticized for her “too many acquaintances,” for her love of the arts and of books, and her lack of seriousness—­was now regarded as an expert in saving p ­ eople and contacted by friends and relatives with pleas for help and support.

News from the Holocaust Extensive correspondence within the collection of letters documents the case of Hans Eisig, the son of Melitta, a friend of Liesel. Letters w ­ ere exchanged between the Movement for the Care of C ­ hildren from Germany (a unit of the British Inter-­ Aid Committee) in Bloomsbury House, the Israelite Welfare Office in Stuttgart (36 Hospitalstraße), and the Federation of Israelite Charitable Organ­izations between May 9–15, 1939. All of t­ hese letters are characterized by utter helplessness in the face of the bureaucratic restrictions imposed on both sides. “We ­will do every­thing we can to accommodate the boy ­here, but unfortunately we ­can’t promise anything”; “The person you ask about in your letter was sent by us to Berlin for child transport. As he has since turned 16 we are afraid that he w ­ ill no longer be dealt with by your department. An u ­ ncle of Hans Eisig had arranged a job for him, but so far no money guarantee has been provided.” Hans’s m ­ other Melitta wrote about their futile efforts: “­Those who want to help often c­ an’t, a[nd]. p ­ eople who could often d ­ on’t want to. And yet it is so urgent. I often think it is like when someone is drowning a[nd] calls for help a. the ­people

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on the bank d ­ on’t help as they are afraid of getting wet.” Hans himself wrote out his curriculum vita by hand: My name is Hans-­Eduard Eisig and I was born on 8 April 1923 in Heilbronn a/ Neckar. My ­father is businessman Hermann Eisig, my ­mother is Melitta Eisig née Vogel. At the age of 6 I started at the local primary school which I attended ­until the age of 11; I then attended the Oberrealschule, now called the Robert-­ Mayer-­Oberschule. As of Easter 1939 I am receiving my certificate of secondary-­ level education. I would now like to prepare myself for a profession. In terms of foreign languages, I have learnt French for 5 years, Latin for 3 years, and for 1 ½ years I have been privately tutored in En­glish. I have played violin for 4 ½ years and have played in many concerts for the local orchestra. I would like to learn a technical trade such as electrical engineering, radio manufacturing, motor production. . . . ​ If I should be unable to find anything in ­t hese professions I would also enjoy learning photography. . . . ​It is my wish to go to ­England to improve my knowledge of the language in the country and to develop into a hard-­working adult.

The description “victim of the Holocaust” is very abstract, and the figure of six million who ­were murdered is difficult to imagine. This document shows the voice of one of them. The attempts to rescue Hans and get him to E ­ ngland failed, and he was deported from Berlin-­Charlottenburg to Auschwitz in 1943. Minni Stern’s husband Alfred, a cousin of Liesel’s, had been imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp a­ fter Kristallnacht. His wife Minni tried what­ever she could to find a guarantor for him. On December 10, 1938, she wrote Liesel from Bad Nauheim: she had obtained a surety for Alfred, a waiting list number, and even a “ship ticket,” but as delighted as we are to have a surety, at the moment it is of no use to me. Please dear Liesel, ­don’t forget me & ­don’t tire if it ­doesn’t work immediately. I’m placing so much hope in you. If I only had a guarantee f. Alfred, I want nothing more, the rest ­w ill sort itself out. . . . ​So I think ­you’ve understood me correctly, I only need a guarantee for a transit residence. We all want to go to Amer­i­ca. . . . ​Now it’s over 4 weeks that A’s been ­there. On 8.12, the day before yesterday, I got a letter from him, quite short of course.—­Dear Liesel, on 8th we had our birthday, we w ­ ere born on the same day—­a nice birthday, d ­ on’t you think? I myself d ­ on’t know where I w ­ ill get the strength from to hold out for so long.—­Often I think it w ­ on’t go on & then it does go on ­because I have to.—­Oh Liesel, how difficult life is—­I have never found it easy, but now it is almost unbearable. Please, please dear Liesel, do what you can; it is so desperately needed.

One week l­ater, she let Liesel know that the police had called, telling her that she was to “pick up” her husband (from imprisonment), ­because he was not able to be released. In fact, he came home u ­ nder his own steam by car. He had contracted pneumonia and was very weak and mentally ravaged: “­people w ­ ere ­dying around him daily.” This made it ever more urgent to intensify the attempts to

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rescue him—­his waiting list number for emigration to the United States was 20,386. On December 23, Minnie wrote again, now asking for a work permit for herself as well, “as I d ­ on’t think I can send my husband alone to E ­ ngland now, as I initially ­imagined.” The unsaid was ­t here to read between the lines. Could Farnbacher help? Or Rosy Mayer (22 Lordship Park, London N16)? German con­sul­tant ­lawyer A. Horovitz was actively pursuing the case of Alfred Stern. Liesel had found in Jack Paynton someone who was ready to provide a guarantee, and ­because Stern was a farmer, it might be pos­si­ble to find him a position “in one of the Hachsharoth,” as Horovitz wrote on February 10, 1939. The hakhsharah was an institution that prepared young p ­ eople for emigration to Palestine by training them in agriculture and craftsmanship. A genealogical website on the Loeb f­ amily gives information on Alfred and Minni, as well as on the “Florsheim ­family”: “Minnie Florsheim married Alfred Stern from Heilbronn, Am-­Neckar. She perished in the Holocaust. Alfred was arrested by the British, sent to the Isle of Man, then to Australia. See his book The Dunera Scandal published in Australia.” The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names at Yad Vashem contains the following entry: Minni Stern, née Flörsheim, was born in 1905 in Bad Nauheim, Germany. She was the ­daughter of Hermann and Helene. She was married to Alfred. Before the Second World War she lived in Bad Nauheim, Germany. During the war she was in Bad Nauheim, Germany. Minni was murdered at Auschwitz, Poland, in 1942. Source of this information: memorial page sent in by: nephew [Alfred Oppenheimer].9

So they did succeed in getting Alfred Stern out of Germany, but his wife Minni, Liesel’s letter-­w riting partner, was deported and murdered at Auschwitz. Liesel’s aunt Bertha—­née Rosenthal, Stern by marriage—­lived at 43 Götzenturmstraße at this time. She scribbled on the letter, “Greetings to Heller from every­one and from me.” Hans Franke’s book on the Jews of Heilbronn states, “Stern, Berta, née Rosenthal *14 May 1874 in Heilbronn, ­house­wife, ­widow, 43 Götzenturmstr.; Frankfurt/M., 7 Sandweg, 18 August 1942 Theresienstadt, [date of death] unknown.” ­These events have only partially survived in the ­family memory, and not all of them form part of Alice Schwab’s memoir, Thank You for Every­thing. Not all news made it to ­England, and particularly during the war contact with the rest of Eu­rope was almost completely severed. At the center of my research stands the story of a successful emigration. While writing its story, however, more and more information on the fate of friends and ­family members murdered in the Holocaust came to light. At the same time I worked together with James Jordan from the University of Southampton and Lisa Leff from the American University in Washington, DC, to produce a special edition of our journal Jewish Culture and History on the subject of “Jewish Migration and the Archive.” Our introduction ended with this paragraph summarizing the results of our research, which often dealt with very personal, private, f­ amily “archives” from suitcases and boxes:

“ I C o u l d N e v e r F o r g e t W h at T h e y ’d D o n e t o M y Fat h e r” 163 Studying archives in the context of migration history can make us aware of the fact that t­ hese repositories on which we rely for our research d ­ on’t provide us with “complete” narratives—­much rather, they tell stories about absence, fragmentation, and loss, challenging researchers from all fields to develop new and creative ways to write history. A story of rescue (of both p ­ eople and historical rec­ords) can only be written if it includes the memory of t­ hose who w ­ ere not saved.10

To come back to the core ­family: at a “get-­together for refugees” or­ga­nized by Nathalie Gurney on Monday eve­nings, Liesel met Professor Wolpe, with whom she shared her worries about her parents. Above all, she feared that the visa they ­were hoping for that would permit them to go to Uruguay would arrive too late. Wolpe introduced her to Mrs. Rathbone, who suggested a hostel run by a Mr. and Mrs. Seligmann in Wimbledon as an initial accommodation and contact point. Liesel’s biggest worry concerned her f­ ather: I was determined to get my f­ ather out as quickly as pos­si­ble, ­because it was more impor­tant to help the men, since they w ­ ere ­under a greater threat of being thrown into concentration camps. The camps had already been set up! I had an u ­ ncle who had already been in a camp, but they let him out again. However, he was re-­arrested, taken back to camp and killed. A ­ fter the camps w ­ ere set up, t­ hings changed completely. We knew about Sachsenhausen, which was prob­ably one of the earliest camps, but ­t here ­were also local camps, although we ­didn’t know exactly where they ­were. ­There was certainly one in the Schwäbische Alp [!] to which ­people ­were taken. Of the ­people taken, some ­were returned to their families, broken and frightened. I had an ­uncle in the Palatinate who was taken; a few months ­later his ashes w ­ ere returned to his ­family, plus his watch and personal possessions. In good German fashion, t­ hese ­were returned. It was therefore a g­ reat relief to my b ­ rother and myself that we managed to get our f­ather out. When he arrived, we took him to that lovely hostel in Wimbledon Parkside, where he was very well received by the other refugees who had been brought over by Mrs. Rathbone and w ­ ere living ­t here.

It seems quite unlikely that Liesel would be unaware of the existence of the early concentration camps in the south of Germany, primarily at Dachau, as well as the in Heuberg near Stetten am kalten Markt in the Schwäbische Alb. However, it could be that Ludwig and Hermine wanted to shield their c­ hildren from knowing about such ­t hings. A ­ fter she married Walter Schwab, the London blitz came to an end, and life in E ­ ngland became a l­ittle more bearable. However, news of the systematic murder of the Jews of Eu­rope was beginning to come through. Alice Schwab said in her testimony for the National Life Story collection: At this time I was worrying about what was happening in Germany; and by that time it ­wasn’t only Germany, but Austria, Poland, the w ­ hole of that part of the world, Roumania, Jugoslavia. The Jews w ­ ere being herded into camps like

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animals. Th ­ ere w ­ ere lots of other camps, apart from Bergen-­Belsen. My relations in Switzerland still had contact with my ­father’s ­brothers and ­sisters. So we did get some news. My ­uncle was killed in a small camp in Wurtemberg-­ Baden; one of my aunts jumped to her death out of a train taking her to Bergen-­ Belsen, or some other camp, I ­don’t remember which. My cousin who was supposed to come to ­England, got homesick and ­couldn’t bear to leave her ­mother. She just dis­appeared and was never heard of again. And her ­mother just dis­appeared. On my ­mother’s side, her ­sister and brother-­i n-­law went from Stuttgart to Holland. ­There they ­were arrested and taken to a big camp at Westerbork where all the Jews in Holland ­were first taken. From Westerbork they ­were sent to Bergen-­Belsen. As it happened, ­t here was an arrangement for German nationals living in Palestine to be exchanged for Jews. It cost a lot of money—­t he Nazis ­didn’t do it for nothing! My ­family in Switzerland and other relations produced the sum needed and the exchange was arranged. My aunt and u ­ ncle w ­ ere on their way to Palestine, in exchange for two ­people in Palestine who would go back to the Fatherland. . . . ​Unfortunately, my u ­ ncle became very ill on the way; he was ­dying and his wife ­wouldn’t leave him. Eventually he died and she was sent to another concentration camp. By that time, the Rus­sians ­were already on the doorstep; they rescued her, but she also died.11

­Here, she summarizes all the news she had heard about the fate of the members of her ­family who had “dis­appeared.” At the time, news came piecemeal; only Hede and Jakob Wertheimer in Switzerland ­were able to stay in contact with relatives and only for a time, partly through the Red Cross, and they also tried, unsuccessfully, to rescue Luise and Richard Loeb. Other information, such as the death of Minni Stern and her ­mother Helene, could only have reached Liesel ­after the war. In a letter of November 20, 1942, Liesel’s friend Joan, waiting at home for the birth of her twins, discussed the terrible news reaching them from the continent: Yes, Liesel, I am sorry to hear of the frightful ­t hings that are happening to the Jews. The worst part of it is that t­ here is nothing one can do. It is dreadful. In a way the best way to think of the prob­lem is to think of the killing of the Jews as part of the war and no more dreadful than the killing of so many soldiers, sailors, and airmen. This diverts attention to the war and ­t here may be ­t hings one can do to assist the ending of the beastliness. I know that the Jews are murdered in cold blood and with torture, but I won­der if their killing is worse than the killing of some other ­people. One feels that when the Jews are killed this suffering is useless but the pre­sent atrocities are arousing so much feeling and understanding that the suffering may not be useless—at least not as useless as some of the sufferings of the Jews in the past. But it is dreadful for you ­because you know so many ­people who are in danger.

The first news of the Holocaust, “scattered information about Nazi massacres of many thousands of Jews in German-­occupied Poland and Rus­sia,” had reached

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Britain by late 1941 or early 1942. The turning point came in late May 1942, when a courier from the Jewish Socialist Bund of Poland reached ­England with a shocking report. It began, “From the day the Russo-­German war broke out, the Germans embarked on the physical extermination of the Jewish population on Polish soil.”12 The Bund Report stressed that the killings ­were not isolated outbursts, but part of a systematic plan to “annihilate all the Jews in Eu­rope,” town by town, country by country. It described how, in villages throughout Poland and Western Rus­sia, German troops marched the Jewish residents to a nearby forest or ravine and machine-­gunned them into ­giant pits. The Bund also detailed the killing of Jews in the Chełmno camp in mobile death vans—­trucks whose exhaust fumes ­were pumped back into the passenger cabin. Shmuel Zygelbojm, a Jewish member of the London-­based Polish Government in Exile, played a major role in publicizing the Bund Report. In November and December 1942 a number of En­glish newspapers reported the mass murder of Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews and asked what Germany’s enemies could do to prevent it. On December 5, 1942 the News Chronicle became the first newspaper to describe it as “a holocaust.”13 ­These dispatches must have motivated Liesel and Joan to exchange letters about the sense of horror they felt. Joan’s reply, advising Liesel to consider even ­t hese atrocities in the context of the war and therefore to do every­t hing pos­si­ble to bring the war to an end, reflected the view of a large part of British society, as well as the British government. However, as Joan herself remarked and could see in Liesel’s letters (which have not survived), the refugees in Britain reacted differently to t­ hese reports affecting their relatives who had stayed in Germany, some of whom had already been deported. On December 4, 1944, the British Air Force bombed the city of Heilbronn. Its medieval center was completely wiped out, and more than 7,000 inhabitants w ­ ere killed. Heilbronn—­the city from which the Rosenthal f­ amily and ­others emigrated, the city from which Berta and Minni Stern, and Hans Eissig, and many ­others, ­were deported—­now had its own story of victimhood—­and we see at the end of this chapter how the two narratives met. From about that time u ­ ntil spring 1945, with the end of the war imminent and Germany’s liberation in sight, clearly many thought it was time to take stock. How had all ­those involved been affected by the events of the past twelve years? In which parts of the world ­were friends and acquaintances scattered? What had happened to their relatives in Eu­rope? And how did ­those once so familiar places look ­a fter twelve years of Nazi dictatorship and six years of war? It is still too early to answer ­these questions, but many of the letters of the coming weeks and months are ­shaped by them. By now all Liesel’s correspondents, from Erwin Rosenthal and Lotte Fink to Martha Sussmann, with whom Liesel had spent her first few weeks in London, wrote exclusively in En­glish and had—­like Lotte and her husband, who had been naturalized in Australia—­t ruly arrived in their new homelands. But the Allied advance brought Germany back into view. Any homesickness this might have stirred in the correspondents was overshadowed by news from the liberated concentration and extermination camps.

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­After several days of cease-­fire negotiations between the Wehrmacht and the British Army, British troops took over the Bergen-­Belsen concentration camp without a fight on April 15, 1945. Shortly before then, the SS had destroyed the camp’s administrative files to erase all written evidence of their crimes. The British soldiers w ­ ere utterly unprepared for the inferno they encountered when they entered the camp. For thousands of the 53,000 prisoners, liberation came too late. Although the British Army and vari­ous relief organ­izations quickly arranged for medical aid, another 14,000 liberated prisoners died of the effects of their imprisonment by June 1945 alone. When the British soldiers took over the camp, they disarmed the remaining SS personnel and placed them u ­ nder arrest. In the following days, both male and female SS members had to dig mass graves in the grounds of the former camp and bury tens of thousands of bodies. The British troops ­were accompanied by military photog­raphers and cameramen whose job it was to document the conditions in Bergen-­Belsen and the emergency aid mea­sures initiated ­t here. The hundreds of photos, film reels, and notes from the day of liberation through June 1945 give some indication of the extent of the crimes committed in Bergen-­Belsen. Many of t­ hese photo­g raphs ­were published around the world, and they have had a lasting impact on the memory of the Nazi concentration camps worldwide. As a result, in Britain the word “Belsen” has become as symbolic of the Holocaust as “Auschwitz” is in Eastern and Central Eu­rope.14 Liesel asked the soldiers she knew for further information, and Harold Ellern replied on April 30, 1945: I quite agree with what you say on the subject of Belsen, but I am afraid that I ­can’t help you in your search for your relatives. Roughly the position is this: ­There ­were 39 000 ­people in the camp and NO REC­ORDS whatsoever. They had been destroyed by the SS previously and in any case several thousand had been admitted since then. When the British troops entered, all the gates shutting the vari­ ous compounds off from each other ­were opened, and all 39,000, or at least all ­t hose who w ­ ere physically able to, started walking around. Next: The only solution was feeding and evacuating, for t­ here was no hope of ever cleansing the camp from disease, so by now only God knows where every­body has got to. Lastly, as I told the ­family, all persons on the exchange list and all complete families had been removed in direction of Theresienstadt 2 or 3 days previous to our arrival, 7,000 p ­ eople in all, and by what you tell me your relatives are almost certain to be amongst them . . . ; all you can do is hope that they are among t­ hose ­we’ll be able to save.

The core f­amily was saved—in September 1938 Helmut came to a boarding school in Brighton where he soon changed his name to Jack Rosen and de­cided never to speak German again; Ludwig Rosenthal arrived via Amsterdam on April 12, 1939, and Hermine, ­after a long and stressful period of waiting, packing, and negotiating the practicalities of her emigration, followed on April 27, 1939. Immediately ­after their arrival the parents tried to reestablish the traditional ­family order and hierarchy. But Liesel in the meantime had found a new self-­assurance.

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For her, emigration in many ways led to a pro­cess of emancipation, and she used her contacts—­the “too many acquaintances” her parents kept complaining about— to try and help other relatives and friends to escape from Germany. Inevitably, this became another point of dissension between the ­family members. Her parents argued that in such dangerous times the inner ­family circle needed to stick together closely. “­Don’t run yourself into the ground for ­others; not one single person helps us apart from my siblings,” Hermine wrote shortly before her arrival in Britain.15 Liesel, having broadened her horizons through her emigration, insisted on her obligation to help wherever and whomever she could. On January 18, 1942, she married Walter Schwab with whose ­mother Anna she had collaborated closely at Woburn House and Bloomsbury House, two London-­ based refugee aid centers. A new ­family, with new rules, was about to be formed (their ­daughter Julia was born in 1950), and it would be an En­glish f­ amily for whom “Heilbronn” became a more and more distant memory—­until Liesel’s (now Alice’s) death in 2002. On her deathbed, Julia recalls, her ­mother spoke of ­going “heim” (home), and when ­family members replied, “But Mommy, you are home,” she said: “No, no, Heilbronn.” Years ­later, Julia Neuberger opened the boxes of letters her ­mother had stowed away in 1948 and handed them over to me. When the German book came out,16 the city of Heilbronn invited her to the book launch in the town hall. Julia recalled this experience: I went to the launch with my d ­ aughter Harriet, and was deeply moved. First, it was amazing to me that they should want to make such a fuss about it. . . . ​To be asked to sign the Golden Book of Heilbronn, to be treated like a VIP, to have the Oberbürgermeister speak in En­glish, to see 150 p ­ eople gathered to hear about my ­mother, when, with one exception, my m ­ other’s oldest friend Hanna Koppe’s ­daughter Heidi, no one had known her—­t his was all extraordinary. I had been to Heilbronn once before, in the 1960s, but remembered very l­ ittle about it. This time I was shown the ­things they thought I would ­really enjoy and understand— an exhibition of how Heilbronn looked in the 1930s, when my ­mother was a teenager ­there, the Jewish cemetery, which was not badly desecrated, and where I saw many ancestors’ graves, the street my m ­ other lived on, and so on.17

Memory In her testimony, Alice Schwab talks only briefly about the postwar period. Immediately ­after the end of the war she received letters from a former (Christian) friend and neighbor who asked her to get in touch again. She hesitated, as did her husband, at first, but she then invited her friend’s d ­ aughter to stay with them in London. Then I started getting invitations to visit Heilbronn. The first such invitation came in 1982 when the municipality invited ­people from all over the world to re-­visit Heilbronn for a week and be shown what happened. But I had had a cancer operation. I felt that I ­ought to go back to see my home town, but the ­surgeon

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thought that it was too early for me to undertake such a journey. Then, as the years rolled by, I got more and more fearful: should I or s­ houldn’t I go? A lot of my friends and some of my relations had been back and had enjoyed their visit. The authorities in Heilbronn tried very hard to make t­ hings pleasant for them. But I was frightened. I h ­ adn’t forgiven them for what they had done, and I felt that I was too upset if I went and it all came flooding back. Then in 1988 the Oberbürgermeister wrote that my husband and I should come on our own, without a group, just on our own. Walter said, “If you ­don’t go now, you never ­w ill.”

So they did go. An old school friend, prob­ably Johanna, picked them up from the Stuttgart airport and took them to the ­hotel. Alice continues, And every­body came to see me. ­There ­were class meetings in the after­noon and lunch the following day. They ­were absolutely marvelous. As far as they could manage it, all my old classmates came, from all over Germany.

Together with Johanna and her ­daughter Heidi she visited Löwenstein, “a lovely place which I had always liked.” She went to see “my old home in Stauffenbergstrasse,” and she and Johanna looked back on their childhood: The night before we left Heilbronn, I met a Mr. Palme [Palm] who was quite an impor­tant local citizen. He now makes it his business to keep rec­ords of all the ­people who had been killed, and he also keeps in touch with the survivors. He also ensures that the Jewish cemetery is properly maintained, and he arranged, when we went to the cemetery, for my grand­father’s grave to be restored. Before saying goodbye, he asked me what I felt. I told him that I c­ ouldn’t have had a better welcome or a better time, and that they could see how much my husband had enjoyed the visit to Heilbronn, but I could never forget what they had done to my ­father and I could never forgive them for that.

The narrative could have ended at this point. But when I went to the Heilbronn city archives I discovered an additional collection of letters. While Alice Schwab had been busy building her f­ amily and a new En­glish life in postwar London and Heilbronn only re­entered her life in the early 1980s, her parents had actively sought contact with their former home town as early as the 1950s. It is my impression that the city of Heilbronn contacted emigrants—­“Auslandsheilbronner,” to use the category ­under which their letters are filed at the local archives—­and attempted to come to terms with the local and regional Nazi past, and its impact, e­ arlier and more intensively than other places in Germany.18 Hermine and Ludwig Rosenthal started traveling back in the mid-1950s and cherished their correspondence with the mayor of Heilbronn, Paul Meyle, and other dignitaries such as the federal president Theodor Heuss. Their letters form part of an impor­tant discourse between the city of Heilbronn and former Heilbronners then residing in places all over the world, from Cape Town to Melbourne, from Buenos Aires to San Francisco; they discuss the very dif­fer­ent ways in which “Heilbronn”—­t he city in southwest Germany, on the one hand, and the former residents of that same city, now scattered

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around the globe but still connected through memory, on the other—­should remember the past that was, in some ways, a common one and in so many other ways was a dif­fer­ent past. Widening the perspective from the core ­family of the Rosenthals to all ­t hose who fall ­under the category of “Auslandsheilbronner” in the city archives can help us place the Rosenthals’ experiences in a broader context. What is the relationship between the “Auslandsheilbronners” and their former home town? What does “Heilbronn” mean for the individual and the collective memories outside the city, and how do ­t hese memories correspond with the local memory that centers around the near-­complete destruction of the city on December 4, 1944? Fritz Wolf has tackled ­t hese questions more extensively than anyone ­else. His name features in the Rosenthal/Schwab ­family stories and in Liesel’s letter collection in several ways: as a former friend who had managed to escape to Palestine, a well-­k nown figure on the streets of Heilbronn from where he had been expelled, and a “former intellectual” who ­until his death in 2006 lived in a small hut in Nahariya on the Mediterranean coast. If the documents are correct, which given the time elapsed cannot be established with any certainty, he first made contact with Heilbronn ­after the war on June 9, 1957, in a letter to the mayor Paul Meyle. In this letter, headed by his address—­“Dr Fritz Wolf, Naharia, Herzl Str. (Israel)”—he wrote, One hundred years a­ fter my grand­father W M Wolf founded his eponymous firm in Heilbronn (in 1961 it would have celebrated its centenary)—­t wenty five years ­after I was forced to leave Heilbronn—­and twelve years a­ fter Hitler was defeated, I thought to myself that one should attempt to forget the horrors of the past and only think of the best parts of it. This letter contains the question: WHAT IS HEILBRONN ­DOING? I have Doctor Hugo Kern in Tel Aviv and Dr Manfred Scheuer in Shavei Tzion19 to thank for the few scraps of news I have received, including the fact that you are in office. Both men ­were once well-­k nown Heilbronn l­ awyers. What is Heilbronn d ­ oing? By this I mean more than just the p ­ eople, the Wartberg and St. Kilian’s and the smell of the early-­morning mist over the Neckar Valley. What became of all that between 1925 and 1939 was the old, decent, “demo­cratic” Heilbronn society? Could you possibly send me something, such as a chronicle or a con­temporary report from the time immediately ­a fter the world war? I would be delighted to read one. Send my greetings to Heilbronn! Perhaps not the a­ ctual Heilbronn, which I do not know at all—­and perhaps not a Heilbronn which no longer exists and which lies in rubble or in graves—­rather the “idea” of Heilbronn. I did, ­a fter all, study philosophy at the Realgymnasium grammar school next to the Friedenskirche with Professor Dr Schopf.20

This is perhaps the most perceptive letter I have ever read in this context. For Fritz Wolf, his memory with which he now confronted the city—it was a friendly confrontation, ­because he was a very friendly man—­produced a sort of “Heilbronn as a spiritual way of life,” in the same way that Thomas Mann viewed his Lübeck.21

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This was an “idea” of the city of which he was once part, which he could not let go, even though a quarter-­century had passed since his emigration and he was in the midst of a life in Israel. ­There w ­ ere the “horrors of the past” and the attempt to forget them. Th ­ ere was an image of the city and its river that lived on in Israel (and in other places). Paul Meyle, too, was a perceptive man, and he personally answered Fritz, writing from his own perspective and with his own agenda: I was delighted to read the kind words you found in your letter. I found it most pleasantly moving to find out that you have now found your way back to your home city in a spiritual sense. Much has indeed changed in the intervening years and de­cades in Heilbronn, and t­ hose who come h ­ ere to refresh their memories of this or that building or this or that street do so in vain. But I believe that in their hearts Heilbronners have remained true to themselves, true to what they ­were prior to 1933—­namely hard-­working, decent, liberally minded citizens. If you have not done so already, now would be a good time to visit your home city once again. We could chat about former times and about the exemplary reconstruction of this city, which has progressed so much thanks to the willingness of its citizens to help. To give you a picture of the city I have taken the liberty of sending you vari­ous texts on Heilbronn, published over the course of the last few years, with this letter.22

With this letter, the City Archive, which for a number of years had been “in regular contact with numerous Heilbronners living abroad,” added Fritz Wolf to the file. It is not easy to tell if the two men w ­ ere speaking on the same level and of the same subject, but on July 16, 1957 Wolf, with his keen, critical mind, sent his heartfelt thanks for Meyle’s time and efforts. He congratulated the city on having a mayor who appreciates that the writings of his city are so perfectly appetizing and aesthetic, and who pays them the re­spect of elevating them to the level of works of art or a scientific paper. Wolf also described the experience of reading about Heilbronn. This is another insightful, sensitive letter, yet one that was at no point conciliatory in its tone. It deserves to be quoted at length: It was with the most mixed of feelings that I spent many hours reading and studying the pictures. I dedicated a good few hours to comparing the pictures at the beginning and at end of the “Blüte, Untergang, Wiedererstehen” (Blossom, Downfall, Resurrection) book alone: I looked for the old Heilbronn and only found it in certain wistful hints. New streets, canals, buildings—­a new Swabian courage and determination to rebuild! I read the names of ­t hose living and mourn the deceased! And as you, dear Mr. Mayor, are without doubt a fine example of humanity, please allow me to make some remarks on the ever-­recurring memory of 4.12.44 [the date of the bombing of Heilbronn that cost more than 7,000 lives] which can perhaps have an even more lasting positive impact as they are addressed to a person who is in a position to make a real difference.

“ I C o u l d N e v e r F o r g e t W h at T h e y ’d D o n e t o M y Fat h e r” 171 ­There is no doubt that Hitler was intentionally not discussed in any of the texts. It is as clear as it can be that t­ oday the situation is still somewhat “delicate,” and that every­one feels a quite natu­ral need to forget. For the same reason it is understandable and justifiable that ­there is not one word on the former Jews of Heilbronn: only when Hitler is mentioned must the Jews also be mentioned—­and if the Jews are not mentioned, Hitler’s name need not be invoked e­ ither. The following remarks therefore have nothing to do with personal resentment at the fact that we Heilbronn Jews, too, are to be counted as living or dead victims and essentially forgotten. It is sometimes hard not to get the impression, however, that many wish to suppress, ignore or even feel a ­little self-­pity for what happened. I see a danger in this, as e­ very recovery pro­cess (and is our correspondence not an example?) relies on acknowl­edgment and not on staying ­silent. Specifically: all too often one gets the impression that 4.12.44 is seen as a mere misfortune, as if it w ­ ere an earthquake or a flood. U ­ nder no circumstance should we go too far in the opposite direction and speak of self-­inflicted guilt: what decent person could acknowledge the concept of collective guilt, who in this world is without sin and who could call an innocent child guilty? So let us not speak of guilt! But as a member of the nation which effectively in­ven­ted the pragmatic writing of history . . . ​I can assert that ­t here should be no talk of mere “misfortune” and that talk should instead be of historical cause and effect. ­There is a deep and terrible connection between Hitler, the Jews and 4.12.44. . . . ​Such t­ hings can only heal with time, and so it ­w ill be a ­little time yet before we meet in Heilbronn.23

Conclusion ­ fter having read all t­ hese letters, I feel that the most impor­tant task is to strike a A balance between reconstructing personal experiences and embedding them in their historical context. Ideas drawn from the biographical research of Andreas Gestrich and Gabriele Rosenthal, among ­others, demand a perspective “which views individuals in a permanent relationship with their environment.”24 Individuals are neither heteronomous puppets nor completely ­free and autonomous; they are actors in what Bourdieu calls a “social space”25 constructed through relationships between individual actors and is in a constant state of flux. This is particularly true of emigration situations, which relocate the actors’ space, physically separate them from each other, and oblige the communication that forms the basis of their relationship to be expressed in letters rather than in face-­to-­face conversation. The shared horizons of meaning and experience are lost when a member of the f­ amily—­Liesel—­leaves the home city to begin a new life elsewhere, in this case in ­England. For her, however, this opens up a new social space, s­ haped by communication with new actors (employers, acquaintances who become friends, work colleagues). In both areas private written sources—­the letters—­a re our main resource. They tell of how

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correspondents pro­cess their respective experiences and how they tell each other about them, often over large physical distances and with long periods of time in between. Not originally meant for our eyes, ­today the letters are an impor­tant source for ­those investigating the fate of German Jewish emigrants ­after 1933. Such collections are still to be found in the cellars and attics of h ­ ouses all over the world.26 Many w ­ ill have been lost when moving ­house or ­after a death, some ­will have been passed on to archives where they can be studied, o ­ thers ­w ill have been kept for par­tic­u­lar reasons, such as a noteworthy correspondence partner, the mention of historic events, or even an in­ter­est­ing postal stamp. All t­ hese collections tell the story of families who, a­ fter 1933, left Germany and moved to one or more other countries to escape Nazi persecution. ­These pro­cesses helped create new ways to perceive and analyze experiences; the pressure of circumstances and the effect emigration had on the “displacement of subjective means of determining identity” even led to the development of new forms of communication. “­Every f­ amily is an archive,” writes Caroline Fetscher.27 Although traditional f­ amily narratives understandably concentrate on ­those who survived and began new lives elsewhere, it is the historian’s duty to “insist that a history of rescue must also include ­t hose who w ­ ere not rescued,” as Lars Fischer has put it in a review of the German edition of Alice’s book.28 The voices of all a f­ amily’s members should be audible in their writing, and their personalities, their vari­ous writing styles, their anger and their despair, and their hopes should shine through.

chapter 10

v

“Looking for a Nice Jewish Girl . . .” Personal Ads and the Creation of Jewish Families in Germany before and a ­ fter the Holocaust Sarah E. Wobick-­Segev

By the turn of the twentieth ­century, numerous German Jewish newspapers had begun publishing personal ads, or “marriage announcements,” as they w ­ ere frequently called, typically listed u ­ nder the heading Heiratsanzeigen (marriage announcements) and, ­later, Heiratsgesuche (marriage requests).1 Placed by individuals or on behalf of ­family members looking for a socially and financially appropriate match, and increasingly by individual men and w ­ omen looking for love and companionship, early twentieth-­century ads reveal a dynamic and changing Jewish marriage market.2 For the historian of everyday life and culture, the ads’ short lines offer a wealth of information about expectations and societal trends, and continuities and changes in marriage patterns, just as the same ads pre­sent fascinating examples of self-­description, albeit clearly in idealized form. For historians of the National Socialist period and postwar era, t­ hese ads offer dramatic snapshots of the key life experiences of t­ hose individuals living in and l­ ater recovering from a time of unparalleled crisis. Yet, for all their obvious and immediate richness, personal ads are ultimately anonymous, episodic, and enigmatic fragments; they offer us no larger context. Who ­were ­t hese individuals? Did they find a match? What became of them? The ads are s­ ilent on t­ hese questions, and additional sources that could fill in t­ hese gaps are elusive. This chapter explores how personal ads placed in several leading newspapers, based mainly in Berlin3 (the largest Jewish community in Germany before the Holocaust), reveal changing attitudes and par­ameters for the creation of partnerships and marriages and how the complicated Jewish experiences of emigration, survival, and self-­identification during and ­after the Holocaust ­shaped ­these same considerations. 173

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The rise of the Nazi Party intensely altered the par­ameters of the search, changing self-­descriptions and conditioning very dif­fer­ent life goals. Similarly, the effects of the Nazi period would echo in postwar ads. To t­ hese ends, I begin with a short introduction to early personal ads from the first third of the twentieth ­century and then continue with an analy­sis of ads from the Nazi era placed primarily in the Berlin edition of the popu­lar Israelitisches Familienblatt from 1933 ­until the forced closure of almost all Jewish newspapers in the fall of 1938. The final examples from the Nazi period come from the last Jewish newspaper in Germany, Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, in which personal ads ­were published from 1938 ­until early 1942, shortly ­after the first deportations from Berlin to the death camps in the East began. It bears noting, however, that Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt was not a typical newspaper. Published ­after Kristallnacht and the closure of all other Jewish newspapers, Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt represented an expression of the larger drive of the Nazi regime to control Jews by creating centralized organ­izations to oversee them, including, in this case, allowing the publication of only a single newspaper. Although German Jews stood ­behind the creation of the newspaper, the Nazi regime monitored its contents and used its pages to speak to the Jewish public. The emphasis on emigration in Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt thus reflected both the very real need for Jews to flee Germany and Nazi policy during the late 1930s that aimed at compelling Jews to leave the Reich.4 Ads placed during the Nazi era, especially from late 1938 u ­ ntil 1942, paint a shattering picture of individuals seeking a spouse in harrowing times. The short announcements reveal cases of ­people who, in a desperate quest to leave the country, emphasized their language skills; connections to other countries, especially the United States; wealth; and even their very lack of ­family attachments. Personal ads placed a­ fter the Holocaust in Der Weg (Berlin, 1946–1953), the first Jewish newspaper published outside of DP camps in Berlin, often expressed a similar desire to emigrate and the ad writer’s yearning for a partner for the journey, just as they told tales of tragic loss and loneliness. As a number of ads suggest, marriage was also a means of consolation and rebuilding during and a­ fter catastrophe: Tradesman, Jew, emigrating soon to South Amer­i­ca, tall, handsome, early 30s, looking to make the acquaintance of a nice Jewish girl in Berlin for the purpose of marriage (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Dec. 30, 1938, p. 6). Lady, 25 years of age, nice appearance, without parents (­father died in Auschwitz), would like to be a loving partner to a similarly single man [einem ebenfalls alleinstehenden Herrn] and offer him a warm [gemütliches] home. (Own apartment available.) Preferred [a man] 40 years of age or less (Der Weg, Oct. 4, 1946, p. 8).

Jewish Personal Ads before the Rise of the Nazi Dictatorship By the 1890s, many though not all German Jewish newspapers printed personal ads, including the widely read, mainstream Israelitisches Familienblatt.5 Announcements before World War I mirrored and replicated the common practices of Jewish marriage at the time; that is, arranged marriages in which the socioeconomic

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status and ­family background of the two partners played determining roles in the conclusion of an appropriate match. Announcements made by or on behalf of men searching for a wife generally included an indication of the employment or education or both of the man, offering a clue to his pre­sent and ­future socioeconomic standing.6 The bride’s dowry further influenced the economic security of the c­ ouple; ads placed by men thus typically noted the expected sum of the prospective bride’s dowry. Social class therefore emerged as the central determining ­factor for arranging matches. The following two ads highlight both the economic nature of Jewish marriages at the turn of the twentieth ­century (and ­earlier) and clear class divisions. Israelite marriage. Young man, 30 years old, self-­employed businessman (butcher shop), desires to meet a young lady with a fortune no less than 10,000 for the purpose of marriage (Israelitisches Familienblatt, Jan. 5, 1905, p. 16). Marriage! A very wealthy manufacturer from a very good f­ amily in Berlin with an annual income of 25,000 seeks to marry a young, beautiful lady with a dowry of at least 150,000 (Israelitisches Familienblatt, Jan. 19, 1905, p. 16).

Other ads placed by or on behalf of men called attention to the moral or religious values of the ideal bride, expressed in phrases such as “religious upbringing” or “from a good home.” Yet, only rarely did ads placed by or on behalf of men make note of the prospective groom’s appearance. Instead, the ideal husband’s worth was based on his socioeconomic potential, not on his physical appearance or even his personality (both of which received short shrift in ads before World War I). The same was not true for w ­ omen. First, announcements for w ­ omen before World War I ­were overwhelmingly made on their behalf; very few examples in the first person exist. One succinct example from March 1905 reads, “A strongly religious match is sought for a beautiful girl, 20s, with 10,000 [dowry].”7 Announcements for w ­ omen typically concentrated on advertising the most salient qualities of the would-be brides; in other words, the characteristics typically deemed desirable for Jewish wives. ­These included beauty, possessing a dowry that corresponded to her socioeconomic background, and in some cases a w ­ oman’s ability to run a ­house­hold or help out in a ­family business. If hair color was mentioned at all, the young ­woman in question was almost always blond, speaking to the apparent attraction German Jews seemed to have to supposedly non-­Jewish physical traits.8 Though ads could pre­sent some variety in phrasing and choice of (self-)description, the financial state of the f­ uture ­couple—­reflected best in the dowry and in the man’s employment—­invariably took pre­ce­dence. Nonetheless, by the 1920s, an increasing number of ads referenced the desire to conclude a marriage of choice and affection. The terms Neigungsehe (marriage of affection) and Selbstinserent (placed by the author) reflect the growing importance of personal taste and satisfaction in the choice of a spouse: On my own behalf [Selbstinserent]. Businessman, 34 years old, handsome, German citizen, with his own debt-­free cigar store in Berlin, would like to meet a beautiful, thin, business-­minded lady for the purpose of marriage (Israelitisches Familienblatt, Jan. 13, 1927, p. 7).

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Financial concerns feature in this ad, but so too do personal desire and attraction: a “handsome man” desired a wife who could help him at work and who also appealed to his tastes and desires. Citizenship proved to be an additional ­factor in the Jewish marriage market ­after World War I; the war brought about significant mobility and a remarkable increase in the number of Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews living in Germany, and in Berlin in par­ tic­u­lar.9 Yet, laws across Germany increasingly made the pro­cess of naturalization very difficult for would-be immigrants. Changes to the l­egal codes in Prus­sia in the early 1920s, for instance, made the pro­cess of naturalization particularly complicated and lengthy. Moreover, in a l­egal environment where a w ­ oman’s citizenship was contingent on that of her husband, the choice of a partner could have impor­tant ­legal and po­liti­cal consequences.10 The self-­assured tone of the following ad placed in Israelitisches Familienbatt in 1927—­one thick with ethnoreligious descriptive codes, as well as a reference to the man’s stature—­belies a deeper anxiety about citizenship, belonging (especially in response to negative ste­reo­t ypes about Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews, or Ostjuden as they ­were known11), and demographic imbalances within the Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish community: Lady’s choice! Business man­ag­er, Eastern Jew [Ostjude], born in Berlin, 32 years [of age], medium height, desires to exchange letters with a beautiful, blond, traditionally raised lady for the purpose of marriage (Israelitisches Familienblatt, Mar. 10, 1927, p. 7).

­ hether this gentleman was successful in his search is unclear, but the odds ­were W not in his ­favor. In 1925, t­ here ­were 5.5 ­percent more Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish men than Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish ­women living in Prus­sia; this meant that some would have had to turn to German Jewish w ­ omen if they desired an endogamous match. The po­liti­cal difficulties associated with such a match might have been overcome in at least some cases, b ­ ecause among German Jews t­ here was a surplus of ­women (a full 4.7 ­percent more w ­ omen than men, according to Trude Maurer).12 Yet, how many German Jewish ­women chose to marry an Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish man in Berlin remains unclear. The demographics might have helped persuade some individuals who ­were intent on marrying another Jew to overcome the vari­ ous hurdles, but the ­legal disincentives—­namely, that ­women would lose their German citizenship on marriage to a foreign national—­ must also have caused frequent pause. Indeed, more Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish men remained single than did German Jewish men.13 In sum, before the rise of the Nazis, economics (as determined by a ­woman’s dowry and, ­later, work, as well as a man’s profession), one’s degree of religiosity (indicated through terms such as traditionally raised or religious), and eventually questions of personal taste (the ideal Jewish ­woman was beautiful, blond, and thin, in keeping with 1920s fashions,14 and the ideal man was both handsome and successful) w ­ ere the benchmarks in Jewish personal ads. Politics emerged insofar as questions of citizenship ­were relevant in the context of increasingly stringent naturalization laws; for example, in ads that noted w ­ hether the person was a German

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citizen or an Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jew. The desire to find a Jewish spouse, and thus maintain endogamy, was another clear motivation for ­family members and individuals to turn to the Jewish press—­a fact that bears noting given the rising rates of intermarriage in Berlin, in par­t ic­u ­lar, and in Germany more broadly before 1933.15

Jewish Personal Ads ­under the Nazis It is hard to overstate the effects of the rise of the National Socialist Party to power in Germany in 1933; the ensuing l­egal changes and worsening social atmosphere very quickly influenced the intimate sphere. The number of intermarriages between Jews and non-­Jews quickly plummeted a­ fter the Nazi rise to power as a consequence of po­liti­cal discrimination and social ostracism.16 Even before the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which made intermarriage illegal (although existing mixed marriages ­were exempted), police and party officials placed pressure on marriage registrars to deny marriage-­license applications made by “racially mixed” ­couples.17 Although this pressure and the laws promulgated in 1935 influenced the rate of intermarriage, they did not negatively influence endogamous Jewish marriage rates. Contrary to what we might other­wise expect given the stresses and strains of the situation, marriage rates among Jews instead r­ ose ­after 1933 and continued to do so before the war, with the exception of 1939, when soaring emigration rates influenced the marriage market.18 ­These trends should not suggest a false dichotomy, however; during the Nazi era, marriage and emigration w ­ ere interrelated phenomena. The real need to seek a way out of Germany immediately and with increasing urgency became a preoccupation for Jews. Marriage, including fictitious marriages or marriages of con­ve­ nience,19 served both material and psychological needs ­under ­these circumstances.20 The bond of matrimony could also allow two individuals, for instance, to enter Palestine on one certificate.21 Not surprisingly, then, personal ads referenced emigration time and again,22 be it through mentions of contacts abroad, affidavits, citizenship, language skills, or material resources. In one ad, a man seeks an attractive young bride for his successful, “handsome” ­brother. Stressing the ­brother’s business acumen and wealth (“considerable assets”), the man placing the ad suggests that his ­brother w ­ ill be able to provide for the ­f uture and that the young ­couple ­will have the means to emigrate and reestablish themselves once abroad. The short reference to the ­brother’s presence “in Germany for over 2 de­cades” can be read as a statement not only of the man’s long-­standing connections to Germany but also suggests that he was not a German citizen: For my b ­ rother—36 year old (Jew), reliable, clever businessman, from a good ­family, pre­sent in Germany for over 2 de­cades, handsome, nice appearance, with considerable assets—­seeking a r­ eally smart [fesche, good-­looking] young lady from a good h ­ ouse for the purpose of marriage and emigration (Israelitisches Familienblatt, Nov. 9, 1933, p. 7).

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Whereas economic assets and a man’s profession ­were impor­tant markers in arranging and concluding socioeco­nom­ically appropriate matches before the rise of the Nazis, during the Nazi period wealth could help guarantee the c­ ouple’s f­ uture for very dif­fer­ent reasons. Contacts abroad and foreign documents (certificates, affidavits, and the like) became essential attributes in the list of desired qualities of a potential spouse, sometimes just as impor­tant as wealth or interchangeable with it: We are looking for a spouse [Ehekamerad] for our d ­ aughter, Jew, 32 years of age, 1.58m tall, thin, beautiful, educated, hardworking, domestic and very well-­off. Contacts in the USA available (Israelitisches Familienblatt, Apr. 28, 1938, p. 33). Businessman with American sponsorship [Bürgschaft, affidavit of support], Jew, with large fortune, mid 30s, seeks to marry a well-­off lady with a talent for languages and contacts in the USA (Israelitisches Familienblatt, Apr. 28, 1938, p. 33).

The three ads just cited reflect certain minor changes in the Jewish marriage market that had already occurred before the rise of the Nazis, including greater attention placed on an individual’s appearance, in keeping with a marriage market that had become based more on personal taste than the concerns of the extended f­ amily. At the same time, the ads reflect certain continuities in the market: attention to citizenship, concern with economic stability, and the question of values and f­ amily background (“from a good home”). Even the fact that ­people placed ads on behalf of f­ amily members was not novel. Yet, the widespread emphasis on emigration was an entirely new and increasingly pressing issue. Moreover, the return to a much ­earlier trend of f­amily members conducting the search on behalf of a loved one should be read not as a s­ imple retrograde step in marriage patterns but as a broader exit strategy involving the w ­ hole ­family. The young f­ amily member who married his or her way out of the country was frequently expected to serve as a scout and agent, advocating in the new country for the necessary documents and support that would enable the emigration of vari­ous relatives who had remained in Germany.23 Fascinatingly, many of the same observations hold true for ads placed in the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau (Berlin), which began to publish personal ads in noticeable numbers beginning in 1933. In its pages, too, f­amily members looked for partners for relatives, and not a small number of men sought out opportunities to marry into established businesses, following much older marital practices. Men ­were to be successful in business, and w ­ omen beautiful, (often) thin, and from good families. In addition, resources (cash, dowries, business opportunities, and the like), connections abroad, education, intelligence, and practical skills (including languages) w ­ ere deemed virtues for both partners. To be sure, t­ here ­were some differences between the ads placed in the two journals. It appears that more foreigners placed ads in the pages of Jüdische Rundschau, meaning that considerations of citizenship would have played a greater role in any resulting ­union (though

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sometimes to the advantage of the ­woman, even if only in the short term).24 Professionals—­especially dentists, doctors, and academics, including w ­ omen—­were more heavi­ly represented in the pages of Jüdische Rundschau than in ­t hose of Israelitisches Familienblatt, as the following example illustrates: Female academic working with a large firm, ready for any change [zu jed. Umstellungsbereit]. 36 years of age, pleasant demeanor and appearance, is looking for a nice, intelligent and capable life partner who wants to emigrate to Palestine or already lives t­ here. 10,000 RM [Reichsmark] available in cash, more l­ater, also possesses elegant, valuable furniture and h ­ ouse­hold effects for a 4-­room [apartment] (Jüdische Rundschau, Aug. 18, 1933, p. 441).25

Not surprisingly, more ads took care to mention that the potential bride or groom was a Zionist or desired to move to Palestine: “To Palestine! A Zionist w ­ oman, late 20s, with net worth of 7000RM is looking to meet a man with similar means for the purpose of marriage and joint emigration.”26 Yet, like ads in Israelitisches Familienblatt, a significant number of ads in Jüdische Rundschau explic­itly referenced emigration but did not state a clear destination. In short, the ads in Jüdische Rundschau do not suggest radically dif­fer­ent expectations than ­t hose placed in Israelitisches Familienblatt. Moreover, ad writers in both newspapers did not always focus on emigration; many sought a Neigungsehe (marriage of affection) and a passende Partei, or compatible life partner. In fact, ads in both Jüdische Rundschau and Israelitisches Familienblatt make clear that emigration did not always take priority over all other considerations; it could take second place to other assets or attributes that individuals sought in their ideal spouse. Certain individuals made a point to stress their desire, despite the times or maybe ­because of them, to find a loving partner, even if the goal in the end was “pos­si­ble joint emigration”: Single, 30-­year-­old Berliner from a good, Jewish ­family, with business and academic education, pleasant appearance and assets, desires a compatible, loving partner [emphasis added], preferably to marry into a business, possibly abroad (Israelitisches Familienblatt, Nov. 9, 1933, p. 7). In­de­pen­dent businessman with a good income, Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jew, raised ­here [in Germany], 38 years old, assets, broadly educated, very good looking, tall, thin, nice appearance, excellent character, desires a marriage of affection [Neigungsehe; emphasis added] with a beautiful, thin lady from a good ­house with some wealth for pos­si­ble joint emigration (Israelitisches Familienblatt, Apr. 28, 1938, p. 33).

Searches for a spouse and, most often, a means of escape through the pages of Israelitisches Familienblatt and other Jewish newspapers w ­ ere put to an end on November 8, 1938, the eve of Kristallnacht, when all sixty-­five German Jewish newspapers and journals w ­ ere shut down. A few weeks l­ater, the last Jewish newspaper printed u ­ nder the Nazi dictatorship, Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, began publication.27

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Initially it appeared twice weekly, and the newspaper published personal ads ­until February 1942—as noted, several months a­ fter the first deportations from Berlin began. Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt was closed in June 1943.28 Although initially the number of personal ads was small, at the peak period of advertising in the newspaper, ­t here ­were nearly forty ads per issue. The topic of emigration dominated the pages of Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, not only in the personal ads but also in endless articles that explained the pro­cess and offered tips and lessons for a community now desperate to leave (including the very first article, published on November  23, 1938, titled “Auswanderungs-­ Bemühungen”).29 The individuals who wrote and placed personal ads almost universally expressed a desire to emigrate; the main difference between ads placed in Israelitisches Familienblatt between 1933 and 1938 and t­ hose placed in Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt was not the continued reference to emigration but the sheer intensity of it. Time had clearly run out, and quick decisions ­were sought30: Decisive [Kurzentschlossen, quick decision-­maker]! Capable 29 year old, Jewish ­woman by birth, able in foreign languages, good looking, cheerful disposition, without money or contacts abroad but with initiative, heart and mind [Verst.], is looking for a truly harmonious life partnership [Lebenskameradsch.] abroad with a sophisticated, goal-­oriented, loving man (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Dec. 20, 1938, p. 4).

The ad writer ­here sought a partner who had already found a way out. Lacking means, however, she highlighted the assets she felt would nonetheless be useful, even if they w ­ ere only a strong spirit and determination. Her emphasis on finding a “loving man” reminds us that not every­one was willing to entertain (at least openly) a marriage of con­ve­nience. It also shows us that Kristallnacht, as decisive as it was in changing attitudes to emigration (both among German and Austrian Jews and in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, which took impor­tant steps to increase the number of refugees they allowed in31), did not always change larger life goals, including finding a suitable and loving companion. The following ad placed by a Jewish man echoes a similar sentiment: Not for money. 37 year old Jew (German citizen) seeks a beautiful, healthy [natürlich], Jewish life partner, should be no more than approximately 27 years of age, sensitive [Herzensbildg], intelligent, practical, possibly with a c­ areer, technical [handwerkl], for the purpose of quick marriage and emigration (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Dec. 30, 1938, p. 6).

This ad also conveys an impor­tant sense of optimism for the ­future: the man sought a life partner who was still of childbearing age, suggesting that he hoped not only to get out of Germany but also to build a f­ amily together with his new wife. Such details emphasize again that not every­one sought a marriage of con­ve­nience.32 In the last two ads, the advertiser sought not just financial resources but also a companion, an attractive life partner, or love match. This wish for companionship emerged in other ads as well, including some that ­were apparently placed by or on

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behalf of ­t hose who had already found a way out but who did not want to be alone (or who required additional financial security): Marriage to Amer­i­ca. Looking for a suitable Jewish ­woman, preferably professionally trained [mit Beruf ], even without assets [auch ohne Vermögen], for a Swede, 50 years old, who is emigrating shortly to Amer­i­ca (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Dec. 23, 1938, p. 8). Dentist, Jew, 46 years of age, emigrating to Palestine soon, seeks marriage with a Zionist (thin and healthy) (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Dec. 30, 1938, p. 6). I am traveling shortly to South Amer­i­ca and am looking for a beautiful, tall, thin, young w ­ oman, Jew, for the purpose of marriage. Some money and endowment (or dowry) welcome. I am 28 years old, tall, elegant appearance, Polish, good profession (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Jan. 17, 1939, p. 8).

Continuing the gendered expectations that emerged in the 1920s, the aforementioned ads placed greater attention on the man’s appearance, not just on that of the w ­ oman (who still ideally was to be beautiful and thin). Yet two of t­ hese last four examples also speak to a further evolution in gendered expectations, wherein ­women’s professional capacity (outside the home) and even intelligence became impor­tant attributes in prospective brides. Further, sexual attraction and partnership, and even common ideological beliefs (or common enough for a marriage of po­liti­cal con­ve­nience), remained impor­tant even as emigration was a primary objective or, perhaps better, a basic real­ity and absolute necessity. A striking characteristic of ­these ads was the significant number of ­people older than age 40 who placed ads in Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt. The waves of emigration since the Nazi rise to power had impor­tant demographic consequences. ­There was a widespread belief that the Nazis would target men and leave ­women and ­children largely unmolested. As a result, significant emphasis was placed on helping Jewish men leave Germany, sometimes leaving ­behind their wives and ­children.33 Even ­after Kristallnacht, men ­were still perceived as being at the greatest risk, and their emigration was prioritized. For instance, Joachim Schlör cites a letter written by a German Jewish refugee, Liesel Rosenthal, in which she explains that she “was determined to get my f­ ather out as quickly as pos­si­ble, ­because it was more impor­tant to help the men, since they ­were ­under a greater threat of being thrown into concentration camps”34 (see chapter  9). W ­ omen, by contrast, had an easier time finding work within the Jewish sector in Nazi Germany and often stayed to care for el­derly parents. In addition, paternalistic concern for single ­women meant that ­there was greater reluctance to encourage their emigration; single sons ­were sent off, while it was feared that unmarried w ­ omen might fall prey to forced prostitution. Additionally, t­ here ­were fewer opportunities and less assistance for single Jewish ­women to emigrate.35 To be sure, gender was not the only f­ actor. Many existing programs that facilitated emigration, especially Zionist ones, favored young men.36 Thus, by late 1938 and early 1939, many young adults—­especially young male adults—­had already left Germany, leaving b ­ ehind older and much younger individuals.

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In the context of the increasing difficulty and the si­mul­ta­neously growing need to leave Germany, a noticeable number of older individuals emphasized their lack of ties (Anhang), suggesting that c­ hildren or other dependents w ­ ere deemed an obstacle to leaving: Good-­looking ­w idow. Jew, without attachments, with assets, very capable in ­house­keeping and business, well educated, sophisticated, knows some Hebrew [Iwrith], wishes marriage with a man, no older than late 50s, for the purpose of emigrating together (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Jan. 17, 1939, p. 8).

The ad writer of the following announcement stressed that he sought a “decisive ­woman” who, like himself, was “without attachments.” The ad writer’s attention to his own appearance, health, and vitality seems to be a compensatory act aimed at offsetting any perceived disadvantages posed by his age: ­Widow. Jew, 61 years old, tall, handsome, without attachments, master craftsman in two fields, with his own machinery, healthy, strong, looks much younger, wishes marriage with a healthy, beautiful, Jewish ­woman, elegant appearance, with assets, without attachments, with sensitivity [m. Herzensbildung], no more than 50 years of age, for the purpose of emigration (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Jan. 17, 1939, p. 8).

Even matchmakers promoted their ser­v ices based on their ability to arrange marriages abroad, as in this very succinct ad: “Widest assortment of connections for marriages abroad [Auslandsheiraten]. Edith Goetschel-­Engelmann. Berlin.”37 A second ad from a bureau that had offices in Berlin, Paris, and Haifa, instructing the reader to “leave b ­ ehind old prejudices” (presumably ­those against the “old-­ fashioned” matchmaker), also suggests why many sought to marry before leaving: Give your life new meaning with a suitable spouse. S/he helps in the building of a common, happy f­ uture around the world. Leave b ­ ehind old prejudices. Mar38 garete Bornstein is a serious, reliable counsel (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Dec. 16, 1938, p. 4).

Marriage offered hope and meaning; the institution itself, as a long-­standing cultural and religious practice, enjoyed overwhelming social ac­cep­tance and significance. In addition, even if the ­couple had only recently met, marriage with another German Jew confirmed connections to a familiar, common past and to one’s homeland; the new ­couple would most likely share much more in common—­for example, culture, language, and customs—­t han most available partners in a foreign country would and presumably would also have greater understanding (and perhaps sympathy) regarding their shared past and the complicated feelings t­ oward all they had left ­behind. The number of ads and the intensity of the search w ­ ere not simply aspirational but also reflected a real rise in the number of weddings. Hermann Samter, a Berlin-­ based journalist for Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, wrote in November 1941, “Characteristic for the pre­sent time is not only the high number of suicides (among us),

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but even more the flood of marriages. Shortly before our end, almost e­ very relationship leads to marriage.”39 Reflecting on Samter’s claim, Marion Kaplan suggests that “many Jews still clung to traditional notions of marriage and ­family,” and ­people appeared to have continued to marry during the Holocaust, possibly as an expression of “protest or defiance.” 40 The heightened desire to continue life as normally as pos­si­ble for as long as pos­si­ble and the desire to maintain one’s humanity in the face of extreme persecution can be seen as the very essence of nonviolent re­sis­tance during the Holocaust. The “flood of marriages” also reflected the very basic and ­human need for companionship and a palpable desire to feel protected. Even a­ fter the beginning of deportations to the East, numerous ads continued to voice a desire to meet a “nice Jewish girl” for the purpose of “­later marriage.” 41 In the worst of times, ­people continued to search for a close connection with another ­human being. The ads thus offer a tragic combination of determination, self-­awareness (including of the dire nature of the situation), desperation, and fragility. In a strange way, the ad writers combined their ideal attributes and desires with statements of their greatest weaknesses. A small but noticeable number of announcements even highlighted an ad writer’s limitations. One man mentioned that he would quite likely lose his job,42 and ­others noted physical disability, although in some cases this admission was tempered by a further reference to military ser­vice: “Jew with mobility impairment [Gehbehinderter], disabled war veteran, 44, trained baker, looking for a Jewish spouse.” 43 Most of the time, however, such weaknesses had nothing to do with the individuals’ own disabilities and every­t hing to do with their status as members of the most persecuted group. Of the many phrases used and repeated in the ads, the most jarring, at least at first glance, ­were ­t hose appropriated from Nazi terminology: Jews—­Volljude (full Jew) and Mischlinge (mixed-­blood)—­sought matches with other Jews or Mischlinge. The use of ­these terms during the Nazi era was strangely logical, given the complicated situation that had arisen as a consequence of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. The laws had not only defined who was Jewish (an individual with three or more Jewish grandparents) and who was “Aryan” but had also created two in-­between categories: Mischlinge of the first grade (­t hose with two Jewish grandparents) and Mischlinge of the second grade (individuals with one Jewish grandparent). Th ­ ese individuals of “mixed” heritage ­were seen as non-­ Aryans and w ­ ere subject to dif­fer­ent levels of persecution and exclusion; they also faced restrictions with regard to their choice of spouse. For example, only in a very small number of cases (and then only with permission) ­were Aryans allowed to marry Mischlinge of the second grade. If a Mischling of the first grade married a “full Jew,” then his or her status would be changed to Geltungsjude (someone deemed a Jew by the regime, even if he or she was of mixed heritage). This latter policy could have profound existential consequences for a Mischling of the first grade who made such a choice.44 Thus, not surprisingly, many Mischlinge of the first degree explic­itly sought out other Mischlinge of the first degree in the pages of Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt:

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Mischling of the first grade, 38 years old age, well off [in guten Verhältnissen lebend], tall, thin, looking for a thin, cultured lady of the same grade [a Mischling of the first degree] between the ages of 24 and 32 for the purpose of marriage (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Dec. 19, 1941, p. 2).

Overall, personal ads from the Nazi period suggest that many Jews in Germany knew they lived in particularly dangerous times. The search for a life partner rarely reflected naive romanticism but was an expression of significant accommodation to new realities, on the one hand, and nonviolent re­sis­tance to the situation, on the other.

Jewish Personal Ads ­after the Holocaust By 1945, the Jewish community of Berlin was devastated. A population of more than 170,000 individuals before the rise of the Nazis, it hovered in the postwar years between 6,000 and 8,000. Furthermore, unlike other parts of Germany (especially Bavaria), in which postwar Jewish communities comprised a significant percentage (though ultimately a low number) of Eastern Eu­ro­pean displaced persons who stayed, most of the thousands of displaced persons who came through Berlin did not remain, and the preponderance of the small community t­ here was German Jewish.45 Most Berlin Jews ­were older and ­were ­either Mischlinge or had survived thanks to a non-­Jewish spouse and ­were thus not searching for a partner.46 For ­those not yet married, finding a Jewish spouse was not easy; the numbers ­were simply not in their ­favor. Though some individuals did manage to meet their ­f uture spouse through Jewish organ­izations,47 ­others appear to have turned to the recently reestablished Jewish press to expand the much smaller pool of candidates. Der Weg, the first postwar publication of the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin (the official religious community of the city),48 included a small but highly informative se­lection of personal ads, offering excerpts from the life stories of ­t hose who placed them. Located on the last page of the short journal—­four pages initially and increasing to eight pages by spring 1946—­t he personal ads ran alongside advertisements for employment and lodging, farewell greetings before emigrating, holiday wishes, and announcements asking for information about lost relatives (the latter typically on the preceding page). Numerous ads from 1946 spoke to loneliness and destruction, some directly, o ­ thers more obliquely.49 Some ads explic­itly mentioned the murder of husbands and c­ hildren: Looking for an intelligent, loving partner for my good-­looking s­ ister, whose husband and child w ­ ere victims of the Hitler era. Age 40–45. Joint emigration desired (Der Weg, Oct. 17, 1946, p. 8). Lady, 50 years of age, blond, thin, youthful appearance and good looking, husband and one d ­aughter dead [verstorben] in concentration camp, wishes acquaintance with intelligent man for the purpose of marriage and emigration to ­England, since one d ­ aughter is married ­t here (Der Weg, Nov. 22, 1946, p. 8).

Yet ­t hese two ads ­were rare in their explicit reference to the loss of spouses and ­children. The following ad is unique, though nevertheless noteworthy, for its direct

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engagement with the emotional and familial realities that many faced in the aftermath of genocide: Businessman, 52 years of age, 1.70m tall, stately appearance, good looking, ambitious, looking for a tidy, loving w ­ oman who would like to build a happy home for me, I would offer ­children whose ­daddy [Vati] died in concentration camps a loving replacement. Open to the possibility of emigration (Der Weg, Aug. 2, 1946, p. 8).

At the same time, all three of ­t hese ads offer in­ter­est­ing perspectives on evolving gender expectations. The first two ads emphasize the desire to find an intelligent man (a quality that was also valued in ­women in a number of ads). Although the last ad expresses traditional gender roles, with a businessman seeking a “tidy” homemaker who ­w ill create a “happy” home and hearth, other ads cite ambition as a desirable trait for both men and w ­ omen, suggesting that the individual in question possessed determination and looked to the f­ uture. Most ads placed in Der Weg in 1946 and ­later did not mention the nature of personal tragedy directly. Instead, ad writers spoke obliquely of their loss. Numerous ads w ­ ere placed by w ­ idows, including w ­ idows with c­ hildren: “­Widow, 47 years old, ambitious, 12 year-­old son, looking to meet a solid life partner between age 50 and 60 for the purpose of marriage.”50 Some ads, like the following two, are even more vague about the writer’s marital status, though both highlight the importance placed on education and intelligence for men and ­women. In the first, it is unclear ­whether the w ­ oman placing the ad was ever married, though she has a 3-­year-­old to care for: “Good looking lady, 26 years of age, with a three-­year old boy, wishes to meet an intelligent man 40 or less for the purpose of marriage and possibly joint emigration.”51 The second ad, placed by a man with a d ­ aughter, voices the writer’s desire for remarriage, though it gives no indication of how his first marriage ended. Although u ­ nder other circumstances we might entertain the possibility that the ad was placed by a divorcé, the ad’s wording suggests that the gentleman in question was a widower: German American doctor of law, impressive appearance, 39 years of age, longs for remarriage with a good-­looking, educated lady with good character and domestic virtues [mit charakterl. und hausfraul. Vorzügen], not without assets, who wishes to [bring] sunshine to my ­house and who wishes to be a loving ­mother to my 11-­year-­old d ­ aughter (Der Weg, Dec. 6, 1946, p. 8).

The ad writer’s expressed hope that a ­f uture wife would “be a loving ­mother to my 11-­year-­old ­daughter” leaves l­ittle room for doubt about the nature of his wife’s absence; we can assume that she was dead.52 And though he sought a good-­looking ­woman with “domestic virtues” who would “bring sunshine to my h ­ ouse,” it was nevertheless impor­tant that she be educated and personable. In other instances, young ­people placed ads complaining about the lack of opportunities for finding a partner; they turned to the Jewish press to expand the meager pool of Jewish suitors: “Two [female] friends (25 years of age), Jews, from good homes, employed, due to the lack of social contacts [Mangel an Gesellschaft] wish to meet quality men [besseren Herren].”53 Similarly, a young w ­ oman placed the following ad,

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noting her difficulties finding a partner and emphasizing in very telling ways that are explored shortly her desire to marry someone at least partly Jewish: Due to the lack of opportunities, I am looking this way [that is, placing a personal ad] for a young man (25–35 years of age, about 1.80m tall), Jew or Mischling, German or foreigner, who likes sports and m ­ usic (Der Weg, Nov. 8, 1946, p. 8).

The fact that the two aforementioned ads w ­ ere written by w ­ omen is particularly intriguing, b ­ ecause the gender imbalance favored Jewish w ­ omen in the marriage market. As Rabbi Steven Schwarzschild noted in Berlin in February 1950, “Jewish girls are more than scarce.”54 The pool of eligible suitors in Berlin was small, and the large number of Jewish displaced persons in the late 1940s did not necessary solve the prob­lem, especially b ­ ecause the DP community was so transitory. As Atina Grossmann notes, the German Jewish population of Berlin had a complicated relationship with the Eastern Eu­ro­pean displaced persons who moved through the city, one that was not “tightly separated” but also not deeply entwined.55 And though Grossmann’s analy­sis of male Jewish displaced persons’ sexual encounters with German w ­ omen suggests that Jewish men w ­ ere at times willing to engage in casual sex with non-­Jewish ­women, the number of Jewish men marrying German ­women was decidedly small. The reverse—­Jewish ­women marrying non-­Jewish men—­was even rarer.56 Finding a Jewish husband appears to have been essential to Jewish ­women in Berlin. Nevertheless, if in the aforementioned examples companionship was a clear motivation for placing ads in the first place, this is not to say that financial and material concerns dis­appeared. Some announcements stressed that the ad writer had secure employment, and o ­ thers referenced housing. In a city still in rubble, possessing one’s own home was deemed a significant financial asset. Thus certain ads highlight homeownership, typically expressed through phrases such as “own apartment available” (eigene Wohnung vorhanden) or “home of one’s own” (Eigen­ ese phrases emerged as a prominent and repeated way to stress ecoheim). Th nomic and material stability. The following two ads are typical: ­ idow, early 40s, 1.70m tall, blond, thin, lively, wishes to meet a man u W ­ nder the age of 55, academic or business owner, for the purpose of marriage. Very experienced in business. Own apartment available (Der Weg, Apr. 12, 1946, p. 8).57 23 year old Jew (1.78 [m] tall) is looking to meet a nice Jewish man for the purpose of eventually marrying [zwecks späterer Heirat].—­Own apartment available (Der Weg, May 10, 1946, p. 8).

The poor housing situation in postwar Berlin could lead to audacious ads, like this highly unusual announcement in which the man placing the ad suggests moving in together before marriage: El­derly, single gentleman, still very robust and good companion, wishes to meet a single, noble-­minded, well-­off lady, 65 years or less, I also wish to live together,

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in the American sector, eventual marriage and emigration are not excluded (Der Weg, Nov. 22, 1946, p. 8).

As this last announcement and o ­ thers remind us, emigration remained a major leitmotif in personal ads, reflecting a story that was representative of the majority of Jews who passed through Germany in the years immediately ­after World War II. One example mentions emigration not once but twice: “Lady who wants to emigrate [Auswanderungslustige Dame], experienced and versatile [mit vielseitigen Erfahrungen], desires u ­ nion with el­derly gentleman who is leaving Germany as an emigrant in the foreseeable ­f uture.”58 Another is almost timeless in its use of well-­ worn tropes—­namely, a business man from a “good Jewish f­ amily” seeking a young, attractive spouse—­but it too repeats the call for emigration and highlights the desire that his ­f uture wife be able to cope with life’s challenges: In­de­pen­dent businessman, 40 years of age, from a good Jewish ­family, is looking to meet a healthy, nice-­looking and capable [lebenstüchtige, able to cope with life] Jewish ­woman, 25–35 years of age, for the purpose of marriage and emigration (Der Weg, Nov. 22, 1946, p. 8).59

Ads referencing emigration continued well into the early 1950s: “Looking for a husband for my cousin [female], 28 years [of age], born in Poland, with the goal of emigration to the USA.” 60 This ad, placed in 1951, is instructive for several reasons. Being born in Poland, the young lady had even fewer reasons to stay in Germany than t­ hose born in the country (many of whom had also left as quickly as they could). Her age might have contributed further to her desire to leave, b ­ ecause young ­people found it easier or perhaps more necessary to leave than did t­ hose who w ­ ere middle-­aged or older. The fact that a cousin placed the ad on her behalf also bears noting. Arranged marriages w ­ ere increasingly rare among Jews, but the cousin’s concern and decision to place an ad in the press point to several pos­si­ble motivations: a sense of familial responsibility (in the very conceivable absence of parents), paternalism, traditional attitudes, a belief in the necessity of endogamy, or some combination thereof. Given her relatively young age (suggesting her ability to bear ­children), we must consider the larger communal concern for endogamy as a determining ­factor in the cousin’s decision to place the ad. Another ad from 1951 follows a similar pattern: “Looking for a reliable Jewish girl between 20 and 28 years of age to marry my b ­ rother, young, in­de­pen­dent businessman, 30 years of age.” 61 It is clear that endogamy and the creation of new Jewish families ­were at the forefront of the minds of individuals and f­amily members a­ fter the war. To be sure, ­there was a significant push to marry and have c­ hildren ­after the Holocaust, just as ­there was a widespread concern with fertility. Many Jews—­both male and female—­ having survived the horrors of the Holocaust (including starvation, which s­ topped menses, and in certain cases pseudomedical torture), w ­ ere intent on determining ­whether they could have ­children. The remarkable postwar birthrate of Jewish displaced persons was “among the highest in the world.” 62 Endogamy and pronatalism

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served as strategies to confront the high death toll and communal destruction on a very personal and immediate level. Fi­nally, the personal ads published in Der Weg reveal a disturbing continuation of racial terminology. As we have seen, in the 1930s the terms Jude, Volljude, and Mischling had been employed in personal ads in the German Jewish press, but their continued usage well into the early 1950s remains significant, especially ­because alternative phrases of self-­description or references to religion w ­ ere very rare. Indeed, the following example is exceptional for the ad writer’s desire to marry a “religious” man: “Lady, beginning 40s, seeks marriage. Only religious men over 50 years [of age] considered.” 63 Instead, ads continued to employ terms from the Nazi era. We can thus find announcements such as “Full Jew [Volljude], 32 years [of age], 169 [cm tall], seeks the acquaintance of a German full-­or half-­Jew [Voll-­ oder Halbjüdin] for the purpose of marriage and pos­si­ble emigration.” 64 Another from the same year announces, “Businessman, 35 years of age, well-­situated, is looking for an appropriately aged wife. Full Jew [Volljüdin] preferred. Assets not necessarily required.” 65 To be sure, ­t hese ads do not reflect the ac­cep­tance of Nazi racial hierarchies or valuations. Rather, ­t hese terms had become shorthand during the Nazi era for a newly created Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community of fate) that brought together individuals who had been persecuted, to differing degrees, by the Nazi state. They offered a clue as to the nature and degree of the persecution each individual experienced during the Nazi era. In the second ad, it is clear that the man searching for a spouse was keen to marry a ­woman whose own experience closely resembled his own. A relatively small number of ads also employed an alternative term to reference the same community of fate: O.d.F. (Opfer des Faschismus, victim of fascism). This designation was common in the Soviet zone and l­ater in the German Demo­cratic Republic. Being identified as a victim of fascism accorded a person a degree of social standing and economic benefits.66 It also invoked the same community of fate that terms such as Volljude conferred while avoiding the clearly negative connotations associated with the use of Nazi racial terminology. One announcement from 1951 reads, “­Woman in her late 40s, pleasant appearance, 1.7m tall, efficient businesswoman and h ­ ouse­w ife, victim of fascism, very reliable, seeks a characterful life partner, no older than 60 [years of age].” 67 One way or another, by noting their status during the Holocaust, ad writers highlighted the persecution they had experienced. By seeking a partner of a similar status, they aimed to find a spouse who shared a traumatic past, one who could understand what they had gone through.

Conclusion Personal ads provide surprisingly rich reflections of how seemingly average p ­ eople imagine and describe their ideal mate and life goals. Ads written in harrowing times, however, offer additional and other­w ise often muted perspectives on the nature and meaning of intimate life choices. The personal ads analyzed ­here from the German Jewish press before, during, and ­after the Holocaust reveal changing

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normative values, including the growing importance of personal decision making and taste, just as they highlight recurring motifs and criteria in the Jewish marriage market. If early-­twentieth-­century ads used religious or political-­national expressions for self-­identification, ads during and even ­after World War II frequently employed racial categories to point to an individual’s pre­sent and past and to the nature of persecution she or he faced. Although markers of self-­description changed over time and across periods, financial resources and economic concerns remained impor­tant attributes. The basic economic function of the f­ amily unit explains this much more universal concern—­which is true t­ oday just as in the past and is relevant for dif­fer­ent ethnic and religious groups. The privileging of financial needs during the Nazi era and thereafter was not new in and of itself, but the stated purpose of t­ hese funds, combined with a frequent insistence that partners have connections abroad or skills to flourish in a new environment, highlight the degree to which emigration dominated the minds of German Jews both in the last years before and immediately ­after World War II. During the Nazi era, emigration was a means to escape persecution, and as the vio­lence of the regime became more immediate, leaving the country became imperative for basic survival. Articles and personal ads in Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt make clear that most ­people understood by late 1938 that ­there was no time to hesitate: emigration was imperative. The question was how and with whom the individual would leave the country. In this regard, marriage could and did at times serve as part of a larger f­amily strategy, whereby younger ­family members ­were sent abroad, charged with the task of trying to find ways out for t­ hose who still remained in Germany. This role extension conferred a very dif­fer­ent set of responsibilities on young c­ ouples, who instead of relying on help from parents to become established in their new lives w ­ ere thrust into the role of ensuring the survival of older relatives. Although the need to emigrate lessened a­ fter the war, the desire to do so did not always wane. Many Jews who survived could not imagine living in Germany any longer and sought a ­future, often far, far away. Yet numerous ads suggest that not all of ­t hese individuals wanted to take this step alone. Personal ads thus allow us to understand the overlapping phenomena of marriage and emigration as both coping and exit strategies, just as they allow us to tease out the nuances of experience and po­liti­cal awareness during ­t hese distinct periods. Fi­nally, marriage did not just serve practical purposes; many ads clearly expressed the writer’s desire to find a companion or life partner, someone who suited their tastes and shared their interests. Even in the worst of times, the emotional and psychological need to find a meaningful relationship compelled individuals to place personal ads. The simplicity and basic humanity of this wish endow the ads with greater significance than their short lines initially suggest.

chapter 11

v

The Postwar Migration of Romani Families from Slovakia to the Bohemian Lands A Complex Legacy of War and Genocide in Czecho­slo­va­kia Helena Sadílková

In critically examining pos­si­ble approaches to writing the histories of the Roma in 1975, ­Will Guy, a British sociologist interested in the con­temporary situation of the Roma in communist Czecho­slo­va­k ia, argued for a focus on “the choices actually made by the Roma in concrete historical situations” and highlighted the need “to probe the variety of their experience.” While remarking that “being a . . . ​minority, it was far more likely that their history would be more a tale of what was done to them than of what they themselves had done,” he also argued for the importance of looking at the contexts in which ­others ­shaped the history of the marginalized minority.1 Traditionally, historical accounts related to the Roma ­were dominated by an approach focused on the history of state policies t­ oward the Roma, and this focus has two side effects. First, it homogenized the Roma into a unified group targeted by dif­fer­ent state policies, implicitly or explic­itly depriving them of the active role of agents in the making of the history. Second, it narrated the history of the Roma in ­t hese accounts as an appendix to bigger histories, as an isolated story encapsulated and impor­tant only for the sake of the group as a minority, and as a history that only superficially communicated with other historical narratives. Looking at the history of the Roma as a history of heterogeneous individuals who negotiate and shape their situations and report on them, and as p ­ eople who are above all part of the larger society and share in its historical development, has recently become an impor­tant strand in Romani studies and its focus on history. 190

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This chapter supports this approach to historical writing on the Roma. It examines the postwar migration of Roma from Slovakia to the Bohemian lands as a pro­cess both that developed as a direct result of war­time events and their aftermath in Czecho­slo­va­k ia and that decisively affected the lives of all local Romani families, ­whether or not they actively took part in the migration. Starting with a summary of the differences in the effects of the war on the Romani families in the Czech and Slovak parts of the republic and their postwar repercussions, this chapter then addresses postwar migration as a response of Romani families in Slovakia to war­time events and to the possibilities of territorial and social mobility that newly opened for them in the postwar period. To offer deeper insight into the complex transformation of the life experiences and trajectories of individual Romani families, it then pre­sents a case study of a ­family from southern Slovakia that joined in the migration in 1946 and established itself as residents of postwar Brno, the Moravian capital and the center of Romani po­liti­cal mobilization in postwar Bohemian lands. Using their example, I argue that migration offered vari­ous opportunities for Romani individuals, supported by their ­family structures, of actively shaping their postwar lives and the lives of their families and local communities. In other words, this chapter very much tells “a tale of what they themselves have done,” to borrow Guy’s words, while underscoring the highly individual circumstances in which the p ­ eople in the circle of their f­ amily took their decisions and actions.

Romani and Sinti Families in Czecho­slo­va­kia: Differences in War­time Fates As has been highlighted over the last several de­cades when the fate of the Roma during the Holocaust became the subject of serious study, the war­time experiences of dif­fer­ent Romani families across the ­whole of Eu­rope varied—­depending on where they lived and the ways in which a given region and above all the state in question and its representatives ­were involved in war and positioned themselves vis-­à-­v is Nazi racial policies.2 The fate of the Roma during the war also depended on the prewar situation of the Romani families, the local interethnic relations, and the dominant approach to the “Gypsies” in the preceding de­cades: anti-­g ypsy sentiments across the dif­fer­ent strata of the local population played an impor­tant role in creating social preconditions that affected the dif­fer­ent Holocaust histories. The case of the Roma in former Czecho­slo­va­kia pre­sents a vivid example of ­these differences. Established in 1918, the new state incorporated neighboring regions that had once belonged to the same larger po­liti­cal unit but whose policies ­toward “the Gypsies” differed. As a consequence, the experiences of the ­people forming the new Czechoslovak society and its Romani/non-­Romani relationships from the central to the local level—­including the life experience of individual Romani families—­ varied quite substantially.

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At the time, most Roma and Sinti in the Bohemian lands ­were members of semi­ nomadic families in the pro­cess of gradual sedentarization (with the impor­tant exception of southeastern Moravia, where a large number of local families w ­ ere already settled).3 The traveling lifestyle of Romani and Sinti families in the Bohemian lands (as well as in Austria) was not only the result of their choice or an effect of a tradition linked with certain types of peripatetic occupations but also a consequence of the historic refusal of a large number of local governments to allow their incorporation into their communities as sedentary families with the right of domicile in a given locality.4 In fact, during the seventeenth and the first half of the eigh­teenth centuries, brutal expulsions and executions of “Gypsies” crossing the border of the Bohemian lands w ­ ere part of the local real­ity.5 In Slovakia by contrast, most of the local Roma belonged to the sedentary population, settling in the vicinity of local communities as early as the sixteenth ­century. Traveling Sinti and Vlax-­Romani families living in Slovakia formed an impor­tant but proportionately minor exception to the long-­term sedentarization model. But even ­t hese, like the seminomadic Romani and Sinti families in the Bohemian lands, had their places of sojourn to which they returned ­after their travels, some even owning land and h ­ ouses in par­tic­ul­ ar localities. Sedentary Roma w ­ ere incorporated into the local communities of rural Slovakia; their relations with the local non-­Romani population w ­ ere based on the exchange of goods and services—as musicians, blacksmiths, and craftsmen, as well as agricultural workers or ­house­hold help. A specific form of paternalism, however, defined their position in local social hierarchies, which was also reflected in the spatial or symbolic separation of Romani settlements from the rest of local society.6 Even when their settlement was part of an inhabited area of the village or town and even when it was very centrally located, it formed a space belonging to Romani inhabitants only that non-­Roma would not enter. Despite the image of the Roma—­largely reproduced also by historical writings—as a poor and eco­nom­ically dependent population at the bottom of the social hierarchy, it should be emphasized that at the outbreak of World War II, the Romani population all across Czecho­slo­va­kia showed impor­tant markers of social diversification: it included not only (poorer) rural Romani communities or seminomadic families who ­were eco­ nom­ically dependent on the local population but also landowners and farmers, a rich musician élite, respected craftsmen, and successful businessmen. During the war, Czecho­slo­va­k ia was divided into two po­l iti­cal entities—­t he Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the Slovak Republic—­w ith large parts of its territory annexed by Nazi Germany and Hungary in 1938–1939. The fate of the Roma and Sinti in the dif­fer­ent regions followed yet again dif­fer­ent trajectories7: the Roma and Sinti living in the territories annexed by Germany met the fate of the Roma and Sinti in the German Reich and awaited more or less immediate deportations to concentration camps. Roma and Sinti in the Protectorate faced forced sedentarization in 1939 and tight police control. Almost half ­were interned in two “Gypsy camps” established on the territory of the Protectorate and managed by Czech authorities and gendarmes in 1942 and 1943. Almost the entire local

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Romani and Sinti population was then transported to Auschwitz-­Birkenau during 1943–1944, It is estimated that only about 10 ­percent of the former Romani and Sinti population of the Protectorate survived, some of them in hiding e­ ither in the territory of the Protectorate or Slovakia.8 Deportation to concentration camps in the territory of the German Reich was also the fate of the Roma living on territories annexed by Hungary—­but only beginning in 1944, with the coming to power of the Arrow Cross Party. The Roma and Sinti living in the territory of the war­time Slovak Republic suffered a long series of persecution ­orders, which resulted in extreme pauperization, exclusion from society, and often almost complete territorial isolation.9 Yet, as a group they w ­ ere spared mass transports to concentration and extermination camps. This was despite harsh intimidation by members of the Hlinka Guard—­a paramilitary organ­ization attached to the leading Slovak ­People’s Party—­and by German soldiers, and despite intensive efforts to use the work of Romani men in forced l­abor camps all across the country. The idea of opening a local concentration camp for “the Gypsies” materialized only in late 1944 in Dubnica nad Váhom (Dubnitz an der Waag, Vágtölgyes), only a few months before the gradual liberation of the Slovak territory. Mass murders and executions of Roma, which ­were known to have occurred in the territory of Poland or the USSR, w ­ ere carried out in Slovakia only in relation to the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising in 1944, when they w ­ ere killed by German army units with the help of the Slovak fascist paramilitary organ­ izations for their real or suspected involvement in the local re­sis­tance movement. The war­time experience of the Roma in Slovakia as t­ hose who “stayed home” during the war also included personal encounters with the war as civilians: they evacuated and hid in the countryside in the winter of 1944 and early spring of 1945 when the war front reached Slovakian territory, and ­women ­were abused by both the e­ nemy soldiers and liberating troops. Images of destruction and death left by the war also form part of the early postwar memories of eyewitnesses, alongside the need to feed their f­ amily, rebuild their destroyed h ­ ouses, or find a new place to live and earn a livelihood. Despite a regulation that excluded “Gypsies” from ser­ vice in the army, a large proportion of Romani men ­were drafted into the Slovak Army (as well as the Hungarian Army in the case of Roma living in the southern territories annexed by Hungary) and fought on the front on the side of the Axis powers. ­Those who ­were captured formed a large body of prisoners of war (POWs) in dif­fer­ent parts of Eu­rope and returned from POW camps as late as a few years ­after 1945. Some, having been retrained by the Allies, returned home as soldiers and participated in the liberation strug­gle.10 In the USSR, Slovak Army soldiers and POWs of Romani origin joined the ranks of what became known as the First Czechoslovak Army Corps, formed mostly from Czechoslovak emigrés in the USSR and POWs, Czech and Slovak nationals including Ruthenians as well as Jews, and also historical Czech immigrants to the Volhynia region of western Ukraine. From 1943 on, the army participated in the fighting of the advancing Red Army in ­today’s Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, and Czech Republic. The only information on the number of Romani soldiers in the

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Czechoslovak Army Corps comes from postwar police sources: a high-­ranking police officer, Josef Mareš, estimated their number at 1,500.11

The Postwar Situation of Romani and Sinti Families in Czecho­slo­va­kia Romani families living on the territory of the re-­created Czechoslovak state (without Subcarpathian Ukraine, which was seized by the USSR) or t­hose returning home again found themselves in dif­fer­ent situations depending on the level of persecution aimed at Romani society as a ­whole in the Bohemian lands and Slovakia, as well as on their individual fates during the war. For the Romani and Sinti survivors from the Bohemian lands, the main issue was the need to come to terms with the tragic fact that members of their families ­were murdered and ­whole local communities ­were annihilated. The survivors strove to build a new life in the changing real­ity of Czechoslovak society and economy, if pos­si­ble reuniting with surviving relatives and establishing new families, based on both intracommunal marriages and marriages outside the community. This is how Leon Růžička (b. 1924), one of the Romani survivors from Kladno in central Bohemia, described in 1958 his early postwar years in the community of coal miners and steel plant workers in Kladno: I suffered in Auschwitz, . . . ​was transported to Buchenwald . . . ​, Dora . . . ​, Harzung[en] . . . ​, Erlich [correct: Ellrich] . . . ​, and . . . ​Bergen [Belsen]. ­After liberation I returned to my homeland. ­There I searched in vain for anyone from my ­family. I was alone, the only one to survive. How terrible that was. I cried. I hated the war so much. All twenty-­seven members of our f­amily, thirteen ­children and our sweet ­mother, they ­were all victims of the war; they ­either died in gas or of inhumane torture. I myself was ill and it took several months before I recovered. But not completely. In 1946 I was called for my military ser­v ice. In 1947 I volunteered for a one-­ year job to help in our coal mines. I got used to the shaft and the miners, my companions at work, I grew together into one with the miners’ life. At the mine I met . . . ​t he ­daughter of a miner . . . ​[and] married her in 1948. . . . ​I grew fond of the black work. And comrade miners grew fond of me and they liked me like I liked them. The horrible past stayed ­behind as a terrible dream which I ­w ill never forget. . . . ​In August 1948 our first son was born. What joy that was at the time. . . . ​W hen I remember the past years and the horrors of concentration camps, I cannot believe I survived and lived to see happiness in my life again.12

This touching narrative on the successful and radically new reconstitution of Růžička’s personal and ­family life in the postwar era—­his new ­family continues to live in the Kladno region unrecognized as Roma by their neighbors—is written in an obvious (genuine, yet deliberately highlighted) personal identification with the po­liti­cal developments in Czecho­slo­va­k ia ­a fter the communist takeover in

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1948.13 One of the in­ter­est­ing silences in this narrative concerns his postwar arrival in Kladno where he had lived before being deported. Although we do not have any details regarding this part of his personal history, archival research has shown that many returning Romani and Sinti survivors faced fierce negative reactions on their reappearance in the municipalities of their prewar homes. One of the most extreme examples comes from southeastern Moravia in the summer of 1945. ­There, in response to the return of a handful of local Romani survivors, five mayors of local municipalities (Bojkovice, Havřice, Nevšová, Veselí nad Moravou, and Záhořovice) signed a petition to the Moravian Land Office complaining that the “Gypsies” (Romani Holocaust survivors) ­were returning in “large numbers”14 and “in spite of all the suffering they had endured, most of them have not changed for the better: they shy from work, steal, ­etc.” The petitioners asked the land authorities to remove “the Gypsies to a village . . . ​where they could be kept to work ­under control,” suggesting “the border territories” presented a good place for their relocation.15 This petition illustrates both the challenges faced by returning survivors and the continuity of prewar anti-­Gypsy sentiments in the local mindset, clearly influenced by the war­time “solution to the Gypsy question.” Moreover, it demonstrates one of the ways in which the large forced population movements that marked the immediate postwar history of Czecho­slo­va­k ia—­i ncluding the expulsion of three million members of the German-­speaking population from Bohemian and Moravian border territories—­were used in the postwar “re-­thinking” of “the Gypsy question” by some parts of the state government. Numerous requests by local officials to resettle and concentrate the unwanted “Gypsy population” in “emptied” German villages ­were also documented in Slovakia.16

Reconciliation with Their War­time Fate as a F ­ amily Issue on the Border of Private and Public Spheres It is difficult to generalize about the individual stances of Romani and Sinti survivors and the decisions taken by them when responding to the disruption or complete rupture of their ­family bonds; of losing many, most, or all close relatives; of having been deprived of their property and homes; and when seeking to honor the dead and yet protect ­t hose who ­were newly born into their re-­created families. A ­whole spectrum of actions and decisions can be bracketed by two extreme positions vis-­à-­v is the public declaration of Romani identity and the Roma and Sintis’ closely connected public and private remembrance of what only much ­later came to be called the Holocaust. Both of t­ hese aspects of identification with their Romani origin and history ­were crucial for the ­future existence of the original Romani population of the Bohemian lands as a group, and both w ­ ere heavi­ly influenced not only by ­family and individual concerns but also, importantly, by the surviving (negative) ste­reo­t ype of “the Gypsy” among the non-­Romani population of the Bohemian lands—as perceived or experienced by survivors both during and a­ fter the war. It should also be emphasized that individual survivors’ attitudes ­toward the difficult past and their ­f uture or the ­f uture of their new ­children, whom they

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hoped to protect and help them grow up in the most positive ways, changed over time in a dynamic that is difficult to capture in this general overview. ­After the war, one of the strategies taken by Romani and Sinti survivors was to live “in hiding,” to evoke a phrase coined by Ceija Stojka, a Romani survivor from Austria, in her outstanding memoir published in the early 1980s.17 They chose to downplay their Romani identity, to render it invisible from the outside. Some survivors took on new surnames. Former speakers of Romani abandoned the language in their everyday use within families. This language shift was already in pro­gress among some of the original Romani communities in the Bohemian lands in the prewar period, but the fact that most speakers of the language w ­ ere killed, combined with the language’s deliberate exclusion from the f­ amily repertoire, sentenced Romani dialects formerly spoken in the territories of the Bohemian lands to the status of dead languages in the coming de­cades. However, the Sinti dialect of Romani was better preserved largely b ­ ecause Sinti families in Czecho­slo­va­k ia stayed in touch with their relatives in Germany, where Sinti was preserved as a secret intracommunal code. F ­ amily concerns stood ­behind such decisions: the ­children of the survivors explain that their parents acted so as to spare their ­children the experience of being identified as someone dif­fer­ent and to prevent potential persecution on the grounds of being easily labeled “a Gypsy” ­because of their name or dif­fer­ent ­mother tongue. This protective attitude continues to influence the public manner of some of the descendants of survivors’ families even t­oday: some families carefully control and restrict the use of their surnames in contexts that would identify them as Roma, especially when they are not generally identifiable as Romani. Even when survivors decide to be partners in oral history research, some do so only anonymously for well-­substantiated concerns that the disclosure of their surnames as Romani could threaten their ­children and other relatives, especially b ­ ecause strong anti-­Romani prejudices continue to be a vis­i­ble part of con­temporary everyday Czech real­ity. The remembrance of their tragic war­t ime history amidst the general public silence that surrounded the fate of the original Romani population of the Bohemian lands was another source of anxiety within the survivors’ families. Officially, “the Gypsies” ­were presented as just another group of victims of Nazi oppression, along with the entire Czechoslovak nation that was involuntarily occupied by Nazi Germany. ­There was no room for a discussion of the specific features of their persecution and, above all, of the question of collaboration by the dif­fer­ent strata of Bohemian and Moravian society in the extermination of this generally negatively perceived population. Public oblivion, combined with a private protective silence, produced a very tense atmosphere inside the families. Some of the survivors’ ­children have had a very difficult time reconciling themselves with the way their parents and older relatives de­cided to protect them. It was not only that some survivors found it difficult to talk about their suffering, especially in front of their ­children, but that some also de­cided that silence would best protect their ­children from a knowledge that could poison their new lives: they feared that the mere knowledge of what happened would create tensions that would negatively shape

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the lives of their ­children. Some thus tried to exclude their ­children from remembering or learning about the war­time tragedies, even within the circle of the larger ­family. The knowledge of the death of f­ amily members was nevertheless transferred to the descendants, even if only emotionally: They did not want to talk about it. On occasions, when the larger ­family met, when, for example, we celebrated something, a few glasses of wine ­were enough to bring them back to ­t hese memories and they ­were all in tears. It was always like this, when they sat together, they would make fun, and then from this joy it would all fall into melancholy and deep sorrow and weeping. Instantly, they would send us c­ hildren away so as to protect us, but their sorrow was transferred on to us nevertheless.18

Silence about the f­ amily members’ war­time fate was also motivated by a need— as perceived by some of the survivors—to physically protect themselves and their new families. In the absence of public ­trials of crimes against Romani victims of the Holocaust, some feared revenge from the perpetrators if survivors ­were recognized as eyewitnesses to the persecutions and especially if they ever spoke out publicly. It should, however, be noted that individual acts of revenge against perpetrators also occurred. Only one of the few postwar ­trials of perpetrators of anti-­ Roma persecution held before the Czechoslovak courts or special retribution commissions featured the presence of a larger number of Romani witnesses. Paradoxically, it was a case against one of several Romani “capos” from the Protectorate “Gypsy camps.” Three other non-­Roma w ­ ere tried in connection to their role in the management of the two Protectorate “Gypsy camps” but they ­were acquitted or released with minor correction. The Romani capo was the only defendant to be found guilty of the crimes committed and sentenced to life imprisonment.19 Some survivors also worried that their ­children might put themselves in danger if they ever de­cided to take vengeance into their own hands. ­Here again, a protective attitude based on life experience and the older generation’s perception of the position of the Roma in postwar Czechoslovak society played a decisive role: My mum, even though she was interned in the [Lety] concentration camp and lived h ­ ere in astoundingly horrible conditions together with the w ­ hole of her larger f­ amily, never even mentioned to me the existence of this place. My f­ ather behaved in the same way. They ­were afraid that I would be taken by the police and put to prison, ­because they knew me. . . . ​My mum feared the citizens forming this society during the First Republic, she was afraid of them during the Protectorate and never ­stopped to fear them even ­a fter the regime change.20

In spite of t­ hese protective strategies, especially ­toward the c­ hildren born a­ fter the war, ­there was a need to remember the dead in the virtual absence of any public commemoration. This need was expressed publicly by erecting tombstones in public cemeteries or, more exceptionally, by placing memorial plaques in public spaces. Some survivors also included their older ­children in their postwar quests to discover the fate of their ­family members or to visit places of their suffering in

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con­temporary Poland and Germany. The war­time suffering of relatives—­including ­brothers and s­ isters they had never known—­and the suffering of their parents as survivors, which sometimes flashed back in emotions when the ­family gathered, ­were m ­ atters that the postwar generation had to come to terms with in their own ways: My f­ather only mentioned his c­ hildren from the first [prewar] marriage when we, his postwar kids, ­were too naughty. “­You’re just a pack, not ­children! But ­t hose c­ hildren of mine, they ­were real ­children.” He would turn his back to us so that we did not see him crying. . . . ​­Later, I spent two years with him in Germany. He wanted to find out what happened to his kids. We lived among the Sinti t­ here, among our relatives. . . . ​I l­ ater met with a w ­ oman who witnessed their terrible death, they ­were brutally murdered in one of the camps. . . . ​I never told my ­father; it would have been too much for him to bear.21 My ­father was one of the few to survive from his ­family. . . . ​This is a part of the ­family history which he shared with us quite openly. I even went with him to Poland and Germany when I was about twelve, to see the places where our relatives w ­ ere interned and died. . . . ​­After the war, he was a communist by belief, persuaded of the ideology. His newly created world was shattered into pieces once again when he saw the Soviet tanks come in 1968. He just went and turned his membership card back to the communist party unit in our town—­and he was instantly fired from work. . . . ​This time, he was hospitalized at a clinic. He just could not bear it. . . . ​I was born in 1970 and very soon a­ fter we moved away, to a dif­fer­ent town where my ­father a­ fter all managed to find some work. . . . ​We all joined the other side, listening to the Voice of Amer­i­ca, ­etc. . . . ​In the 1980s, my parents de­cided we should emigrate from Czecho­slo­va­k ia. . . . ​The plan was to escape via Yugo­slavia to where we traveled one summer, but we did not succeed to get out.22

At the other end of the spectrum of reactions and attitudes, t­ here ­were survivors who became active as public figures—­already by the early 1950s and openly as representatives of the Romani community—in an attempt to take part in the design and implementation of policies targeted at the Roma in communist Czecho­slo­va­ kia. In their strug­gle for po­liti­cal participation, they advocated for the creation of a Romani organ­ization that would defend the rights of the Roma to participate in making key decisions on their f­ uture as a minority group in the country. The eagerness of ­t hese individuals to participate in con­temporary debates on the Roma and in the decision-­making pro­cess had diverse sources. A key motivation was their personal war­t ime experience of the destruction of entire Romani communities from which they originated, at a time when ­others de­cided to “solve the Gypsy question” on their own, treating the Roma as mere objects of their policies.23 In a tellingly unrecognized continuation of the war­time discourse “on the Gypsies,” the w ­ hole complex of issues and challenges linked with the Roma and state interventions into their lives continued to be called “the solution to the Gypsy question” in the postwar discourse in communist Czecho­slo­va­k ia. Unsurprisingly, two

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of the main tasks of the Romani organ­ization—in its brief existence from 1969–1973 as the (Czech) Union of Gypsies-­Roma—­were support for public remembrance of Romani victims of the Holocaust and assistance with compensation claims made by Romani survivors.24 The renewed interest of the central and local Czechoslovak authorities in “the Gypsies” a­ fter the war was mainly generated by the growing number of Roma arriving in the Bohemian lands from Slovakia as work mi­grants. They very soon completely outnumbered the original Romani population. Newspapers and reports issued by state administrative institutions from the late 1940s, which resurfaced in the mid-1950s, spoke of the Bohemian lands as being “flooded by Gypsy packs,” creating in the eyes of the authorities—­“once again”—­“an acute threat to public security and health.”25 With the number of the Romani mi­grants from Slovakia steadily rising in the postwar years and de­cades, it was not only the state authorities who had to put up with their presence in the Bohemian lands but also the remaining members of the original Romani population. In the eyes of the state and the general public, they ­were all mostly seen as one group, but internally, sociocultural bound­aries existed between dif­fer­ent Romani communities. Historically, close f­ amily relations between the Roma living in the Bohemian lands and Slovakia existed only among t­ hose communities of Roma living in the Moravian-­Slovak border regions. The o ­ thers ­were mostly foreigners to each other. It remains an open question to what extent they ­were informed about the details of their respective war­time fates, as well as their prewar lives and choices. But it is obvious that the mutual awareness of their respective war­time histories could only have grown in the postwar years, as members of t­ hese diverse communities interacted with each other on both the private, personal level (including postwar intermarriages) and the public level. For example, many participated in public activities in vari­ous Bohemian and Moravian municipalities or w ­ ere po­liti­cally involved in Romani issues, especially in the context of the Union of Gypsies-­Roma, as well as in activities preceding its establishment. Even though the historical proponents and found­ers of the organ­i zation mostly represented members of prewar Romani and Sinti communities, the organ­ ization incorporated—as early as 1968, during the preparation phase preceding its official establishment in 1969—­representatives of Romani mi­grant communities from Slovakia residing in the Bohemian lands. They also determined that it would focus a large part of its activities on prob­lems faced by the recent Romani mi­grant population.

Romani Families in Postwar Slovakia and Their Postwar Migration to the Bohemian Lands The Roma in postwar Slovakia found themselves in a dif­fer­ent situation than the Romani survivors in the Bohemian lands: the families of ­t hose in Slovakia had mostly survived the war, but they still strug­gled to make a living and to break out of the isolation and poverty they w ­ ere forced into during the war. Many had been

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evicted from their original places of residence on the basis of o ­ rders from the early 1940s and since then had lived in temporary huts, often far from neighboring villages lacking basic infrastructure, including a safe source of potable w ­ ater or a paved road connecting the settlement with the village or town to which it belonged. In regions where the local population, including the Roma, had left their homes to survive the passing of the occupying army in hiding, many Roma did not have a place to return to, ­because their ­houses had been partially or completely destroyed: It was on May 9, when we got back home. . . . ​The war had ended. Our ­house was destroyed. So we just slept over t­ here the first night, and my dad walked the next morning to the nearby former Polish border—it was now Rus­sian, but they spoke Ukrainian ­t here; their ­houses ­were also destroyed and they needed bricks, so we took that job and moved ­t here. We slept in hay sheds during the summer; it was like that the first year, and the next one as well. We did not go to school. Our dad made 12,000 bricks and got three goats for that work. So we herded the goats with the other ­children from the village. I was ten when I first came to school.26 The war was over and everywhere you could hear: “Freedom! A new life! Equality! Our ­f uture is an open road!” And we ­were still living at Korpáš, where the Hlinka Guard had driven us during the war. One room and a closet in the shanty. My ­father, ­mother, grand­mother, ­brother Toňu, my s­ isters Haňuša and Vilma, and Jozef and I with our two c­ hildren and a third one on the way all squeezed inside. . . . ​During the war we knew t­ hings had to be that way, but now ­a fter the liberation we thought to ourselves that ­t hings could be dif­fer­ent and right away. . . . ​But ­t here ­were no flats in Prešov, and at that time no one even considered buying a ­house, as some Roma managed to do ­later: we ­didn’t have the money, ­t here ­were no ­houses for sale, and even if ­t here ­were, the peasants would have a hard time selling it to a Gypsy. And as for building a shanty at Korpáš and living like savages, we ­didn’t want to do that e­ ither.27

The new realities of postwar Czecho­slo­va­k ia offered a dramatic new opportunity to solve the precarious situation in which many Romani families in Slovakia found themselves. Work-­related migration to the Bohemian lands enabled the Roma in Slovakia as individuals, families, or ­whole communities to escape the harsh Slovak realities of isolation, poverty, and tight social hierarchies by ­either establishing their lives and new homes in the Bohemian lands or earning capital ­t here to be reinvested back in Slovakia. The first mi­grants started to arrive in the Bohemian lands in the spring and summer of 1945. In the following years this led to a massive chain migration movement, which resulted in the establishment of large permanent communities of Romani postwar mi­grants from Slovakia in the Bohemian lands. As early as 1947, which was the year of the first postwar republic-­ wide register of “Gypsies” or­ga­nized in preparation for policies aimed at controlling the spontaneous movement of the Romani population inside Czecho­slo­va­k ia, more than 16,000 Romani mi­grants from Slovakia ­were registered in the Bohemian lands, in contrast to the estimated 1,000 autochthonous Romani survivors.

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Currently, descendants of Romani postwar mi­grants from Slovakia form the majority of the Romani population in the Czech Republic. The postwar migration represented a decisive moment in the history of Romani communities in Czecho­slo­va­k ia. It affected the individual postwar histories of all local Romani families, w ­ hether their members chose to participate in the migration or to stay home in Slovakia, ­whether they ­were among the newly arriving mi­grants or among t­ hose who ­were descendants of the original Romani population of the Bohemian lands. It also was a legacy of the war­time history in at least three interconnected aspects: it was closely linked with the repercussions of the war­time persecution of Roma in Slovakia; it developed in the context of postwar (forced) population movements across the ­whole of Czecho­slo­va­k ia, which w ­ ere largely planned by the late 1940s; and it occurred in the context of the reconstruction of infrastructure and industry in postwar Bohemian lands. It is estimated that, in only the first two postwar years, at least 5.5 million ­people in Czecho­slo­va­k ia (of a total of almost 12 million) w ­ ere involved in the movements of population, e­ ither forced or voluntary; this figure included almost three million Germans living mostly in the border territories of the Bohemian lands, the so-­called Sudetenland, who ­were expelled from Czecho­slo­va­k ia and forcefully resettled to Germany based on the argument of collective guilt.28 However, forced expulsion/resettlement from traditional territories of residence was also imposed on the German and Hungarian populations in Slovakia and smaller ethnic groups in the Bohemian lands accused of collaboration with Nazi Germany and its allies. ­Running parallel to the expulsions, state authorities or­ga­nized the resettlement of the “emptied border regions” in the following years. Most of the p ­ eople involved in the resettlement scheme w ­ ere immigrants from the “inland”—­t he “inner” regions of the Bohemian lands—as well as, importantly for the Roma, from the ­whole territory of Slovakia 29, and more or less recent emigrants as well as historic settlers of Czech and Slovak origin living beyond the borders of postwar Czecho­ slo­va­k ia, especially in East Central Eu­rope. Th ­ ere w ­ ere, for example, large historic communities of Czechs in western Ukraine and western Romania from the nineteenth c­ entury, both groups participated massively in the postwar resettlement of the Czech territory. The Roma as a group ­were not one of the primary target groups of this resettlement scheme. They ­were nevertheless significantly involved: Romani workers and their families from Slovakia started to move to the territory of the Bohemian lands, including the border regions, mostly as agricultural or industrial workers hired by local firms and enterprises/factories, as well as individual farmers or man­ag­ers of larger agricultural units. Perceived as mi­g rant workers, the Roma ­were often ­housed in the border territories in the abandoned ­houses which ­were not yet inhabited by other newcomers. ­Limited evidence makes it impossible to determine the proportion of Roma involved in the pro­cess of resettlement in the role of so-­called national-­caretakers, entrusted for example with the management of land and agricultural or industrial enterprises, which also included the acquisition of confiscated land and property. What information we do have suggests that when Romani individuals participated in this role, they did so as indi-

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viduals whose ethnic identity was not disclosed but was submerged in other categories of new settlers in the border regions (i.e., war veterans, settlers from Slovakia, and so on). The migration of Roma from Slovakia in the postwar de­cades is best described as a constant movement of p ­ eople (and goods) between the Bohemian lands and Slovakia, as well as inside the Bohemian lands. A certain proportion of the mi­grants returned to Slovakia, sometimes repeatedly, and a certain proportion immediately or gradually settled down in the Bohemian lands for good. The migration incentives ­were manifold, and vari­ous reasons often combined to determine the decision of a given individual (and his or her f­ amily).30 As mentioned, a large proportion of the migration was initiated (and sustained) by workforce recruitment in Slovakia by both government and private firms, stimulated by the reconstruction and building of infrastructure and industry; increased numbers of workers ­were also needed in agriculture. Eyewitness accounts mention not only media campaigns and direct recruitment in the territory of Slovakia but also the presence of recruiters on trains heading from Slovakia to the Bohemian lands, as well as at railway stations in Czech and Moravian regional centers. Work in the Bohemian lands was better paid, and the employers also offered accommodations that presented a significant improvement in living conditions, especially for ­those from poor communities, or t­ hose who ­were forced by war­time policies to live in makeshift h ­ ouses isolated from the economy and social life of the local community, or ­t hose whose homes ­were destroyed during the war.31 Some of the first Slovak Roma to come to the Bohemian lands ­were Romani soldiers fighting in the already mentioned First Czechoslovak Army Corps that entered the Moravian and Bohemian territory with the advancing front.32 Traumatic war­t ime memories of harassment, persecution, and killing ­were another impor­tant incentive to leave, which worked not only on the individual level but very much so on the level of w ­ hole (larger) families and (eventually) w ­ hole local Romani communities. Although the implementation of anti-­Gypsy mea­sures in the Bohemian lands during the war can be viewed as a state-­administered genocide with ­little room for individual negotiation, the opposite was true in Slovakia, where the implementation of most of the mea­sures and the identification of individuals as “Gypsies” w ­ ere done by local ­people. On the one hand, this greater involvement of local p ­ eople created larger room for the Roma and especially the local administrations (vis-­à-­v is the central government) to negotiate their/“their Gypsies’ ” way out of persecution. On the other hand, it meant the severe disruption of interethnic communal ties, when neighbors—­especially ­t hose who joined the Hlinka Guard—­participated in the everyday harassment and persecutions of Roma. For example, Irena Tomášová (b. 1923)33 from the Prešov (Eperjes, Preschau, Pejrešis) region in eastern Slovakia described the eviction of her f­ amily and relatives from their original h ­ ouses in the winter of 1942 as one of the most traumatic experiences of the war. They ­were forced to destroy their ­houses as they ­were watched over by the local gendarmes, and the only assistance local villa­gers offered was to carry the material on their wagons to the place where the Roma w ­ ere ordered

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to stay. Irena Tomášová also survived internment in a forced l­abor camp, experienced repeated harassment and threats of sexual abuse by German soldiers, and lost her first child during the war. Nevertheless, the experience of eviction was the one that she reflected on as the most painful—­exactly ­because of the intimacy of the relations with the p ­ eople she saw as perpetrators—­and the one she acted on: I would have never thought that we could be harmed by someone whom we knew, whom we helped out, who grew up with us and who knew that we have never done anything bad to him, never stole anything from him. That this person can humiliate you so much, degrade you. . . . ​I did not want to live at home, b ­ ecause I could not forget what the ­people from the village did to us, I could not forgive them. . . . ​The ­whole ­family moved out of t­ here; nobody stayed b ­ ehind.34

The Roma experienced ­great suffering while hiding in the countryside: witnessing death and complete destruction as a result of heavy fighting, seeing (and burying) bodies of ­people killed in combat—­soldiers, re­sis­tance fighters, and civilians—as well as corpses of dead animals. The experience of survival in extreme situations of utmost poverty, isolation, and destruction, which led to the breaking of sociocultural norms and taboos, also made it difficult for some of the survivors to stay in places associated with such disquieting memories where they ­were continually being revived. The migration can also be interpreted as a reaction to a deeper historical experience linked with the position of the Roma as “Gypsies” in the social hierarchies of rural Slovakia, as well as its continuities. In fact, in a quite large number of municipalities, postwar development was very slow in or intentionally bypassed Romani settlements and their inhabitants. Many local authorities prevented the Roma from building new ­houses or buying estates outside the place reserved for the “Gypsies”; what is more, forced resettlements of Romani communities from the villages to the outskirts of village land property did not have to end with the war, as the war-­time eviction ­orders ­were still in force in Slovakia in the post-­war years. In contrast to the stagnation or deteriorating situation in Slovak rural communities, urban Bohemian lands offered unpre­ce­dented opportunities of social mobility and acquiring not only material goods but also social capital. As the experience with the life in postwar Bohemian lands and migration “to Czechia” grew among the Roma from Slovakia, the Bohemian lands w ­ ere portrayed inside the Slovak Romani communities as “the promised land” where, even if Roma did mostly hard physical work, it was still pos­si­ble to earn good money or gather goods to be invested or reused in Slovakia on their return. Paradoxically, given the war­time history of local Romani groups and the generally negative attitude of dif­fer­ent strata of Czech society to the new “Gypsy” mi­g rants in the postwar period (as documented in archives), the “promised land myth” also portrayed the non-­Romani population in the Bohemian lands as p ­ eople who would treat Roma in a much politer way than did the non-­Roma in Slovakia. What counted was not only the relative material wealth available through resettling but also the experience of living in the Bohemian lands:

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Fortunately, at that time “the Czech lands opened up,” as the Roma said. Before the war, many Roma from our parts in Slovakia ­didn’t even know that the Czech lands even existed. . . . ​Roma ­were just flocking to the Czech lands and when they came back to look in on their relatives, they sung the country’s praises as if it ­were the promised land. A tenth of that was the real truth, but ninety p ­ ercent was a truth that had been dreamed up. . . . ​Obviously Roma w ­ ere ­going to the Czech lands b ­ ecause they could make a living t­ here and get a place to live, but . . . ​ our p ­ eople w ­ ere also drawn to the Czech lands by enthusiastic reports of how the Czechs d ­ idn’t call gypsies “gypsies” but “Mr. Horváth” and “Mrs. Kalej”—­ and they addressed us with the formal pronoun. A Gypsy, and “Mr.” and “Mrs.”! Something that d ­ idn’t go together in Slovakia stuck to it completely naturally in the Czech lands. The Czech lands r­ eally did become the promised land.35

A Migration Grounded in ­Family Patterns ­ amily bonds and community ties played a crucial role in shaping the mechanisms F of migration from Slovakia and the structure of the communities newly formed in the Bohemian lands. The basic decision regarding who would migrate first to try and take advantage of the opportunities in the Bohemian lands depended on the ­family situation and, above all, on the individual’s position within the ­family, based on gender, age, and marital status. The first mi­grants, who came in groups of relatives, ­were ­t hose who could afford to leave their families back in Slovakia. Often t­ hese groups would consist of (male) members of the larger f­ amily—­typically the f­ ather, his ­brothers or brothers-­i n-­law, and their older or grown-up sons or sons-­in-­law, accompanied by some of their partners: in the cases of childless ­couples, ­t hose who had grown ­children, or ­t hose who could leave their smaller ­children b ­ ehind in the care of their m ­ others or mothers-­in-­law. Typically, married ­women with ­children would follow in ­later stages, participating in the migration trajectories and strategies of the families of their husbands. F ­ athers and b ­ rothers who had already established themselves in the Bohemian lands would also be followed by their yet unmarried ­daughters or s­ isters who had attained an age regarded as appropriate to adulthood. Yet for ­t hose men who had initially de­cided not to move or t­ hose whose initial destination in the Bohemian lands proved not to be as attractive as expected, their married s­ isters living in the Bohemian lands frequently represented the first/next connecting point in their migration. ­Family relationships ­were decisive in the choice of destination. ­People traveled most often to places where they already had someone to connect with, which was mostly ­either someone from their larger f­amily or someone they knew from the larger local Romani community in the region of their origin—­which, again, often meant at least distant ­family relations. The lit­er­a­ture mentions the importance of “collective replication”36 as a princi­ple that worked as an incentive for ­t hose who initially stayed b ­ ehind in Slovakia to follow ­t hose who left to try their luck. Their examples as ­people of Romani origin who “made it in the Bohemian lands” showed that ­t here was a real possibility of social mobility that could work for other Roma

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as well. The relatives in the Bohemian lands represented not only examples that could be followed but they also created hubs for other ­family members. The newcomers often lived at least temporarily with their relatives who already had a place to stay and who also often helped them find a job and accommodations and navigate their new surroundings, connecting them to the local social networks they had already managed to create for themselves. As the number of new Romani community members increased, the families and relatives moving to and reuniting in Czech and Moravian municipalities gradually formed new local offshoots of the original Romani communities from Slovakia. They re-­created a communal sense of life in the Czech surroundings, including a certain level of social control over their members and the nature of social relationships with other Romani communities from Slovakia that w ­ ere perceived as “belonging,” “not belonging,” or even tabooed in the sense of keeping a mutual social distance. Studies documenting the formation of new Romani communities in the Bohemian lands include descriptions of conflict situations between dif­fer­ ent Romani (larger) families that w ­ ere established in the same Czech/Moravian municipality, in which one of the ­family communities pushed the o ­ thers out of a shared social space. Narratives regarding the settlement of individual families in the Bohemian lands also show that the strength of the newly formed larger family/regional community in a par­tic­u ­lar Czech or Moravian locality served as one of the criterion in the initial decision to move to the Bohemian lands as well as to change the location t­ here if the mi­grants ­were not satisfied with their situation in their first destination. If the new offshoots of the local communities served as “safe havens” for newly arriving f­ amily members, the original Slovak communities—­that is, when ­there was a community that remained in Slovakia, ­because in some instances ­whole communities resettled rather quickly, completely abandoning their former “homes”—­were equally impor­tant for the mi­grants living in the Bohemian lands. This reciprocal relationship remained strong for years and even de­cades to follow, with vibrant relationships sometimes continuing u ­ ntil ­today. Individual families migrating to the Bohemian lands often had property in Slovakia—­their original ­houses or even ­those built with the help of the money and material earned in the Bohemian lands, which ­were used or looked ­after by the remaining members of larger f­ amily units. The f­ amily communities staying in Slovakia also provided emotional support and social certainties in the event of unexpected crisis situations—­t he breakup of marriages, serious health prob­lems, conflict situations, and the like: they w ­ ere the communities of relatives to which the mi­grants could always return. The existing multilayered social, emotional, and material bonds of the Romani mi­grants to their original Slovak localities are also reflected in the language used especially by the first generations of the mi­grants, who often talked about the Slovak communities as their “home” even if they had resettled to the Bohemian lands for good. Some of the older members of the community who migrated to the Bohemian lands would also return “back home” near the end of their lives, ­because they wished to die and be buried “at home,” in the place they w ­ ere connected to by ancestral bonds.

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Relations with the original Slovak communities ­were maintained by ­family visits; for example, it was common for ­children to spend their summer holidays in Slovakia with the remaining members of the larger families. Th ­ ere w ­ ere also f­ amily reunions for f­ amily gatherings such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals, as well as seasonal and religious festivals. The par­tic­u­lar “offshoot” localities in the Czech lands ­were also incorporated into the traditional marriage territories of the original community. The continuity of marital exchanges between specific localities in the Bohemian lands and Slovakia serves in some cases as an impor­tant bond between the Czech and Slovak part of the newly formed larger “Czech-­o-­Slovak” community u ­ ntil ­today. The tradition of entering the musical profession was very closely tied to ­family relations, ­because local Romani bands w ­ ere often formed on the basis of (larger) ­family units, and musical education and training ­were handed down inside the ­family; ­family members who continued to earn their living as musicians in the postwar era often commuted to Slovakia to play at ceremonies or festivals. Returning to the original communities was also impor­tant, ­because it presented the opportunity to confirm the status of successful mi­grant families. It was only in the social environment of the original community (including Romani relatives as well as non-­Romani neighbors) that the social mobility of mi­grants could be demonstrated in socially and culturally appropriate ways and be registered and recognized by ­t hose perceived as “own”, in the sense of the local (remaining) Romani community as well as the local society of Roma and non-­Roma. Although the welfare of the f­ amily and familial ties ­were the primarily mechanisms of the postwar migration of Romani families from Slovakia, for some individuals, the rather distant Bohemian lands offered an opportunity to escape from communal relationships that enforced mechanisms of social control and conservative sociocultural norms. For example, the first Romani mi­grants to Kladno in central Bohemia included not only a group of male relatives from a f­ amily of formerly well-­established musicians from eastern Slovakia looking for new sources of income but also a young ­couple formed by partners from two antagonistic communities who prob­ably left for the Bohemian lands to escape the conflicts stemming from their relationship.37 ­There are also examples of young w ­ omen who escaped arranged marriages by leaving Slovakia for the Bohemian lands.38 The escape to the Bohemian lands also served as a way to solve serious and especially violent intracommunal (as well as interethnic) clashes or rows.

A Migration Case Study: Building a New Community in Postwar Brno With the most impor­tant contextual information presented, let us now turn to a case study of a f­ amily of Romani mi­grants in postwar Bohemian lands. The f­ amily history presented ­here offers insight into the complex transformation of the life experience of a ­family of Slovak Romani mi­grants as a result of their participation in the migration movement that was inseparably linked with historically unpre­ ce­dented opportunities for social mobility. The ­family came from a community that split into several groups in the aftermath of the war, when mi­grants from the

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same locality established several larger, stable communities in dif­fer­ent parts of the Bohemian lands, and about a half of the original community (participating at dif­fer­ent times in a temporary migration to the Bohemian lands) remained based in Slovakia. The case shows in detail the patterns of postwar migration as a complex legacy of the war and as a pro­cess in which the Roma w ­ ere the decisive actors. It also enables us to explore the interconnectedness of the migration movement to the Bohemian lands with (historical) developments in the original community in Slovakia and offers insight into familial and intracommunal communication and maintenance of relations across the Czech-(o)-­Slovak divide, which became a shared part of the ­family history of most postwar Romani mi­grants in the Bohemian lands. Importantly, the case study illustrates aspects of the postwar developments in Brno, the Moravian capital, which became the final destination point for the migrating f­ amily u ­ nder discussion. Brno, as the regional capital, also became one of the hubs for the Roma and Sinti who survived the war as largely uprooted individuals without ­family and without homes—­not only ­t hose whose prewar lives ­were connected with the town but also for t­ hose survivors whose return to their original localities proved to be problematic or impossible ­because they ­were seen as unwanted returnees. As mentioned ­earlier, members of dif­fer­ent Romani communities who lived and gradually settled in the municipality ­after the war seemed to establish a pattern of cooperation, and Brno became an impor­tant center of Romani po­liti­cal mobilization; ­later in 1968, it became the seat of the only officially sanctioned Romani organ­ization in communist Czecho­slo­va­k ia. Two members of the f­ amily in focus also became involved in the local social and po­liti­cal activities that led to the development of that Romani organ­ization. Their personal histories are therefore also illustrative of the postwar dynamics that resulted in the establishment of an organ­ization uniting members of historically dif­fer­ent Romani groups living in postwar Czecho­slo­va­k ia in their quest for po­liti­cal participation. I have researched the history of this par­t ic­u ­lar ­family and community since 2010, making use of documentation in local archives in Slovakia and the Bohemian lands and conducting oral history interviews with members of the community residing in Brno, as well as in the original village in Slovakia.39 A large part of the ­family history presented ­here is based on interviews with the eldest ­daughter in the ­family (b. 1945), who is currently one of the eldest members of this par­tic­u­ lar local Romani community in Brno. I illustrate the postwar history of her f­ amily by quoting excerpts of my interviews with her, which highlight the unique narrative mode she uses in retelling it.

Historical Background The ­family came from a small village in the southeastern part of the region historically called Gemer (Gömör), in the vicinity of the regional center of Rožňava (Rosznyó, Rosenau). ­Today, the village belongs to the agricultural Hungarian-­ speaking territories of Slovakia. The local Romani community had a history

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connected to the village and the region dating back to at least the late eigh­ teenth ­century and belonged to one of the largest local Romani settlements in the region, comprising more than 100 members in 1924. The local Roma ­were known throughout the region primarily as musicians and small craftsmen. Other ways of earning a livelihood included, serving as help in households and agriculture, and providing miscellaneous other ser­v ices used by the local population, including both the local Hungarian gentry and the local urban Jewish community. Despite the existing social and economic ties with the local population, the Roma also had a history of conflict with their neighbors. In 1933, the Romani settlement that was right next to the central parts of the village was removed a few kilo­meters outside to the outer edge of the municipal estates. This removal sparked a lengthy ­legal dispute, which was resolved in 1937 by the highest administrative court of Slovakia, which ruled that the authorities had to let the Roma move back into the village; however, this order was effectively ignored. It was only in the late 1950s and early 1960s that the Roma w ­ ere allowed to resettle “into” the village. The old “Gypsy settlement” outside the village was completely abandoned and “liquidated” (in the terminology of the time) in 1971.40 When war broke out, the ­family u ­ nder discussion was made up of two young parents and a small ­daughter. Both parents w ­ ere born in the 1920s and came from families of local Romani musicians. The young ­father played in the band of his ­father but also worked as a seasonal worker and craftsman. The young m ­ other helped in the h ­ ouse­holds and fields of local landowners. During the war, the region was annexed by Hungary. The ­father was conscripted into the Hungarian Army, together with a handful of other local Roma his age. Initially living in the regional barracks, they w ­ ere ordered to fight on the front in autumn 1944. ­Family members ­were allowed to meet with the soldiers before they departed for war. “I was the fruit of my mum’s and my dad’s last date just before he was sent away. I was born in May 1945. I was also the last of the ­children in our ­family to be born in Slovakia,” said their d ­ aughter with a smile. Her f­ ather fought on the Rus­sian front before he was taken prisoner. He returned home from a POW camp in 1946 to discover that his second d ­ aughter had been born almost a year ­earlier and that his first-­born ­daughter had died. The entire Romani community was then struggling in the remote settlement, severely affected by the war­t ime events but surviving. During the war a typhoid epidemic had broken out in the settlement. The entire settlement was quarantined and patrolled, with punishment meted out to t­ hose who tried to leave to procure food for their families (food supplies—­which ­were less than insufficient in the memories of the Roma—­were rationed by the local authorities). Adults who ­were not conscripted into the army had to engage in forced ­labor, such as working for soldiers in the local German army garrison; ­women’s memories of that work included instances of sexual abuse. Other harsh memories ­were of experiences connected to the advancing front, when the local Roma w ­ ere in the cross-­fire but ­were forbidden to escape; the arrival of liberation troops was also

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accompanied by the sexual abuse of w ­ omen. At the same time, as a group, the local Roma escaped transports to concentration camps, unlike other Romani communities from the Hungarian territory, including former Slovak regions. Many interviewees made sharp distinctions between the local non-­Roma and “foreign” perpetrators—­t he Hungarian “Nyílasi,” German soldiers, and the like—­a nd alluded to aspects of war­t ime suffering shared with local non-­Roma, including, for example, exemplary executions of ­people who joined the local re­sis­tance, as well as the w ­ omen being victims of sexual abuse. Their recollections indicate that at least some local Roma could rely on support from local non-­ Roma in times of extreme food shortage or during the fighting at the time of liberation. Although the memories do not necessarily provide a complete picture of the intensity and quality of local interethnic or intercommunal relations, they do show that relationships with local non-­Roma ­were not completely destroyed during the war. Awareness of having shared a similar fate, regardless of ethnic origin, was also strengthened by mea­sures that touched all locals and had postwar repercussions. ­These included conscription into the Hungarian Army and fighting on the side of the Axis powers, aspects of history that needed to be silenced in the postwar de­cades (it was only in 1993 that a memorial to local men fallen on the front—as members of the Hungarian Army—­was erected in the village; importantly it includes the names of local Romani soldiers who died in the war). The postwar anti-­Hungarian campaign and persecutions—­t he forced resettlement of the Hungarian population, the complicated pro­cess of reclaiming Czechoslovak citizenship, and the “re-­Slovakization” campaign41—­a ffected directly or indirectly the entire local Hungarian-­speaking community, including the Roma. The fact that the war­time experience did not mean the total severing of local interethnic relations may be one of the reasons why a large part of the local Roma who participated in the postwar migration into the Bohemian lands kept returning to their original settlement, while continuously pushing for their relocation back “into” the village. However, historical ethnosocial hierarchies that defined the place of the Roma inside the local social hierarchy, as well as their location relative to the village, continued to govern the local mindset and social practices. They also translated into difficulties faced by the Roma in postwar negotiations with local authorities regarding their resettlement back into the village. Even though they had pushed for building permits to build h ­ ouses inside the village since the early 1950s, their requests w ­ ere only granted by the local authorities in the late 1950s when—­under pressure from the regional administration and aided by state funding allocated for the campaign to “liquidate Gypsy settlements”—­the Roma ­were allowed to move into a newly built quarter on the outer edge of the village layout.42 The legacy of the war, particularly the postwar policies directed at the Hungarian-­speaking population as “traitors to the Czechoslovak state,” played an impor­tant role in t­ hese difficult negotiations. Some members of the local Hungarian gentry had fled the village in the last months of the war. Some w ­ ere arrested by the liberating army,

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whereas other local families w ­ ere included in the forced resettlement campaign in the late 1940s. When the Roma w ­ ere fi­nally allowed to resettle in the village and leave their isolated settlement, their ­houses ­were built on land forcefully abandoned by the Hungarian families and then nationalized.

Leaving Slovakia The first postwar years, as they are remembered by members of the local Romani community, did not bring any substantial change in their situation. They continued to earn a living by offering ser­v ices to the local non-­Romani population and looking for work across a broader region: they thus continued in the local tradition, crossing borders in search of work. Finding employment in the Bohemian lands (the first local Romani families left for the Bohemian lands as late as 1946) can thus be seen in this case as a continuation and transformation of an existing tradition and patterns of work in the new real­ity of postwar Czecho­slo­va­k ia. The members of the young ­family in this case study ­were among the first local Roma to leave for work in the Bohemian lands. They w ­ ere contacted by recruitment officers from a private Czech construction firm looking for workers on a proj­ ect reconstructing railway tracks. The f­ather de­cided to go, and ­because the conditions allowed, he went together with his wife and small d ­ aughter. A ­ fter the long war­time separation when he was a POW, which was marked by the death of their first ­daughter, the ­couple wanted to stay together. They described their postwar reunification in a very touching, almost mystical recollection: the ­father’s homecoming was first announced by a local Romani woman-­seer whom the ­mother had contacted in her quest to find any information on her missing husband, and her prediction came true in a few weeks.43 The Czech recruiters promised not only work but also accommodations that could ­house families. The ­couple only had one child, which made travel less demanding. Moreover, other close relatives from the ­father’s side also de­cided to go: both of his parents and all three siblings, one of them also with his partner and a small son, migrated together. Close relatives from the m ­ other’s side—­her parents and siblings, including her married s­ ister, her husband, and even his parents—­a lso joined them. A few other Romani families from the same village de­cided to go as well, accompanied by several non-­Romani locals from the region. The firm or­ga­nized their transport from Slovakia into the Bohemian lands. Over the first year, the group lived in several places in the Bohemian lands, moving wherever the firm needed them: They went to the Bohemian lands to work ­here. But it was not like they just de­cided to go and went! P ­ eople came to pick them up with big cars. . . . ​Engineers, bosses, they came to ask who wanted . . . ​to work. . . . ​They took us to the Bohemian lands . . . ​and gave us a h ­ ouse. . . . ​They would come early in the morning and drive the men to their work. They worked on the railway tracks. Repairing what was destroyed. And that was how we got . . . ​closer and closer to Brno. They would always give us a h ­ ouse, . . . ​we would live t­ here . . . ​for two months, three months and when they finished the work, we would be moved somewhere e­ lse.

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The men worked on the railway and the ­women managed the cooking and the laundry; they even cooked lunches for the w ­ hole com­pany.44

In 1947, the group was living in Kutiny in the Tišnov region in southern Moravia. This place is remembered quite vividly in their recollections. The year 1947 was also the year of the “Gypsy register” in Czecho­slo­va­k ia, which also captured data on the group of Romani families in Kutiny. Of a total of seventy-­one “Gypsies” included in the register from this Moravian village (all of whom ­were mi­g rant workers from Slovakia employed by the same construction firm), the group of Romani families from the community in this case study included fifty-­one adults and ­children—­approximately one-­t hird of the Romani inhabitants of their home village in Slovakia.45 ­Family ties and presumably good work relations with the man­ ag­ers of the firm had encouraged other Roma and their families from the original village to join the group, although some just joined the group for brief periods of time and may have been counted in this census. Recollections of members of this ­family cluster in Kutiny suggest that this group of Romani mi­grants was able to re-­create to a considerable degree their communal life from their Slovak home—­living close together as a community, organ­izing weddings and baptisms, and establishing relationships with local non-­Romani families that resembled the solidarity of the social network that nested them in Slovakia. Above all, they also cultivated relations with the man­ag­ers of the com­pany—­hosting them and performing ­music for them that they appreciated—­which proved to be impor­tant, especially for our young protagonist ­family (as mentioned ­earlier, the ­father was a first violin player and caught the attention of the man­ag­ers): We ­were about sixty ­people staying ­there . . . ​the old parents with their sons, their wives and ­children—­and as we moved along the tracks, new c­ hildren would be born. . . . ​We had ­houses that ­were quite spacious. . . . ​They ­were built in such a way that they ­were close to each other and they formed something like a big yard, you see? And that was where the w ­ omen would do the laundry, or where m ­ usic was played when t­ here was an occasion. [The local non-­Roma] liked us, you know? Our mums used to go to help them out, ­doing dif­fer­ent jobs that they needed a help with. . . . ​I also remember . . . ​ we used to bring leftover food, like old bread, ­etc. to the local farmers who had pigs or hens, you see? . . . ​And they would give our mums other t­ hings in return. Potatoes, milk, eggs. When the men returned from work, sometimes their non-­Romani colleagues, . . . ​would come with them as well. . . . ​The w ­ omen in our place would cook for them, they showed ­these ­people their re­spect. . . . ​They thus got to know how we live, that we re­spect them. . . . ​They liked visiting us; they would often stay with us late into the night, talking, having fun, enjoying the joyful atmosphere and the ­music.46

References to enjoying entertainment and to sharing food and drinks with non-­ Romani colleagues or neighbors ­were a frequent motif in the recollection of dif­fer­ent

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witnesses to migration to the Bohemian lands. They can be interpreted as reflections highlighting their social mobility and unproblematic integration into the society in their new homes, partially grounded in the “promised land” imagery and linked with the perceived positive difference in interethnic relations in the Bohemian lands. The image of sharing food or of non-­Roma eating the food prepared by Romani ­women is particularly power­ful ­because it asserts that the Roma in question ­were treated as equals and without prejudice by their non-­Romani counter­parts. In 1948, ­after the communist takeover in Czecho­slo­va­k ia, the construction firm was nationalized, and the community of workers was dispersed. The young ­family, together with the grandparents on the ­father’s side and two of the f­ ather’s ­brothers, moved to the Moravian capital of Brno where the adult men from the ­family ­were offered work—­thanks to their connections with the construction man­ag­ers of their former employer. They w ­ ere employed to build a new heating plant in Brno in connection with the dynamic postwar development of the city into an industrial and commercial center with several universities that was attracting large numbers of new inhabitants. The young ­family established itself in Brno, and while maintaining a contact with their relatives in Slovakia, they settled t­ here for good. The f­ amily continued to visit their relatives in Slovakia on a regular basis. The ­children spent their summer holidays with their grand­mother from the m ­ other’s side in Slovakia, who had returned home when the ­family moved to Brno, as well as with all the other relatives who stayed ­t here. The grandparents from the ­father’s side moved to Brno, but when the grand­father became ill with a terminal illness, he and his wife returned back to Slovakia ­because he wished to die “at home.” The visits to Slovakia also offered the possibility to observe, demonstrate, and reify the social status of the ­family as successful mi­grants in Brno. A telling comparison of the Czech and Slovak experiences and an indication of the dif­fer­ent ele­ ments associated with the “better life” in the Bohemian lands—­including the traditional image of polite interactions with local non-­Roma that formed the myth of “the promised land”—­appeared in the testimony of the eldest d ­ aughter when she tried to replay a conversation with members of the original community in Slovakia as a regular part of the visits “back home”: When we came back to Slovakia, to the settlement, the ­people looked at us like at extraterrestrials. . . . ​They saw the clothing we wore, like p ­ eople from a town, . . . ​my f­ ather said he played in a ­music ensemble . . . ​—­“You say Gypsies have a band t­ here?”—­“It’s not a Gypsy band. Gadje play t­ here, Slovaks!”—­“­Don’t kid! You play with the gadje?”—­“And why not? I played the first violin even ­here.” . . . ​—­“And where do you live? In which settlement?”—­“I have a flat, I live among other ­people, among the gadje.”—­“Oh come on, stop kidding us!”—­“Well, come to visit me to see for yourself! Do you know what ­people t­ here say to me? ‘Good morning, sir!’ and they wave their head at me like that, to ­great me.” . . . ​ I cannot forget this; . . . ​t hey just c­ ouldn’t understand.47

Conversely, the visits also offered the possibility to observe developments in the home village. This is how the eldest d ­ aughter commented on economic develop-

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ment in Slovakia, remembering one of her last visits to the home village in the late 1970s. She appreciated the diligence and hard work of her relatives to better themselves in the postwar de­cades while, importantly, noting their participation in temporary work migration to the Bohemian lands: By that time, almost no one lived in the settlement. B ­ ecause the ­people from that settlement, they have worked on themselves so much. Th ­ ose p ­ eople that w ­ ere coming to do dif­fer­ent work all across the republic, they bought ­houses. And if they did not buy them, they just built them. On their own. Beautiful, large ­houses. Inside the village!48

As mentioned, multiple f­ actors enabled the return of the original Romani community in Slovakia to its home village a­ fter almost thirty years of isolation. The migration of Roma to the Bohemian lands had two impor­tant effects that facilitated ­t hese local postwar developments. First, a certain proportion of the local Romani community was living in the Bohemian lands in the 1950s and was on the path to settling ­t here permanently, which considerably decreased the number of local Romani inhabitants whose living situation needed to be “solved” by local Slovak authorities. Second, since many of the local Roma participated in only temporary work migration via their f­ amily networks created in the Bohemian lands, they managed to accumulate capital that they could not only invest in Slovakia but also use as leverage in negotiations with the local authorities regarding the issuing of building permits.

Living in Brno The establishment of the young f­ amily in Brno as permanent residents was facilitated not only by the stability of the work they managed to secure but also by positive intercommunal relations with dif­fer­ent strata of Romani and non-­Romani society in Brno. They w ­ ere able to offer temporary accommodations to their relatives in their apartment, and the f­ ather had managed to secure the position of a middle-­ man for the “engineers” from the construction firm—­procuring seasonal/temporary workers from his home village/region in Slovakia when ­t here was a need for them. Thus the f­amily became one of the core families of the communal social network, enabling other f­ amily members to come and work in Brno (and to ­settle down in the Bohemian lands): Our ­family that stayed ­behind and the other Roma from the village, they would write: “­There’s no work, we need to earn some money. We are d ­ ying of ­hunger . . . ! How are t­hings getting on in t­here, how do you live?” And my ­father would write to them: “Come, you can work h ­ ere as well.” B ­ ecause that person, the engineer, . . . ​he would . . . ​tell my ­father how many ­people he could invite to come, and he would give them work. But ­t hese ­people, they would not know any Czech . . . ​a nd b ­ ecause [the engineer] knew my ­father already well, he would say: . . . ​“look a­ fter them, make sure every­thing goes fine . . .”—so that they would do the work the way they ­were supposed to. So that was the other job

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my dad did. He was helping the other Roma. You see? E ­ very week they would go back home, bringing money, bringing goods bought h ­ ere. And we would also give them clothes and other stuff that we did not need, all that in parcels dispatched from Brno.49

Knowing him as an outstanding violin player, the “engineers” also introduced the f­ ather to p ­ eople from the technical university in Brno, which at the time was in the pro­cess of establishing what would soon become a famous Slovak folklore ensemble—­Poľana—in which he was one of the first violin players. Among the many contacts he established through its per­for­mances w ­ ere officers of the municipal authorities, who invited him in the late 1950s to participate in the work of the municipal council structures as one of the local “Gypsy co-­workers.” The “Gypsy co-­workers” served as community workers, helping the local council resolve prob­ lems arising from the presence of large numbers of Romani mi­grants from dif­fer­ ent regions of Slovakia in Brno. That role increased his ability to help his relatives and community members from Slovakia s­ ettle in Brno, as well as aiding other Roma then living in Brno. Archival documents suggest that the Brno municipal structures offered this unique role to a small group of Romani individuals, at the core of which ­were t­ hose coming from the prewar Romani communities of southeastern Moravia, as mentioned e­ arlier. Several of ­these survivors w ­ ere in contact with the municipal authorities in Brno from the early 1950s, lobbying for the repre­sen­ta­tion of Roma in the government and regional structures and issues that concerned them. In fact, one of the issues discussed in Brno at the time was securing the cooperation of ­people from mi­grant Romani families, who could serve as models for ­others in the desired integration of mi­grants into the body of local society and society at large. The council searched for representatives of dif­fer­ent communities of Romani mi­grants from Slovakia who could be co-­opted into the mission of helping resolve prob­lems with employment, appropriate accommodations, education of ­children and adults, and issues of health and hygiene.50 When the Union of Gypsies-­Roma was in formation from 1968 to 1969, ­after more than a de­cade of lobbying for the participation of Roma in decision making and the implementation of policies directed at them, its leadership searched for Roma who could contribute to the management of its activities. Naturally they also turned to Roma who w ­ ere already active in local government structures, b ­ ecause they ­were knowledgeable about the work of local municipal councils and the prob­ lems the Romani families and individuals faced locally. The Union thus integrated into its structures ­ people from dif­fer­ ent local Romani communities, members of the prewar Czech and Moravian Romani and Sinti families (who ­were among the found­ers and presided over the central committee of the Union), and representatives of postwar Romani mi­g rants from dif­fer­ent parts of Slovakia.51 Established in 1969 with a program that was to support the development of local Romani communities across the Czech part of Czecho­slo­va­k ia very much in line

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with the official policies, the organ­ization also a­ dopted a large cultural program that included emphasis on commemoration of the Romani victims of the Holocaust and assistance to survivors, as well as publishing a newspaper, promoting the use of Romani language, and opening the topic of the recognition of the Roma as a national minority. Necessarily it supported self-­awareness and ethnic emancipation moving to the limits of what was allowed by the central authorities, once again stiffening the grip on the Czechoslovak society as ­whole, ­after the 1968 occupation of Czecho­slo­va­k ia had ended the hopeful Prague Spring po­liti­cal and social developments. Acting on the pretext of economic mismanagement and small membership, the Union was dissolved ­under pressure from the central authorities in 1973. When the Romani emancipation movement resurfaced in Czecho­slo­va­k ia in the mid-1980s, advocating once again for the larger participation of Roma in the issues that concerned them, it was already led by representatives of the postwar mi­grant Romani communities. The well-­being of the f­ amily u ­ nder examination was also fostered by their cultivation of relationships with dif­fer­ent strata of the surrounding non-­Romani society: neighbors in the dif­fer­ent quarters they moved into in an upward trajectory of ever nicer apartments, bosses and colleagues at work, musicians, dancers and leaders of the folklore ensemble, headmasters and school teachers of their c­ hildren, and so on. Th ­ ese relationships made up a very dif­fer­ent social universe when compared with the interethnic contacts and communications in their home village in Slovakia before the war. Their social world was made more complex also by the need to develop relationships with dif­fer­ent members of the growing Romani community in Brno, composed of f­amily clusters of vari­ous origins who w ­ ere work mi­g rants, as well as survivors, from the original Czech and Moravian Romani communities. The dramatic novelty of ­t hese relationships—­and one of the challenges in their cultivation—­also lay in the language barrier that the ­family had to overcome. Coming from a Romani settlement in southern Slovakia, they spoke a local dialect of Romani and Hungarian as their first languages. Communication in Czech was something they all had to learn or attempt to master; for example, the eldest daughter, who started school in Brno in 1951, had to repeat a grade in order to learn Czech. When the f­ ather started to attend the meetings of the local council, he realized he needed a translator not only to understand but also to express himself fully, and it was his eldest ­daughter that he de­cided to bring along with him to meetings. She first served as an interpreter, then as his assistant, and, as she gained the re­spect of other members of the council, as a co-­worker. She continued to work with the council ­until 1989. This involvement meant that sooner or ­later she got to know the personalities of the other members of the prewar Romani communities working for the local administration (among them, the found­ers of the sociopo­liti­cal emancipation movement) and they got to know her. In 1968, she was among ­those who ­were invited to take part in the meetings of the preparatory committee of the Union of Gypsies-­Roma. She continued to work for it u ­ ntil its dissolution in 1973.

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Conclusion The Holocaust and post-­Holocaust experiences of the Roma and Sinti in the Bohemian lands and Slovakia reflect substantial differences in the war­time trajectory of anti-­Gypsy persecution in the dif­fer­ent regions of the former Czechoslovak state and their consequences for individual Romani families and local communities. Nearly all Bohemian and Moravian Roma and Sinti faced genocide. Their fate and the fate of their prewar communities stand in contrast to the harsh experiences of Slovak Roma of pauperization, dislocation, humiliation, and vio­lence but not murder: a considerable part of their communities survived the war. The early postwar era was a period of f­amily and community reconstruction, especially for the Romani survivors of genocide who returned and continued to live in the Bohemian lands. Their postwar lives, decisions, and actions, including the h ­ andling of their identity, ­mother tongue, and family/community history, ­were deeply affected by the perceived continuation of anti-­Gypsy ste­reo­t ypes in non-­ Romani Czech society. In contrast, the postwar history of Romani families from Slovakia was marked especially by family-­based migration to the Bohemian lands and—­for ­those who de­cided not to return—by a striving to establish their new lives in a new setting, eco­nom­ically as well as socially, which meant developing relations with the non-­Romani society in Bohemia. Largely without knowing about the genocide of the local Roma and Sinti, the Romani mi­grants perceived the local non-­Romani society as much better with regard to their treatment of “Gypsies” than the non-­Romani society in their Slovak home localities. The f­amily history narrative presented in this last section, which highlighted the positive turn in interethnic relations in the Czech and Moravian parts of communist Czecho­slo­va­k ia, is not unique. The narrative frames of ac­cep­tance, integration, and success employed in the retelling of f­ amily histories shape the content of what is narrated and remembered from the past across dif­fer­ent Slovak Romani communities and their members who took part in the postwar migration to the Bohemian lands. The fact that t­ hese histories are told from the postcommunist perspective is yet another key to understanding them: as reflections of the very difficult social and economic situation that a part of the Roma continues to face in ­today’s Czech and Slovak republics. Nevertheless, ­these ­family histories reveal some of the everyday relations and exchanges in their closest circle of acquaintances, colleagues, and neighbors. They testify to the possibilities of unpre­ce­dented social mobility that the postwar period offered for Romani families and normality of relationships with their surroundings. Th ­ ese narratives thus stand in sharp contrast with the existing archival documentation that—­coming from the provenance of administrative offices and state institutions focused on “the Gypsies” as a prob­ lem—­shift focus to problematic situations and problematic communications, while still revealing impor­tant continuities in the mindset and social practices of the non-­Romani majority vis-­à-­v is the Roma. More of such family-­centered microhistories based on both archival and oral history research are needed to interrogate the history based solely on official, non-­

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Romani documents. If official papers are used as the dominant source of information about postwar history of Roma in Czecho­slo­va­k ia, they can lead to the reproduction of ste­reo­t ypes and prejudices and often deny the agency of Romani individuals. As this chapter shows, this agency was based on the abilities and achievements of individuals who not only seized new opportunities and challenges pre­sent in postwar Czecho­slo­va­k ia but also felt a strong sense of responsibility ­toward their ­family and larger ­family networks. Fi­nally, their individual and ­family histories w ­ ere deeply nested in the pro­cesses that s­ haped the development of postwar Czechoslovak society as such and in its dramatic early postwar history, which affected all of the citizens of the republic, ­whether they w ­ ere the target of centrally planned policies as a specific (ethnic) group or not. The case study—­while illustrating the unique history of social mobility experienced by a ­family of Romani mi­grants from Slovakia—­reveals precisely this sharing of a common history with the local society of which the Roma w ­ ere a part, as well as the w ­ hole of Czechoslovak society. Such sharing of the diverse direct or indirect effects of their common history on their lives and life choices is often rendered invisible in accounts focused on the history of the Roma as a minority and as objectified by the schemes of the non-­Romani establishment.

Acknowl­edgments

This volume began as a conversation between the two editors and eventually expanded to include many o ­ thers. Sitting on a bench in the public thoroughfare outside a large international conference on the Holocaust, with ­people streaming by around us, we began to articulate the question that lies at the core of this volume. We strug­gled to explain why many of the other­w ise excellent and inspiring papers that we had heard over the last few days treated the subjects of their research only as individuals, as if they did not belong to larger familial structures. So many of the lingering issues in their work seemed related to the intimate sphere of the f­ amily. What would happen, we wondered, if scholars w ­ ere to approach the Holocaust from the perspective of the f­ amily? We are deeply grateful that so many scholars and institutions ­were supportive of this proj­ect. Thanks to the Institute of Con­temporary History (Czech Acad­emy of Sciences) and the German Historical Institute of Warsaw (DHI), a group of Eu­ro­ pean, Israeli, and American scholars ­were able to gather together in Prague and open up a discussion about the f­ amily and the Holocaust. We would like to thank Ruth Leiserowicz of the DHI for being our partner in organ­izing that conference. The conference was cosponsored by the program, Global Conflicts and Local Interaction, Strategy 21AV (Czech Acad­emy of Sciences), and by CEFRES in Prague. We also thank the contributors to the volume for their hard work, commitment, and patience with the pro­cess. En­glish is not the first (nor even the second) language of many of the authors. We appreciate their efforts, and we have all benefited from the excellent language editing of Tomasz Frydel, a scholar in his own right. Given the complexities of place names in East Central Eu­rope, and diversity of systems for representing it, we have encouraged each of the scholars to make their own decisions about usage ­after first introducing all of the possibilities. Elisabeth Maselli, of Rutgers University Press, expressed early interest in this proj­ect and shepherded it through with both academic rigor and generous support. We appreciate as well the behind-­t he-­scenes work of the anonymous readers and excellent staff of the press. 219

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Kateřina Čapková’s work on this volume was financially supported by the research grant from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (GACR) no. 19-26638X, “Genocide, Postwar Migration and Social Mobility: Entangled Experiences of Roma and Jews.” Additionally, a publication subvention from the Jewish Studies Program at the Pennsylvania State University covered the costs of language editing and indexing for the volume. ­After spending several years focusing on the centrality of the f­ amily in the lives of victims of the Holocaust, it is impossible not to reflect on our own far more fortunate families and all that they have done and continue to do for us. We dedicate this volume to them.

Notes

introduction We are grateful to Jan Grill, Atina Grossmann, Helena Sadílková, and the anonymous reviewers for the press for constructive readings of previous drafts of this introduction. 1. Lotte Weiss, My Two Lives (Sydney: Sydney Jewish Museum, 2003), 140. 2. František Klempár in an interview with Milena Hübschmannová, April  1985  in Sokolov, published in Milena Hübschmannová, ed., “Po židoch cigáni,” Svědectví Romů ze Slovenska 1939–1945, Vol. I (Prague: Triáda, 2005), 795. 3. We are aware of the dif­fer­ent definitions of the term “Roma.” In most of this introduction we understand it as a general term that subsumes diverse groups related to Romani ethnicity, including the Sinti. Where we deal with the situation in regions where the Sinti community was substantial (especially in Germany, Austria, and the Bohemian lands), we do mention Sinti as a separate, though related, community. In the individual chapters the authors chose their terminology based on the local context. 4. Elisa von Joeden-­Forgey, “Gender and the F ­ uture of Genocide Studies and Prevention,” in Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth ­Century: A Comparative Survey, ed. Amy E. Randall, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 305. 5. Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 6. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-­Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Po­liti­cal Consequences (London: SAGE, 2001), 105. 7. Selma Steinmetz, Österreichs Zigeuner im NS-­Staat (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1966), 40–41, cited and translated in Sybil Milton, “Holocaust: The Gypsies,” in ­Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, ed. Samuel Totten, William  S. Parsons and Israel W. Charny, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 191–192. 8. Meyer Megdal, My Holocaust Testimony (unpublished, 1994), 4. 9. Hannah Pollin-­Galay, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 65. 10. Pollin-­Galay, Ecologies of Witnessing, 79. 11. Paula E. Hyman, “Introduction: Perspectives on the Evolving Jewish F ­ amily,” in The Jewish F ­ amily: Myths and Real­ity, ed. Steven M. Cohen and Paula E. Hyman (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 4. 12. Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Eu­rope between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 48.

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13. Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov, “Commencement of Roma Civic Emancipation,” Studies in Arts and Humanities 3, no. 2 (2017): 6–28; Brigid O’Keeffe, New Soviet Gypsies. Nationality, Per­for­mance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 14. Milena Hübschmannová, “Kirvo,” Rombase. Didactically edited information on Roma, http://­rombase​.­uni​-­graz​.a­ t​/­index​.­html (accessed June 5, 2019). 15. Markéta Hajská, “Kmotrovství v kultuře romských osad,” in Romové: kulturologické etudy, ed. Tomáš Hirt and Marek Jakoubek (Plzeň: Aleš Čeněk, 2004), 252–273. 16. See for instance the testimony of Jolanka Kurejová (b. 1926) in Hübschmannová, ed., “Po židoch cigáni,” 704–716. See also the case of Alfreda Markowska who rescued about fifty Jewish and Romani ­children in the Lublin region: K. Gierliński, “Piękne życie Alfredy Markowskiej,” Romano Atmo 5 (2006): 10–11. 17. Jennifer Marlow, “Life in Hiding and Beyond,” in Jewish Families in Eu­rope, 1939–­Pre­sent: History, Repre­sen­ta­tion, and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 110–130. 18. See also Jennifer L. Marlow, “Polish Catholic Maids and Nannies: Female Aid and the Domestic Realm in Nazi-­Occupied Poland” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2014); Nina Paulovičová, “ ‘Invisible’ Rescuers of Jews. The Case Study of House­keepers and Maids in World War II Slovakia,” in ­Women and World War II, ed. Eduard Nižňanský and Denisa Nešťáková (Bratislava: Stimul, 2016), 119–132. 19. One of the earliest such studies is that of Ruth Bondy, Elder of the Jews: Jacob Edelstein of Theresienstadt (New York: Grove Press, 1989; originally published in Hebrew in 1981). 20. Philip Friedman, “Prob­lems of Research on the Holocaust: An Overview,” in Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, ed. Ada June Friedman (New York: Jewish Publication Society of Amer­i­ca, 1980), 565. 21. Lenore J. Weitzman and Dalia Ofer, “Introduction: The Role of Gender in the Holocaust,” in ­Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 1–2. 22. Vandana Joshi, “Social Base of Racial Othering in Nazi Society: The Racial Community and ­Women’s Agency in Denunciatory Practices,” in Life, Death, and Sacrifice: ­Women and ­Family in the Holocaust, ed. Esther Hertzog (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2008); Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German ­Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). 23. Stephen R. Haynes discusses this development in his book chapter, “Ordinary Masculinity: Gender Analy­sis and Holocaust Scholarship,” in Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth ­Century. See also Maddy Carey, Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust: Between Destruction and Construction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 24. Judith Gerson, “­Family ­Matters: German Jewish Masculinities among Nazi Era Refugees,” in Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History, ed. Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 212. 25. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); Claudia Koonz, ­Mothers in the Fatherland: W ­ omen, the ­Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martins, 1987). 26. Doris L. Bergen, “What Do Studies of ­Women, Gender, and Sexuality Contribute to Understanding the Holocaust?” in Dif­fe r­ent Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust, ed. Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 20. 27. See for example Zoë Waxman, ­Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017); Carol Rittner and John  K. Roth, eds., Dif­f er­ent Voices: ­Women and the Holocaust (St.  Paul: Paragon House, 1993); Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998); Esther Fuchs, ed., ­Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Repre­sen­ta­tion, Studies in the Shoah, vol. XXII (Lanham, MD: University Press of Amer­i­ca, 1999); Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Golden-

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berg, eds., Experience and Expression: ­Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003); Esther Hertzog, ed., Life, Death, and Sacrifice: W ­ omen and ­Family in the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2008); Sonia M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Vio­lence against Jewish W ­ omen during the Holocaust (Hanover, NH: University Press of New E ­ ngland, 2010); Myrna Goldenberg, ed., Dif­f er­ent Horrors/Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust (Se­attle: University of Washington Press, 2013); and Andrea Petö, Louise Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska, eds., ­Women and the Holocaust: New Perspective and Challenges (Warsaw: IBL PAN, 2015). 28. Yosef Litvak, Peliṭim yehudim mi-Polin bi-­Vrit-­ha-­Mo‘atsot, 1939–1946 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1988), 24. 29. Isabelle Choko, “My First Life,” in Stolen Youth: Five W ­ omen’s Survival in the Holocaust, ed. Isabelle Choko, Frances Irwin, Lotti Kahana-­Aufleger, Margit Raab Kalina, and Jane (New: Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Proj­ect, 2005), 21. 30. Many testimonies and memoirs include passages trying to explain ­t hese decisions and expressing horror at their outcomes. Chaim Grade’s My ­Mother’s Sabbath Days: A Memoir (New York: Schocken, 1987) pre­sents a particularly emotional account. The entire text is ­really an elegy to his ­mother, whom he left b ­ ehind when he fled eastward. 31. For more on t­hese decisions, see Eliyana R. Adler, “Hrubieszów at the Crossroads: Polish Jews Navigate the German and Soviet Occupations,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 28, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 1–30; and Eliyana R. Adler and Natalia Aleksiun, “Seeking Relative Safety: The Flight of Polish Jews to the East in the Autumn of 1939,” Yad Vashem Studies 46, no. 1 (2018): 41–71. The works of Marion Kaplan—­Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)—­a nd Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt—­Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009)—­about prewar emigration decisions from Germany also showcases the centrality of the f­ amily. 32. Saul Friedländer, “An Integrated History of the Holocaust,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 14–15 (2007), http://­archiv​.­eurotopics​.­net​/e­ n​/­home​/­presseschau​/­archiv​/­magazin​ /­gesellschaft​-­verteilerseite​/­holocaust ​_­leugnung ​_­2007​_­04​/­apuz ​_­holocaust ​_ ­geschichte​ _­friedlaender​/­1 (accessed Dec. 18, 2019). 33. Bergen, “What Do Studies of ­Women, Gender, and Sexuality Contribute to Understanding the Holocaust?” 26. 34. Joan Ringelheim, “­Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” in Dif­ fer­ent Voices: W ­ omen and the Holocaust, ed. Carol Rittner and John  K. Roth (St.  Paul: Paragon House, 1993), 387–388. 35. Lorely French, “An Austrian Roma ­Family Remembers: Trauma and Gender in Autobiographies by Ceija, Karl, and Mongo Stojka,” German Studies Review 31, no. 1 (2008): 64–86. 36. Debórah Dwork, ­Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Eu­rope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Tara Zahra, The Lost C ­ hildren: Reconstructing Eu­rope’s Families ­after World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Joanna Beata Michlic, Jewish Families in Eu­rope, 1939–­Pre­sent: History, Repre­sen­ta­tion, and Memory (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017); Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Israel “Finding Their Voice”: Social Dynamics and Post-­War Experiences (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005); Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Eva Fogelman, and Dalia Ofer, eds., ­Children in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath: Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive (New York: Berghahn, 2017); Boaz Cohen, “The ­Children’s Voice: Postwar Collection of Testimonies from Child Survivors of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 1 (Spring 2007), 73–95; Boaz Cohen, “Representing the Experiences of C ­ hildren in the Holocaust: ­Children’s Survivor Testimonies Published in Fun Letsten Hurbn, Munich, 1946–49,” in “We Are ­Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, ed. Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 74–97.

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37. Joanna Beata Michlic, “Jewish Families in Eu­rope, 1939–­Pre­sent: History, Repre­sen­ ta­tion, and Memory—­An Introduction,” in Jewish Families in Eu­rope, xix. 38. Michlic, “Jewish Families in Eu­rope, 1939–­Pre­sent,” xxiii–­x xiv. 39. For a critical reassessment of this interpretation, see Kateřina Čapková. “Beyond the Assimilationist Narrative: Historiography on the Jews of the Bohemian Lands and Poland ­a fter the Second World War,” Studia Judaica 19, no. 1 (2016), 129–155. 40. For more on the development of early Yiddish-­language scholarship on the Holocaust, see, for example, Laura Jockusch, Collect and Rec­ord! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Eu­rope (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012); Natalia Aleksiun, “The Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, 1944–1947,” Polin 20 (2008), 74–97; and Mark L. Smith, “No Silence in Yiddish: Popu­lar and Scholarly Writing about the Holocaust in the Early Postwar Years,” in ­After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, ed. David Cesarani and Eric J. Sund­quist (London: Routledge, 2012), 55–66. 41. Sybil Milton, “Holocaust: The Gypsies,” in ­Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, ed. Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 162, 171. The reproduction of anti-­Roma ste­reo­types in state administrations’ policies and documentation in the postwar period also had a direct impact on the exclusion of Romani victims from the compensation programs. In many communist countries, Romani Holocaust survivors could apply for compensation only ­a fter the fall of communism, and even then many applications w ­ ere unsuccessful. For the Czech(oslovak) case, see Milada Závodská, Lada Viková, “Dokumentace genocidy Romů za 2. světové války v Československu—­nálezová zpráva: diskontinuita a kontinuita odhalování historie Romů po roce 1946,” Romano džaniben 2 (2016): 107–124. For an excellent integrated history of recognition of the Jewish and Romani Holocaust, see Ari Joskowicz, “Separate Suffering, Shared Archives: Jewish and Romani Histories of Nazi Persecution,” History and Memory, 1 no. 28 (2016): 110–140. 42. See also Kinga Frojimovics, “Dif­fer­ent Interpretations of Reconstruction: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the World Jewish Congress in Hungary ­a fter the Holocaust,” in The Jews are Coming Back. The Return of the Jews to their Countries of Countries of Origin ­after WWII, ed. David Bankier (Jerusalem: Berghahn Books and Yad Vashem, 2005), 277–292. 43. Ari Joskowicz, “Romani Refugees and the Postwar Order,” Journal of Con­temporary History 51, no. 4 (2016): 760–787. 44. Anton Weiss-­Wendt, “Introduction,” in The Nazi Genocide of the Roma. Reassessment and Commemoration, ed. Anton Weiss-­Wendt (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 2. 45. Weiss, My Two Lives, 81.

chapter 1  —­  the romani f­ amily before and during the holocaust I am most grateful to the editors of this volume for their constructive and encouraging comments on the first draft of this chapter. I would also like to thank Martin Dean and Arūnas Bubnys for their help in identifying the relevant archival sources on the mass killings of Roma in Belarus and Lithuania. My work in the USHMM collections was pos­si­ble thanks to the Jeff and Toby Herr Fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in 2014. My field trip to Lithuania in autumn 2016 was pos­si­ ble thanks to my Fellowship at the Imre Kertesz Kolleg Jena. 1. See, for instance, Judith M. Gerson and Diane L. Wolf, Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Eve Rosenhaft, “Blacks and Gypsies in Nazi Germany: The Limits of the ‘Racial State,’ ” History Workshop Journal 72, no.  1 (2011): 161–170; Michelle Kelso, “ ‘And Roma ­were victims, too’: The Romani Genocide and Holocaust Education in Romania,” Intercultural Education 24, nos. 1–2 (2013): 61–78.

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2. Michelle Kelso, “Romani ­Women and the Holocaust: Testimonies of Sexual Vio­lence in Romanian-­Controlled Transnistria,” in ­Women and Genocide. Gendered Experience of Vio­lence, Survival, and Re­sis­tance, ed. JoAnn Di Georgio-­Lutz and Donna Gosbee (Toronto: ­Women’s Press, 2016), 37–71. 3. In par­tic­u­lar, Kelso shows how a focus on the experiences of Jewish w ­ omen in concentration camps has influenced our understanding of vio­lence against ­women in the Holocaust. 4. Sybil Milton, “Hidden Lives: Sinti and Roma ­Women,” in Experience and Expression: ­Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, ed. Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2004), 53–75. 5. Paola Trevisan, “ ’Gypsies’ in Fascist Italy: From Expelled Foreigners to Dangerous Italians,” Social History 4, no. 3 (2017): 342–364; and “The internment of Italian Sinti in the Province of Modena during Fascism: From Ethnographic to Archival Research,” Romani Studies 23, no. 2 (2013): 139–160. 6. Lada Viková, “Největší význam má pro mne přátelství a sounáležitost, vědomí, že nejsem jenom já, to pochází od mé matky. / Setkání s výtvarnicí Nicole Taubinger (a s její maminkou, sportovkyní a gymnaziální profesorkou, Miroslavou Taubinger),” Romano džaniben 23, no. 1 (2016): 89–126. 7. See Ari Joskowicz, “Separate Suffering, Shared Archives: Jewish and Romani Histories of Nazi Persecution,” History and Memory 28, no. 1 (2016): 110–140; Volha Bartash, “­Family Memories as Sources for Holocaust Studies: Insights from the Belarusian-­Lithuanian Border Region,” S.I.M.O.N.—­Shoah: Intervention. Methods, Documentation 2 (2017): 4–16. 8. Sławomir Kapralski, “The Voices of a Mute Memory: The Holocaust and the Identity of the Eastern Eu­ro­pean Romanies,” in Der nationalsozialistische Genozid an den Roma, ed. Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal et al. (Cologne: Böhlau Verla, 2008), 93–111. 9. Michelle Kelso, “Romani W ­ omen and the Holocaust,” 37–71. 10. For more on the traditional lifestyle of Roma in the region u ­ nder consideration, see Volha Bartash, “The Sedentarisation of Roma in the Soviet Union ­after 1956: A Case Study from the Former Belarus­sian Soviet Socialist Republic,” Romani Studies 25, no. 1 (2015): 23–51. 11. Since this part of the article deals with the prewar life of Romani families in the borderlands of Poland, I chose to use a Polish version of geo­graph­i­cal names. When introduced into the text for the first time, Belarusian, Yiddish, or Lithuanian versions are added in brackets. Further, I use ­either prewar or modern version of the names, depending on a historical period or the context. When drawing on my interviews in the border region, I stick to the transliteration preferred by an in­for­mant. In the footnotes to the interviews conducted between 2015 and 2017, I use e­ ither a Belarusian or Lithuanian transliteration. 12. For more on the economic situation in the so-­called Eastern Borderlands of interwar Poland, see Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorus­sia (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2002). 13. A ­ fter I finished writing this section, I attended an exhibition on the persecution of Roma in the Lithuanian Museum of Genocide Victims, a joint effort of the museum and Vida Beinortienė, a local collector from Panevėžys. The exhibition includes some unique photos that illustrate the prewar life or Roma in Lithuania. 14. I participated in the oral history proj­ect, “Mir: The History of the Town Narrated by Its Inhabitants,” conducted by the chair of the Ethnology Department, Belarusian State University, in 2003–2005. 15. Jack Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 16. Romani groups are cultural and linguistic communities of Roma that possess a number of distinctive ethnographic characteristics and tend to a group endogamy. 17. Bartash, “The Sedentarisation of Roma in the Soviet Union ­a fter 1956,” 29. 18. Interview with Nadezhda Gasparovich, Druja, July 2017, in possession of the author. 19. Interview with Josef Tychina, Vilnius, Oct. 2016, in possession of the author.

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20. Memorial Book: The Gypsies at Auschwitz-­Birkenau = Księga Pamięci. Cyganie w obozie koncentracyjnym Auschwitz-­Birkenau = Gedenkbuch. Die Sinti und Roma im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-­Birkenau (Munich: Państwowe Muzeum (Oświęcim), 1993), 588, 1202, 1296. 21. Interview with Barbara Gasparowich, Eišiškės, October  2016, in possession of the author; USHMM collections, RG-14.101M, Reel 425, Frame 440–650. 22. Bartash, “The Sedentarisation of Roma in the Soviet Union a­ fter 1956,” 29–31. 23. ­A fter the Soviet occupation of 1939, most of t­hese p ­ eople ­were persecuted and deported to northern Rus­sia, the Ural region, and Siberia. 24. Interview with Mikolas Tamarjavichus, Vilnius, Oct.2016, in possession of the author. 25. Bartash, “Let the Victims Speak: Memories of Belarusian Roma as Sources for Genocide Studies,” in Diskriminiert—­vernichtet—­vergessen: Behinderte in der Sowjetunion, unter nationalsozialistischer Besatzung und im Ostblock 1917–1991, ed. Alexander Friedman and Rainer Hudemann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016), 499–507. 26. See also Bartash, “­Family Memories as Sources for Holocaust Studies.” 27. Bartash, “Sedentarisation of Roma in the Soviet Union a­ fter 1956,” 28. 28. Bartash, “Sedentarisation of Roma in the Soviet Union ­a fter 1956,” 28. 29. Interview with Josef Tychina, Vilnius, Oct.2016, in possession of the author. 30. Interview with Anatolij Aleksandrovich, Pastavy, Sept. 2015, in possession of the author. 31. Bartash, “­Family Memories as Sources for Holocaust Studies,” 30. 32. Interview with Ivan Grohovsky, Vidzy, July 2017, in possession of the author. 33. Interview with Ivan Grohovsky, Vidzy, July 2017, in possession of the author. 34. Lev Cherenkov, Avtobiografija, Vremena i Ludi, Oct. 25, 2009. 35. Lev Cherenkov, Avtobiografija, Vremena i Ludi, Oct. 25, 2009. 36. Some remarkable and illustrative examples of such families can be found in Vida Beinortienė and Daiva Tumasonytė, Panevėžio romų kančių keliai 1941–1945 m. (Panevėžys: Komunikacijos centras, 2016). 37. Nikolaj Bessonov, “Tsygane: Gody ssylok i pobegov,” 30 Oktjabrja 6, no. 26 (2002): 10. 38. Interview with Anatolij Alexandrovich, Pastavy, Sept. 2015, in possession of the author. 39. For multiple examples, see Nikolaj Bessonov, Tsyganskaja tragedija. 1941–1945: Fakty, dokumenty, vospominanija, Vol. II: Vooružennyj otpor (Saint Petersburg: Šatra, 2010). 40. Nikolaj Bessonov, “Tsyganje SSSR v okkupacii. Strategii Vyzhivanija,” Golokost i Suchas­ nist: Studii v Ukraini i Sviti 6, no. 2 (2009): 17–52. 41. Belaruskaja Staronka, no.  31, Apr.  18, 1942, quoted in Valdemar Kalinin, Zagadka baltijskih tsygan: Ocherki istorii, kultury i socialnogo razvitija baltiskih tsygan (Minsk: Logvinov, 2005), 96. 42. Similar observations could have been made regarding the plight of Jews during the Holocaust; for example, Jewish musicians w ­ ere often forced to perform in concentration camps. For further reading, see Doris L. Bergen, “­Music and the Holocaust,” in The Holocaust: Introductory Essays, ed. David Scrase and Wolfgang Mieder (Burlington, VT: Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont, 1996), 133–147. 43. Ronald Headland, Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Ser­vice, 1941–1943 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992), 62. 44. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) collections, RG-14.101M, Reel 425, Frame 440–650. 45. Bartash, “­Family Memories of Roma as Sources for Holocaust Studies,” 40. 46. USHMM, 7021/92, RG-22.002M, Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate German-­Fascist Crimes Committed on Soviet Territory from the USSR, 1941–1945. 47. Michael Rajak and Zvi Rajak, Khurbn Glubok (Buenos Aires: Former Residents’ Association in Argentina, 1956), 76–77. H ­ ere I cite the translation by Eilat Gordin Levitan available at https://­w ww​.­jewishgen​.­org ​/ ­Yizkor​/­H lybokaye​/­H lybokaye​.­html (accessed

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Feb. 14, 2018). I am grateful to the editors for the verification of the translation with the Yiddish original. 48. Sławomir Kapralski, Naród z popiołów. Pamięć zagłady a tożsamośc Romów (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2012). 49. Interview with Anatolij Alexandrovich, Pastavy, Sept. 2015, in possession of the author. 50. Interview with Galina Vantsevich, Minsk, June 2015, in possession of the author. 51. Interview with Irina Gerko, Narach, July 2017, in possession of the author. 52. Interview with Josef Tychina, Vilnius, Oct. 2016, in possession of the author; interview with Ivan Grohovsky, Vidzy, July 2017, in possession of the author. 53. Interview with Alexander Orlovsky, Braslaũ, July 2017, in possession of the author. 54. Interview with Nadezhda Egorova, Ashmjany, Aug. 2015, in possession of the author. 55. Interview with Svetlana Marcinkewich, Ashmjany, Aug. 2015, in possession of the author. 56. Conversation with Jonas Matuzevicius, Eišiškės, Oct. 2016, field notes in possession of the author. 57. Starovery (Russ. Old Believers) are Eastern Orthodox Christians who maintain “old” liturgical and ritual practices of the Orthodox Church that existed before the church reforms of the seventeenth ­century. When they ­were persecuted by the authorities in Moscow, the Old Believers fled to neighboring countries, including the G ­ rand Duchy of Lithuania, which encompassed the territories of present-­day Belarus and Lithuania. 58. Interview with Pavel Yanovich, Pastavy, Oct. 2015, in possession of the author. 59. Interview with Luba Kasperovich, Ashmjany, Aug. 2015, in possession of the author. 60. Interview of the author with Anatolij Aleksandrovich, Pastavy, Sept. 2015. 61. For experiences of Jewish youth in Soviet partisan units, see Anika Walke, Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorus­sia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 62. Nikolaj Biessonov, “Nazistowskie ludobójstwo Cyganów na Białorusi,” Studia Romologica 3, (2010): 21–40, h ­ ere 23. 63. Interview with Barbara Gasparovich, Eišiškės, Oct. 2016, in possession of the author. 64. Materialy po zlodejanijam nemecko-­fascistskih zahvatchikov i ich soobschnikov nad grazhdanami Oshmjanskogo rajona Molodechnenskoj oblasti, BSSR, 1945. The State Archive of the Rus­sian Federation, fond 7021, inventory 89, file 12. 65. Interview with Galina Vantsevich, Minsk, June 2015, in possession of the author. 66. Aušra Simoniukštytė, “Lietuvos romai: tarp istorijos ir atminties,” Lietuvos etnologija 6, no. 15 (2007): 123–154. 67. Arūnas Bubnys, “Lietuvos romų persekiojimas nacių okupacijos metais (1941–1944),” in Panevėžio romų kančių keliai 1941–1945 m., ed. Vida Beinortienė and Daiva Tumasonytė, 87–95. 68. Lithuanian Special Archives, F. K-1, inv. 58, b. 7866/3, pp. 86–87, 184, 187. 69. Lithuanian Special Archives, F. 1, inv. 58, b. 47694-3, p. 205. 70. According to the territorial division of the German administration, most parts of the former Wilno voivodeship w ­ ere incorporated into the General District of Lithuania (Generalbezirk Litauen). The eastern parts of the former voivodeship ­were incorporated into the General District of Belarus (Generalbezirk Weißruthenien). 71. Monika Tomkiewicz, Zbrodnia w Ponarach 1941–1944 (Warsaw: IPN, 2008), 129. 72. Memorial Book: The Gypsies at Auschwitz-­Birkenau, 1993. 73. The diary of Hilda, who did not survive the war, became part of Mendl Gelbart, ed., Sefer Zikaron le-­kehilat Oshmana. Oshmana Memorial Book, En­glish Section (Tel Aviv: Oshmaner Organ­ization in Israel and the Oshmaner Society in the U.S.A, 1969), 64. 74. Boris Rosin, Yama (Interview with Yulian Farber), Nezavisimyj Almanah “Lebed’ ” 636, June 22, 2011, http://­lebed​.­com​/­2011​/a­ rt5860​.­htm (accessed Oct. 4, 2018). 75. Interview with Mura Stefanovich, Eišiškės, Oct. 2016, in possession of the author.

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76. See Papusza, Pieśni Papuszy (Papušakre gila), Wiersze w języku cygańskim, przełożył, opracował, wstępem i objaśnieniami opatrzył Jerzy Ficowski (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Zakładu im. Ossolińskich, 1956). 77. For more on this issue, see Andrej Kotljarchuk, “World War II Memory Politics: Jewish, Polish and Roma Minorities of Belarus,” Journal of Belarusian Studies 7, no. 1 (2013): 7–37.

chapter 2  —­  separation and divorce in the Łódź and warsaw ghettos 1. A team of authors, working in the Łódź Ghetto Archives within the Rec­ords Departments, was tasked by the head of the Council of Elders, Chaim M. Rumkowski, with keeping a daily rec­ord of life in the Łódź (Litzmannstadt) ghetto. The Chronicle was recorded from January 12, 1941, to July 30, 1944, a month before the final liquidation of the ghetto. ­Today, it is regarded as one of the most impor­tant documents of the Łódź ghetto and the Holocaust in general. A se­lection from the Chronicle was published in En­glish as Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 1941–1944 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). A full translation of the chronicle into Hebrew was published by Yad Vashem in 1986–1989: Khronika shel geṭo lodzh, vol. 1, trans. and annotated by Arie Ben Menachem and Joseph Rab (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 307. Historian Dalia Ofer offers an alternative analy­sis of the divorce case mentioned ­here in her book chapter, “Parenthood in the Shadow of the Holocaust,” in Jewish Families in Eu­rope, 1939–­Pre­sent: History, Repre­sen­ta­tion, and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 3–25. It would appear, however, that her analy­sis does not take into consideration a number of faulty assumptions. This is not the place to explore the ­factors ­behind the carpenters’ strike, but by the time this divorce petition was filed on December 21, 1941, almost a year had passed since that strike, which took place in late January and early February 1941. Given the hardships of ghetto life, this was a very long interlude. Th ­ ere was also no connection between this case and the start of the deportations to the Chełmno death camp, which began in mid-­January 1942. The ghetto residents did not hear of the planned deportations ­until ­after December 20, 1941, and then only in general terms and with no inkling of their implications. For more on the subject, see Michal Unger, Lodz—­aḥaron ha-­geṭa’ot be-­Polin (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005), 230–245, 285–286. 2. Wertheimer was a refugee from Prague who became a member of the staff of the Ghetto Archives in May 1942. He was an industrial chemist by profession, a Zionist, and a social activist in Prague, and wrote an occasional column, “Sketches of Ghetto Life,” in the Chronicle. He was deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in August 1944. See the testimony of Bernard Ostrowski, Yad Vashem Archives (hereafter YVA), M49-­E/2841, 1; Sascha Feuchert, Erwin Leibfried, and Jörg Riecke, eds., Die Chronik des Gettos Lodz/ Litzmannstadt: Supplemente und Anhang (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007), 20–36. 3. Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Warszawie (Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw [AŻIH], 205/349, Encyclopedia of the Łódź Ghetto, s.v. “Familienleben,” 118–120. 4. For example, see Dalia Ofer, “Cohesion and Rupture: The Jewish ­Family in East Eu­ro­ pean Ghettos during the Holocaust,” Studies in Con­temporary Jewry 14 (1998): 143–165; Michal Unger, “The Status and Plight of ­Women in the Lodz Ghetto,” in ­Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore  J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 123–142; Sharon Kangisser Cohen, “The Experience of the Jewish ­Family in the Nazi Ghetto: Kovno—­A Case Study,” Journal of F ­ amily History 31, no. 3 (July 2006): 268–288; Dalia Ofer, “The Contribution of Gender to the Study of the Holocaust,” in Gender and Jewish History, ed. Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 127–131, 133–139; Judith Tydor Baumel, “Gender and ­Family Studies of the Holocaust: The Development of a Historical Discipline,” in Life, Death and Sac-

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rifice: W ­ omen and ­Family in the Holocaust, ed. Ester Hertzog (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2008), 21–40; Dalia Ofer, “Motherhood ­under Siege,” in Life, Death and Sacrifice, 45–62; and “Parenthood in the Shadow of the Holocaust.” This article is cited above, in note 1; Zoë Waxman, ­Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 1, 21–52. 5. This article is part of a broader ongoing research proj­ect. The first part deals with marriage in the ghettos. The second part, presented h ­ ere, deals with divorce. 6. See Unger, Lodz, 370–378. 7. Israel Bartal and Isaiah Gafni, eds., Eros, erusin ve-­isurim: miniyut ve-­mishpaḥah ba-­hisṭoryah (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1998), 7–8. Impor­tant historical and so­cio­log­i­cal studies of other periods have been published on the subject, such as Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the M ­ iddle Ages (New York: New York University Press, 1993); and “­Family, Kinship and Marriage among Ashkenazim in the Sixteenth to Eigh­teenth ­Century,” Jewish Journal of Sociology 1 (1959): 4–22; ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Rus­sia (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 131; Shaul Stampfer, “Marital Patterns in Interwar Poland,” in The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars, ed. Yisrael Guttman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk (Hanover, NH: University Press of New ­England, 1989), 173–197; Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Vol. 18: Jewish ­Women in Eastern Eu­rope, ed. ChaeRan Freeze, Paula E. Hyman, and Antony Polonsky (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2005). 8. Some of t­ hese maskilim wrote memoirs with detailed accounts of their lives. See Israel Bartal, “Virility and Impotence: from Traditional Society to the Haskalah, Part II: ­Toward Embodiment: Wrestling with the Angel,” in ­Brother Keepers: New Perspectives on Jewish Masculinity, ed. Harry Brod and Shawn Israel Zevit (Harriman, TN: Men’s Studies Press, 2010); Mordechai Zalkin, “Ha-­mishpaḥah ha-­maśkilit u-­meḳomah be-­hitpatḥut tenu‘at ha-­ haśkalah ha-­yehudit be-­Mizraḥ Eropah,” Eros, erusin ve-­isurim, 240; Shaul Stampfer, “Love and ­Family,” in Families, Rabbis and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth C ­ entury Eastern Eu­rope (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010), 27. 9. Paula E. Hyman, “Gender and the Jewish ­Family in Modern Eu­rope,” in ­Women in the Holocaust, 31–32. This was also the case in middle-­class Hasidic society in interwar Poland. The ­women studied in Polish schools and ­were influenced by Polish culture, a fact that caused friction in the f­amily and sometimes led to divorce. See Gershon Bacon, “The Missing 52 ­Percent: Research on Jewish ­Women in Interwar Poland and Its Implications for Holocaust Studies,” in ­Women in the Holocaust, 56–57; Stampfer, Families, Rabbis and Education, 31, 33. 10. Zalkin, “Ha-­mishpaḥah ha-­maśkilit,” 240; Bartal, “Virility and Impotence,” 2–4. 11. According to the Rus­sian Imperial Census of 1897, 17% of Jewish ­women, ­were literate in Rus­sian too. See Shmuel Feiner, “Ha-­ishah ha-yehudiyah ha-­modernit: mikreh mivḥan be-­yaḥase ha-­haśkalah ve-­ha-­modernah,” Eros, erusin, ve-­isurim, 268–271; Shaul Stampfer, “Gender Differentiation and Education in the Jewish ­Woman in the Nineteenth Eastern Eu­rope,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Vol. 7: Jewish Life in Nazi-­Occupied Warsaw, ed. Antony Polonsky (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1992): 63–87. 12. Stampfer, Families, Rabbis and Education, 41–42. 13. Moshe Rosman, “Lehiyot ishah yehudiyah be-­Polin-­Lita be-­reshit ha-­‘et ha-­hadashah,” in Kiyum u-­shever: Yehude Polin le-­dorotehem part II, ed. Israel Bartal and Israel Guman (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2001), 421–422, 426–434; Moshe Rosman, “The History of Jewish W ­ omen in Early Modern Poland,” Polin 18 (2005): 25–56; Stampfer, Families, Rabbis and Education, 36, 44–47; Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Rus­sia, 131, 146, 188. 14. Stampfer, Families, Rabbis and Education, 44–45; ChaeRan Y. Freeze, “Marriage,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Eu­rope, https://­y ivoencyclopedia​.­org.

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15. Ester Farbstein, Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah and Leadership during the Holocaust, trans. Deborah Stern (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 2007), 348–350. 16. Pessia Farsi, “The ­Father of the Agunot: Rabbi Shlomo David Kahana (1869–1953), and the Central Bureau to Release War ­Widows, in its Two Avatars (1917–1953)” (Master’s thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2017). I would like to thank Pessia Farsi for her generosity in sharing her thesis with me. See also Gur Alroey, ha-Mahpekhah ha-­shekeṭah: ha-­hagirah ha-­yehudit ­me-ha-Imperyah ha-Rusit 1875–1924 (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2008), 117–132; Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Rus­sia, 299–307. 17. Gershon Bacon, ““Ha-­ḥevrah ha-­masortit bi-­temurot ha-­‘ itim: hebeṭim be-­toldot ha-­ yahadut ha-­ortodoḳsit be-Polin u-ve-Rusyah, 1850–1939,” Kiyum ve-­shever, part 2, 458–466. 18. Number of divorces per 1,000 marriages. 19. Bartal and Gafni, Eros, Marriage and Prohibition, 8–14; Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Rus­sia, 20, 180–182; Asaf Kaniel, “Ben ḥilonim, masortiyim ve-­ ortodoḳsim: shmirat mitsṿot be-­re’i ha-­hitmodedut ‘im gezerat ‘ha-­kashrut’ 1937–1939,” Gal-­Ed 22 (2010): 75–76; Stampfer, Families, Rabbis and Education, 44. 20. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Rus­sia, 157–161. 21. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Rus­sia, 20, 199–201, 206–216, 220–260, 313. 22. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Rus­sia, 210–230. 23. Stampfer, “Marital Patterns in Interwar Poland,” 184. 24. Bina Garncarska-­Kadary, “ Temurot ba-­matsav ha-­ḥomri shel shikhvot ha-­‘ovdim ha-­yehudiyim be-­Polin (1930–1939),” Gal-­Ed 9 (1986): 146; Szyja Bronsztejn, Ludność żydowska w Polsce w okresie międzywojennym. Studium statystyczne (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1963), 160–161; Stampfer, “Marital Patterns in Interwar Poland,” 180, 182–187; Gershon Bacon, “Poland: Interwar,” in The Encyclopedia of Jewish ­Women, https://­jwa​.­org​/­encyclopedia, 180, 182–186. The crisis of the Jewish f­amily in that period was also manifested in the essays that young Jews sent to competitions or­ga­nized by YIVO in the 1930s. See Jeffrey Shandler, ed., Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 25. Bronsztejn, Ludność Żydowska w Polsce, 160–161; Bacon, “The Missing 52  ­Percent,” 60–61, 64–65. 26. The Łódź Community Register of Divorces, 1913–1939, AŻIH, 682; Bronsztejn, Ludność Żydowska w Polsce, 167. 27. We should note a book relevant to the topic but that is set in Nazi Germany: Martin Doerry, My Wounded Heart: The Life of Lilli Jahn, 1940–1944, trans. John Brownjohn (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). 28. Rabbi Shimon Huberband, Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious Life in Poland during the Holocaust (Hoboken, NJ: Yeshiva University Press, 1987), 203. 29. David Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1990), 24. 30. Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, ed. Martin Gilbert and Dina Porat (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 394. 31. YIVO Archives, RG 241/800; Ghetto Fighters’ House Archive (hereafter GFHA), Collections, 270; Dobroszycki, The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 39. 32. “Statistical ­A lbum of the Ghetto, Part I, 1940–1941,” YVA, Photo Archives, FA 74 (1), 4; Ghetto Archives. “First Months of the Occupation,” (German), YIVO, RG 241/832, 35; Danuta Dąbrowska, “Administracja żydowska w Łódzi i jej agendy w okresie od początku okupacji do zamknięcia getta (8.9.39–30.4.40),” BŻIH 45–46 (1963): 125. 33. The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust, vol. 2, ed. Guy Miron (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009), 902. 34. Dr. Jakub Poznański (1890–1959), a chemist by education, was one of the most impor­ tant diarists in the ghetto and one of the few to survive the war and continue his diary into the early postwar period. See Jakub Poznański, Dziennik z łódzkiego getta (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Bellona i ŻIH, 2002), 41.

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35. The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, vol. 2, 235–236. 36. YVA, M.10 /AR. I-1004, 3. 37. Isaiah Spiegel, “Bread,” in Ghetto Kingdom: Short Stories (Jerusalem: Shirley Marton School of Printing & Graphic Arts, 1989), 35–37. 38. Sara Selver-­Urbach, Though the Win­dow of My Home: Recollections from the Lodz Ghetto (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 80. 39. On September  5–12, 1942, in a cruel and bloody operation, the Germans deported around 16,000 Jews from the Łódź ghetto to the Chełmno death camp. The action was one of the most dramatic chapters of the ghetto, known by its inhabitants as Sperre, short for the German Gehsperre, meaning “curfew.” 40. Alan Adelson, ed., The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódź Ghetto, trans. Kamil Turowski (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 176–177, 219, 247. 41. Israel Aviram, Łódź: Traugutta 11 (Tel Aviv: self-­published, 1985), 7. 42. The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, vol. 1, 128–129. 43. In her study, Slepak referred to the ­women she interviewed by their initials. Only Batya Temkin, a member of Poale Zion–­Left and of the Jewish under­ground in the Warsaw ghetto, was named in full. 44. Dalia Ofer, “Her View through My Lens: Cecilia Slepak Studies W ­ omen in the Warsaw Ghetto,” in Gender, Place and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience: Re-­Placing Ourselves, ed. Judith Tydor Baumel and Tova Cohen (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 29–50; Waxman, ­Women in the Holocaust, 25. 45. Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi [State Archives in Łódź (hereafter APŁ)], L19559, Przełożony Starszeństwa Żydów (hereafter PSŻ), 940. I should note that the names of all the ­couples referred to here appear in the proceedings of the divorce cases, but I omitted them to re­spect their privacy. 46. The first divorce hearing took place on Nov. 5, 1940; the divorce was issued on Jan. 19, 1941; see APŁ, L19559, PSŻ, 940. 47. Kronika Getta Łódzkiego / Litzmannstadt Getto, 1941–1944, vol. 5 (Łódź: Wyd. Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2009), 310. 48. YIVO Archives, RG 241/800; The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, vol. 1, 55, 329; vol. 2, 1. 49. The number is only approximate ­because t­here is no absolute correspondence between marriage and divorce dates. 50. The calculation is 134 (number of divorce petitions) divided by 881 (the number of weddings during the same period) times 1,000: this yields 152. See a t­ able of the number of weddings in the Łódź Ghetto, according to the spouses’ age, for November 1940–­June 1942, YIVO Archives, RG 241/800. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Rus­sia, 2, 180–182. Compare to figures on p. 7. 51. Dobroszycki, The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 411–412. 52. From October  27, 1942, ­until August  1943, Rumkowski married 506 ­couples. A ­ lbum from the Ghetto Archives: “The Reform of Marriage in Ghetto, 1943,” GFHA Collections, 1313, 92; summary of the reports of marriages in the Ghetto, from September–­November 1943, in The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, vol. 3, 511, 543, 560, 577, 594, 628, 644, 694, 709. 53. Kronika Getta Łódzkiego / Litzmannstadt Getto, 1940–1944, Tom. 5, 310. 54. This was the view of Regina Wajnberger Rumkowska, Rumkowski’s wife, who served as the ­legal defense for respondents in divorce cases starting in 1943. See Encyclopedia of the Łódź Ghetto, APŁ, 278/1103, 419–422. 55. The Germans introduced “ghetto scrip” in July  1940, with the aim of soaking up what­ever cash remained available to ghetto residents. They printed bills of vari­ous denominations that ­were worthless outside the ghetto. However, the Jews ­were compelled to exchange their money for the new “currency,” b ­ ecause that was the only way they could buy food. Ghetto residents nicknamed the ghetto scrip “Rumki,” b ­ ecause they thought it was created on Rumkowski’s initiative. 56. APŁ, L19077, PSŻ, 458, 223.

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57. Irene Hauser, “Nicht einmal zum Sterben habe ich Protektion . . .”: Tagebuch von Irene Hauser (Frankfurt am Main: Arbeitsstelle zur Vorbereitung des Frank­furter Lern-­und Dokumentationszentrum des Holocaust, 1992), July 9, 1942, July 15, 1942. See also July 22, 1942. The booklet is not numbered. 58. APŁ, L19559, PSŻ 940, 1/40. See similar hearings on Nov.  27, Dec.  3, 10, 18, 1940; Feb. 18, Mar. 9, and July 20, 1941. 59. Melezin, Przyczynek do znajomości stosunków demograficznych, 25; Unger, “The Status and Plight of W ­ omen in the Lodz Ghetto,” 130–131. 60. Divorce Protocols from May 14, 1944, GFHA, 2123. 61. Divorce Protocols from Apr. 30 and May 7, 1944, GFHA, 2123. 62. APŁ, L 19077, PSŻ 458. 63. Divorce Protocols from 1944, GFHA, 2123. 64. APŁ, L 19964. 65. Divorce Protocols from 1944, GFHA, 2123. 66. The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, vol. 1, 264–265. 67. Barbara Engelking, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 650; YVA, M.10/AR, II-220. 68. Elsewhere Huberband wrote that since the start of the war ­t here had been hardly any divorces: “This can be explained primarily by the fact that p ­ eople have assumed a greater and more serious degree of responsibility in ­these difficult times. When nations are drowning in blood, it is shameful to become involved in ­family squabbles.” Yet the real­ity was dif­fer­ent, as we have seen. See Huberband, Kiddush Hashem, 203. 69. Huberband, Kiddush Hashem, 243. 70. Dobroszycki, The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 121. 71. APŁ, L 19964, PSŻ 942, 264. 72. Farbstein, Hidden in Thunder, 348–350; Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 300. 73. Singer, Im Eilschritt durch den Gettotag, 54. Singer was a refugee from Prague who was deported to the Łódź ghetto in the fall of 1941. He was an attorney, dramatist, and journalist in Prague during the 1930s. In 1943–1944 he was director of the Ghetto Archives. He was l­ ater murdered in Auschwitz. 74. As maintained by historian Dalia Ofer in “Parenthood in the Shadow of the Holocaust,” 10. 75. The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, vol. I, 194. 76. Unger, “The Status and Plight of ­Women in the Lodz Ghetto,” 123–127. 77. AŻIH, 205/349, Encyclopedia of the Łódź Ghetto, s.v. “Familienleben,” 120.

chapter 3  —­  narrating daily ­family life in ghettos ­under nazi occupation 1. For further deliberation on the ghetto as a coercive society, see Dalia Ofer, “The Ghettos in Transnistria and Ghettos ­under German Occupation in Eastern Eu­rope: A Comparative Approach,” in Im Ghetto 1939–1945: Neue Forschungen zu Alltag und Umfeld, ed. Christoph Dieckmann and Babette Quinkert, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2009), 30–53. 2. On the quest for normality, see the discussion in Dalia Ofer, “Ghetto Inmates: Their Perspectives and the Historian‘s Craft,” in Lebenswelt Ghetto: Alltag und Soziales Umfeld während der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung, ed. Imke Hansen, Katrin Steffen, and Joachim Tauber (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013), 52–70. 3. For further discussion of the ­family and its educational scene in the prewar period, see Ido Bassok, Teḥiyat ha-­ne‘urim: mishpaḥah ve-­ḥinukh be-­yahadut Polin ben milḥamot ha‘olam (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2015).

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4. William J. Goode, The ­Family, 2nd ed., Prentice-­Hall Foundations of Modern Sociology Series (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1982), 1–14; Dalia Ofer, “Everyday Life of Jews ­u nder Nazi Occupation: Methodological Issues,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 42–69; Paula E. Hyman, “Gender and the Jewish ­Family in Modern Eu­rope,” in ­Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 25–38. 5. I am using the se­lection of autobiographies in the YIVO proj­ect that was carried out in 1932, 1934, and 1939. For the proj­ect and its goals, see Jeffrey Shandler, ed., Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), xi–­x liv; and in Hebrew, a slightly dif­fer­ent collection, Ido Bassok, ed. and trans., ‘Alilot ne‘urim: otobiyografiyot shel bene no‘ar yehudim mi-Polin ben shete milḥamot ha-­‘olam (Tel Aviv: Institute for the History of Polish Jewry, Tel Aviv University, 2011), 7–66. 6. All information about the economic situation of Jews in prewar Poland is based on Irit Cherniavsky, Be-­‘or shinehem: ‘al ‘aliyatam shel yehude Polin lifne ha-sho‘ah (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2015), 36–42; and Jerzy Tomaszewski, “ha-Yehudim be-meshek Polin ba-shanim 1918–1939,” in Ḳiyum ve-­shever: yehude Polin le-­dorotehem, vol. 1, ed. Israel Bartal and Israel Gutman (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1997), 415–425. 7. See, for example, Rex Tarnow in the YIVO collection of autobiographies, no.  3671; Bassok, Alilot ne’urim, 133–54. 8. See Cherniavskiy, Be-­‘or shinehem; and Jerzy Tomaszewski, “ha-Yehudim be-meshek Polin ba-shanim 1918–1939.” 9. Cherniavskiy, Be-­‘or shinehem; and Jerzy Tomaszewski, “Ha-­yehudim be-­k halkalat polin 1918–1939.” 10. Testimony by Feiwel Szlomowicz, Yad Vashem Archives (henceforth YVA), O.3/7007; see also Ruth Altbeuer Cyprys, A Jump for Life: A Survivor’s Journal from Nazi-­Occupied Poland (New York: Continuum, 1997), 41, quoted in Raquel Hodara, “The Polish Jewish ­Woman from the Beginning of the Occupation to the Deportation to the Ghettos,” Yad Vashem Studies 32 (2004): 406. 11. Lea Prias, ed., Ba-­‘arafel ha-­nedudim (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014), 34–35. 12. Cecilia Slepak’s research is part of the Ringelblum Archive (ARI/49), divided into a number of notebooks. Her subjects are identified only by an initial. I use the Yad Vashem Archives copy, YVA, JM/217/4 and JM/215/3 (henceforth, Slepak Report, followed by a notebook number). We have very l­ittle information about Slepak. Ringelblum writes that she had a good reputation from her translation of Shimon Dubnov’s twelve-­volume History of the Jews into Polish, and she was asked to write about w ­ omen in the ghetto. He mentions that she was deported to Treblinka in the G ­ reat Deportation in the summer of 1942; see Emmanuel Ringelblum, Ketavim aḥaronim, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1994), 223–225. 13. Hodara, “Polish Jewish ­Woman,” 407; Memoirs of Leib Reiser, YVA (manuscript reference O.33/296; typescript reference O.33/254). 14. Noemi Szac Wajnkranc, Ḥalaf ‘im ha-­e sh: reshimot ‘al geṭo Ṿarshah she-­nikhtevu be-­maḥabo, ed. Bella Gutterman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003), 21–22. 15. Alexandra Zapruder, ed., Sal­vaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 204. In this collection Rudashevski’s diaries are not fully translated. I use this translation whenever pos­si­ble and other­w ise translate from the Hebrew version, which is a full translation: Yitskhok Rudashevski, Yomano shel na‘ar mi-­Ṿilna (Tel Aviv: Ha-­k ibuts ha-­meuḥad, 1968). 16. Zapruder, ed., Sal­vaged Pages, 199–200. 17. Zapruder, ed., Sal­vaged Pages, 204. 18. On the transition of the Kovno ghetto to a series of forced l­abor camps before its dismantling, see Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011), vol. 2, 1287–1298; entry for Oct. 13, 1943, in Avraham Tory,

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Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, ed. with an introduction by Martin Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 500–501. 19. Slepak Report, notebook 3. 20. Aron Einat, Ḥayey yom-­yom be-­geṭo Ṿilna (Givat Havivah: Moreshet, 2013),123–125. 21. YVA M-49/P-160, Glozerowa Sabina. 22. Calel Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer: Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 23–26. 23. Masha (Masza) Rolnik, I Have to Tell (Jerusalem: Achiever, 1965), 117–118. 24. Peretz Opoczynski, Reshimot mi-­geṭo Ṿarshah (Tel Aviv: Ha-­k ibuts ha-­meuḥad, 1970), 105. 25. Shaul Stampfer, “How Jewish society Adapted to Change in Male/Female Relationships in 19th/Early 20th  ­century Eastern Eu­rope,” in Gender Relationships in Marriage and Out, ed. Rivkah Blau (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2007), 65–83. 26. David Rosen, “The F ­ amily in Judaism: Past, Pre­sent and F ­ uture, Fears and Hopes,” in Worlds of Memory and Wisdom: Encounters of Jews and African Christians, ed. Jean Halpérin and Hans Ucko (Geneva: World Council of Church Publications, 2005), 85–92; Lisa Pine, “Gender and ­Family,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 364–382. 27. Shaul Stampfer, “Marital Patterns in Interwar Poland,” in The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars, ed. Yisrael Gutman et  al. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New ­England, 1989), 173–97. 28. Lenore J. Weitzman, “Re­sis­tance in Everyday Life: ­Family Strategies, Role Reversals, and Role Sharing in the Holocaust,” in Jewish Families in Eu­rope, 1939–­Pre­sent: History, Repre­sen­ta­tion, and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 46–66. 29. Khronika shel geṭo lodzh, trans. and annotated by Arie Ben-­Menachem and Joseph Rab, 4 vols. (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986–89), vol. 1, 128, 144. A se­lection from the Chronicle was translated into En­glish as The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941–1944, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Whenever a quotation appears in the En­g lish version, I cite it; in all other cases, the quotation is my own translation from the Hebrew version. 30. Irene Hauser, Nicht einmal zum Sterben habe ich Protektion. . . . : Tagebuch (Frankfurt am Main: Arbeitstelle zur Vorbereitung des Frank­furter Lern-­und Dokumentationszentrums des Holocaustes, 1992); Andrea Löw, Juden in Getto Litzmannstadt. Lebensbedingugen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006); p.  382 n. 120, mentions that Leopold, Irene’s husband, survived the ghetto. 31. Khronika shel geṭo lodzh, vol. 1, 307. 32. Opoczynski, Reshimot mi-­geṭo Ṿarshah, 254. 33. Slepak Report, notebook 3. 34. Szac Wajnkranc, Ḥalaf ‘im ha-­esh, 46. 35. Zapruder, ed., Sal­vaged Pages, 236. 36. Zapruder, ed., Sal­vaged Pages, 239. 37. Zapruder, ed., Sal­vaged Pages, 239. 38. Miriam Offer, Ḥaluk lavan ba-­geṭo (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2015), 497–504. 39. YVA, M10 ARI 196. Part of the report is translated in Marta Markowska, ed., The Ringelblum Archive: Annihilation Day by Day (Warsaw: Karta Centre, 2008), 76–77. 40. Markowska, ed., The Ringelblum Archive: Annihilation Day by Day, 76. 41. Markowska, ed., The Ringelblum Archive: Annihilation Day by Day, 77. 42. Slepak Report, notebook 3. 43. Mass extermination in Chełmno began in December 1941, and the first victims w ­ ere Jews from the surrounding area. An anonymous letter of a Jew from Kutno (three kilo­ meters from Krośniewice) described the deportation to Chełmno and the rumors that

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­ eople ­were sent ­t here but no one returned and that Poles living nearby testified that no p food was transported to Chełmno. See Markowska, ed., The Ringelblum Archive: Annihilation Day by Day, 136. 44. One should bear in mind that the mass deportation from Warsaw started only a few weeks l­ater. From the dates given in the testimony, it seems that Slepak interviewed her around May or late April 1942. 45. Alison Blunt and Ann Varley, “Geographies of Home: An Introduction,” Cultural Geo­graphies 11 (2004): 1. 46. Mary Douglas, “The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space,” Social Research 58, no  1 (Spring 1991): 287–307, esp. 298–301. 47. For further information on dif­fer­ent approaches to the concept of home in diverse disciplines, see Tiina Peil, “Home,” in International Encyclopedia of H ­ uman Geography, vol. 5, ed. Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009), 180–184. 48. Helena Szereszewska, Ha-­pereḳ ha-­aḥaron: zikhronot mi-­Ṿarshah ha-kvushah, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv Ha-­k ibuts ha-­meuḥad,1980), 25–29. 49. Wajnkranc, Ḥalaf ‘im ha-­esh, 23. 50. Zapruder, ed., Sal­vaged Pages, 199–200. 51. See, for example, the analy­sis of the emotional and social impact of forced relocation in an urban setting in Marc Fried, “Grieving for a Lost Home: Psychological Costs of Relocation,” in Urban Renewal, ed. James Q. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 359–379. Fried wrote, “On the ground of spatial and interpersonal orientation and commitments, dislocation from the residential area represents a par­tic­u ­lar marked disruption in the sense of community” (p. 379). 52. Zapruder, ed., Sal­vaged Pages, 204. 53. Rudashevski, Yomano shel na‘ar mi-­Ṿilna, 30. 54. Rudashevski, Yomano shel na‘ar mi-­Ṿilna, 34. 55. In regard to the space at home, note his relief when his u ­ ncle’s ­family obtained their own lodgings and moved out; Rudashevski, Yomano shel na‘ar mi-­Ṿilna, 52. 56. Rudashevski, Yomano shel na‘ar mi-­Ṿilna, 43–44.

chapter 4  —­  Uneasy Bonds I would like to thank Eliyana Adler and Kateřina Čapková for their critical comments on an early draft of this chapter, as well as ­t hese colleagues who read and discussed it with me: Sarah M. Cushman, Emily Gioielli, Anna Hájková, Marion Kaplan, Jennifer Marlow, Joanna Śliwa, and Raphael Utz. 1. Samuel Golfard, The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia, ed. Wendy Lower (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2011), 56. The note was dated Jan. 26, 1943. See Pinkas ha-­Kehilot Polin, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976), 442. https://­w ww​.­jewishgen​.o ­ rg​/­y izkor​/­pinkas​ _­poland​/­pol2​_­00440​.­html (accessed Jan. 1, 2018). 2. Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: Feminist Press and the City University of New York, 2003), 122. 3. Cesia Brandstatter stayed together with seven friends she had known from Bais Yaakov and public schools in Chrzanów. The young ­women strug­gled to protect each other in a transit camp in Sosnowiec and shared food and bunk beds in the ­labor camp of Ober Altstadt near Trautenau in the Sudetenland. Together, they returned to Chrzanów ­a fter liberation. Klüger, Still Alive, 217. 4. For accounts of camp ­sisters who assisted one another, see Lucie Adelsberger, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995); Sara Tuvel Bern­stein with Louise Loots Thornton and Marlene Bern­stein Samuels, The Seamstress: A Memoir of Survival (New York: Berkley Books, 1997); Halina Birenbaum, Hope Is the Last to Die: A

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Coming of Age u ­ nder Nazi Terror (Armonk, NY: M. E. Shape, 1996); Joyce Parkey, “Camp ­Sisters: W ­ omen and the Holocaust,” VCU Menorah Review 67 (Summer–­Fall 2007), https://­ www​.m ­ enorahreview​.­org​/­article​.­aspx​?i­ d​=­57. 5. Sybil Milton, “­Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-­Jewish ­Women,” in When Biology Became Destiny: W ­ omen in Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 311–316. 6. Milton, “­Women and the Holocaust,” 313. 7. ­Mothers, S­ isters, Resisters: Oral Histories of ­Women Who Survived the Holocaust, ed. Brana Gurewitsch (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 95–218. See also Hans Ellger, “Die Frauen-­Aussenlager des KZ Neuengamme: Lebensbedingungen und Überlebensstrategien,” in Genozid und Geschlecht: jüdische Frauen im nationalsozialistischen Lagersystem, ed. Gisela Bock (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005), 169–184. 8. Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: ­Women, Men and the Holocaust (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 2004), 119–204; Rochelle G. Seidel, The Jewish W ­ omen of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Sarah Helm, If This Is a ­Woman: Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for ­Women (London: ­Little, Brown, 2015). But Tec also suggested that men in camps formed bonding groups as well. See Tec, Resilience and Courage, 188–196. More recently, Sarah M. Cushman analyzed survival strategies among female inmates at Auschwitz-­Birkenau and concluded, “­Those without ­family or friends soon sought to find connection and support. They found ­others with whom to bond and formed family-­type groups. ­These groups shared food, ­water, sleeping space, and moral encouragement. They watched out for one another. Such families ­were created from hometown friends, schoolmates, or countrywomen.” See Sarah M. Cushman, “The ­Women of Birkenau” (PhD diss., Clark University, 2010), 135. In her recent monograph ­Women in the Holocaust, Zoë Waxman echoes scholarship that recognized the centrality of familial bonding in concentration camps. She writes, “It was sensible to form alliances with other prisoners, and efforts ­were made to re­create something of the life they had left ­behind. The memoirs of female survivors suggest that ­women responded to the suffering they ­were forced to endure by trying to maintain familial or emotional bonds.” See Zoë Waxman, ­Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 105. 9. Katherine R. Allen, Rosemary Blieszner, and Karen A. Roberto, “Perspectives on Extended ­Family and Fictive Kin in L ­ ater Years: Strategies and Meanings of Kin Reinterpretation,” Journal of F ­ amily Issues 32, no. 9 (2011): 1156–1177. 10. See Pat O’Conner, Friendship among ­Women: A Critical Review (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992); Marilyn Yalom with Theresa Donovan Brown, The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015). 11. Survivors’ unconscious or conscious homophobic feelings may confound historians’ abilities to write about male bonding. See a draft of the article by Anna Hájková, “Same Sex Desire among the Holocaust Victims: On Writing a Queer History of the Holocaust.” I want to thank Dr.  Hájková for sharing her draft with me. See also Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2002): 14–44. 12. Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Warszawie (Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, AŻIH), collection 301, file 9, testimony of Nuta Gruber, 10, protocol no. 2, written down by Eda Lichtman, Lublin, Sept. 6, 1944. The synopsis of the testimony, recorded in Łódź, is dated Oct. 13, 1945. The survivor is identified as “Pruber Nuta,” but the testimony suggests the name is “Gruber,” born in Dubienka, living in Kamień Koszyrski in 1941. 13. AŻIH, 301/15, testimony of Chana Barasz, recorded in Yiddish, Łódź, Apr. 14, 1945.

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14. AŻIH, 301/1013, 13, testimony of Estera Rubinsztejn, taken down in Łódź, Nov.  15, 1945. Rubinsztejn was born in Warsaw in 1917, graduated from high school, and was a lab assistant. 15. Yad Vashem Archives (YVA), collection O.33, file 1144, diary of Rózia Basseches-­ Wagnerowa, 127. 16. YVA, O.33/1144, 111–112. 17. Michael Hauptman (Michał Mirski), Zapomniane mogiły (Warsaw: ISP PAN, ŻIH, 2008), 43–44. 18. AŻIH, 301/88, 2, testimony of Dolek Ruder, son of Mendel and Zofia, born Jan. 8, 1938, in Złoczów. 19. AŻIH, 301/87, 11, testimony of Mendel Ruder, son of Mordechai and Fruma Lajner, born Apr. 9, 1909 in Obertyn, a tailor by profession. Before the war he lived in Złoczów. 20. AŻIH, 301/2370, 1, testimony of Helena Rauch, born in 1922 in Jarosław, during the war in Lwów at 7 Gródecka Street, currently Cracow, Zgody Square 13, Apt. 16. Stanisław Robak—­circus artist was born in Cieszyn on Feb.  1, 1910. Before the war in Lwów at 8 Traugutta Street, Apt. 13. Currently Cracow, 13 Zgody Square, Apt. 16. The two put down the same address in their postwar testimony. In the protocol it was noted that Robak was a Roman Catholic but with “Semitic looks.” 21. See https://­w ww​.­ushmm​.­org ​/­remember​/­office​-­of​-­survivor​-­a ffairs​/­memory​-­project​ /­featured​-w ­ riters​/d ­ rimer​-­diamond (accessed on Mar. 14, 2017). 22. For a discussion on the role of gender in preparing hiding places and securing food provisions, see Natalia Aleksiun, “Gender and the Daily Life of Jews in Hiding in Eastern Galicia,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish ­Women’s Studies and Gender Issues, no. 27 (2014): 38–61. 23. YVA, 0.3/8656, oral interview with Yehuda Tenenbaum, Sept. 28, 1995. Interviewed in Hebrew by Miriam Aviezer. Tenenbaum was born in Grabowiec near Lublin in 1916. 24. See Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Narrating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Signs: Journal of ­Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 503–533. 25. Blanca Rosenberg, To Tell at Last: Survival u ­ nder False Identity, 1941–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 6–7. 26. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), interview with Maria Rosenbloom, Sept. 23, 1996, RG-50.030*0379, 43–45. 27. Rosenberg, To Tell at Last, 61–79. 28. USHMM, Sept. 23, 1996, RG-50.030*0379, 46–47. 29. Rosenberg, To Tell at Last, 85–88. 30. Rosenberg, To Tell at Last, 100. In Rosenberg’s memoir, she noted that Maria shared her story of trying to pass in Lwów: “Tears filled her eyes and she reached for me again. ‘It ­doesn’t ­matter. Just so long as ­you’re ­here with me. Together ­we’ll face the world. Maybe ­we’ll survive.’ She looked at me.” (p. 103). 31. Rosenberg, To Tell at Last, 116–118. 32. Rosenberg, To Tell at Last, 121. 33. USHMM, September 23, 1996, RG-50.030*0379, 42. 34. Rosenberg, To Tell at Last, 152. 35. Rosenberg, To Tell at Last, 142. When she learned about the liquidation of the ghetto in Kołomyja from her s­ ister who arrived in Lwów covered in ashes, “I stretched on that floor. Frania too, and I wanted nothing but for the f loor to open, the f loor ­d idn’t open that hard f loor was ­t here. I ­c ouldn’t even cry. . . . ​E xcept Blanka woke me from that stupor I think sometime ­later saying that the landlady wants to bring us some tea. And this meant we had to get up, wash up, and look pretty.” USHMM, September 23, 1996, RG-50.030*0379, 49.

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36. USHMM, Sept. 23, 1996, RG-50.030*0379, 62. 37. Rosenberg, To Tell at Last, 136. 38. AŻIH, 301/2194, 2, testimony of Lusia Grossman, born June 2, 1927, in Lwów, recorded in Wałbrzych on Feb. 17, 1947, by Dr. Wetrzchajzer. 39. AŻIH, 301/2194, 3. 40. AŻIH, 301/2194, 4. 41. See Nachum Bogner, Be-­ḥasde zarim: hatsalat yeladim bi-­zehut sheʾulah be-­Polin (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2000); for the En­glish translation see Nachum Bogner, At the Mercy of Strangers: The Rescue of Jewish ­Children with Assumed Identities in Poland (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009); Emuna Nachmany-­Gafny, Divided Hearts (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2006); Joanna Beata Michlic, “What Does a Child Remember? Recollections of the War and the Early Postwar Period among Child Survivors from Poland,” in Jewish Families in Europe,1939–­Pre­sent: History, Repre­sen­ta­tion and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 153–172. 42. AŻIH, 301/2734, 2, testimony of Wiktor Rattner, recorded by Ida Gliksztejn, Bytom, Sept. 10, 1947. The boy was taken to a Jewish orphanage. 43. AŻIH, 301/2734, 3. 44. In the case of Zofia Spatz (married Heimrath, born 1929), her nanny escaped with her from Lwów, presented her as an illegitimate child, and raised her during the war in her village. A ­ fter the war, Zofia refused to be re­united with her biological f­ather. Interview with the author. 45. AŻIH, 301/2496, 4–5, testimony of Ludwika Barb (Ludwika Buczyńska), born in Lwów on Nov. 8, 1927, testimony recorded on June 11, 1947 in Wrocław. 46. AŻIH, 301/2480, 1, testimony of Berta Trinczer (née Szerman), born on Apr. 3, 1915 in Stanisławów, d ­ aughter of Fiszel and Lina Zarbanszer, living at 24 Chrobry Street, Bytom, recorded by Ida Gliksztejn, Bytom, Apr. 1947. 47. AŻIH, 301/2480, 2. 48. AŻIH, 301/2480, 3. 49. Rosenberg, To Tell at Last, 100. 50. AŻIH, 301/2370, 2. 51. Staatsarchiv München (Bavarian State Archives in Munich, BSA), StanW 33033/2, 230–231, Eidesstattliche Erklärung, Dec. 7, 1954, Toronto. 52. Cf. his short account BSA, StanW 33033/2, 226–229, Eidesstattliche Versicherung, Dec. 7, 1954, Toronto. See his l­ ater account in BSA, StanW 33033/4, Vernehmungsniederschrift, Munich, Aug. 8, 1960, AZ 1Js421/60. 53. Rudolf Reder, “Belzec: Testimony of Rudolf Reder, Sole Survivor of Belzec Extermination Camp, WW2,” trans. Dawid Glück (Kiryat Tivon, Israel, 2014), 13–14. https://­dunekglik​ .­fi les​.w ­ ordpress​.­com​/­2014​/1­ 1​/e­ nglish​-­translation​.­pdf. 54. For the discussion of the discrepancies between several testimonies given by Obóz zagłady w Bełżcu w relacjach ocalonych i zeznaniach polskich świadków, ed. Dariusz Libionka (Lublin: Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 2014). 55. AŻIH, 301/39, 3, testimony of Sonia Katzman, born in 1922  in Brody, ­daughter of Sania and Jakub. She passed her high school exams in 1939  in Oświata Gymnasium in Równe. When the testimony was recorded on Jan. 17, 1945, her name was Elżbieta Żak. See ibid., 1, 10. 56. In her account of the Holocaust published in the Memorial Book of Brody, Katzman mentions the help she received from Tadeusz Żak. She adds additional details about Żak’s life; he was one of ­t hose who distinguished himself in helping Jews during the German occupation: or the hell that surrounded me during the four years of the German conquest, I did find some points of light. One of them was Tadeusz Zak [Żak]. Tedik [Tadek] arrived in Brody with his ­father

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in 1935. His ­mother passed away a few years e­ arlier and his f­ ather married Mrs. Pipel. During the Soviet rule, his f­ather was sent to Siberia. Tadeusz Zak very actively saved Jews. I was one of the ­people he saved through self-­sacrifice. He spent a lot of effort to save my ­mother, but to my sorrow, the Ukrainians murdered her and another 35 Jews from Brody on 6 May 1943. May their memory be blessed. Tadeusz Zak passed away in Warsaw from a heart attack, in 1981. He left a wife, a son and three grandchildren. He was not recognized officially as a Righ­teous Among Nations despite the fact that he deserved to be recognized ­because what he did and ­because of his personality. It is therefore appropriate to mention him in the Yizkor Book for Brody.

Sonya Katzman-­Vinogradov, “The Shomer Branch on Leshniovska Street,” 131. See the translation of the account in https://­w ww​.j­ ewishgen​.­org​/­y izkor​/ ­brody​/ ­bro129​.­html. 57. See YVA, 0.33/8308, 123(4). Katzman also notes that Żak was helping his Jewish stepmother and his stepsiblings. 58. YVA, 0.33/8308, 124(5). In her account, Tadeusz Żak dis­appears ­a fter they run away. She then tried to survive alone in Lwów and Jarosław where she was liberated. 59. YVA, 0.33/8308, 124(5). 60. Janina Bauman, Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl’s Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond, 1939–1945 (New York: F ­ ree Press, 1986), 153. 61. See Myrna Goldenberg, “Rape during the Holocaust,” in The Legacy of the Holocaust: Women and the Holocaust, ed. Zygmunt Mazur, Jay  T. Lees, Arnold Krammer, and ­ Władysław Witalisz (Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2007), 159–169; Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide.” See also Waxman, ­Women in the Holocaust, 44, 109–110. 62. See http://­missing​-­identity​.­net​/­itta​-­keller​-­stary​-­sambor​-­and​-­lviv​-­u kraine​/­. 63. USHMM, Itta Keller Ben Haiem Collection, 2007.129, folder 2, written in Marseille, July 8, 1947. She emigrated to Israel in October 1947. Kobyłko was recognized as the Righ­teous Among the Nations in 1993. See http://­db​.­yadvashem​.­org ​/­r ighteous​/­family​ .­html​?­language​= e­ n&itemId​=4­ 015678 (accessed Oct. 10, 2018). 64. On Itta Keller’s ­f ather Shlomo, see https://­y vng​.­y advashem​.­org ​/­nameDetails​ .­html​?­language​= e­ n&itemId​=­3936984&ind​=7­ . 65. For a discussion on intermarriage in interwar Poland see Anna Landau-­Czajka, Syn będzie Lech. Asymilacja Żydow w Polsce międzywojennej (Warsaw: Neriton, 2006), 193–205. 66. Tec concluded, “Like the w ­ omen, men from vari­ous walks of life and with vari­ous degrees of sophistication formed bonding groups.” Tec, Resilience and Courage, 188. See also Cushman, The ­Women of Birkenau, 350. Moreover, Cushman pointed to the ways that ­there tended to be gender bias relating to familial roles in the context of concentration camps. She claimed: “Survivors and scholars speak of f­amily bonding among w ­ omen in exclusively female—­ and traditionally feminine—­ terms (e.g. camp ­ sisters, mother-­ daughter, ­etc.). They do not describe members of ­these groups taking on traditionally masculine roles like protector, provider, leader, decision-­maker, ­etc. even when such was the case.” Cushman concludes that “in such single sex environments, where extreme conditions forced survival instincts to emerge, that both men and w ­ omen ­adopted be­hav­iors traditionally constructed as belonging to the other sex. At the same time, dehumanization had already deprived prisoners of most, if not all, of their socially assigned gender signifiers therefore, adopting ‘non-­traditional’ be­hav­ior was unremarkable u ­ nder the circumstances.” (p. 135). 67. Cushman suggested that the “biological ­family could be both a luxury and a burden. It provided an intact grouping upon arrival but could be an exhausting obligation that few had the energy to fulfill.” Cushman, The ­Women of Birkenau, 133.

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chapter 5  —­  siblings in the holocaust and its aftermath in france and the united states I first and foremost want to thank the two Z. s­ isters for generously sharing their past with me. I would also like to thank the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University and the Bauman Foundation for their generous support. I am grateful to Susan Gross Solomon and Patrick Farges, as well as the participants in the symposium, “The Holocaust and its Aftermath from the F ­ amily Perspective” (Prague, 2017), for their useful comments. A similar version of this chapter appeared in French, with permission, as “Orphelines ou sœurs? Penser la famille juive pendant et après la Shoah en France et aux Etats-­Unis,” 20 & 21. Revue d’histoire (Vingtième siècle), n.145, January–­March 2020. 1. An exception: Helene Bass-­Wichelhaus analyzes the resilience of two ­sisters who experienced the Holocaust ­under dif­fer­ent conditions. Helene Bass-­Wichelhaus, “Resilience in Child Survivors. History and Application of Coding the International Study of Or­ga­nized Persecution of ­Children,” in ­Children in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath: Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive, ed. Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Eva Fogelman, and Dalia Ofer (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 170–186. On ­family life in the ghettos, see Dalia Ofer, “Cohesion and Rupture: The Jewish F ­ amily in East Eu­ro­pean Ghettos during the Holocaust,” Studies in Con­temporary Jewry 14 (1998): 143–165. More generally, on the historiography of w ­ omen and families, see Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds. ­Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Lisa Pine, “Gender and the ­Family,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 364–382; Judith Tydor Baumel, “Gender and ­Family Studies of the Holocaust: The Development of a Historical Discipline,” in Life, Death, and Sacrifice: ­Women and F ­ amily in the Holocaust, ed. Esther Herzog (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2008), 21–40. 2. Daniella Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding ­Family and Nation, The Modern Jewish Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 31–73; Tara Zahra, The Lost ­Children: Reconstructing Eu­rope’s Families ­after World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 132–145; Ivan Jablonka, ed., L’Enfant-­Shoah (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2014). 3. The historiography on Holocaust testimony is too vast to enumerate h ­ ere. For a recent analy­sis of it, see Zoë Waxman, “Testimony and Repre­sen­ta­t ion,” in Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 487–507. One example of the individualized nature of testimony is the chosen practice of memoir writing; a second is the imposed structure of the video testimony proj­ects, which sought out individuals and not groups (for example, Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation). 4. On ­children and the repre­sen­ta­tion of the Holocaust, see Mark M. Anderson, “The Child Victim as Witness to the Holocaust: An American Story,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 1–22. He argues that the breakthrough moments in Holocaust repre­sen­ta­ tion have been made through portrayals of c­ hildren and families, especially in the United States: “the figure of the persecuted child turns the Holocaust into a moving and accessible story with religious and mythic associations” (3). According to Anderson, ­t hese repre­ sen­ta­tions “offer a simplified narrative of good and evil that does not necessarily lead to greater historical knowledge, critical awareness, or po­liti­cal commitment” (20). 5. I conducted oral history interviews from July 2015 through December 2016. Case files ­were accessed with the permission of the individuals. For ethical considerations, even though the ­sisters gave me permission to use their real names and signed a consent form during our interview, I asked them to read this chapter before its publication, offering to change their names or edit the material. A ­ fter a ­great deal of discussion, we de­cided to use false names, which they chose. Hank Greenspan’s suggestion to listen to Holocaust survivors remains my guiding princi­ple: On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and

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Life History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998). I raised my ethical issues with the s­ isters and listened to their solutions. On ethical issues in the usage of survivor testimony, see Rachel Einwohner, “Ethical Considerations on the Use of Archived Testimonies in Holocaust Research: Beyond the IRB Exception,” Qualitative Sociology 34 (2011): 415–430. 6. The microhistory method has proven fruitful for rethinking current generalizations and assumptions on the Holocaust. See Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann, “Introduction. ­Toward a Microhistory of the Holocaust,” in Microhistories of the Holocaust, ed. Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann (New York, Berghahn, 2017), 1–13. 7. I am currently writing a social history of the Kindertransport to France, the evacuation of Jewish c­ hildren from France to the United States during World War II, and Jewish child refugees’ postwar lives. Using a long periodization and transnational method, my goal is to understand the networks established by the ­children in France and the United States and the emergence of the American Friends and Alumni of OSE, in 1994. See t­ hese works by Laura Hobson Faure: “Attentes européennes, réalités américaines: l’émigration des enfants de l’Œuvre de secours aux enfants de la France occupée vers les États-­Unis, 1941–1942,” in L’Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants par delà les frontières: Prévenir et Guérir dans un siècle de vio­lences, 1912–1960, ed. Laura Hobson Faure, Mathias Gardet, Katy Hazan, and Catherine Nicault (Paris, Editions Armand Colin, 2014), 166–183; “Les enfants juifs et l’American Joint Distribution Committee dans la France d’après-­g uerre,” in L’enfant et la Shoah après 1945, ed. Ivan Jablonka (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2014), 83–97; “Shaping ­Children’s Lives: American Jewish Aid in Post-­World War II France (1944–1948),” in Re-­Examining the Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities, ed. Jonathan Zvi Kaplan and Nadia Malinovich (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 173–193; “Becoming Refugees: the Migrations of Central Eu­ro­pean C ­ hildren through France to the United States,” Habilitation à diriger des recherches, vol. 2 (Paris: Sciences Po, 2018). 8. In the course of my larger study, I conducted thirty-­seven semi-­directed interviews with forty-­four p ­ eople. The siblings in my larger study represent dif­fer­ent subsets of persecuted populations: In addition to the Z. ­sisters discussed ­here, the G. ­brothers came to France on a Kindertransport from Berlin in 1939, w ­ ere placed in several c­ hildren’s homes, and ­were ­later sent to the United States in 1941, where they ­were cared for by separate foster families. The S. ­sisters arrived in France on a c­ hildren’s transport from Vienna; they w ­ ere placed together in a Jewish c­ hildren’s home and then in a Catholic orphanage. When this proved too dangerous, the s­ isters w ­ ere hidden in two separate families. At the end of the war, they ­were re­united with their ­mother, who had escaped to E ­ ngland and then emigrated to the United States. ­These siblings share major commonalities: all ­were Central Eu­ro­pean refugees in France, and all ­were placed in homes managed by the Jewish organ­ization Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE). All of them eventually emigrated to the United States. All w ­ ere separated from their sibling at some point during the war or postwar period but now live in close geo­graph­i­cal proximity. All lost one or both parents in Auschwitz. 9. The ­family was swept up in the Bürckel-­Wagner Operation (Oct. 22–25, 1940), which led to the expulsion of approximately 6,500 Jews from the Palatinate region. For more information, see http://­w ww​.­campgurs​.­com​/­default​.­asp​?­t ype​= S­ R&savoirplus​= ­87&idsection​=2­ (accessed Mar. 12, 2018). 10. The girls ­were liberated in January  1941, most likely by the Red Cross or Secours Suisse; USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children u ­ nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter to M. and Mrs. Z., Jan. 14, 1941. This was before OSE’s first liberations, which took place in February 1941. OSE managed to transfer 102 c­ hildren out of Gurs and, u ­ nder the auspices of Andrée Salomon and l­ater Ruth Lambert, it managed to evacuate most ­children ­under age 15. In March 1942, t­ here remained seventy-­eight ­children u ­ nder age 14 and eigh­teen between 14–18 years of age in Gurs. Sabine Zeitoun, Histoire de l’OSE: de la Russie tsariste à l’occupation en France, 1912–1944. L’Oeuvre de secours aux enfants, du légalisme à la résistance (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), 269–278.

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11. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children u ­ nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter to Mr. and Mrs. Z., Jan. 14, 1941. La Pouponnière was founded by the Assistance Médicale aux Enfants de Refugiés or the Association aux Enfants réfugiés and l­ater transferred to the auspices of OSE; Katy Hazan, and Serge Klarsfeld, Le sauvetage des enfants juifs pendant l’Occupation, dans les maisons de l’OSE, 1938–1945 (Paris: Œuvre de secours aux enfants: Somogy, 2008), 146–147. On this structure, see Pierre Goetschel’s documentary film, L’héritage retrouvé (Lietmotiv Production, 2013). 12. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children ­under the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter to Mr. and Mrs. Z., Jan 14, 1941. JDC archives, RG 1933–45, file 610, Letter from Assistance médicale aux Enfants de réfugiés to Albert Levy, Jan. 1941. The example of 15-­month-­old Rachel losing her teeth was given as an indication of the harsh conditions in the camp. Thank you to Claire Demoulin for translating this source from the German. 13. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children u ­ nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter to Mr. and Mrs. Z., Jan 14, 1941. 14. FZS Papers, Written account by Rachel. Lea stated she was not placed in the nursery but instead in a convent ­because she was too old; Interview, July 2015. The sisters’ OSE file also has several contradictions about their placement history during the war. However, both the ­sisters and the case file indicate their separate placements and the ­sisters’ postwar reunion in 1945; USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children ­u nder the care of OSE, Reel 67. 15. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children u ­ nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, “Z., Lea,” December 1946. Compare with “Personal history of child, Z. Rachel,” May 30, 1948. 16. Letter from June 12, 1942, from her f­ ather; FZS Papers, Written account by Rachel. 17. Oral history interview conducted by author with Z. ­sisters, New York, July 2015. 18. Contradiction: OSE file says 1946; USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children u ­ nder the care of OSE, Reel 67. Rachel’s written account says April 1945; FZS Papers. She published a version of this account in Susan Gold, ed., The Hidden Child Book Club Remembers: An Anthology of Holocaust Stories (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Full Court Press, 2016), 19. 19. FZS Papers, Written account by Rachel, p. 15. 20. FZS Papers, Written account by Rachel, p. 15. 21. FZS Papers, Written account by Rachel, p. 15. 22. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of c­ hildren ­under the care of OSE, Reel 67. “Attestion, Sous Préfecture d’Oloron,” no date. The parents ­were sent to Rivesaltes on Sept. 23, 1942, then to Drancy, and fi­nally to Auschwitz. 23. As Daniella Doron points out in her study of youth in postwar France, French Jewish organ­izations put f­amily on a pedestal even as they sought out collectivist solutions for surviving Jewish youth. Part of this was out of fear that Jewish families, weakened from persecutions, could not be trusted with task of raising the next generation. Yet, they also questioned ­whether collective homes w ­ ere the right place for t­ hese c­ hildren; Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France, 118–161. See also my own work on the dif­fer­ent priorities among American and French Jewish social workers in the postwar period; Laura Hobson Faure, Un “Plan Marshall Juif,” la présence juive américaine en France après la Shoah, 1944–54 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013) 229–236; an En­glish edition is forthcoming. 24. On the emergence of the U.S. social work profession and “scientific charity,” see among ­others Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 25. This observation is based on my readings of selected case files. I was unable to find any institutional policy on the placement of siblings in this organ­ization’s archives. For more on their postwar treatment of child Holocaust survivors in postwar US society, see Beth Cohen, Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Amer­i­ca (New Brunswick, NJ:

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Rutgers University Press, 2007), 94–114; and Child Survivors of the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018). 26. This was an ongoing debate in Eu­ro­pean and U.S. social work. Zahra, The Lost ­Children, 66–78; 99–102. 27. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children ­under the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter from JZ to OSE, Oct 8, 1945; Letter from Masour to Jordan, Feb. 9, 1950. 28. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of c­ hildren u ­ nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter from L. Wulman to G. Masour, Feb. 18, 1947. 29. FZS Papers, Letter from Peggy Gunzburger to Belle Wolkomir, Mar.  6, 1951. The caseworker states, “­There is no doubt in Z.’s interest in the ­children. For 5 years they have wrestled not only with a welter of immigration information detail but with extremely conflicted feelings which could express themselves only hostily [sic] at first.” She explained that the Z.’s could not take care of the kids b ­ ecause of their overcrowded home and insufficient income, but concluded, “They would not consider separating the ­children even if they had room for one, which they ­don’t have.” 30. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of c­ hildren ­under the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter from J. Masour to L. Wulman, Apr. 2, 1947. 31. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children u ­ nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter from L. Pollnow, American Joint Distribution Committee, to OSE, June 9, 1947. 32. The adoption may have fallen through b ­ ecause of the results of the testing done on the ­children or the ­family’s concern about the ­uncle’s involvement in their lives. 33. Through the Baroness Pierre de Gunzbourg, now in New York, who assisted the American branch of OSE. 34. FZS Papers, photo ­a lbum. 35. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children ­u nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter from J. Masour to SASE, Oct. 7, 1947; Letter from E. Masour to Renée Epstein, “L’oncle s’oppose formellement à toute adoption et veut s’occuper lui-­même de ses nièces,” (“The ­uncle is formally opposed to adoption and wants to care for his nieces himself”) Oct. 23, 1947. 36. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children ­u nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter from E. Masour to Mr. Z., Mar. 1, 1948. 37. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of c­ hildren ­u nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter from Mr.  Z. to OSE Paris, Apr.  10, 1948. Their nationality is not clearly stated in the file. 38. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of c­ hildren ­u nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, “Compte rendu de la visite du 24 novembre 1949,” E. Masour. 39. The OSE never explic­itly stated that it would look for an American adoptive f­amily. However, at this moment, the adoption of Jewish ­children was seen primarily as an international pro­cess, ­because French Jews ­were in the midst of recovering from the Holocaust and often had to place their c­ hildren in collective homes in the immediate postwar period. Nonetheless, ­t here is mention in the file that OSE looked for an adoptive family for the girls in France; USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children ­under the care of OSE, Reel 67, Commission de l’Enfance du 2 février 1950. More generally, see Faure, “Shaping ­Children’s Lives,” 173–193. 40. They cannot be blamed. The notion of child trauma emerged during and especially ­a fter World War II; Zahra, The Lost ­Children, 88–117. Early theorizations w ­ ere advanced by Anna Freud, John Bowlby, Ernst Papanek, and Alfred and Françoise Brauner. On dealing with traumatized c­ hildren in postwar France, see Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France, 165–174. The link between trauma and Holocaust survivors was made in the 1960s; Arlene Stein, Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their C ­ hildren, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 13–37, 48–74. As Dagmar Herzog points out, ­there is a causal link between the Vietnam War and the emergence of

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PTSD; Herzog, Cold War Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 89–122. On changing child psychiatric practices in postwar French Jewish organ­izations and public structures, see Susan Gross Solomon, “Patient Dossiers and Clinical Practice in 1950s French Child Psychiatry,” Revue d’histoire de l’enfance “irrégulière,” 18 (2016): 275–296. 41. This commission seems to have been held with members of OSE and JDC staff. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of c­ hildren ­under the care of OSE, Reel 67, Commission de l’enfance du 2 Février, 1950. 42. Miss Meyer was an American JDC employee. Although she was well placed to know that the EJCA was a reputable organ­ization, she was also aware of the bud­getary constraints on the JDC at that moment; Faure, “Shaping ­Children’s Lives.” 43. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children ­u nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter from E. Masour to Charles Jordan, Feb. 9, 1950. 44. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of c­ hildren ­under the care of OSE, Reel 67, Extrait d’une letter de l’ADJC au sujet de l’Emigration aux USA des enfants Z. Lea, Rachel, no date. 45. Oral History Interview with Z. ­Sisters, New York, July 2015. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children ­under the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter from E. Masour to Mme Adania, AJDC, June 21, 1950, states that OSE does not know what had been determined between the u ­ ncle and the EJCA regarding the girls’ care in the United States. 46. Marcuse had studied po­liti­cal history, philosophy, and economics at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin and had obtained a diploma in social work before emigrating to the United States in 1921; Judy Tydor Baumel, Unfulfilled Promise: Rescue and Resettlement of Jewish Refugee ­Children in the United States, 1934–1945 (Juneau, AK: Denali Press, 1990), 51. Marcuse was extremely harsh in her assessment of French Jewish social work practices: “For some reason or other, the director of one of their institutions has become most personally attached to them. She happens to be a very well-­meaning and intelligent person, however with absolutely no social work training and a complete inability to make an objective plan for any of her pets. When she learned that the relatives could not be considered, she went about to solicit families about who she had heard from friends of hers.” FZS Papers, Lotte Marcuse to Belle Wolkomir (JCA of Essex Co), Dec. 26, 1950. 47. FZS Papers, Letter from Lotte Marcuse to Peggy Gunzburger, Feb. 1, 1951. Rachel and Lea felt the need to explain t­hese observations a­ fter reading the chapter. Rachel wrote, “Part of the reason why Lea was so upset upon leaving the boat when we arrived in Newark—­a fter traveling 10 days over the ocean—we had thrown up during the trip and we ­were very dehydrated, also Lea was very lonely for the friends that she had left ­behind in France; and, most of all, nobody spoke French when we got off the boat. Nobody understood us. This was besides the fact that we ­were not ­going to live with our Aunt and ­Uncle.” Email correspondence with author, Mar. 4, 2018. 48. Laura Hobson Faure, “Eu­ro­pean Expectations, American Realities. The Immigration of Jewish C ­ hildren from Occupied France to the United States, 1941–42,” in Gender, Families and Transmission in Con­temporary Jewish Context, ed. Martine Gross, Sophie Nizard, and Yann Scioldo-­Zürcher (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 143–157; Baumel, Unfulfilled Promise, 83–110. 49. FZS Papers, letter from Lotte Marcuse, “Z., Lea and Rachel.” For a comparison, see research by Antoine Bugard on the Canadian Jewish orphans proj­ect; Antoine Burgard, “ ‘Une nouvelle vie dans un nouveau pays’: Trajectoires d’orphelins de la Shoah vers le Canada (1947–52)” (PhD diss., Lumière Lyon 2/Université du Québec à Montréal, 2017). 50. “Alors maintenant nous somme [sic] dans une maison d’enfant mais sait [sic] très bien;” USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of c­ hildren ­under the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter from Lea and Rachel Z. to Mme Masour, Oct. 26, 1951. The ­children continued to send letters and cards for the Jewish New Year ­until 1954. 51. FZS Papers, Letter from Lotte Marcuse to Peggy Gunzburger, Jan. 3, 1951.

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52. Lotte Marcuse showed a more tempered, but nonetheless lukewarm attitude ­here: “­There is some positive value to child and to agency in the tie to, or the claim on a relative—­ sometime—­during the placement experience. We therefore cannot deny the potential value of any relatives which the c­ hildren have in this country. Since t­ hese c­ hildren have their only living relatives in the United States, we have de­cided to make e­ very conceivable effort to facilitate the admission of the ­children to the US.” FZS Papers, Letter from Lotte Marcuse to Peggy Gunzburger, Apr. 14, 1950. 53. FZS Papers, Letter from Lotte Marcuse to Belle Wolkomir, Jan. 26, 1951. 54. According to the s­ isters, this was due to the closure of their c­ hildren’s home, which became a parking lot. 55. Oral history interview, conducted by author with Lea and Rachel Z., NY, July 2015. 56. Oral history interview, conducted by author with Lea and Rachel Z., NY, July 2015. 57. Oral history interview, conducted by author with Lea and Rachel Z., NY, July 2015. 58. Oral history interview, conducted by author with Lea and Rachel Z., NY, July 2015. 59. Oral history interview, conducted by author with Lea and Rachel Z., NY, July 2015. She may be referring to the fact that even though the ­sisters lived in the same ­children’s homes, they did not live together in a nuclear ­family setting and ­were most likely in dif­ fer­ent age groups. 60. Oral history interview, conducted by author with Lea and Rachel Z., NY, July 2015. 61. Arlene Stein uses the term “post-­Holocaust memory workers.” Stein, Reluctant Witnesses, 133. 62. Compare Annette Wieviorka, L’ère du témoin (Paris: Pluriel, 2013) and Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) with Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence ­after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 63. Stein, Reluctant Witnesses, 90. 64. Stein, Reluctant Witnesses, 17. 65. Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: ­Children of the Holocaust. International Library of Group Psychotherapy and Group Pro­cess (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992), 26–47. 66. Email FZS to author, July 8, 2015. 67. She considers that she only had two placements, ­because she chose to go to the Girls Club, which was run by the Jewish Child Care Association. 68. Oral history interview, conducted by author with Lea and Rachel Z., NY, July 2015. 69. Oral history interview, conducted by author with Lea and Rachel Z., NY, July 2015. 70. Oral history interview, conducted by author with Lea and Rachel Z., NY, July 2015. 71. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of ­children u ­ nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter from Rachel Z. to Mlle Annelise, OSE, May 16, 1961. 72. FZS Papers, Written Account by Rachel. Published in Gold, ed., The Hidden Child Book Club Remembers, 25. 73. See http://­db​.­yadvashem​.­org​/­r ighteous​/­r ighteousName​.­html​?­language​= e­ n&itemId​ =­4022117 (accessed Oct. 13, 2018). 74. Kaddish is the prayer for the dead in Judaism. FZS Papers, Written Account by Rachel. Published in Gold, ed., The Hidden Child Book Club Remembers, 23. She places this visit in 1972, but Klarsfeld’s memorial book was published in 1978. 75. Rachel left the camera at the Paris airport by ­mistake, which she felt was most definitely a subconscious act; Oral history interview, conducted by author with Lea and Rachel Z., NY, July 2015. 76. Oral history interview, conducted by author with Lea and Rachel Z., NY, July 2015. 77. Oral history interview, conducted by author with Lea and Rachel Z., NY, July 2015. 78. Telephone conversation with Lea Z., Oct. 18, 2017. 79. USHMM, RG-43.113M, Selected Individual files of c­ hildren ­u nder the care of OSE, Reel 67, Letter from Lea Z. to Liliane in French; May 11, 1978.

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80. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1985). 81. Jonathan Boyarin, Jewish Families. Key Words in Jewish Studies 4 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013); Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Repre­sen­ta­tion of ­Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press,1995). 82. A Google search for “Holocaust Survivor Siblings” yields 334,000 results, most of which describe sibling reunions in the popu­lar press; search done on Feb. 23, 2018. 83. Beth Cohen argues that shattered families, if re­united, strug­gled with trauma and loss. Missing parents and surviving c­ hildren sit uneasily with new marriages and siblings, recasting the postwar years in a somber hue. Beth Cohen, “Starting Over,” in Sharon Kangisser Cohen et al., ­Children in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, 62–80.

chapter 6  —­  the impact of the american jewish joint distribution committee’s aid strategy on the lives of jewish families in hungary, 1945–1949 1. Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes: The Impact of American Jews on Post–­Holocaust Eu­ro­ pean Jewry (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989), xviii. 2. For Hungary, see Kinga Frojimovics, “Dif­fer­ent Interpretation of Reconstruction: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the World Jewish Congress in Hungary ­a fter the Holocaust,” in The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to their Countries of Origin ­after WWII, ed. Davis Bankier (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005), 277–292. For Romania, see Jean Ancel, “She’erit Hapleta in Romania during the Transition Period to a Communist Regime, August 1944—­December 1947,” in She’erit Hapleta, 1944–­1948, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), 156. 3. A Zsidó Világkongresszus Magyarországi Képviseletének 2. számú összefoglaló jelentése, 1946. július 1.—­október 31: 8. (Hungarian Jewish Archives [henceforth HJA], WJC XXXIII. 3. 1). 4. Az 1941. évi népszámlálás, vol. II. [The 1941 Census] (Budapest, 1976). 5. Zsigmond Pál Pach, “A magyarországi zsidóság mai statisztikájának szembetűnő jelenségei,” in Sheerit Jisrael—­Maradék-­zsidóság, ed. Benoschofsky Imre (Budapest, 1947), 22–32. 6. In 1946, the Jewish population of Budapest represented 67% of Hungarian Jewry. Zsidó Világkongresszus Magyarországi Képviselete és az Amerikai Joint Distribution Committee Statisztikai Osztályának Közleményei 10 (1948): 3–4. 7. For demographic and occupational data of the Jewish population in Budapest, see ­Victor Karady, “Post-­Holocaust Hungarian Jewry, 1945–48: Class Structure, Re-­Stratification and Potential Social Mobility,” in Jews and Other Ethnic Groups in a Multi-­Ethnic World, ed. Ezra Mendelssohn (Oxford University Press, 1987), 147–160. 8. Kinga Frojimovics and Éva Kovács, “Jews in a ‘Judenrein’ City: Hungarian Jewish Slave Laborers in Vienna (1944–1945),” Hungarian Historical Review 4, no. 3 (2015): 705–736. 9. József Schindler, “A vidéki zsidóság kormegoszlása,” Vidéki Rabbikar Körlevele 2 (1955): 180–184. 10. Mária Ember, El a faluból (Budapest, 2002), 20. 11. Ember, El a faluból, 32–33. 12. Péter Kertész, interview by Balázs Mészáros, 2004. http://­w ww​.­centropa​.­org ​/­hu​ /­bio​graphy​/­kertesz​-­peter (accessed May 14, 2017). 13. Ágnes Gergely, Két szimpla a Kedvesben. Memoár (Budapest, 2014), 67. 14. Pach, “A magyarországi zsidóság mai statisztikájának szembetűnő jelenségei,” 30. The official census of 1941 registered 72,018 Jewish ­children ­under the age of 16. 15. Zsidó Világkongresszus Magyarországi Képviselete és az Amerikai Joint Distribution Committee Statisztikai Osztályának Közleményei 11 (1948): 5.

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16. HJA, Joint XXXIII. 4. a. 5, 30. 17. Leon Shapiro, “Jewish C ­ hildren in Liberated Eu­rope: Their Needs and the JDC Child Care Work,” American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Research Department Reports 1 (January, 1946): 11. The same source gives data on the f­amily status of c­ hildren in the homes of Budapest: 18% had lost both parents, 68% ­were half-­orphans, and the remaining 14% had survived together with both parents. 18. HJA, Joint XXXIII. 4. a. 1, 1. 19. On educational inequalities and denominations, see the publications of Victor Karády; for example, “Jewish Over-­Schooling Revisited: The Case of Hungarian Secondary Education in the Old Regime (1900–1941),” Yearbook of the Jewish Studies Programme, 1998/1999 (Budapest: Central Eu­ro­pean University, 2000), 75–91. 20. Zsidó Világkongresszus Magyarországi Képviselete és az Amerikai Joint Distribution Committee Statisztikai Osztályának Közleményei 8–9 (1948): 16. 21. István Kulcsár, “A maradék zsidóság lelki keresztmetszete 1946-­ban,” in Sheerit Jisrael—­Maradék-­zsidóság, 36. 22. Kulcsár, “A maradék zsidóság lelki keresztmetszete 1946-­ban,” 37. 23. Imre Heller, “Zsidó exisztenciák kérdése,” in Sheerit Jisrael—­Maradék-­zsidóság, 58. 24. In May 1946, the department supported a total of 119 agricultural and 60 industrial production facilities, with a total workforce of 5,228. Cf. Kinga Frojimovics, Szétszakadt történelem: Zsidó vallási irányzatok Magyarországon, 1868–­1950 (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2008), 388. 25. As mentioned ­earlier, in May 1946 a total of 3,734 Jewish ­children received daily care from all institutions supported by the JDC. Th ­ ere ­were 420 ­children in institutions run by Jewish communities and 3,314 ­children in institutions run by Zionist organ­izations: Dror 200, Maccabi hatzair 270, Hanoar hazioni 222, Habonim 142, Dror—­Habonim—­Maccabi in cooperation 350, Ichud 37, Shomer 682, Bnei Akiva 705, Agudat Jisrael 706. (HJA, Joint XXXIII. 4. a. 5, 30.) On Zionist organ­izations, see Attila Novák, Átmenetben. A cionista mozgalom négy éve Magyarországon (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2000). 26. Vidor Pálné, “Zerá kódes,” in Sheerit Jisrael—­Maradék-­zsidóság. 88. 27. Géza Varsányi (ed.), Szociális segítőmunka a gyermek-­és ifjúságvédelem terén (Budapest, 1936), 63. 28. HJA, Joint XXXIII. 4. a. 5. 30. (July 25, 1945), 3. 29. HJA, Joint XXXIII. 4. a. 5. 30. (July 25, 1945), 3–4. 30. HJA, Joint XXXIII. 4. a. 5. 30. (July 25, 1945), 8. 31. HJA, Joint XXXIII. 4. a. 5. 30. (July 25, 1945), 9. 32. Among o ­ thers, we can mention h ­ ere Sándor Groszmann, the secretary of JDC in Budapest. Cf. David Gur, ­Brothers for Re­sis­tance and Rescue: The Under­ground Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary during World War II (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2007). 33. Hungarian Communist leaders—­u nder Soviet pressure—­t urned against the Zionist movement in 1948. By early 1949 all Zionist organ­izations had to cease functioning. 34. On the influence of the Communist Party, see László Svéd, “A Magyar zsidóság és a hatalom, 1945–1955,” Múltunk, 38, nos. 2–3 (1993): 248–302; Róbert Győri Szabó, A kommunista párt és a zsidóság Magyarországon, 1945–1956 (Budapest, 1997). 35. Frojimovics, Szétszakadt történelem, 389. 36. On postwar Western Eu­ro­pean “individualism,” see Tara Zahra, “Lost C ­ hildren: Displacement, ­Family, and Nation on Postwar Eu­rope,” Journal of Modern History 81, no. 1 (2009): 45–86. 37. On Gábor Sztehlo (1909–1974) and his c­ hildren’s home, see Charles Fenyvesi, When Angels Fooled the World: Rescuers of Jews in War­time Hungary (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), chap. 5. 38. Hrabovszkyné Révész Margit, “Háborúsújtotta gyermekek,” Köznevelés 22 (1948): 556. 39. “Otthont a deportálásból visszanemtértek gyerekeinek,” Új Élet, Jan. 14, 1946, 4.

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40. In France, however, according to the 1945 figures, more Jewish c­ hildren ­were living with foster parents (2,873) than in residential homes (2,026). Cf. Shapiro, “Jewish C ­ hildren in Liberated Eu­rope,” 7, t­ able V. 41. “Érdekes akció az elhagyott öregek elhelyezése érdekében,” Új Élet, May 22, 1947, 14. 42. Bauer, Out of the Ashes, xviii. 43. The Year of Survival. 1946 Annual Report: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (New York: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1947), 7. 44. For differences in costs, see the JDC data from France: “the cost of full maintenance of a child in an institution averaged about 4,000 francs (about $33) per month. . . . ​The expenditures for ­children placed with families vary from 1,000 to 1,200 francs (about $8.50 to $10) per month.” Shapiro, “Jewish C ­ hildren in Liberated Eu­rope,” 8. 45. “Joint 1947—­Dr. Görög Frigyes sajtótájékoztatója,” Új Élet, March 6, 1947, 2. 46. Frojimovics, Szétszakadt történelem, 391. 47. HJA, Joint XXXIII. 4. a. 5.—­Florence S. Jacobson’s Report on February—­November 1948, 20–21. One of the thirteen homes was a temporary home for c­ hildren and teen­agers. According to the sources, dismantling the network of residential c­ hildren’s homes did not have the same effect as in France, where the former care recipients found themselves “on the street.” Cf. Laura Hobson Faure, “Shaping ­Children’s Lives: American Jewish Aid in Post-­World War II France (1944–1948),” in The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities, ed. Zwi Jonathan Kaplan and Nadia Malinovich (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 186–189. 48. Israel Gaynor Jacobson (1912–1999) previously worked in Italy, Greece, and Czecho­ slo­va­k ia as a local JDC representative. From 1945–1946, he was also a supporter of the traditional aid-­providing program in Greece. On his activities in Greece, see Katherina Elizabeth Fleming, Greece—­A Jewish History (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2008), 166–189. 49. Frojimovics, Szétszakadt történelem, 382. 50. Bauer, Out of the Ashes, 145–146. 51. Péter Kertész, interview by Balázs Mészáros, 2004. http://­w ww​.­centropa​.­org ​/­hu​ /­biography​/k­ ertesz​-p ­ eter (accessed May 14, 2017).

chapter 7  —­  “for your benefit” 1. Sydney Drapkin to Jack Eisen, letter, Jan. 18, 1945, CJC War Efforts DA 18, Box 23, file 7, Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives (formerly known as the Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee National Archives; hereafter cited as CJHN); also see Eisen to Drapkin, letter, Jan. 24, 1945 letter, CJC War Efforts DA 18, Box 23, file 7, CJHN. 2. Eisen to Drapkin, letter, Jan. 24, 1945. 3. See, for example, “David  P. Boder Interviews Eda Button (August  5, 1946; Paris, France),” http://­voices​.­iit​.­edu​/i­ nterview​?­doc​=­buttonE&display​=­buttonE​_­en. 4. Drapkin to Eisen, letter, June 10, 1945, War Efforts DA 18, Box 23, file 7, CJHN. 5. Eisen to Drapkin, letter, June 12, 1945, War Efforts DA 18, Box 23, file 7, CJHN. 6. Drapkin to Eisen, letter, Oct. 30, 1945, War Efforts DA 18, Box 23, file 7, CJHN. 7. Transcript of Interview of Lala Fishman by Robin Judd (Mar. 12, 2009, Skokie, IL). Also see Lala Fishman and Steven Weingartner, Lala’s Story: A Memoir of the Holocaust (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). 8. See, for example, Andrea Friedman, Citizenship in Cold War Amer­i­ca: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2014); Giora Goodman, “ ‘Only the Best British Brides’: Regulating the Relationship between US Ser­v icemen and British ­Women in the Early Cold War,” Con­temporary Eu­ro­ pean History 17, no. 4 (2008): 483–503; Sonya O. Rose, “Girls and GIs: Race, Sex, and Diplomacy in Second World War Britain,” International History Review 19, no. 1 (1997): 146–160; Philip Wolgin, and Irene Bloemraad, “ ‘Our Gratitude to Our Soldiers’: Military Spouses, ­Family Re-­Unification, and Postwar Immigration Reform,” Journal of Interdisciplinary

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History XLI, no. I (Summer 2010): 27–60; and Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth ­Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010). 9. The nonfraternization policies sought to address ­t hese and other concerns. Although not all fraternization policies or activities explic­itly concerned sexual interactions or heterosexual relationships, the regulations and their implementation ­ were consistently framed in gendered ways. See, for example, Bob Moore, “Illicit Encounters: Female Civilian Fraternization with Axis Prisoners of War in Second World War Britain,” Journal of Con­temporary History 48, no. 4 (2013): 742–760; and Rose, “Girls and GIs.” 10. Landon to Chief of Staff, HQ, Letter, Dec. 18, 1942, Rec­ords of Headquarters, Eu­ro­ pean Theater of Operations, AG 291.1 Marriage Reports, Box 53, Rec­ord Group (hereafter RG) 498, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD (hereafter, referred to as NACP). Also see Barbara  G. Friedman, From the Battlefront to the Bridal Suite: Media Coverage of British War Brides, 1942–1946 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007). 11. A 1943 report, for example, revealed that of the five officers who had requested permission to marry in 1942, four had fiancés who ­were pregnant. Similarly, of the 111 enlisted men, 66 ­were requesting permission to marry ­women who ­were pregnant or who had recently given birth. May 4, 1943, G-1 Report about Marriage, Rec­ords of Headquarters, Eu­ro­pean Theater of Operations, AG 291.1, Box 53, RG 498, NACP. 12. This narrative unfolded alongside the delineation of other policies concerning marriage and citizenship that similarly promoted a par­tic­u ­lar vision of the f­amily and the military; ­t hese policies addressed ­whether POWs currently interned in their countries could marry local w ­ omen, w ­ hether religious ceremonies conducted abroad would be valid at home, and ­whether fiancés of naturalized or current citizens should be exempted from immigration laws. On POWS see Memo Issued by Col­o­nel  A.  M. Tollefson, Assistant Director, Prisoner of War Division, Aug. 29, 1944, AG 291.1, Marriages Box 198 (Volume IV), RG 247, NACP. On ceremonies abroad see, Alvie L. McKnight (Chaplain USA assistant), Letter, July 21, 1945, AG 291.1, in Marriages box 198 (Volume V), RG 247, NACP. 13. Directive of R. A. Elliot Jr. to all Commander Officers, Aug. 19, 1944, AG 291.1, Marriages Box 198 (Volume IV), RG 247, NACP. 14. Out­going Restricted Message, Control Commission for Germany British Ele­ment to CONFOLK, Aug.  26, 1946, Policy for Non Fraternisation, FO 1032/1367, National Archives, Public Rec­ords Office, Kew (hereafter TNA PRO). 15. S. Gershon Levi, Certificate, Nov. 3, 1944, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 6, File 6, CJHN. 16. Thus, U.S. commanders could not approve marriages of “persons of Asiatic or East Indian descent.” Moreover, b ­ ecause several states did not recognize the marriage contracts between p ­ eople of dif­fer­ent races, the U.S. military discouraged its commanders from permitting such marriages. May 22, 1944, from AG to Commanding Generals Theaters of Operations, Headquarters of Eu­ro­pean Theater of Operations United States Army (World War II), AG 291.1, Box 31, RG 498, NACP; also see Dec. 15, 1943, letter from George  R. Merrell to Mark  A. Tomas, Director, ARC, China/Burma/India Command, File 618.4, RG 200, NACP. 17. May  22, 1944, letter from AG to Commanding Generals Theaters of Operations, Headquarters of Eu­ro­pean Theater of Operations United States Army (World War II), AG 291.1, Box 31, RG 498, NACP. 18. May 26, 1944, letter to Theater Commander, ETO, from B. Rogers, Brigadier General, USA Commanding, Headquarters of Eu­ro­pean Theater of Operations United States Army (World War II), AG 291.1 Box 31, RG 498, NACP. 19. Minutes of the Conference of Jewish Chaplains, Jan. 2 and 3, 1944, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 5, File 18, CJHN. Some brides underwent a third screening at the point of entry. 20. Minutes of the Conference of Jewish Chaplains; Apr. 16, 1945, Message EURD 1157 from ATC, London, to AG, Rec­ords of Headquarters, Eu­ro­pean Theater of Operations,

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AG 291.1, Box 31, RG 498, NACP; M. Berman (Se­nior Jewish chaplain) to IB Rose, Letter, May 13, 1945, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 5, File 10, CJHN. 21. May 18, 1943, Letter from Archbishop of Canterbury, Rec­ords of Headquarters, Eu­ro­ pean Theater of Operations, AG 291.1, Box 53, RG 498, NACP; Doris Bushnell, Chief Correspondence Unit Home Ser­vice (American Red Cross), Letter, June 13, 1944, Marriages, File 618.31, Box 200, NACP; Zaltzman to Christmas, Letter, Sept. 20, 1944, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 6, File 6, CJHN. 22. Directive of R. A. Elliot Jr. to all Commander Officers, Aug. 19, 1944, AG 291.1, Marriages Box 198 (Volume IV), RG 247, NACP. For a recent examination of the U.S. chaplaincy’s involvement in the private spheres of home and ­family, see Ronit Y. Stahl, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy ­Shaped Religion and State in Modern Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 106–133. 23. Bertram Klausner, Monthly Report, June 1945, I-337 Rec­ords of the National Jewish Welfare Board, Subgroup III, Veterans Affairs, undated, 1917–1985 (bulk 1940–1978), Series B, National Jewish Welfare Board Veterans Affairs Commission on Jewish Chaplains, Chaplains Files, Box 71, folder 25, American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS). 24. Meyer J. Goldman, Monthly Report, Aug. 1945, I-337, Subgroup III, Series B, Box 62, Folder 7, AJHS; Hirsch Freund, Monthly Report, Sept. 1945 (submitted on 5 Nov. 1945), I-337, Subgroup III, Series B, Box 57, Folder 42, AJHS; Hirsch  E.L. Freund, Monthly Report, July 1945 (submitted on Nov. 5, 1945), I-337, Subgroup III, Series B, Box 57, Folder 42, AJHS; Hermann Dicker, Monthly Report, Feb. 1945, I-337, Subgroup III, Series B, Box 52, Folder 29, AJHS. 25. 25 Nov.  1944 Memo (confidential) to Commanding General, Eu­ro­pean Theater of Operations, US Army from HH Newman, Col­o­nel, AGD, Acting Adjutant General, Headquarters of Eu­ro­pean Theater of Operations United States Army (World War II), AG 291.1, Box 31, RG 498, NACP. 26. Procedure to Facilitate the Marriage of Certain Persons in Germany by Command of General Eisenhower, Oct. 12, 1945, AG 291.1, Marriages Box 198 (Volume VI), RG 247, NACP. 27. Nov.  25, 1944, Memo (confidential) to Commanding General, Eu­ro­pean Theater of Operations, US Army from HH Newman, Col­o­nel, AGD, Acting Adjutant General, Headquarters of Eu­ro­pean Theater of Operations United States Army (World War II), AG 291.1, Box 31, RG 498, NACP; Dec. 1944 Draft of the Military Government (Germany) Concerning Marriages with Members of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, Headquarters of Eu­ro­pean Theater of Operations United States Army (World War II), AG 291.1, Box 31, RG 498, NACP; “A Directive for the Use of CDN Chaplains Stationed in Northwest Eu­rope,” Feb. 21, 1945, DA 18, Box 5, File 10, CJHN; “Austria GIs May Ask to Marry Frauleins,” Stars and Stripes, Jan. 4, 1946, p. 2. 28. Gerda Weissman to Kurt Klein, letter, 30 Oct. 1945 in Gerda Weissmann Klein and Kurt Klein, eds., The Hours A ­ fter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 119–120. 29. Daniel Isaacman to his parents, V mail, June 8, 1945, Box 2, Folder 6, 50/173, Daniel Isaac­man Collection, University of Pennsylvania Archives (hereafter cited as UPA). 30. 1945–1948 Identification Papers, Series 1 Identification Papers, Morris and Lala Fishman Papers, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives. 31. Klein and Klein, The Hours A ­ fter, 72. 32. Interview of Morton (Mort) Horvitz, Conducted by Jeff Krulik, National Jewish Military Museum (NJMM). 33. Honigman cited in a memo from Chaplain Cass to Captain Weintraub, Oct. 19, 1945, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 5, File 10, CJHN. 34. J. Eisen to Abe Bonder, Letter, Oct. 16, 1945, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 2, File 5a, CJHN; also see J. Eisen to Charlie Appel, Letter, July 27, 1945, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 23, File 4. CJHN.

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35. 25 Nov. 1944 memo (confidential); December 1944 draft of the Military Government—­ Germany concerning marriages with members of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. 36. Anna Bergman interview, conducted by Lyn Smith, cata­log number 26752, 2004-0502, Imperial War Museum (IWM). 37. John W. Parfitt to the American Consul (Germany), Letter, June 7, 1946, MS-239 Charles Strull Papers, Box 6, Folder 5, Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (AJA); also see John W. Parfitt, Affidavit of Support, June 7, 1946, MS-239, Box 6, Folder 5, AJA. 38. See, for example, the discussion in Kateřina Čapková and David Rechter, “Germans or Jews? German-­Speaking Jews in Post-­War Eu­rope: An Introduction,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 62, 1 (Nov. 1 2017): 69–74. 39. Parfitt, Letter, June 7, 1946. 40. Certificate of Approval for Private Schwab, July 20, 1944, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 6, File 6, CJHN. 41. Certificate of Approval for Private R ­ ifle, June 14, 1944, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 6, File 6. CJHN. 42. See, for example, “Ceremonies—­Marriages,” in The Chaplain TM 16-205 War Department Technical Manual (July 5, 1944), pp. 37–38, Herbert A. Friedman 763, Series A, Box 1/3, AJA. 43. Manuel M. Poliakoff, Monthly Report, November 1945, I-337, Subgroup III, Series B, Box 90, Folder 4, AJHS. 44. “Weddings in Heidelberg,” Center Courier 1, no.  2 (March  1946), P68-­XI, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish ­People, Jerusalem (CAHJP). 45. “JWB Synagogue Center Opened,” Center Courier 1, no.  1 (February  1946), P68-­XI, CAHJP. 46. Bellak, Marriage Application, Oct.  31, 1945, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 5, File 10, CJHN. 47. Nor would he be the officiant. Bellak, Marriage Application, Oct. 31, 1945; Isaac Rose, Response to Marriage Application, 31 Oct.  1945, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 5, File 10, CJHN; also see Aikins, Marriage Application (reviewed by Chaplain Gershon Levi), Feb. 7, 1944, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 6, File 6, CJHN. 48. Joseph Freedman to Rabbi Philip Bern­stein, Letter, July  1, 1944, I-337, Subgroup III, Series B, Box 57, Folder 42, AJHS. 49. Division of Religious Activities (National Jewish Welfare Board), Responsa in War Time (New York: National Jewish Welfare Board, 1947), 22–25. See Eugene Lipp­mann, Monthly Report, Jan. 1945, I 337, Subgroup III, Series B, Box 82, Folder 3, AJHS; Harold Saperstein to his wife, Letter, Mar.15,1945, Harold I Saperstein MSS, Col No. 718, Box 8/12, AJA. 50. Philip Pincus, Monthly Report, Nov.  1949, I-337 Subgroup III, Series B, Box 89, Folder 20, AJHS. 51. Mayer Abramowitz, “View from 82: Intermarriage in Berlin . . . ​The Fraulein Kind,” http://­w ww​.j­ ewishfederations​.­org​/­page​.­aspx​?­id​=­30924. 52. “Rabbi Chaplain in Berlin Withholds Sanction of Jewish-­German Marriages,” The Oregonian, Feb. 27, 1947, p. 2. 53. Minutes of the 2–3 Jan. 1944 Conference of Jewish Chaplains, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 5, File 18, CJHN. 54. Max Eisler to J. Eisen, Letter, Apr. 5, 1945, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 23, File 8, CJHN; Eisen, Response to Eisler, Apr. 1945, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 23, File 8, CJHN. 55. Responsa in War Time, 29–30. 56. Responsa in War Time, 26. 57. Committee on Army and Navy Religious Activities (CANRA), Responsa on Marriage Ceremony: Friday night, MSS 675, Box 13, File 11, AJA.

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58. Kritzer, Application for Marriage, Mar. 5, 1944, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 6, File 6, CJHN; S. Gershon Levi, Review of Kritzer’s Application to Marry, March 1944, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 6, File 6, CJHN; Rev. A. Susman, Manchester, Marriage Authorization Query, July 1944, ACC 2805/6 Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie, Box 6, File 1, Document 142, London Metropolitan Archive (LMA); I B Rose to A Wolfson, Letter, July 10, 1945, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 5, File 10, CJHN. 59. S Gershon Levi, Permission to Marry (Levine Percy), Jan. 25, 1945, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 6, File 6, CJHN; also see S. Gershon Levi, Permission to Marry (Baron), Apr. 13, 1944, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 6, File 6. CJHN; S. Gershon Levi, Permission to Marry (Goodman), Mar. 10, 1944, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 6, File 6, CJHN. 60. M. Berman to IB Rose, Letter, May 13, 1945, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 5, File 10, CJHN. 61. J. Eisen to Ralph Charad, Letter, Feb. 16, 1945, CJC War Efforts -­DA 18, Box 23, File 6a, CJHN. 62. Interview of Morton (Mort) Horvitz, p. 26. 63. Committee on Army and Navy Religious Activities (CANRA), Responsa on Marriage, MSS 675, 13/11, AJA; Committee on Army and Navy Religious Activities, Minutes, July 13, 1944, I-180, Rec­ords of the National Jewish Welfare Board, Army-­Navy Division, AJHS; also see Aryeh Lev to Morris Kertzer, Letter, Apr. 18, 1944, MSS Col No. 709 (Morris Kertzer), Box 12, File 2, AJA. 64. Transcript of Interview of Bella Lewkowicz Ostroff and Roy Ostroff, Conducted by Robin Judd (Mar. 16, 2009). Also see Phil Cohen to J. Eisen, Letter, July 27, 1944, CJC War Efforts, DA 18, Box 23, File 6b, CJHN. 65. Transcript of Interview of Judith Summer, Conducted by Robin Judd (June 23, 2008). 66. Minutes of a Conference of Jewish Chaplains, Jan. 2 and 3, 1944. 67. Transcript of Interview of Lydia Servetnick, Conducted by Robin Judd (Jan. 30, 2009). 68. The View from 82: A Wedding in Berlin, http://­w ww​.­ujc​.­org​/­page​.­aspx​?­id​=­38547. 69. Jan. 24, 1945, Letter from Eisen to Drapkin.

chapter 8  —­  “return to normality?” 1. Although the number of scholarly studies of the Nazi persecution of Sinti and Roma has increased in the last twenty years, more research still remains to be done. For instance, the role of the churches in the persecution and annihilation of Sinti and Roma awaits proper study. In this regard, in 2017 the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma published an expert opinion listing core research objectives (http://­zentralrat​.­sintiundroma​.­de​ /­g utachten​-­z um​-­forschungsstand​-­protestantismus​-­u nd​-­a ntiziganismus​/­). A good overview of the historiography can be found in Alexandra Bartels et  al., “Versuch einer Biblio­graphie,” in Antiziga­nistische Zustände, 2nd ed., ed. Alexandra Bartels et al. (Berlin: Unrast Verlag, 2013), also available ­here: https://­w ww​.­unrast​-­verlag​.­de​/­images​/­stories​ /­v irtuemart​/­product​/­978​-­3​-­89771​-­518​-­9​_­bibliografie​.­pdf. 2. The first work on the Nazi persecution of Sinti and Roma to be published in En­glish is Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, The Destiny of Eu­rope’s Gypsies (London: Heinemann Educational for Sussex University Press, 1972). A German edition was published in 1981 by the Society for Threatened ­Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, GfbV). 3. Yehuda Bauer, who is still of key importance to this debate, has supported the argument that “gypsies ­were not murdered for racial reasons, but as so-­called asocials . . . ​nor was their destruction complete.” For a detailed critique see Ian Hancock, Danger! Educated Gypsy: Selected Essays (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010), 238. 4. Tilmann Zülch, ed., In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute verfolgt (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1979). 5. This includes the (semi) public debates, as well as state and official documents, which are used as a reference and a basis for argumentation; they intentionally or unwittingly reproduce prejudices.

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6. An example is a prejudiced study by Guenther Lewy, in which he describes members of the minority in collective terms, sometimes romanticizing them in an antigypsyist manner and even attempting to justify their persecution by recourse to their alleged nature. On the basis of this apol­o­getic impulse—in view of the singularity of the Shoah— in his concluding remarks Lewy goes so far as to cast doubt on the very existence of a Nazi policy of destruction of Sinti and Roma and a denial of the Holocaust of Roma. See Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)​. In 2017 Romani scholars created a forum, Critical Romani Studies, and started a journal (https://­crs​.­ceu​.­edu​/­index​.­php​/­crs​/­i ndex). The journal actively solicits papers from critically minded young Romani scholars, many of whom have experienced significant barriers in engaging with the production of academic knowledge. At the time that Levy’s book was published, Romani scholars ­were still scattered and marginalized in the academic discourse. Better organ­ization and an audible voice in the academic field ­were only attained in recent years. One of the objectives of Romani scholars is to set up their own collections and archives, such as the Holocaust section, “Voices of the Victims,” at the RomArchive: https://­blog​.­romarchive​.­eu​/­​?­page​_­id​=7­ 978. 7. Luise Rinser, Wer wirft den Stein? Zigeuner sein in Deutschland. Eine Anklage (Berlin: Weitbrecht Verlag, 1987); Romani Rose, Bürgerrechte für Sinti und Roma—­Das Buch zum Rassismus in Deutschland (Heidelberg: Schriftenreihe des Zentralrats, 1987). 8. Only recent studies discuss Romani DPs: Ari Joskowicz, “Romani Refugees and the Postwar order,” Journal of Con­temporary History 51, no.  4 (2016): 760–787. Anna Szasz, “Do you recognize us?” in Konzentrationslager Studien zur Geschichte des NS-­Terrors—­ Repatriierung in Europa 1945, ed. Insa Eschebach et al. (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2016). 9. Many Romani survivors left shortly a­ fter the camps ­were liberated out of fear to be registered again. Unlike Jewish DPs Sinti and Roma w ­ ere not registered systematically and supranationally. See: Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2007). 10. Donald Kenrick, Sinti und Roma: Die Vernichtung eines Volkes im NS-­Staat (Göttingen: Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Völker, Reihe Pogrom, 1981), 140–141. 11. Heike Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit: Auswirkungen nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung auf deutsche Sinti (New York: Campus Verlag, 2001). 12. In this essay, I draw on the following published accounts: Otto Rosenberg and Ulrich Enzensberger, Das Brennglas (München: Droemer Knaur, 2002); Ewald Hanstein and Ralf Lorenzen, Meine hundert Leben. Erinnerungen eines deutschen Sinto (Bremen: Donat, 2005); Latscho Tschawo, Die Befreiung des Latscho Tschawo. Ein Sinto-­Leben in Deutschland (Bornheim-­Merten: Lamuv Verlag GmbH, 1984); Anja Tuckermann, Denk nicht, wir bleiben hier! Die Lebensgeschichte des Sinto Hugo Höllenreiner (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2005); Lolo Reinhardt, Märza Winter, and Monika Döppert, Überwintern. Jugenderinnerungen eines schwäbischen Zigeuners (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1999); Daweli Reinhardt and Joachim Hennig, Hundert Jahre Musik der Reinhardts. Daweli erzählt sein Leben (Koblenz: Fölbach, 2003). Also, the following online digital accounts have been used: Oskar Böhmer, “Erinnerungsbericht” https://­drive​.­google​.­com​/­fi le​/­d​/­0B7X49rNMWgYDMWFRTVZ0a3​ NjTGs​/­edit (accessed August 21, 2017); and the history of persecution by Regine Böhmer and Lotte Braun: http://­w ww​.­deathcamps​.o ­ rg​/­belzec​/r­ omaregineb​_­de​.­html (accessed August 21, 2017). Furthermore, I have consulted biographical interviews from the 1960s and 1970s conducted by Reimar Gilsenbach with Sinti in the GDR. T ­ oday, the written estate of Reimar Gilsenbach is preserved in the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma (DokuZ) in Heidelberg. The interviews are from the following collection: Reimar Gilsenbach, NGO 4. 13. Accounts are found in Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit; Josef Behringer and Adam Strauss, Flucht, Internierung, Deportation, Vernichtung: Hessische Sinti und Roma berichten über ihre Verfolgung während des Nationalsozialismus (Seeheim: I-­Verb, 2005);

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Michail Krausnick, “Da wollten wir frei sein!” Eine Sinti-­Familie erzählt (Weinheim: Beltz, 1993); Christa Stolle, “Geschwüre am makellosen deutschen Volkskörper” “Zur Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Sinti und Roma: Erlebnisse zweier Sintizza, in Sinti und Roma und wir: Ausgrenzung, Internierung und Verfolgung einer Minderheit, ed. Ulrich Hägele (Tübingen: Universitätsstadt Tübingen, 1998), 132–148; Silvia Wolf and Jacques Delfeld, Überleben—­das war für uns nicht vorgesehn! (Verband Deutscher Sinti und Roma, Landesverband Rheinland-­Pfalz, 2012); and Ludwig Eiber, Eva Strauss, and Michail Krausnick, “Ich wusste es wird schlimm”: Die Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma in München 1933–1945 (Munich: Buchendorfer Verlag, 1993). Most of t­ hese interviews w ­ ere conducted to preserve the memories of Sinti and Roma survivors in the context of regional research on their persecution. 14. It is an overall finding; the questions I would have had ­were not answered or posted by the interviewer. See for example n. 74. 15. Pierre Bourdieu, Praktische Vernunft. Zur Theorie des Handels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), 76. The statements are therefore not an exact copy of historical events but their reflection: they show how certain situations w ­ ere perceived and assessed. 16. Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 92. 17. Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 93. 18. Sinti and Roma arrived in Bełżec, having been deported from Czecho­slo­va­k ia, Poland, and Germany as early as May 1940. They ­were forced to construct a ­labor camp, to which thousands of Polish Jews would l­ater be deported. The ­labor camp was “closed” in October 1940. However, the Bełżec death camp was l­ ater built on a nearby clearing. 19. Regine Böhmer and Lotte Braun, http://­w ww​.­deathcamps​.­org​/ ­belzec​/­romaregineb​ _­de​.­html (accessed Aug. 21, 2017). 20. Lily van Angeren-­Franz and Henny Clemens, “Polizeilich zwangsentführt”: Das Leben der Sintizza Lily van Angeren-­Franz, ed. Hans Schmid (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 2004), 105. Ewald Hanstein and Ralf Lorenzen, Meine hundert Leben: Erinnerungen eines deutschen Sinto (Bremen: Donat, 2005), 78. Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 97. 21. Rosenberg, Brennglas (Munich: Knaur, 2002), 116. 22. Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 96. 23. Leo Eitinger, Die Jahre danach: Folgen und Spätfolgen der KZ-­Haft, in Überleben und Spätfolgen, ed. Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel (Dachau: Dachauer Hefte, no. 8, 1992), 3–17, ­here 3. 24. Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 101. 25. Behringer and Strauss, Flucht, Internierung, Deportation, Vernichtung, 158. 26. Fischer and Riedesser define trauma as “a vital discrepancy between threatening situational f­ actors and the individual possibilities of coping with feelings of helplessness and defenseless disclosure, thus causing a lasting shattering of self-­and world-­ understanding.” See Gottfried Fischer and Peter Riedesser, Lehrbuch der Psychotraumatologie (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, 1998), 79. 27. Hanstein and Lorenzen, Meine hundert Leben, 78. 28. Atina Grossmann, Juden, Deutsche, Alliierte: Begegnungen im besetzten Deutschland, trans. Ulrike Bischoff (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012), 28. 29. Johannes-­Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-­Newth, Beyond Camps and Forced L ­ abor: Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution: Proceedings of the First International Multidisciplinary Conference at the Imperial War Museum (Osnabrück: Secolo-­Verlag, 2005), 11–14. In addition, UNRRA and the military government set up housing, provided the DPs with food, and or­ga­nized a tracing ser­v ice for relatives. See Grossmann, Juden, Deutsche, Alliierte, 214–215. 30. Reinhard Florian, Jana Mechelhoff-­Herezi, and Uwe Neumärker, Ich wollte nach Hause, nach Ostpreussen! Das Überleben eines deutschen Sinto (Berlin: Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, 2012), 72–73.

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31. Nor are t­here any data or statistics on the number of Sinti and Roma in Germany a­ fter 1945. See Gabi Meyer, Offizielles Erinnern und die Situation der Sinti und Roma in Deutschland: Der nationalsozialistische Völkermord in den parlamentarischen Debatten des Deutschen Bundestages (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2013) 119. See also Anja Reuss, Kontinuitäten der Stigmatisierung: Sinti und Roma in der deutschen Nachkriegszeit (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2015), 69 ff. 32. Mechthild Brand, Unsere Nachbarn: Zigeuner, Sinti, Roma—­Lebensbedingungen einer Minderheit in Hamm (Essen: Klartext, 2007), 123. 33. Daniel Strauß, “da muß man wahrhaft alle Humanität ausschalten . . . ​ˮ Zur Nachkriegsgeschichte der Sinti und Roma in Deutschland, in “Zwischen Romantisierung und Rassismus,ˮ Sinti und Roma –600 Jahre in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1998), 27. 34. Anja Tuckermann, Denk nicht, wir bleiben hier! Die Lebensgeschichte des Sinto Hugo Höllenreiner (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2005), 225. 35. For instance, the Czech and Slovenian Lalleri (Romani group) did not want to return. See Brand, Unsere Nachbarn, 130ff. 36. Brand, Unsere Nachbarn, 226–227. 37. Gilsenbach, NGO 4 (DokuZ). Interview with Anita Strauß, 1969. Hanstein, and Lorenzen, Meine hundert Leben, 84. Tuckermann, Lebensgeschichte, 226 ff. 38. Interview with T. H. Sch, 50. Quoted in Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 95. 39. Gilsenbach, NGO 4 (DokuZ). Interview with Marie Laubinger. 40. Tuckermann, Lebensgeschichte, 230 ff. 41. Tuckermann, Lebensgeschichte, 236. 42. Krimhilde Malinowski and Norbert Aas, Das Schweigen wird gebrochen. Erinnerungen einer Sintezza an den Nationalsozialismus (Bayreuth: Schriftenreihe des Verbands Deutscher Sinti und Roma Bayern, 2003), 76. 43. Malinowski, Schweigen, 76. 44. Tuckermann, Lebensgeschichte, 236. 45. Behringer and Strauss, Flucht, Internierung, Deportation, Vernichtung, 138. 46. Böhmer, Erinnerungsbericht, http://­w ww1​.­uni​-­hamburg​.­de​/­rz3a035//­eyeboehmer​.­html (accessed June 25, 2013). 47. Jewish survivors described themselves as She’erit Hapletah, which means “the surviving remnant.” The term refers to a passage from the Bible about a small group of Jews who survived the Assyrians. Grossmann, Juden, Deutsche, Alliierte, 29, n. 31 ff. 48. For details regarding the life situation of Sinti and Roma a­ fter 1945, see Reuss, Kontinuitäten der Stigmatisierung. 49. Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 46. 50. Grossmann, Juden, Deutsche, Alliierte, 246. 51. Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 105. 52. Eitinger, Die Jahre danach, 4. 53. Rosenberg, Brennglas, 142. 54. Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 47. 55. Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 71. 56. Karin Gässler, Extremtraumatisierung in der Pubertät. Grundlagen spezifischer Erziehungs-­und Bildungskonzeptionen für die nachfolgenden Generationen von jüdischen Verfolgten während des deutschen Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1993), 40. 57. Interview with K. M., 20–21. Quoted in Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 102–103. 58. Interview with K.  M., 20–21. Quoted in Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 56–57. 59. Zenon Jagoda, Stanislaw Klodzinski, Jan Maslowski, and Olaf Kühl, Das Überleben im Lager aus der Sicht ehemaliger Häftlinge von Auschwitz-­Birkenau, in Die Auschwitz-­

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Hefte. Texte der polnischen Zeitschrift »Przeglad Lekarski« über historische, psychische und me­dizinische Aspekte des Lebens und Sterbens in Auschwitz, ed. Jochen August (Weinheim: Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, H. 9.5, 1994), 13–52, ­here 14. 60. Rosenberg, Brennglas, 70–71. 61. Heiko Haumann, Die Akte Zilli Reichmann: Zur Geschichte der Sinti im 20: Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2016), 190. 62. Wolf and Delfeld, Überleben, 53. 63. Lolo Reinhardt, Märza Winter, and Monika Döppert, Überwintern. Jugenderinnerungen eines schwäbischen Zigeuners (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1999), 87. 64. Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 55. 65. Tuckermann, Lebensgeschichte, 238–39. 66. Reuss, Kontinuitäten der Stigmatisierung, 128–138. 67. Michaela Baetz, Heike Herzog, and Oliver von Mengersen, Die Rezeption des nationalsozialistischen Völkermords an den Sinti und Roma in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone und der DDR: eine Dokumentation zur politischen Bildung (Heidelberg: Dokumentations-­ und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma, 2007), 17. 68. Tuckermann, Lebensgeschichte, 238–239. 69. For a similar situation among Jewish survivors, see Atina Grossmann, “Opfer, Störenfriede und Überlebende: Wahrnehmung und Selbstwahrnehmung jüdischer Displaced Persons im Nachkriegsdeutschland”, in Gedächtnis und Geschlecht: Deutungsmuster in Darstellungen des nationalsozialistischen Genozids, ed. Insa Eschebach, Sigrid Jacobeit, and Silke Wenk (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2002), 297–326, ­here 308. 70. Haumann, Die Akte Zilli Reichmann, 185, 193. 71. Gerda Weissmann Klein and Kurt Klein, The Hours ­After: Letters of Love and Longing in War’s Aftermath (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 274. Cited in Grossmann, Juden, Deutsche, Alliierte, 316. 72. LAB, C Rep. 118-01 Nr. 38466, OdF-­A kte Christine Strauß. LAB, C Rep 118-01 Nr. 38465, OdF-­A kte Ursula Strauß. LAB, C Rep. 118-01 Nr. 38464, OdF-­A kte Fritz Strauß. 73. Rosenberg, Brennglas, 142. 74. Interview with W. P., 25. Quoted in Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 108. 75. Interview with W. P., 25. Quoted in Krokowski, Die Last der Vergangenheit, 109.

chapter 9  —­  “i could never forget what ­they’d done to my ­father” 1. Joachim Schlör, “Liesel, it’s time for you to leave.” Von Heilbronn nach E ­ ngland. Die Flucht der Familie Rosenthal vor der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung (Heilbronn: Stadtarchiv, 2016). An En­glish translation, on which this chapter is based, will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in November 2020. 2. Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich. Refugee Jews, 1933–1946 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), xiii. 3. ­These quotations are taken from the collection of f­ amily letters. I still hold them and intend to pass them on to the city archives of Heilbronn once the En­glish edition of my book has come out. In this chapter, I cannot reference or cite the letters in more detail. 4. See http://­sounds​.­bl​.­uk​/­Oral​-­history​/J­ ewish​-­Holocaust​-­survivors​/­021M​-­C0410​X0089​ XX​-­0001V0 (accessed Aug. 30, 2017). 5. Carlos  E. Sluzki, “Migration and ­Family Conflict,” ­Family Pro­cess 18, no.  4 (1979): 379–390. 6. Sluzki, “Migration and ­Family Conflict,” 382. 7. Sluzki, “Migration and ­Family Conflict,” 386. On the sea voyage as a temporal and spatial model of inbetween-­ness, see Joachim Schlör, “Reflexionen and Bord. Die Schiffsreise als Ort und Zeit im Dazwischen,” in Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch, Vol.

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35: Passagen des Exils, ed. Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto (Munich: text und kritik, 2017), 54–68. 8. Sluzki, “Migration and F ­ amily Conflict,” 386. 9. See http://­y vng​.y­ advashem​.­org​/­index​.­html​?­language​= e­ n&s​_ ­lastName​= S­ tern&s​_fi ­ rst​ Name​=­Minni&s​_­place​=­(accessed Aug. 30, 2017). 10. James Jordan, Lisa Leff, and Joachim Schlör, “Jewish Migration and the Archive: Introduction,” Jewish Culture and History 15, nos. 1–2 (2014): 1–5, h ­ ere, 5. 11. Alice Schwab, “Thank you for Every­t hing.” Transcript of the interview stored at the British Library (fn. 4). 12. Rafael Medoff, “How Amer­i­ca First Learned of the Holocaust,” The Algemeiner, Nov.  6, 2012, http://­w ww​.­a lgemeiner​.­com​/­2012​/0 ­ 6​/­11​/ ­how​-­a merica​-­fi rst​-­learned​-­of​-­t he​ -­holocaust/ (accessed Jan. 2015). 13. “Who Coined the Term Holocaust to Refer to the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ for the Jewish ­People? En­glish Language and Usage,” http://­english​.­stackexchange​.­com​/q ­ uestions​/­106031 (accessed Nov. 3, 2016). 14. David Cesarani, Tony Kushner, Jo Reilly, and Colin Richmond, eds., Belsen in History and Memory (London: Routledge, 1997). 15. For ­family relations in the pro­cess of emigration, see also Christine Hartig, “Darum sorge selbst dafür, gesund zu bleiben u. energisch mit Dir selbst zu sein—­Veränderte Erwartungen an Kinder angesichts der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung,” in Das Ende der Kindheit?—­Jüdische Kindheit und Jugend ab 1900. Juden in Mitteleuropa 2014, St. Pölten: Institut für jüdische Geschichte Österreichs, 2014, 16–25. 16. Schlör, “Liesel, its time for you to leave” (see endnote 1). 17. Julia Neuberger, “Heilbronn January 16, 2016,” Parkes Institute Annual Review (2015–2016): 30–31. 18. Hans Franke‘s Geschichte und Schicksal der Juden von Heilbronn was published as early as 1965. A revised edition was published by Stadtarchiv in Heilbronn in 2015. 19. Hugo Kern and Manfred Scheuer both emigrated from Heilbronn to Palestine in the 1930s. Scheuer, a former ­lawyer, became the mayor of the Moshava Shave Zion, a middle-­ class settlement that consisted mainly of thirty-­five Jewish families who left their native Rexingen in the Black Forest in 1930 to create a new community on the banks of the Mediterranean Sea, not far from the Lebanese border. 20. Stadtarchiv Heilbronn, Bestand Auslandsheilbronner. B021-117: Schriftwechsel mit Dr. Fritz Wolf, Nahariya (Israel) [emphasis added]. 21. Thomas Mann, Lübeck als geistige Lebensform. Lebensform (Lübeck: Otto Quitzow Verlag, 1926). 22. Letter from Mayor Paul Meyle to Fritz Wolf (undated, presumably sent on June 22, 1957). Stadtarchiv Heilbronn, Bestand Auslandsheilbronner. B021-117: Schriftwechsel mit Dr. Fritz Wolf, Nahariya (Israel). 23. Stadtarchiv Heilbronn, Bestand Auslandsheilbronner. B021-117: Schriftwechsel mit Dr. Fritz Wolf, Nahariya (Israel) [emphasis added]. 24.Andreas Gestrich, “Einleitung: Sozialhistorische Biographieforschung,” in Biographie— sozialgeschichtlich, ed. Andreas Gestrich, Peter Knoch, and Helga Merkel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 5; Gabriele Rosenthal, “Zur Konstitution von Generationen in familienbiographischen Prozessen. Krieg, Nationalsozialismus und Genozid in Familiengeschichte und Biographie,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 5, no. 4 (1994): 489–516. 25. Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” So­cio­log­i­cal Theory 71, no.  1 (1989): 14–25. 26. Atina Grossmann, “Versions of Home: German Jewish Refugee Papers out of the Closet and into the Archives,” New German Critique 90 (Fall 2003): 94–108. In June 2015, the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-­Jewish Relations at the University of

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Southampton or­ga­nized a workshop at London’s Wiener Library, “Making the Private Public: Refugee Correspondence and Academic Writing,” with contributions by Esther Saraga, Elisabeth Heinemann, Christine Hartig, Shirli Gilbert, and Joachim Schlör. 27. Caroline Fetscher, “Deutsche Geschichte: Die eigene Familie als NS-­Archiv,” Der Tages­spiegel, May 20, 2013. 28. Lars Fischer, “Review of ‘Liesel, it’s time for you to leave,’ ” Journal of Jewish Studies, 68, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 436.

chapter 10  —­  “looking for a nice jewish girl . . .” This chapter first appeared in Jewish Social Studies 23, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2018) and is reprinted with permission. The title of the article derives from a personal ad appearing in ­ nless indicated other­w ise, all translations Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Feb. 9, 1940, p. 7. U are my own, although at times I changed the wording slightly to render it in more idiomatic En­glish. 1. The earliest personal ads w ­ ere placed in En­glish newspapers in the 1690s, only fifty years ­after the creation of the modern newspaper. See H. G. Cocks, Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column (London: Random House, 2009), viii. In the German Jewish press, personal ads ­were printed from the late nineteenth ­century onward. On the history of personal ads in the German and German Jewish press, see Gunilla-­Friederike Budde, Auf dem Weg ins Bürgerleben: Kindheit und Erziehung in deutschen und englischen Bürgerfamilien, 1840–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), esp. 28–29; Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish ­Middle Class: W ­ omen, ­Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 93–98, 103–106; Trude Maurer, “Partnersuche und Lebensplanung: Heiratsannoncen als Quelle für die Sozial-­und Mentalitätsgeschichte der Juden in Deutschland,” in Juden in Deutschland: Emanzipation, Integration, Verfolgung und Vernichtung; 25 Jahre Institut für die Geschichte der Deutschen Juden Hamburg, ed. Alice Jankowski, Peter Freimark, and Ina  S. Lorenz (Hamburg  : Hans Christians Verlag, 1991), 344–374; Sarah Wobick, “Une place pour l’amour? Le mariage juif à Paris et à Berlin dans une période de transition (1890–1930),” in Expériences croisées: Les juifs de France et d’Allemagne aux XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Heidi Knörzer (Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 2010), 178–207; and Sarah Wobick-­Segev, Homes away from Home: Jewish Belonging in Twentieth-­Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). 2. On the changing Jewish marriage market, see the following works by Marion Kaplan: “ ‘Based on Love’: The Courtship of Hendele and Jochanan, 1803–1804,” in Jüdische Welten: Juden in Deutschland vom 18. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart, ed. Marion Kaplan and Beate Meyer (Hamburg: Wallstein Verlag, 2005), 86–107; “For Love or Money: The Marriage Strategies of Jews in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 28 (1983): 263–300; and The Making of the Jewish M ­ iddle Class 85–116; and Wobick-­Segev, Homes away from Home. 3. ­There is one impor­tant exception: in the first section, where I explore early ads from before World War I, I include ads from Israelitisches Familienblatt based in Hamburg. However, they all made explicit reference to Berlin, ­either stating Berlin as the place of residence or including it in the address indicated at the end of the ad. 4. Rivka Elkin, Biton ha-­hadashot ha-­yehudi: Nose degel ha-­hagirah ha-­yehudit me-­ Germaniyah, 1938–1941 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2015), 11–12, 15, 17–19. 5. Israelitisches Familienblatt (published in Hamburg, 1898–1935, and in Berlin, 1935–1938, with special editions for Frankfurt and Berlin as of 1921) printed an impressive number of personal ads in ­every issue. Marriage announcements took up nearly one full standard page of the Hamburg edition for 1910. In 1927, the Berlin edition regularly published more than one and a half pages of ads. Personal ads could also be found in such diverse journals as Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, a mainstream, non-­Zionist, and non-­Orthodox newspaper that agitated initially for the cause of emancipation and then ­later against anti-

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semitism, and Der Israelit, an Orthodox newspaper published in Frankfurt. Additionally, matchmakers placed ads in ­t hese journals. 6. As Trude Maurer has noted, merchants w ­ ere well represented among ­those placing ads; Maurer, “Partnersuche und Lebensplanung,” 347. 7. Israelitisches Familienblatt, Mar. 16, 1905, p. 16. 8. For example, consider the following announcement: “Marriage. Looking for a dentist, veterinarian or merchant [or businessman] with secure employment for a 20-­year-­old pretty blond, elegant appearance, apt in business and from a good f­ amily, tentative dowry of 15–20 thousand and trousseau” (Israelitisches Familienblatt, Mar. 16, 1905, p. 16). On the attitudes of Jews (including German Jews) ­toward supposedly Jewish and non-­Jewish “racial” traits, see Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 169–193, esp. 178–179. 9. Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 1918–1933 (Hamburg: Hans Christian Verlag, 1986), 72–81. In Berlin in 1925, t­here ­were 172,672 Jews, among them 43,838 foreign Jews, who ­were more than one-­quarter of the Jewish population in the city (p. 76). 10. Rogers Brubaker, Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 215 n. 117. On the complicated and often very lengthy pro­cess of naturalization for East Eu­ro­pean Jews in Germany (where residency requirements could be as long as thirty years before eligibility for naturalization), including discriminatory practices and challenges faced by East Eu­ro­pean Jews, see Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 308–323. 11. Steven E. Aschheim, ­Brothers and Strangers: The East Eu­ro­pean Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). 12. Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 83. 13. Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 85. She notes that, of t­ hose 15 years of age and older in 1925, 44.9% of foreign Jewish men and 32.3% of foreign Jewish ­women ­were single, compared to 38% of German Jewish men and 33.5% of German Jewish w ­ omen. 14. This reflected more general shifts in fashion and conceptions of beauty. See Mila Ganeva, ­Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918–1933 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), 162. 15. The general consensus on the marriage patterns of Berlin Jews was that roughly one-­ quarter entered into religiously mixed marriages before the Nazi takeover in 1933, with more Jewish men than ­women marrying out. By the years 1930–1933, the rate of intermarriage hovered at 27%. U. O. Schmelz, “Die Demographische Entwicklung der Juden in Deutschland von der Mitte des 19: Jahrhunderts bis 1933,” Leo Baeck Institute Bulletin 83 (1989): 39. See also Steven Lowenstein, “Jewish Intermarriage and Conversion in Germany and Austria,” Modern Judaism 25 (2005): 28–29. Beate Meyer notes that although 44% of German Jews married non-­Jewish spouses just before the rise of Nazism, by 1934 the number had fallen to 15%; Beate Meyer, “The Mixed Marriage: A Guarantee of Survival or a Reflection of German Society during the Nazi Regime?” in Probing the Depths of German Antisemitism: German Society and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1941, ed. David Bankier (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 54. See also Nathan Stoltzfus, “The Limits of Policy: Social Protection of Intermarried German Jews in Nazi Germany,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, ed. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2001): 122–123. 16. By the summer of 1933, external pressure placed on non-­Jewish Germans had already reduced the rate of intermarriage; Trude Maurer, “From Everyday Life to a State of Emergency: Jews in Weimar and Nazi Germany,” in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, ed. Marion Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 287. At the same time, Nathan Stoltzfus notes, the pending ban on mixed marriages led a number of committed ­couples to quickly marry before the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935; Nathan Stoltzfus, Re­sis­tance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 56.

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17. In 1938, legislation was passed that aimed to facilitate divorces between Jews and non-­Jews. Despite ­these policies, the ­great majority of ­these ­couples remained married; Stoltzfus, “Limits of Policy,” 118, 123. On pressure placed on local marriage registrars, see Stoltzfus, Re­sis­tance of the Heart, 47. On the refusal of local marriage registrars to permit intermarriage, see Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 79. On pressure against intermarriage, see Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 88. 18. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 75. 19. Susanne Bennewitz is currently working on a proj­ect titled “Die weiße Ehe mit der Schweiz: Zur Kriminalisierung der Bürgerrechtsehe (1922–1952).” As part of this larger proj­ect, Bennewitz is exploring the Jewish marriage market in Switzerland during the 1930s, when t­ here ­were many cases of arranged marriages in which po­liti­cal or financial interests clearly determined the match. She has also spoken about Swiss authorities’ concern with seemingly fictitious marriages and their l­egal implications (­women automatically gained Swiss citizenship when marrying a Swiss man): Susanne Bennewitz, “Die Einbürgerung im Ehebett: Nationale Grenzdefinition im schweizerischen Scheinehe-­ Diskurs (1928–1944)” (paper presented at the Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Exilforschung e.V., Universität des Saarlandes, Mar.  25, 2017). I am grateful to Dr.  Bennewitz for sharing the early conclusions of her work with me. 20. In 1933, a number of German émigrés began placing ads in the French Jewish press to find partners and establish themselves in their new homes; for example: “German refugee, 40 years of age, very educated, widower, without ­children, having lost all of his fortune, good husband, would like to rebuild a home, desires to meet a young w ­ idow or divorcée, practicing, well-­off, educated, preferably brunette, multilingual, fairly pe­tite, with the purpose of marriage” (Univers Israélite, July 7, 1933, p. 405). This ad was not an exception; w ­ omen placed ads of this kind as well; see, for example, Univers Israélite, Dec. 27, 1935, p. 222. To be sure, some individuals simply chose to wait ­until a­ fter emigration before getting married or announcing an engagement to “please the ­family”; Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 76. 21. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 76. 22. Also noted by Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 141–142. 23. Kateřina Čapková and Michal Frankl note that some Jewish w ­ omen who fled Germany for Czecho­slo­va ­k ia employed heiratspolitische Strategien—­using marriage as a means to change citizenship. They note ads in Prager Tagblatt seeking local (Czech Jewish) men for ­daughters; Kateřina Čapková and Michal Frankl, Unsichere Zuflucht: Die Tschechoslowakei und ihre Flüchtlinge aus NS-­Deutschland und Österreich, 1933–1938, trans. Kristina Kallert (Vienna: Böhlau, 2012), 179. The idea that ­children could serve as their parents’ protectors, reversing parent–­child roles, has been noted elsewhere; see Joachim Schlör, “Liesel, it’s time for you to leave”: Von Heilbronn nach ­England; Die Flucht der Familie Rosenthal von der nationalsozialistschen Verfolgung (Heilbronn: Veröffentlichungen des Archivs der Stadt Heilbronn, 2015), esp. 89–130, and Leonore  J. Weitzman, “Re­sis­tance in Everyday Life: ­Family Strategies, Role Reversals, and Role Sharing in the Holocaust,” in Jewish Families in Eu­rope, 1939–­Pre­sent: History, Repre­sen­ta­tion, and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 46–66. Clemens Maier gives the example of a personal ad that was intended as a strategy to help a ­daughter leave; see Clemens Maier, “The Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, 1938–43,” in Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation, ed. Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schutz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 109. 24. See, for example, “On my own behalf! Dentist, Czechoslovak citizen . . .” (Jüdische Rundschau, Sept. 1, 1933, p. 478), and “Yugo­slav wishes to marry . . .” (Jüdische Rundschau, Jan. 12, 1934, p. 6). 25. See also this short ad placed by a female doctor: “Young doctor [female], pretty, seeks marriage, if pos­si­ble with doctor” (Jüdische Rundschau, Feb. 2, 1934, p. 10).

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26. Jüdische Rundschau, Sept. 12, 1935, p. 8. 27. Daniel Fraenkel, Lihiyot yehudi be-­Berlin: Mikhtavei Hermann Samter me-19 be-­ Ogust 1939 ‘ad 7 be-­Februar 1943 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 15. 28. From 1938 to 1941, it was published on Tuesdays and Fridays and was between four and sixteen pages long. Beginning January 21, 1941, the newspaper was only published on Fridays. By June 1943 it was only one page long. The last issue was printed on June 4, 1943; Maier, “Jüdische Nachrichtenblatt,” 105, 118. By the time the newspaper closed in June 1943, the Nazis had deported large numbers of Berlin Jews to the death camps in the East. This pro­cess culminated in the final mass arrest and deportation that was known as the Fabrikaktion, or factory action, that began in late February 1943; Fraenkel, Lihiyot yehudi, 43–52. 29. For a discussion of the newspaper and its many articles on emigration, see Elkin, Biton ha-­hadashot ha-­yehudi, 20–43. 30. Even ­a fter the beginning of the war, emigration to neutral or allied countries was still pos­si­ble. Emigration was outlawed on October  23, 1941, by order of the Reich Security Main Office [IV B 4 b(Rz) 2920/41 g (984), a few days ­a fter deportations started. 31. Hagit Lavsky, “The Impact of 1938 on German-­Jewish Emigration and Adaptation in Palestine, Britain and the USA,” in ‘Wer bleibt, opfert seine Jahre, vielleicht sein Leben’: Deutsche Juden, 1938–1941, ed. Susanne Heim, Beate Meyer, and Francis R. Nicosia (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010), 207–225, esp. 207–213. 32. Even before the closure of all other Jewish newspapers, we find ads written by individuals who had already found a way out. Consider the following from Jüdische Rundschau, in which a “beautiful, intelligent ­woman” already living in Palestine used the pages of the Zionist journal to find a “life partner,” presumably from back home: “LADY. A compatible spouse is sought for [a lady] early 30s, beautiful, intelligent, domestic [häuslich], good character traits, educated, from a very good Jewish ­family, living in Palestine, well-­to-do” (Jüdische Rundschau, Sept. 17, 1936, p. 28). 33. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, ­Women in the Holocaust: Theoretical Foundations for a Gendered Analy­sis of the Holocaust (Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, 2004), 15–16; Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 138–140. 34. Schlör, “Liesel, it’s time,” 99. 35. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 138–141. 36. ­These included Zionist programs (hakhsharot), like the Youth Aliyah, that prepared young men and ­women to live and work in Palestine. See Francis R. Nicosia, “Haavara, Hachshara, und Aliyah-­beth: Jüdisch-­zionistische Auswanderung in den Jahren 1938–1941,” in Wer bleibt, opfert seine Jahre, 134–148, and Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 29, 111, 117. 37. Both placed in Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Dec. 16, 1938, p. 4; t­ hese ­were the only two announcements for this issue. 38. Bornstein also advertised her ser­vices in Jüdische Rundschau in e­arlier years. See Jüdische Rundschau, Jan. 12, 1934, p. 6. 39. Cited in Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 165. 40. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 165. 41. For example, “Good-­looking young man, Jew, 37, seeks nice, intelligent, Jewish girl for the purpose of l­ ater marriage” (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Jan. 6, 1942, p. 2). 42. “Jewish person who treats the sick [Jüdischer Krankenbehandler] . . .” (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Sept. 5, 1941, p. 4). 43. Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, Jan. 6, 1942, p. 2. 44. Beate Meyer, ‘Jüdische Mischlinge’: Rassenpolitik und Verfolgungserfahrung, 1933–1945 (Munich: Dölling und Galitz Verlag, 2002), 166. 45. Jay Howard Geller, Jews in Post-­Holocaust Germany, 1945–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77; Michael Brenner, ­After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany, trans. Barbara Harshav (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press,

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1997), 45. According to Brenner, by 1948 ­t here ­were 8,000 Jews living in Berlin, of whom 29.6% w ­ ere Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews. 46. Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2007), 88, 97. 47. Ruth Galinski (née Weinberg), for instance, met her ­f uture husband Heinz, a survivor of Auschwitz, in 1948 through the Jewish sports movement Ha-­koah (The Strength) in Berlin. She recalled that they had first met on “the Makkabi sports field in Grunewald.” She had been a cofounder of Ha-­koah, and he came to a game in his capacity as representative of the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin. Their courtship was quick: “I met him in July and we ­were engaged on my birthday, the 19th  of July, and in October ­were married.” Galinski was also the chairman of the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin for many years. See Ruth Galinski, “Woher der Hass?” in Jüdische Berliner: Leben nach der Shoa, 14 Gespräche, ed. Ulrich Eckhardt and Andreas Nachama (Berlin: Jaron Verlag, 2003), 91. Ruth Galinski’s friend Inge Borck mentions Ruth and Heinz Galinski’s meeting in her own interview from the same volume. See Inge Borck, “Ich war nie weg,” in Eckhardt and Nachama, Jüdische Berliner, 62. Louis Posner, originally from Berlin, met his wife in a rehabilitation camp in Wuerttemberg. He had gone ­t here to learn a trade, and his wife worked in the camp office. They married in October 1950; Louis Posner, Through a Boy’s Eyes: The Turbulent Years, 1926–1945 (Santa Ana, CA: Seven Locks Press, 2000), 281. 48. Ruth Gay, Safe among the Germans: Liberated Jews a­ fter World War II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 166. 49. It bears noting that, although the sample is too small to be representative of wider trends, the ads from 1946 w ­ ere placed overwhelmingly by or on behalf of w ­ omen, of whom most ­were over the age of 30. 50. Der Weg, Oct. 10, 1946, p. 8. 51. Der Weg, Nov. 8, 1946, p. 8. Consider also an ad placed by a ­w idow with an 8-­year-­old ­daughter (Der Weg, Sept. 13, 1946, p. 8) and another placed by a “tall, blond lady, 25 years of age with 1-­a nd-­a-­half-­year-­old ­daughter” (Der Weg, May 17, 1946, p. 8). 52. To be sure, only a ­couple of the ads from Der Weg’s first year of publication ­were placed by individuals who admitted to having been divorced; most ­people who placed ads stated that they ­were ­either single or widowed. 53. Der Weg, Dec. 6, 1946, p. 8. 54. Rabbi Steven  S. Schwarzschild, “Mixed Marriages and Conversion in Post-­War Germany,” Berlin, Feb.  1950, file B. 2/19 Nr. 4, p.  9, Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Heidelberg, Germany. 55. Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 125. 56. According to Grossmann, by 1950, one thousand weddings had been registered between Jewish men and German w ­ omen across Germany. On intimate relations between Germans and Jews a­ fter the war, see Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 227–230. For examples of letters from German ­women asking to convert before marrying Jewish men, see file B. 2/19 Nr. 4, Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland. 57. Similarly: “39 year-­old blond [­woman], thin, divorced [but not the guilty party, schuldlos geschieden] seeks acquaintance with a Jewish man, no more than 45 years of age, for the purpose of marriage. Possesses her own apartment” (Der Weg, Apr. 26, 1946, p. 8). 58. Der Weg, Oct. 10, 1946, p. 8. 59. Several ads from 1946 mention the desire for a healthy partner. The following, in contrast, highlights the ad writer’s disability: “Baker and pastry chef [male], with mobility impairment, 49 years of age seeks a life partner for emigration” (Der Weg, Apr. 26, 1946, p. 8). Though it could be coincidental, the man’s profession, age, and disability are identical to ­those of a man who placed an ad in Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt on Jan. 6, 1942 (see n. 44). If so, it would mean that he survived against all odds.

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60. Der Weg, Jan. 26, 1951, p. 4. 61. Der Weg, June 1, 1951, p. 4. 62. Gay, Safe among the Germans, 68. Gay notes that the 1947 birthrate among Jewish displaced persons was 50.2 per thousand, whereas the German rate at the time was 7.6 per thousand. 63. Der Weg, Aug. 17, 1951, p. 4. 64. Der Weg, Aug. 1, 1952, p. 4. 65. Der Weg, July 18, 1952, p. 2. 66. Geller, Jews in Post-­Holocaust Germany, 98. 67. Der Weg, Jan. 26, 1951, p. 4. See also Der Weg, Jan. 18, 1952, p. 2: “[­Woman] late 40s, pleasant appearance, 1.70m tall, good in business and in ­running a ­house­hold, victim of fascism, very stable seeks a steadfast [of good character, lit. charaktervoll] life partner no older than 60 years of age.”

chapter 11  —­  the postwar migration of romani families from slovakia to the bohemian lands Research for this chapter was financed by the grant no. 19-26638X, “Genocide, Postwar Migration and Social Mobility: Entangled Experiences of Roma and Jews,” funded by the Czech Science Foundation. I would like to express my gratitude especially to all of the members of the Romani survivors’ families that accepted me as a researcher and shared with me their ­family histories and experiences. 1. ­Will Guy, “Ways of Looking at Roma: The Case of Czecho­slo­va­k ia,” in Gypsies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, ed. Diane Tong (New York: Garland, 1998), 13–68. 2. I use the term “Rom/a, Romani” as an umbrella term for the dif­fer­ent groups that reflect their Romani identity, even though some of them prefer to use other terms for their self-­identification and distinction from the other Romani groups; in this general sense I thus subsume “Sinti” u ­ nder the term “Roma,” for the sake of clarity. I use the term “Gypsy” only when quoting the language of the sources, si­mul­ta­neously bearing in mind the term often included more groups than just the Roma, whose histories are my primary focus. When speaking about par­tic­u ­lar Romani groups historically pre­sent in the territory of the former Czecho­slo­va­k ia, I use specific terms that the members of t­ hese groups used when referring to themselves. I thus write for example about Sinti and Roma as the Romani groups most harshly affected by the Nazi racial policies targeting “Gypsies” in the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia. 3. Ctibor Nečas, Romové na Moravě a ve Slezsku (1740–1945) (Brno: Matice moravská, 2005), 475. 4. Tara Zahra, “ ‘Condemned to Rootlessness and Unable to Budge’: Roma, Migration Panics, and Internment in the Habsburg Empire,” American Historical Review 122, no. 3 (2017): 1–25. 5. Jiří Hanzal, Cikáni na Moravě v 15. až 18. století. Dějiny etnika na okraji společnosti (Praha: Lidové noviny, 2004). 6. Milena Hübschmannová, “Economic Stratification and Interaction: Roma, an Ethnic Jati in East Slovakia,” in Gypsies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, 233–267. 7. Ctibor Nečas, Českoslovenští Romové v letech 1938–1945 (Brno: Masarykova universita, 1994). 8. Ctibor Nečas, The Holocaust of Czech Roma (Prague: Prostor, 1999). 9. Milena Hübschmannová, ed., “Po židoch cigáni.” I. díl (1939–­srpen 1944): Svědectví Romů ze Slovenska 1939–1945 (Prague: Triáda, 2005); Nečas, Českoslovenští Romové v letech 1938–1945.

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10. Helena Sadílková, Dušan Slačka, and Milada Závodská, eds., Aby bylo i s námi počítáno: Společensko-­politická angažovanost Romů a snahy o založení romské organizace v poválečném Československu (Brno: Muzeum romské kultury, 2018), 136–137. 11. Anna Jurová, Rómska menšina na Slovensku v dokumentoch 1945–75 (Košice: Spoločenskovedný ústav SAV, 2008), 7. 12. Leon Růžička, Milada Závodská, and Helena Sadílková, “Včera a dnes (vzpomínka cikána na nacistické lágry),” Romano džaniben 20, no. 1 (2013): 151–153. 13. In 1958 Leon Růžička submitted a written account of his life, including the war­time suffering and postwar re-­creation of his ­family and professional life, for a literary contest or­ga­nized by the Union of Anti-­Fascist Fighters, ­after publishing a short summary in its newspaper in 1957. He worked on extending this account into “a book,” as confirmed by his relatives in 2017. Although the manuscript is prob­ably lost, the short article from 1957 remains the oldest written and published testimony on the war­t ime events by a member of the Romani/Sinti community from Czecho­slo­va­k ia. 14. The prewar Romani community in Bojkovice had about one hundred members, out of which only two p ­ eople survived the war and returned home; the village of Havřice, where eleven Romani families lived before the war, saw the return of thirteen Romani survivors, only some of whom w ­ ere originally from t­ here. Nečas, Romové na Moravě a ve Slezsku, 82–90, 95–96. 15. Nečas, Romové na Moravě a ve Slezsku, 90. Similar conflict was documented in Uherský Ostroh (southeastern Moravia); it developed around the return of seven Romani Holocaust survivors, whom the local villa­gers did not want to allow to s­ ettle in their neighborhood (their original Romani h ­ ouses had been destroyed). Nina Pavelčíková, Romové v českých zemích v letech 1945–1989 (Prague: UDVZK, 2004), 24–25. 16. Jurová, Rómska menšina na Slovensku, 82–90, 95–96. 17. Ceija Stojka, Wir leben im Verborgenen: Erinnerungen einer Rom-­Zigeunerin, ed. Berger Karin (Vienna: Picus Verlag, 1988). 18. Interview with Miroslava Taubinger (b. 1945), in Lada Viková, “Největší význam má pro mne přátelství a sounáležitost, vědomí, že nejsem jenom já, to pochází od mé matky. / Setkání s výtvarnicí Nicole Taubinger (a s její maminkou, sportovkyní a gymnaziální profesorkou, Miroslavou Taubinger),” Romano džaniben 23, no. 1 (2016): 89–126. 19. Markus Pape, A nikdo vám nebude věřit: Dokument o koncentračním táboře Lety u Písku (Prague: G plus G, 1997); Michal Schuster, “Proces s Blažejem Dydym na základě materiálů Mimořádného lidového soudu v Brně roku 1947,” Romano džaniben 20, no.  1 (2013): 73–101. 20. A speech by Čeněk Růžička at the commemoration ceremony at the site of the former “Gypsy concentration camp” in Lety u Písku, June 24, 2017. Available at www​.­romea​.­cz (Přímý přenos pietního shromáždění v místě bývalého koncentračního tábora v letech u Písku) (accessed Oct. 14, 2018). 21. Personal communication with Jan Hauer (b. 1948), June 17, 2019. 22. Personal communication with Zdeněk Daniel (b. 1970), Jan 17, 2019. 23. Helena Sadílková, “Sami máme zájem na dořešení problematiky: Usilování angažovaných Romů v poválečném Československu o participaci a sebe-­ organizaci (1945–1968),” in Aby bylo i s námi počítáno, 27–58. 24. Celia Donert, The Rights of the Roma: The Strug­gle for Citizenship in Postwar Czecho­ slo­va­kia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 25. Matěj Spurný, Nejsou jako my: Česká společnost a menšiny v pohraničí (1945–1960) (Prague: Antikomplex, 2011), 237–285. 26. Ladislav Dudy Koťo (b. 1938, Snina region), in Nikdy jsem nebyl podceňovanej. Ze slo­ venských osad do českých měst za prací. Poválečné vzpomínky, ed. Kateřina Sidiropulu Janků (Brno: Munipress, 2015), 18–19. The f­ amily of the eyewitness originated from eastern Slovakia and was interned in the Gypsy concentration camp erected in 1944 in western

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Slovakia. ­After their release from the camp, the ­family had to walk across the Slovakian territory, which was being liberated by the Red Army from the east, thus effectively meeting the retreating German troops. 27. Biography of Elena Lacková (b. 1922, Prešov region), in A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy ­Woman in Slovakia, ed. Ilona Lacková (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2000), 117. Elena Lacková lost one of her ­children during the war. In 1946 she de­cided to commit to paper the dif­fer­ent pieces of the local Romani collective experience of World War II in the form of a drama, which she staged with the help of the Roma from her settlement (the drama was published in Slovak in 1956). ­These per­for­mances gained renown, and her ­family theater com­pany toured dif­fer­ent parts of Czecho­slo­va­k ia; this rocketed her into the communist expert circles dealing with what was then called “work among the Gypsy citizens.” Lacková spent a large part of work life as an employee of vari­ ous regional offices in Slovakia and Bohemia with the task to ameliorate the situation of the local Roma. She became one of the leading figures of the emancipation movement among the Roma in former Czecho­slo­va­k ia. The published biography is based on a series of recordings of her conversations with Milena Hübschmannová over several years in the 1980s ­a fter Lacková retired. 28. Adrian von Arburg, “Tak či onak. Nucené přesídlení v komplexním pojetí poválečné sídelní politiky v českých zemích,” Soudobé dějiny 10, no. 3 (2003): 253–292. 29. By 1950, approximately 200,000 Slovaks had traveled to the Czech borderlands. Vla­ dimír Srb and Alois Andrle, Populační, ekonomický a národnostní vývoj pohraničních okresů ČSR od roku 1930 do roku 2010 (Prague: Terplan, 1989), 18. 30. From the rather large body of lit­er­a­ture dealing with the migration, see for example Karel Kára et al., Ke společenské problematice Cikánů v ČSSR (Praha: Ústav pro filosofii a sociologii ČSAV 1975), 184–200; Milena Hübschmannová, Šaj pes dovakeras / Můžeme se domluvit (Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého 1993); Pavelčíková, Romové v českých zemích v letech 1945–1989. 31. Well-­off Romani families ­were to be found, for example, in the circles of town musicians—as noted in an interview with Dezider Lacko (b. 1938) conducted in 2017—­a nd also included successful craftsmen and businessmen, such as ­horse and pig dealers (Milena Hübschmannová, “Josef Pešta, motospojka u hlavního štábu,” Romano džaniben 5, no. 4 [1998]: 64–71), as well as farmers—as noted in interviews with Olga Fečová (b. 1942) and Štefan Tišer (b. 1950), both conducted in 2016. 32. Interview with Anna Surmajová (b. 1932), survivor of the Dubnica nad Váhom concentration camp, conducted in 2014 and published as “Bylo nám dobře pak přišla válka: Rozhovor s Annou Surmajovou,” Romano džaniben 22, no. 1 (2015): 115–124. 33. Jana Kramářová et al., (Ne)bolí: vzpomínky Romů na válku a život po válce (Prague: Člověk v tísni, 2005), 25–37. 34. Kramářová et al., (Ne)bolí, 34–35. 35. Biography of Elena Lacková (b. 1922, Prešov region), in Lacková, A False Dawn, 117–118. In Romani as well as in Czech, the Romani narrators—­including Lacková—­use the term “o Čechi” / “Čechy” (Czech lands), thereby subsuming Moravia (and Silesia) ­u nder the term “Czech,” which strictly speaking refers only to the Bohemian part of the historical territory of the “Lands of the Bohemian Crown” (i.e., Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia). 36. Kára et al., Ke společenské problematice Cikánů v ČSSR, 184–200. 37. Tomáš Haišman, “K počátkům územních pohybů michalovských Romů do Kladna,” in Zpravodaj koordinované sítě vědeckých informací pro etnologii a folkloristiku, č. 11 (Materiály k problematice etnických skupin na území ČSSR), sv. 10 (Cikáni v průmyslovém městě—­problematika adaptace a asimilace), č. 1 (1988), 10–88. 38. Tera Fabiánová, “Ačhiľom Romňi / Jsem pořád Romka,” in Čalo voďi / Sytá duše. Anto­logie prozaických textů romských autorů z ČR (Brno: MRK, 2008), 248–262.

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39. The following subchapters use data primarily gathered for my unpublished dissertation thesis and expanded during subsequent research: Helena Sadílková, “Poválečná historie Romů v Československu ve vzpomínkách pamětníků: Možnosti rekonstrukce poválečné migrace vybrané skupiny Romů ze Slovenska do českých zemí” (PhD diss., Charles University, 2016). 40. Helena Sadílková, “Resettling the Settlement: From Recent History of a Romani Settlement in South-­Eastern Slovakia,” in Das amen godi pala Lev Čerenkov. Romani historija, čhib taj kultura, ed. Kiril Kozhanov, Dieter W. Halwachs, and Mikhail Oslon (Graz: Grazer Romani Publikationen, Karl-­Franzes Universität, 2017), 339–352. 41. Štefan Šutaj, “The Magyar Minority in Slovakia before and ­after the Second World War,” in Slovakia in History, ed. Mikuláš Teich, Dušan Kováč, and Martin Brown (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 269–283. 42. Sadílková, “Resettling the Settlement.” 43. Personal communication with Margita Lázoková (b. 1945), May 23, 2019. 44. Interview with Margita Lázoková (b. 1945), 2010. 45. The rest of the Roma registered in Kutiny included families of Romani mi­grants from another village in the Rozsnyó region (nine ­people) and from several villages in eastern Slovakia (eleven ­people). 46. Interview with M. Lázoková (b. 1945), 2010. 47. Interview with M. Lázoková (b. 1945), 2010. 48. Interview with M. Lázoková (b. 1945), 2010. 49. Interview with M. Lázoková (b. 1945), 2010. 50. Sadílková, “Poválečná historie Romů v Československu ve vzpomínkách pamětníků,” 243–251. 51. Sadílková, “Sami máme zájem na dořešení problematiky,” 27–58.

Notes on Contributors

Eliyana R. Adler is an associate professor in the Department of History and Program in Jewish Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Adler’s first book, In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Rus­sia, received the Heldt Prize for the Best Book in Slavic/Eastern Eu­ro­pe­an/Eurasian ­Women’s Studies in 2011. She coedited volume 30 of Polin (2018), as well as Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-­Holocaust De­cades (2017) and Jewish Lit­er­a­ture and History: An Interdisciplinary Conversation (2008). She is completing a proj­ect on Polish Jews who survived World War II in the unoccupied regions of the Soviet Union and is starting a new one on memorial books. Natalia Aleksiun is professor of Modern Jewish History at the Gradu­ate School of Jewish Studies, Touro College, New York. Her publications include Where To? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944–1950 (in Polish) and numerous articles in Yad Vashem Studies, Polish Review, Dapim, East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Affairs, Studies in Con­ temporary Jewry, Polin, Gal Ed, East Eu­ro­pean Socie­ties and Politics, Nashim, and German History. She coedited volumes 20 and 29 of Polin and published a critical edition of Gerszon Taffet’s early Holocaust monograph on the destruction of Żółkiew Jewry (Zagłada Żydów żółkiewskich, 2019). Her book Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust, is forthcoming. She is currently working on a book about the daily lives of Jews in hiding in Galicia during the Holocaust. Viktória Bányai is a se­nior research fellow at the Institute for Minority Studies (Center for Jewish Studies), Hungarian Acad­emy of Sciences. She received her PhD in history from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, in 2002. Her research fields are Hungarian Jewish history and culture in premodern and modern times, the history of Jewish education, and Jewish cemeteries in Hungary. Volha Bartash is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast Eu­ro­pean Studies (IOS), Regensburg, Germany where she is working on the proj­ ect, “ROMPAST: Two Paths of a Shared Past: Memory and Repre­sen­ta­tion of the 267

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Nazi Genocide of Roma in Belarus and Lithuania.” It is supported by the Eu­ro­ pean Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Marie Skłodowska-­ Curie Individual Fellowship). Volha has been conducting oral history research on the Roma’s experiences and memories of the Nazi genocide in the Belarusian-­ Lithuanian border region since 2013. Before joining the IOS, she held several international fellowships at institutes for advanced studies, including the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena. Her research has received support from the KONE Foundation and the Swedish Institute. Kateřina Čapková is a se­nior researcher at the Institute of Con­temporary History, Prague, and teaches at Charles University and at NYU in Prague. Her book, Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia (2012; in Czech, in 2005 and 2014) received the Outstanding Academic Title of 2012 from Choice magazine. With Michal Frankl, she coauthored Unsichere Zuflucht (2012; in Czech, in 2008), a book about refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria to Czecho­slo­va­ kia. With Hillel J. Kieval she is coeditor of Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands (forthcoming in En­glish, German, Hebrew, and Czech), a collective monograph on the history of Jews in the Bohemian lands from the early modern period up to pre­sent times. In 2016 she established the Prague Forum for Romani Histories (http://­w ww​.­romanihistories​.­usd​.­cas​.­cz​/­). Currently she is working on a proj­ect on the entangled history of Jews and Roma in Central Eu­rope in the twentieth ­century. Laura Hobson Faure is professor of modern history at the Panthéon-­Sorbonne University-­Paris 1. Her research focuses on the intersections between French and American Jewish life during and ­after the Holocaust. She is the author of Un « Plan Marshall Juif »: la présence juive américaine en France après la Shoah (2013; an En­glish edition is forthcoming) and coeditor of L’Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants et les populations juives au XXème siècle: Prévenir et Guérir dans un siècle de vio­lences (2014). She is writing a two-­volume study on Jewish child refugees in France and the United States during and a­ fter the Holocaust, exploring the connection between their war­time experiences and ­later activism as Holocaust survivors; she recently completed the first volume, Becoming Refugees: The Migrations of Central Eu­ro­ pean Jewish C ­ hildren through France to the United States, 1938–42. Robin Judd is an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University. The author of Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and German-­Jewish Po­liti­cal Life in Germany, 1843–1933 and a number of articles concerning Jewish history, gender history, and ritual be­hav­ior, she is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled Loss, Liberation, and Love: Jewish Brides, Solider Husbands, and Strategies for Reconstruction, 1943–1955. Judd is currently the U.S. editor of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. Dalia Ofer is the Max and Rita Haber Professor of Holocaust and East Eu­ro­pean Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (emerita). Her book, Escaping the

Notes on Contr ibutors

269

Holocaust: Illegal Immigration to the Land of Israel (in Hebrew, 1990; in En­glish, 1998) received the Ben Zvi Award and the National Jewish Book Award. She is the coeditor of several volumes including the following: with Lenore J. Weitzman, ­Women in the Holocaust (1999); with Paula E. Hyman, Jewish ­Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia (2007); with Françoise S. Ouzan and Judy Tydor Baumel-­Schwartz, Holocaust Survivors: Resettlement, Memories, Identities (2012); and with Sharon Kangisser Cohen and Eva Fogelman, ­Children in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath: Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive (2017). Anja Reuss holds an MA in modern Eu­ro­pean history and has a focus on National Socialism, genocide studies, migration and the history of minorities. She has studied abroad in Israel and the United States. One of her research priorities is the German occupation and annihilation policy in Belarus, 1941–1944. From 2011 to 2014, she was the coordinator of a research proj­ect at the Humboldt University of Berlin and coeditor of a memorial book on Berlin Jews deported to the Minsk ghetto (www​.­berlin​-m ­ insk​.­de). She is a member of the Association for Research on Antigypsyism and published, in 2015, a study on the continuities of the stigmatization of Sinti and Roma in Germany ­after World War II. Helena Sadílková is head of the Seminar of Romani Studies (Department of Central-­European Studies, Charles University, Prague), where she teaches Romani language and history. Her major research interests are the postwar history of the Roma in Czecho­slo­va­kia, focusing on interaction among members of local Romani communities and the local non-­Romani population, including the local authorities. She also works in the field of applied linguistics. She is coeditor-­in-­chief of the Czech Romani studies journal, Romano džaniben (Prague). Currently she is working on a proj­ect on the entangled history of Jews and Roma in Central Eu­rope in the twentieth ­century. Joachim Schlör received his PhD from the University of Tübingen in 1990; his dissertation was published as Nights in the Big City: Berlin, Paris, London 1840–1930 (1998) and his habilitation from the University of Potsdam in 2003 as Das Ich der Stadt: Debatten über Judentum und Urbanität, 1822–1938 (2005). Since 2006 he has been professor of modern Jewish/non-­Jewish relations at the University of Southampton. He is the editor of Jewish Culture and History and coeditor of Mobile Culture Studies. Among his latest publications is ‘Liesel, it’s time for you to leave’: Von Heilbronn nach E ­ ngland: Die Flucht der Familie Rosenthal vor nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung (2016), which ­w ill come out in an En­glish translation in 2020. Michal Unger is a se­nior lecturer in modern Jewish history, focusing on Holocaust studies, at the Ashkelon Academic College, Israel (emerita). She is the author of: Lodz—­aharon ha-­geta’ot be-­Polin (2005), which was awarded Yad Vashem’s annual Buchman Memorial Prize, 2005; an En­glish version is forthcoming. She edited the diaries of Josef Zelkowicz, In ­Those Terrible Days, Notes from the Łódź Ghetto (2002); Jakub Poznański’s diary (2010); and Rivka Lifshitz, To Write as Long

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as I Breathe: A Diary of a Girl in the Lodz Ghetto (2018). Her current research proj­ ects are “Marriage in the Ghettos during the Holocaust” and “­After an Alibi: Hans Biebow and the Rescue of Three Jewish Groups from the Lodz Ghetto (1944–1945).” Sarah E. Wobick-­Segev is a research associate at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Hamburg. She is the author of Homes away from Home: Jewish Belonging in Twentieth-­Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg (2018). She coedited, with Gideon Reuveni, The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Ethnicity and Economic Life (2011), and, with Richard I. Cohen and Asher D. Biemann, Spiritual Homelands: The Cultural Experience of Exile, Place and Displacement among Jews and O ­ thers (2019). She is currently working on her second monograph, which explores the role of a number of leading Central Eu­ro­pean Jewish ­women in creating religious culture.

Index

Abramowitz, Rabbi Mayer, 135–136 ­ omen”), 45, 59 agunot (“chained w Akulova, Lubov, 36 Aleksiun, Natalia, 5, 11 Anderson, Mark M., 240n4 antisemitism, 4, 9, 45, 66 Aranovici, Noel, 120 Arrow Cross Party (Hungarian fascists), 193 Ashmjany (Ozmiana, Oshmene), 35, 38, 39, 40 Asinaũka (Osinowka), 39 assimilation, 9 Astrashicky Haradok (Gródek Ostroszycki), 35 Auschwitz-­Birkenau death camp, 13, 23, 39, 60, 149, 153; deportations to, 86, 116, 150, 161; “gypsy ­family camp” in, 145, 151; Roma and Sinti transported to, 193; surrogate families in, 86, 236n8 Australia, 1, 157, 158, 162, 165 Austria, 130, 132, 163, 192, 196, 221n3 Aviram, Israel, 52 Bad Cannstatt, 157 Bad Nauheim, 161, 162 Baja (Frankenstadt) ghetto, 116 Balstogė (Białystok, Bielastok), 48 Bányai, Viktória, 11 Barasz, Chana, 88 Barb, Ludwika, 94 Bárdos, Pál, 118 Bartash, Volha, 4 Basseches-­Wagnerowa, Rózia, 88 Bauer, Yehuda, 115, 142 Bauman, Janina, 96 Beinortienė, Vida, 225n13 Belarus, 20, 21, 22, 23, 39; fieldwork in, 28; German administration of, 227n70;

institutional archives of, 19; in Soviet Union, 24; SS killing squads in, 32; western region of, 24, 31 Belarusian-­Lithuanian border region, 18, 19, 41; forests, 28, 35, 36; Kresy (Eastern Polish borderlands), 20, 23; Nazi invasion of, 31; Soviet occupation of, 24, 29–30, 226n23 Belarusians, 20, 26 belonging, 18, 205; anxiety about, 176; home as space of, 79, 83; lack of sense of, 147; redefinition of, 3; rift in fabric of, 4 Bełżec death camp, 95, 254n18 Bentschen (Zbąszyn) expulsion, 47–48 Berditchev (Berdychiv), 46 Bergen, Doris L., 7, 8 Bergen-­Belsen concentration camp, 144, 146, 164, 166, 194 Berkowitz, Aaron, 120 Berlin, 7, 173, 259n9; postwar Jewish population, 184, 261–262n45; rising rates of intermarriage in, 177, 259n15 Bessarabia, 78–79 Bessonov, Nikolaj, 30, 31, 36 Białystok (Bielastok, Balstogė), 48 Bohemian lands: anti-­Gypsy ste­reo­t ypes in, 195; migration of Roma from Slovakia to, 191, 199–217; myth of “promised land” among Roma from Slovakia, 203–204, 212; Romani language extinguished in, 12, 196; Sudetenland, 201. See also Czecho­slo­va­k ia Böhmer, Oskar and Günther, 148 Böhmer, Regine, 144 Bojkovice, 195, 264n14 Bomba, Abraham, 7 Bördeland, 145

271

272 I n d e x Borkowska, Joanna, 95 Bornstein, Margarete, 182, 261n38 Borysław (Boryslav), 90 Bourdieu, Pierre, 171 Brandstatter, Cesia, 86, 235n3 Braslaũ (Brasław), 20, 27, 35, 36 Bratislava (Pressburg), 1 “Bread” (Spiegel), 50–51 Brennglas, Das [The Burning Lens] (Rosenberg), 153 Britain/United Kingdom, 13, 130, 133, 137, 142, 158, 180 British Library, 157, 158 Brno (Brünn), Slovak Romani mi­grants in, 191, 206–216 Brody, 96, 238n56 Browning, Christopher, 7 Brünn. See Brno Brussels, 128 Bubnys, Arũnas, 38 Buchenwald concentration camp, 194 Budapest, 13, 115, 124, 125; Jewish c­ hildren in, 117–118; Jewish population of, 116; ­People’s House, 121 Bulgaria, 4 Bund, Jewish Socialist, 65, 165 bystanders, 6, 7, 26 Canada, 130, 133; Jewish chaplains in Canadian armed forces, 136, 137, 138; Jewish emigration to, 96, 128, 129, 131 CANRA (American Jewish chaplaincy organ­ization), 135, 136 “capos,” 197 Celle, 144 charitable organ­izations, 2, 9, 11–12, 106, 119–120, 160 Chełmno (Kulm) death camp, 51, 55, 60, 231n39; deportations to, 56, 69, 73, 228n1; mass extermination in, 165, 234–235n43 ­children, 11, 66–67, 127; approaches ­toward education and rearing of, 64; child as primary vector of Holocaust repre­sen­ta­ tion, 103, 240n4; child ­labor in interwar Poland, 66; child support and custody in divorce, 46, 55, 56; educational opportunities for, 119; as Holocaust victims, 8; Jewish ­children taken in by non-­Jews, 93–94; as providers for families, 72; rescue of Jewish ­children, 10; Romani ­children, 18, 26, 32–33; surrogate families and, 87; survival rates among, 34, 116 Chişinău (Kishinev), 46 Choko, Isabelle, 7 Christians, 106, 167; Catholic, 25–26, 30, 45; Jewish conversion to Chris­tian­ity, 46;

married to Jews, 7. See also Orthodox Chris­tian­ity Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 42, 43, 50, 58, 59, 60; on divorce, 74; on familial murder in the ghetto, 73 Cichońską, Jadzia (Regina Farb), 93 class differences, 4, 64, 65, 72, 80; arranged marriages and, 175; intersection with other axes of differentiation, 8; lower and lower-­middle, 65, 66, 74; ­middle class, 5, 28, 29, 69, 75, 81, 97, 229n9, 257n19; surrogate families and, 87; upper class, 80; upper ­middle, 72, 80; urban lower class, 44 Cohen, Beth, 246n83 Cohen, Boaz, 8 Cohen, Sharon Kangisser, 8 Cold War, 123 collaborators, 7, 9, 33, 133 communism, 9, 51, 68; appeal to young Polish Jews, 65–66; in Czecho­slo­va­k ia, 190, 198, 207, 212; in Hungary, 121, 125–126, 247n33. See also Soviet Union (USSR) concentration camps, 41, 148, 192; ­family members who died in, 184–185; “Gypsy camps” in Czecho­slo­va­k ia, 197, 264n20, 264–265n26; liberated by Allied armies, 144–146, 165; in Lithuania, 37, 38; Rosenthal ­family knowledge of, 163–164; surrogate families in, 86. See also specific camps court rec­ords, 55 Cushman, Sarah M., 236n8, 239n66, 239n67 Czech language, 215 Czecho­slo­va­k ia, 8, 260n23; communist takeover of, 190, 194–195, 198, 207, 212; expulsion of German-­speaking population, 195; Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 192–193, 197, 263n2; postwar situation of Romani/Sinti families, 194–195; Prague spring, 215. See also Bohemian lands; Moravia; Slovakia Czosnek ­family, 73 Dachau concentration camp, 161, 163 Dachau memorial site, hunger strike at (1980), 142 daily/everyday life, 8, 18, 66, 83, 84, 88, 141; in ghettos, 61–65, 77; personal ads and, 173; reconstruction of emotional relationships during Holocaust, 87 Daul, Hinda, 40 death/extermination camps, 23, 144, 165, 174, 261n28. See also Auschwitz-­Birkenau; Chełmno death marches, 132, 145, 149

Index Debrecen (Debrezin), 116, 125 deportations, 7, 13, 39, 63, 67, 85, 261n28; to Auschwitz, 86, 116, 150, 161; avoidance of, 30, 68; challenge of keeping families together in face of, 68–71; to Chełmno, 51, 56, 59, 73, 228n1; divorce during, 59; to forced l­ abor camps, 68, 69–70; job as protection against, 56; marriage to a non-­Jew as escape from, 128–129; of Roma from Soviet cities, 30; trains associated with, 146 Destiny of Eu­rope’s Gypsies, The (Kenrick and Puxon, 1972), 252n2 Diadia Pietia (Anton Briński), 88 diaries, 9, 43, 55, 85–86 diseases, 35, 53, 72, 77, 208; as grounds for refusal of immigration, 133; sexual diseases, 131 divorce, 54–58, 72, 228n1; appearances kept up in collapsed relationships, 50–53; in Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish society, 43–47; in first period of World War II, 47–48; ghetto conditions leading to, 48–58; Jewish chaplains in Allied armies and, 136; separation without formal divorce, 53–54; statistics on, 46 domestic vio­lence, 3, 55 Dora. See Mittelbau-­Dora Doron, Daniella, 242n23 DPs (displaced persons) and DP camps, 12, 129, 137, 148, 174; Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews in Berlin, 184, 186; international organ­izations and, 145–146, 254n29; postwar birthrate of displaced persons, 188; Roma and Sinti in, 142, 146, 253n9 Drohobycz (Drohobych), 90 Dubichi (Dubichaj, Dubizhi), 37 Dubnica nad Vahóm (Dubnitz an der Waag, Vágtölgyes), 193 Dubnov, Shimon, 233n12 Dunera Scandal, The (Stern), 162 Dwork, Debórah, 8, 157 Ecologies of Witnessing (Pollin-­Galay), 3–4 ego-­documents, 9. See also testimonies Eichmann trial, 110 Eisen, Chaplain Jack, 128, 129 Eisig, Hans, 160–161, 165 Eisig, Melitta, 160–161 Eišiškės. See Ejszyszki Eitinger, Leo, 145 EJCA (Eu­ro­pean Jewish ­Children’s Aid), 106, 107–108, 109, 111, 114 Ejszyszki (Eišiškės, Eyshishok), 22, 27, 35, 37, 40 El a faluból [Away from the Village] (Ember, 2002), 117

273 el­derly ­people, 7, 78, 93, 156, 181; in Belarusian-­Lithuanian border region, 24; death in forests, 35; Jewish survivors in Budapest, 116; in postwar Eu­rope, 9; Roma, 18, 21, 31, 38; survival rates among, 116 Ellern, Harold, 166 Ember, Mária, 117, 118, 119 En­glish language, 4, 158 Esperanto language, 66 Eu­rope, Central, 8, 9 Eu­rope, Eastern: divorce in Jewish society, 43–47; f­ amily solidarity in ghettos of, 43; Jewish communities sold by governments of, 126; Jewish ­family relationships in, 72–73; World War I in, 65 Eu­rope, Western, 9 extended ­family, 3, 4, 14, 72, 84, 114 extermination camps. See death/extermination camps Eyshishok. See Ejszyszki ­family, 1, 14; conservative definition of, 3; destruction of f­ amily life, 6; diverse definitions of, 3; microhistories centered on, 216; rebuilding of, 10; as social construct, 2; spectrum of gender roles and, 8. See also nuclear ­family; extended ­family; Jewish families; Romani and Sinti families; surrogate families ­family studies, 2 Farber, Yulian, 40 Farbstein, Ester, 59 Faure, Laura Hobson, 3, 11 Federation of Israelite Charitable Organ­ izations, 160 feminism, 3, 6, 111 Fetscher, Caroline, 172 Fink, Lotte, 165 First Czechoslovak Army Corps, 193–194, 202 Fischer, Lars, 172 Florian, Reinhard, 146 forests, 28, 33, 37, 241n8, 248n40; connections between Roma and Jews in, 41; hiding in, 35, 87, 88, 89, 90, 96; massacres in, 23, 34, 38, 165; partisan groups in, 1, 35, 36, 41, 88; Romani encampments in, 33 foster-­k inship, 4, 5, 86, 90, 106, 109–110, 114, 124 France, 103–104, 107, 113, 114, 248n40, 248n44 Franke, Hans, 162, 257n18 Frankenstadt (Baja) ghetto, 116 fraternization policies, in Allied militaries, 129, 130, 249n9 Freeze, ChaeRan Y., 45–46

274 I n d e x French, Lorely, 8 Frenkel, Binyomin, 59 Friedländer, Saul, 8 Friedman, Philip, 6 Frojimovics, Kinga, 125 Fünfkirchen (Pécs, Pečuj, Pečuh), 124 Gadjo (non-­Roma), 28 Galicia, 91 Galinski, Ruth, 262n47 Garten (Grodno, Hrodno), 68, 83 Gasparowich, Barbara, 23 Gemer (Gömör), 207 gender roles, 8, 60–61, 71, 77, 99; per­sis­tence among Jews in hiding, 90; in personal ads, 185 gender studies, 8 genocide, 3, 5, 14, 30, 216; aftermath of, 137, 185; f­ amily as target of, 2; mechanisms of, 6; Romani experience of, 22, 28, 30, 33, 39, 142, 154, 202 German Jewish ­Children’s Aid, 106 German language, 9, 134, 158 Germans, 91, 94–95, 135, 146, 147 Germany, Nazi, 192, 201; Jewish emigration from, 178–182, 261n30; Romani and Sinti ­women in, 17; war with Soviet Union, 30–31, 37, 165. See also Nazis/Nazism Germany, postwar, 112, 198; personal ads in, 13; Romani and Sinti survivors in, 12, 141, 147–155; Soviet zone and German Demo­cratic Republic, 188; territories lost to Poland and Czecho­slo­va­k ia, 146; Zigeunerpolitik (“Gypsy” policy), 141 Germany, pre-­Nazi, 173, 176, 259n10 Gerson, Judith, 6 Gestrich, Andreas, 171 ghettos, 41, 62–65, 83–84, 85; ­family relationships, 71–76, 98; in Hungary, 116; keeping families together, 67–71; ­limited sense of home in ghettos, 79–83; physical well-­being of ­family members, 77–79; relocation of Jews and non-­Jews, 80–81. See also specific ghettos Ginsburg, Fajga (Maria Kobyłko), 97 Girls Club group home, 110, 111–112, 245n67 Glac, Stanisław (Edward Rothman), 91 Glozerowa, Sabina, 70, 83 Goetschel-­Engelmann, Edith, 182 Golfard, Samuel, 85–86, 89 Gömör (Gemer), 207 Goode, William J., 64 Goody, Jack, 21 Görög, Frigyes, 123 Grade, Chaim, 223n30 ­Great Depression, 66

Grodno (Hrodno, Garten), 68, 83 Grossman, Atina, 186, 262n56 Grossman, Lusia, 92–93 Gruber, Abraham (Bumek), 90 Gruber, Nuta, 88, 236n12 guilt feelings, 13 Gulag camps, 30 Gurewitsch, Brana, 87 Gurney, Nathalie, 163 Gurs internment camp (France), 103, 104, 105, 241n10 Guy, W ­ ill, 190, 191 Győr (Raab, Jura), 124 “Gypsies,” 12, 32–33, 195, 216, 263n2; antigypsy ste­reo­t ypes, 142, 253n6; dif­fer­ent treatment in Slovakia and Bohemian lands, 202, 204; “Gypsy issue,” 39; nationwide registration in postwar Czecho­slo­va­k ia, 200, 211; popu­lar anti-­g ypsy sentiments in Czecho­slo­va­k ia, 191; postwar German Zigeunerpolitik (“Gypsy” policy), 141. See also Roma/ Romani p ­ eople; Sinti Hakhsharah, (Zionist agricultural training), 4, 162, 261n36 Hajdúság region (Hungary), 116 Hajská, Markéta, 5 Hajtű-­kanyar [Hairpin Bend] (Ember, 1974), 117 Halavackie ­family, 26–27, 37 Hamburg, 121, 144, 148, 258n3 Hanstein, Ewald, 145 Harzungen concentration camp, 145, 194 Hasenhecke DP camp, 129 Hasidim, 45, 52, 91, 229n9 Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), 44, 45 Hauser, Irena, 55–56, 73–74, 83 Hauser, Leopold, 73–74 Havřice, 195, 264n14 Hebrew language, 9, 96, 182 Hecht, Wanda, 93 Heilbronn, Germany, 156, 157; bombed by British Air Force, 165; city archives, 168, 170, 256n3; invitations to Alice Schwab to visit, 167–168; Jewish emigration from, 257n19; Jews of, 162; memories of emigrants from, 168–171; Rosenthal ­family emigration from, 160 Heller, Imre, 122 Herzog, Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi, 59 heteronormativity, 3 Heuberg, 163 Heuss, Theodor, 168 Hidden C ­ hildren conferences, 112 History of the Jews (Dubnov), 233n12 Hitler, Adolf, 121, 135, 171

Index Hlinka Guard (Slovak fascist paramilitary), 193, 200, 202 Hlybokaje (Glębokie, Glubok), 32, 35 Hodara, Raquel, 68 Höllenreiner, Hugo, 146–148, 152 Holocaust (tele­v i­sion miniseries), 110 Holocaust Studies, 6, 9, 14, 17 Hrodno (Grodno, Garten), 68, 83 Huberband, Rabbi Shimon, 47–48, 58, 232n68 Hudahaj (Gudogai), 33 Hungarian Jewish Crafts and Agricultural Union, 123 Hungarian language, 209 Hungary, pro-­Nazi regime in, 192 Hungary, survivors in, 11–12, 115–116; actors in aid provision activity, 122–127; Girls’ and Boys’ Orphanage of the Pest Jewish Committee, 123; JDC policies and suggested alternatives, 120–122; National Jewish Relief Committee, 122, 124, 125; parents and c­ hildren, 117–120; population of Holocaust survivors, 115 Hyman, Paula, 4 In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute verfolgt [Gassed in Auschwitz, Persecuted to This Day] (Zülch, ed., 1979), 142 individualism, in Western Eu­rope, 124 interethnic communication, 39 intermarriages, 7, 9; Allied military marriage policies, 128–132, 249n16; illegality ­under Nazi regime, 177, 259n16; Jewish Allied soldiers and non-­Jewish ­women, 135–136; Jewish chaplains in Allied armies and, 128, 129, 132, 134, 135–138; Jewish war brides and Allied soldiers, 12, 132–135; proposals from non-­Jews to Jews in hiding, 96–97; rising rates in pre-­Nazi Germany, 177, 259n15; Roma/non-­Roma, 26–30, 35–36 International Refugee Organ­ization, 145 intimate relations, 8, 9–10, 99 IRO (International Refugee Organ­ization), 12 Israel, State of, 9, 125, 169–170, 257n19 Israelite Welfare Office (Stuttgart), 160 Israelitisches Familienblatt (Hamburg newspaper), 174–176, 178, 179, 180, 258–259n5, 258n3 Italy, Fascist, 17 Ivano-Frankivsk (Stanisławów), 94 Jacobson, Israel G., 124, 248n48 JDC (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), 11–12, 66, 129, 145; actors in aid provision activity, 122–127; aid sent to Hungary, 115; alternative policies

275 suggested for, 120–122; C ­ hildren’s Department, 121, 122, 126; Hungarian Committee, 118, 121, 122, 123; Work and Workshop Organ­ization Department, 119–120, 122 Jewish Child Care Association, 245n67 Jewish Culture and History (journal), 162 Jewish families: in Belarusian-­Lithuanian border region, 19; class differences among, 64, 65, 72, 80; complexity of ­family relationships, 75–76; daily routine in ghettos, 62; dilemmas of families in ghettos, 67–83; emigration and ­family dynamics, 158–160; hidden by Romani families, 5; historical background from Eastern Eu­rope, 65–67; home versus dwelling in the ghetto, 79–83; mass emigration from Eu­rope and, 45; “myth of the Jewish ­family,” 113; non-­Jewish maids and nannies employed by, 5; physical well-­being of ­family members in ghettos, 77–79; reunification ­a fter the war, 109, 246n83; spousal relationships in ghettos, 73–76. See also surrogate families; survivors, Jewish Jewish Historical Commission, 89 Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Rus­sia (Freeze), 45–46 Jewish Studies, 6 Jews, 1, 14; Eastern Eu­ro­pean (Ostjuden), 176; in Eastern Polish borderlands, 20; in hiding, 11, 87; passing as non-­Jews, 87, 91, 92–93, 133 Joeden-­Forgey, Elisa von, 2 Jordan, James, 162 Joshi, Vandana, 6 Joskowicz, Ari, 12 Judd, Robin, 12 Judenräte (Jewish Councils), 52, 62; changes in leadership of, 63 Jüdische Rundschau (Zionist newspaper), 178–179, 261n32 Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt (newspaper), 174, 180–184, 189, 261n28 Jura (Győr, Raab), 124 Kaddish prayer, 112, 245n74 Kahana, Rabbi Shlomo David, 45, 59 Kahane, Rabbi David, 48 Kaldychava (Kołdyczewo) concentration camp, 41 Kamién Koszyrski (Kamin-­Kashyrskyi), 88, 236n12 Kaplan, Marion, 183 Kapralski, Sławomir, 18, 33 Karcag, 117 Kasperovich, Stanislav, 36

276 I n d e x Kassel, 129–130 Katzman, Sonia (Elżbieta Żak), 96, 97, 238–239nn55–56 Kaunas. See Kovno Kaunas massacre (1941), 37 Kazakhstan, 29, 30 Kaziany woods, 36 Kelso, Michelle, 17, 18, 225n3 Kenrick, Donald, 252n2 Kern, Hugo, 169, 257n19 Kharkov (Kharkiv), 46 kirvipen (godparenthood), 5 Kishinev (Chişinău), 46 Kladno, 194, 206 Klarsfeld, Serge, 112, 245n74 Klausner, Chaplain Bert, 132 Klein, Gerda Weissmann, 152–153 Klempár, František, 1 Klüger, Ruth, 86, 89 Kobryń (Kobrin), 22 Kobyłko, Maria (Fajga Ginsburg), 97 Kobyłko, Tadeusz, 97 Kokrowsky, Heike, 154 Kołdyczewo (Kaldychava) concentration camp, 41 Kołomyja ghetto, 91, 92, 93, 237n35 Koonz, Claudia, 7 Kovno (Kaunas, Kowne), 37, 48, 69–70 Kowalew, Natas, 7 Kraków (Krakau, Kroke), 23, 66, 95 Krasicki, Wiktor, 93–94 Kristallnacht, 161, 174, 181 Kroke. See Kraków Krokowski, Heike, 142–143 Krośniewice (Mittelstadt, Kroßwitz), 78, 83 Kulcsár, István, 119 Kulm. See Chełmno Kutiny, 211, 266n45 l­ abor, gendered division of, 3 ­labor camps, 68, 69–70, 90, 235n3 Lacková, Elena, 265n27, 265n35 Lanzmann, Claude, 7 Last der Vergangenheit, Die [The Burden of the Past] (Krokowski, 2001), 142–143 Laubinger, Marie, 147 Leff, Lisa, 162 Lemberg. See Lwów Lety concentration camp, 197, 264n20 Lewy, Guenther, 253n6 Lida (Lide), 23, 27, 31 Lithuania, 19, 28, 39, 68; General District of Lithuania, 39, 227n70; Soviet occupation of, 24; Yiddish-­language testimonies in, 4. See also Belarusian-­Lithuanian border region

Lithuanian Museum of Genocide Victims, 225n13 Lithuanians, 20, 32, 34, 69 Litzmannstadt. See Łódź lived experiences, 31, 40, 127. See also daily/ everyday life Łódź (Litzmannstadt, Lodzh) ghetto: Christians in, 48; complexity of f­ amily relationships in, 75–76; conditions leading to divorce, 48–49, 50; deportations to Chełmno death camp, 51, 55, 59, 231n39; Divorce Council, 42, 54, 55, 57; divorce in, 11, 54–58, 60–61, 231n50; forced ­labor for German war economy, 60; Ghetto Archives, 42–43, 228n1, 228n2; Judenrat (Jewish Council), 57, 75, 81; Rabbinical Council, 54; spousal relationships in, 73–76 Loeb, Luise and Richard, 164 London, 158, 160; Nazi bombing (blitz) of World War II, 163; Polish Government in Exile, 165; refugee aid centers in, 167; Rosenthal ­family in, 156, 157, 163, 167–168; Toynbee Hall, 121 Lower, Wendy, 6 Lublin, 70, 151 Lwów (L’viv, Lemberg), 48, 88, 91, 94, 95, 97; ghetto, 92; Polish Jews in, 66 magirdo (Roma excluded from community), 29 Mann, Thomas, 169 Marcinkevich, Darja, 28 Marcinkevich ­family, 22, 28, 38 Marcuse, Lotte, 108, 109, 244n46, 245n52 Markowska, Alfreda, 222n16 Marlow, Jennifer, 5 marriage: arranged by matchmakers, 44, 175, 182; bigamy, 46–47, 58; of con­ve­ nience, 177, 180, 181; economic motivations for, 57; endogamy, 177, 187–188, 225n16; fictitious, 177, 260n19; in Łódź ghetto, 11, 231n50; remarriages, 46, 185; Romani marriage territories in Bohemian lands, 206; surrogate families and, 89; “white marriage,” 128. See also divorce; intermarriages; personal ads maskilim (followers of Haskalah), 44, 229n8 mass killing sites, 22, 40 Maurer, Trude, 176 Mauthausen concentration camp, 146 Megdal, Meyer, 3 memoirs, 1, 6, 8, 85, 196; from Belarusian-­ Lithuanian border region, 20; daily life in ghettos and, 62; of female survivors, 236n8 Memorial Candles (Wardi), 111

Index memory, 17, 19; collective/communal, 21–22, 28, 143; intersection of Jewish and Romani memory paths, 41; memory work/workers, 104, 110, 111, 113, 245n61; preserved within ­family circles, 21; Rosenthal ­family letters and, 167–171 men, Jewish: deaths in military ­labor ser­v ice, 116, 117; divorce and, 46–47; inability to provide for families in ghettos, 72; personal ads announced by/ for, 175–176, 177–178, 180–181, 185, 187; surrogate families and, 87; Torah studies, 44, 50 men, Romani: drafted into Slovak and Hungarian armies, 193, 208, 209; in First Czechoslovak Army Corps, 193–194; in partisan units, 11, 39; in Soviet Red Army, 31 Mendelsohn, Ezra, 4 Meyer, Beate, 259n15 Meyle, Paul, 168, 169, 170 Michlic, Joanna, 8 Milton, Sybil, 17, 86 Minsk, 31, 37 Mirski, Michał (Michael Hauptmann), 89 Mischlinge (mixed-­blood), 183–184, 188 Mitnagdim (opponents of Haskalah), 45 Mittelbau-­Dora concentration camp, 145, 194 Mittelstadt (Krośniewice, Kroßwitz), 78, 83 Moravia, 191, 196, 199, 211; First Czechoslovak Army Corps in, 202; German population expelled from, 195; Nazi Protectorate over, 192–193, 197, 263n2; return of Romani survivors to, 195, 264n15. See also Czecho­slo­va­k ia Moshava Shave Zion, Israel, 169, 257n19 ­Mothers, ­Sisters, Resisters (Gurewitsch), 87 Movement for the Care of ­Children from Germany, 160 Mühlheim, 151 multiculturalism, 111 musical per­for­mances, forced, 31, 226n42 Musovsky, Alexei, 29 My M ­ other’s Sabbath Days: A Memoir (Grade, 1987), 223n30 My Two Lives (Weiss), 1 Nahariya, Israel, 169 Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, The (Lewy, 2000), 253n6 Nazis/Nazism, 1, 133–134, 142–143, 156, 172; administrative divisions of occupied territory, 39, 227n70; Jewish property confiscated by, 80; Nuremberg laws, 48, 177, 183, 259n16; “pacification” actions, 35; police, 32, 35; racial hierarchy and

277 terminology of, 14, 183, 188; rise of Nazi Party, 174, 177; roundups of Jews, 51, 85, 90, 96; Sperre operation (1942), 52, 231n39; terms used to describe Roma, 9. See also Germany, Nazi; SS (Scuitzstaffel) Neuberger, Rabbi Baroness Julia, 156, 167 Neuengamme concentration camp, 153 Nevšová, 195 Nowogródek, 19, 20, 24 nuclear ­family, 3, 4, 72; ­children and, 8; diminution of, 10; duress of ghetto life, 42; rescue of, 13; sedentary Romani families, 39 Odessa, 46 O.d.F. [Opfer des Faschismus] (victim of fascism), 188, 263n67 Ofer, Dalia, 6, 11, 228n1 Oneg Shabbat Archives, 47, 50, 53. See also Ringelblum Archives Opoczynski, Peretz, 71, 74 oral histories, 9, 18, 20, 40–41, 62, 104, 216 Orlovskaja, Marianna, 35 orphans, 5, 26–27, 86, 90, 106, 107; full orphans as minority in orphanages, 11; “Holocaust orphan,” 103, 104, 114 Orthodox Chris­tian­ity, 25–26, 28, 36, 45, 227n57 Orthodox Judaism, 44, 106, 119, 136 OSE (Oueuvre de Secours aux Enfants), 104–114, 242n11 Pale of Settlement, 44, 45, 54 Palestine, 59, 65, 97, 162; British Mandate in, 158; German nationals in Palestine exchanged for Jews, 164; journey by ship to, 159; personal ads and emigration to, 177, 179, 261n32 Panevėžys, 225n13 Papanek, Ernst, 124 Papugai, Moshe, 74 Papusza (Bronisława Wajs), 41 partisans, 1, 11, 22; Lithuanian anti-­Soviet partisans, 36; Nazi anti-­partisan actions, 33; refuge with, 36, 41; Romani ­women as in­for­mants for, 35; Zhukov unit, 36 Pasevich, Lubov, 33–34, 36 Pasevich ­family, 27, 30 Paynton, Jack, 162 peasants, 19, 25, 28; relations with nomadic Roma, 26; Roma hidden by, 26, 32; Ukrainian, 22 Pécs (Fünfkirchen, Pečuj, Pečuh), 124 Pelt, Robert Jan van, 157 ­People’s House, Settlement and Volksheim (Varsányi, 1912), 121 Perechodnik, Calel, 70–71

278 I n d e x perpetrators, 7, 9, 32, 203, 209; assistants to, 26; gender and, 6; Jewish military brides treated as, 134; revenge from and against, 197 personal ads, in German Jewish newspapers, 173–177, 188–189; a­ fter the Holocaust, 184–188; citizenship as ­factor in marriage market, 176–177, 260n23; émigré ads in French newspapers, 260n20; history of newspaper personal ads, 258n1; housing as concern in, 186–187; before Nazi dictatorship, 174–177; in Nazi period, 177–184; in Soviet zone and German Demo­cratic Republic, 188, 263n67 Pfeil, Christian, 151 philanthropy, 11, 134 Piłsudski, Józef, 66, 67 Pincus, Chaplain Philip, 135 Poale Zion, 231n43. See also Zionism pogroms, 37, 45, 46 Poland, in Rus­sian Empire (Congress Poland), 44 Poland, interwar (Second Polish Republic), 19, 24, 61; hardships for Jews ­under, 65–67; Hasidic society in, 229n9; Jewish men fleeing eastward from, 7–8; marriage and divorce in, 47; Soviet occupation in east, 48. See also Belarusian-­Lithuanian border region Poland, Nazi-­occupied (General Government), 60, 77, 79, 91, 193; Jews in hiding, 87; liberated by Red Army, 95–96 Poland, postwar (Communist), 21, 198 Poles: in Eastern borderlands, 20, 24; exchange of homes with ghettoized Jews, 80–81; as friends and helpers of Jews, 70; Jews hidden by, 88, 90, 97; Jews “passing” as, 34, 91, 133; taken to Germany for forced l­ abor, 92–93; testimonies about death camps, 234–235n43 Polish Home Army, 96 Polish language, 34, 37; as lingua franca in borderlands, 23; survivor testimonies in, 89 Polish-­Soviet War (1919–1921), 45 Pollin-­Galay, Hannah, 3–4 Ponary (Paneriai, Ponar) mass killing site, 40 POWs (prisoners of war), 193, 208, 210 Poznański, Jakub, 49–50, 230n34 Prague, 137, 228n2, 232n73 Pravienishki (Pravieniškės, Praveniskiu), 37, 38 Prešov (Eperjes, Preschau, Pejrešis), 200, 202 Pressburg (Bratislava), 1 Prużany (Pruzhane), 22 Przemyślany (Peremyshliany), 85 public sphere, 68, 110, 195–199 Puxon, Grattan, 252n2

queer theory, 3 Raab (Győr, Jura), 124 rabbis: decline in authority of, 46; divorce and, 44, 45, 48, 55, 56, 59 Radom, 85 Rajak ­brothers, 32–33, 40 Rattner, Emil, 93 Rauch, Helena, 95, 237n20 Ravensbrück concentration camp, 144, 149, 152, 153 Red Army, Soviet, 30–31, 90, 95–96; deserters from, 36; Łódź ghetto liberated by, 43; in Slovakia, 193, 264–265n26 Red Cross, 145, 164 Reder, Rudolf, 95–96 Reichmann, Zilli, 151, 152 Reinchardt-­Fabian, Maria, 29 Reinhardt, Lolo, 151 Reiser, Leib, 68, 83 Reuss, Anja, 12 Révész, László (aka Perec Révész), 122–123 Révész, Margit, 124 Ringelblum, Emanuel, 6 Ringelblum Archives, 47, 58, 233n12. See also Oneg Shabbat Archives Ringelheim, Joan, 8 Rivne (Równe), 22, 238n55 Robak, Stanisław, 95, 237n20 Rolnik, Masza, 71 Romania, 4, 201 Romani and Sinti families: difference in war­time fates in Czecho­slo­va­k ia, 191–194; documentation of, 19–22; on eve of World War II, 18, 20; ­family in survivor communities, 141; humiliated through sexual vio­lence, 18; nomadic ­family in interwar period, 22–26; non-­Romani godparent chosen by, 5, 26; in partisan units, 22; patrilineal system, 24–25; postwar migration from Slovakia to Bohemian lands, 191, 199–217; postwar situation in Czecho­slo­va­k ia, 194–195; rebuilding of families in postwar Germany, 152–154; reconciliation with war­time fate on border of private/public spheres, 195–199; responses to Nazi vio­lence, 19; sedentary families and mixed marriages, 26–30; sedentary families’ responses to occupation, 35–39; tortured and murdered by Nazis, 32–33 Romani language, 12, 28, 29, 196 Roma/Romani p ­ eople, 1, 8; in Belarus-­ Lithuania border region, 10–11; definitions of, 221n3, 263n2; as Displaced Persons (DPs), 142, 253n9; excluded from

Index postwar compensation programs, 224n41; forced musical per­for­mances ­under Nazi occupation, 31; h ­ orse trading, 20, 22; Jewish-­Romani war­time encounters, 41; lack of international institutions in support of, 9, 12; lack of repre­sen­ta­tion in Allied armies, 142, 146; liberation and return from the camps, 143–150; Litoũska (Lithuanian) Roma, 21, 29; nomadic, 18, 19, 26, 30–35, 39–40, 192; passing as non-­Roma, 34, 40; po­liti­cal activism and, 4; Polska (Polish) Roma, 21, 23; postwar migrations of, 9; Ruska (Rus­sian) Roma, 27, 29; scholarship on Nazi persecution of, 141–143, 252nn1–2; sedentary, 19, 39; socializing with non-­Romani neighbors, 211–212; targeted for total destruction, 14. See also “Gypsies”; Sinti; survivors, Roma and Sinti Rose, Chaplain I. B., 135 Rose, Sonya, 130 Rosenberg (Nebenzahl), Blanca, 91–92, 237n30, 237n35 Rosenberg, Otto, 144–145, 149, 150, 153 Rosenbloom, Maria, 91–92, 237n30, 237n35 Rosenthal, Erwin, 165 Rosenthal, Gabriele, 171 Rosenthal, Helmut (Jack Rosen), 156, 157, 160, 166 Rosenthal, Hermine, 156, 157, 160, 166, 167 Rosenthal, Liesel (Alice Schwab), ­family letters to, 13, 154–158, 171–172, 181; emigration to ­England and, 156, 158; Heilbronn and collective memory, 167–171; Liesel as pioneer in emigration, 160; news from the Holocaust, 160–167 Rosenthal, Ludwig, 156, 157, 160, 166 Rothman, Edward (Stanisław Glac), 91 Równe (Rivne), 22, 238n55 Rožňava (Rosznyó, Rosenau), 207, 266n45 Rubinsztejn, Estera, 88, 237n14 Rudashevski, Yitskhok, 69, 82–83, 233n15 Ruder, Dolek, 89–90 Rumkowski, Chaim M., 59, 228n1, 231n52, 231n55 Rus­sian Empire, 28, 29, 44 Rus­sian language, 229n11 Rus­sian Revolution, 29 Rus­sians, in Eastern Polish borderlands, 20 Rutkowska, Alexandra, 23 Rutkowska, Hanna, 23 Rutkowska, Janina, 23 Rutkowska, Salomaia, 23 Rutkowski, Stefan, 23 Rutkowskie f­ amily, 23, 27 Růžička, Leon, 194, 264n12

279 Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 144, 163 Sadílková, Helena, 8, 13 Samter, Hermann, 182–183 Sawiński ­family, 90 Scandinavia, 9 Scheuer, Manfred, 169, 257n19 Schlör, Joachim, 13, 181 Schmidt, Anton, 152 Schwab, Alice. See Rosenthal, Liesel (Alice Schwab), ­family letters to Schwab, Julia. See Neuberger, Rabbi Baroness Julia Schwab, Walter, 163, 167 Schwartz, Joseph, 120, 126 Seghedin (Szeged, Szegedin) ghetto, 116 Selver-­Urbach, Sara, 51 Serbia, 4 sexuality, 7, 88, 95, 98, 111; Nazi medical experiments and, 149–150; sexual barter, 96 sexual vio­lence, 18, 33, 149 Shoah (Lanzmann film), 7 shtetls, 66 Siberia, 30 siblings, 8, 11, 23, 79, 99, 109; murdered, 85; in Romani families, 5, 38; separation and foster placement in postwar period, 106–110; surrogate families and, 86, 94, 95, 98; survivor identity and engagement with the past, 110–114; war­time experiences in France, 104–106 Sierakowiak, Dawid, 51–52 Simoniukštytė, Aušra, 38 Singer, Oskar, 59, 232n73 Sinti, 9, 31, 221n3, 263n2; as Displaced Persons (DPs), 142, 253n9; f­ amily in survivor communities, 141; in Fascist Italy, 17; liberation and return from the camps, 143–150; scholarship on Nazi persecution of, 141–143, 252nn1–2; targeted for total destruction, 14. See also “Gypsies”; Roma/Romani p ­ eople; survivors, Roma and Sinti Slepak, Cecilia, 53, 70, 74–75, 231n43, 233n12 Slepak Report, 68, 74, 233n12 Slovakia, 5, 122; German population expelled from, 195; “Gypsies” in social hierarchy of rural areas, 203; postwar anti-­Hungarian campaign, 209–210; pro-­Nazi regime in, 192–193; Romani migration to Bohemian lands from, 191, 199–217; Romani survivors in, 12. See also Czecho­slo­va­k ia Slovak National Uprising (1944), 1, 193 Sluzki, Carlos, 158–159 Social Work in the Field of Child Protection (Varsányi, ed., 1936), 121 Society for Threatened P ­ eoples, 142, 252n2

280 I n d e x Sollnock (Szolnok) ghetto, 116 Soviet Union (USSR), 4, 19, 194; Belarus in, 24; Czechoslovak émigrés in, 193; invasion of Czecho­slo­va­k ia (1968), 198, 215; Nazi genocide of Roma in, 33; Roma in, 21, 30, 40; war with Nazi Germany, 30–31, 37, 165. See also Red Army, Soviet Spatz (Heimrath), Zofia, 238n44 Spiegel, Isaiah, 50–51 SS (Schutzstaffel), 35, 40, 63, 144; Bergen-­ Belsen personnel captured by British Army, 166; Einsatzgruppen (killing squads), 32, 35; medical torture of Romani ­women, 149. See also Nazis/Nazism Stampfer, Shaul, 71 Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk), 94 Stankiewicz, Wanda, 41 Stary Sambor (Staryi Sambir), 97 Stein, Arlene, 110, 111, 245n61 ste­reo­t ypes, 20, 28, 142, 176, 195, 217 sterilization, forced, 149, 153, 154 Stern, Alfred, 161–162 Stern, Berta, 162, 165 Stern, Minnie Florsheim, 161–162, 164 Stetten am kalten Markt, 163 Still Alive (Klüger), 86 Stojka, Ceija, 196 Stoltzfus, Nathan, 259n16 Strasshof ­labor camp (Austria), 116, 117, 118 Strauss, Christine, 153 Strauss, Daniel, 146 surrogate families, 4, 11, 85–87, 98–99; “camp s­ isters,” 86, 87, 98; male bonding and, 99, 236n11; methodological ­challenges in study of, 87–89; new families with non-­Jews, 93–98; ship brothers/ship ­sisters, 159; spouses, siblings, and parents, 89–93 survivors, Jewish, 2, 8, 9, 10, 12, 146; documentation of experiences, 143; emergence of collective survivor identity, 110–111; in Hungary, 115–116; as individual subjects, 103; interviews with, 3–4; migration to Britain, 13; radical aloneness of, 3. See also Jewish families survivors, Roma and Sinti, 2, 8, 153, 154–155, 195; assistance and support for, 151–152; communist government of, 264n15; compensation claims of, 199; discrimination in postwar Germany, 12, 142, 143, 152; documentation of experiences, 143; migration from Slovakia to Bohemian lands, 12–13; Romani identity and, 195, 196; sedentism as survival strategy, 38; survivor guilt among, 150. See also Romani and Sinti families Sussmann, Martha, 165

Szeged (Szegedin, Seghedin) ghetto, 116 Szolnok (Sollnock) ghetto, 116 Sztehlo, Gábor, 124 tabor (camp of a Romani nomadic group), 24, 25, 28, 32, 33 Talmud, 45 Tatars, 20 Tec, Nechama, 87, 236n8, 239n66 Tenenbaum, Yehuda, 90–91, 237n23 testimonies, 3–4, 7, 10, 88, 97–98, 112; better documented for Jewish than Romani survivors, 143; emotion and, 87, 95–96; in En­glish, 4; eyewitnesses to massacres, 32, 40; from ghettos, 43, 60, 85; importance of families and, 9, 85, 98; integrated into Holocaust scholarship, 17; limitations of, 99; in Polish, 89; Roma and Sinti, 12, 143, 148, 151–152, 154; in Yiddish, 4, 89 Thank You for Every­thing (Schwab), 162 Theresienstadt concentration camp, 86, 156 Tomášová, Irena, 202, 203 To Tell at Last (Rosenberg), 92 Transnistria, 17, 18 trauma, 63, 107, 111, 117, 135, 145; defined, 254n26; post-­trauma, 63, 149 Trawniki concentration camp, 75 Treblinka death camp, 7, 88 Trevisan, Paola, 17 Trinczer, Berta, 94–95 Trunk, Isaiah, 59 Tychina, Franz, 27, 37 Tychina, Maria, 27 Tychina f­ amily, 37 Uherský Ostroh, 264n15 Ukraine, 19, 41, 85, 193; Czechs in western Ukraine, 201; Romani families in, 22–23. See also Volhynia Ukrainians, 92–93 Unger, Michal, 11 Union of Gypsies-­Roma, 199, 214–215 United States, 9, 79; foster families in, 103–104, 105, 113, 114; German Jewish refugees in, 6, 180; immigration laws, 45, 131; Jewish chaplains in U.S. military, 135–138; journey by ship to, 159; U.S. military marriage regulations, 112, 29–130, 133 UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), 145, 254n29 Vágtölgyes (Dubnica nad Vahóm, Dubnitz an der Waag), 193 Vantsevich f­ amily, 37 Varsányi, Géza, 120–122, 125, 126

Index Veil, Simone, 142 Vel’ká Lesná, 1 Veselí nad Moravou, 195 Vidor, Rabbi Pál, 120 Vidzy (Widze, Vidzh), 20, 28 Vienna, 3, 55, 93, 116, 121, 241n8 Viková, Lada, 17 Vilne. See Wilno Vilnius. See Wilno Volhynia, 19, 41, 88, 193 Volljude (full Jew), 183, 188 Wajlowna, Regina, 77–78 Wajnkranc, Noemi Szac, 69, 75, 81 Wajnkranc, Yurek, 75 Wardi, Dina, 111 Warsaw, 27, 47 Warsaw ghetto, 6, 50, 53; deportations from, 70, 235n44; divorce in, 58; establishment of, 49, 77; Jewish under­ ground in, 231n43; Slepak Report, 68, 233n12 Warsaw Uprising (1944), 88 Waxman, Zoë, 236n8 Weg, Der (Jewish newspaper), 174, 184, 185, 188, 262nn51–52 Weiss, Lotte, 10, 13 Weiss, Veronika, 145 Weitzman, Lenore J., 6 Wertheimer, Hede and Jakob, 164 Wertheimer, Peter, 42–43, 228n2 “What Do Studies of W ­ omen, Gender, and Sexuality Contribute to Understanding the Holocaust?” (Bergen, 2013), 7 Wiesenthal, Simon, 142 Wilno (Vilnius, Vilne), 21, 46, 82; German occupation of, 31; ghetto in, 71; Polish Jews in, 66; Wilno voivodeship, 19, 20, 24, 227n70 WJC (World Jewish Congress), 115, 116, 118, 246n14 Wobick-­Segev, Sarah, 13 Wolf, Fritz, 169–171 Wolgin, Philip, 130 ­women, German: female perpetrators, 6; marriage with Jewish Allied soldiers sought by, 135–136; surrogate families and, 94

281 ­women, Jewish: bonding in concentration camps, 86, 235n3; education in Eastern Eu­rope, 44, 229n9; f­ amily relationships and, 72–73; gender roles in Łódź ghetto, 60–61; personal ads announced by/for, 175, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 259n8, 262n49; surrogate f­ amily relationships, 91–93; war brides of Allied soldiers, 132–135 ­women, Romani: daily tasks and risks of, 34–35; food for relatives in hiding, 10–11; as in­for­mants, 35; in Nazi Germany, 17; sexual abuse/violence against, 18, 33, 149, 203, 208, 209 ­Women in the Holocaust (Ofer and Weitzman, eds.), 6 ­Women in the Holocaust (Waxman), 236n8 ­Women’s Studies, 6 World War I, 31, 45, 65, 67, 121 World War II, 14, 47–48, 59, 103, 142, 158, 189 Yad Vashem: Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, 162; Righ­teous Among the Nations, 11, 98, 112, 238–239n56, 239n63 Yanovich, Pavel, 27, 28 Yanovich, Vera, 35 Yanovich ­family, 20 Yiddish language, 6, 9, 89 youth movements, 4, 51, 62, 65, 90 Zagórska, Maria, 93, 94 Záhořovice, 195 Zahra, Tara, 8 Zajdel, Bronisław, 93, 94 Żak, Elżbieta (Sonia Katzman), 96, 97, 238–239nn55–56 Żak, Tadeusz, 96, 238–239n56 Zbąszyn (Bentschen) expulsion, 47–48 Zeiger, Susan, 130 Zionism, 4, 9, 181; hakhsharot (agricultural training farms), 4, 162, 261n36; Hungarian Communist leaders and, 247n33; in Hungary, 119, 120, 122–123, 247n25; personal ads in Zionist newspaper, 178–179; youth movements, 65, 90 Złoczów (Zolochiv), 89 Zülch, Tilmann, 142 Zygelbojm, Shmuel, 165