Safe Among the Germans
Liberated Jews After World War II
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- $40.99
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- $40.99
Publisher Description
This book tells the little-known story of why a quarter-million Jews, survivors of death camps and forced labor, sought refuge in Germany after World War II. Those who had ventured to return to Poland after liberation soon found that their homeland had become a new killing ground, where some 1,500 Jews were murdered in pogroms between 1945 and 1947. Facing death at home, and with Palestine and the rest of the world largely closed to them, they looked for a place to be safe and found it in the shelter of the Allied Occupation Forces in Germany.
By 1950 a little community of 20,000 Jews remained in Germany: 8,000 native German Jews and 12,000 from Eastern Europe. Ruth Gay examines their contrasting lives in the two postwar Germanies. After the fall of Communism, the Jewish community was suddenly overwhelmed by tens of thousands of former Soviet Jews. Now there are some 100,000 Jews in Germany. The old, somewhat nostalgic life of the first postwar decades is being swept aside by radical forces from the Lubavitcher at one end to Reform and feminism at the other. What started in 1945 as a “remnant” community has become a dynamic new center of Jewish life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
How has there come to be a Jewish population more than 100,000 strong in the land Hitler promised to make "Judenrein"? As Gay shows in this intriguing if uneven history, Germany ironically served as a haven for Eastern European Jewish immigrants immediately after the war, when a quarter-million Jews were housed, under the protection of the Allies, in displaced persons camps. Gay's discussion of this is the strongest part of her book, as she deftly examines the dynamics of the "surviving remnant" of European Jewry as it tried to rebuild itself amid the ashes of the Holocaust, creating schools, arts organizations and families. As Gay notes poignantly, "the last flowering, the last living moment of Polish Jewish culture, played itself out in the D.P. camps in Germany." As soon as they could, however, most of the Jews emigrated. Germany's Jewish population then struggled with small numbers and the legacy of Nazism for more than 40 years. As Gay (who won a National Jewish Book Award for Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America) tracks the life of Jews in both East and West Germany, the book loses focus. But as she details the influx of tens of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, the narrative picks up again as she shows how this latest set of refugees has the opportunity to create a new, vibrant German Jewry. 30 illus.
