Beginning in 1950, the state of Israel prosecuted and jailed dozens
of Holocaust survivors who had served as camp kapos or ghetto
police under the Nazis. At last comes the first full account of the
kapo trials, based on records newly declassified after forty years.
In December 1945, a Polish-born commuter on a Tel Aviv bus
recognized a fellow rider as the former head of a town council the
Nazis had established to manage the Jews. When he denounced the man
as a collaborator, the rider leapt off the bus, pursued by
passengers intent on beating him to death. Five years later, to
address ongoing tensions within Holocaust survivor communities, the
State of Israel instituted the criminal prosecution of Jews who had
served as ghetto administrators or kapos in concentration camps.
Dan Porat brings to light more than three dozen little-known
trials, held over the following two decades, of survivors charged
with Nazi collaboration. Scouring police investigation files and
trial records, he found accounts of Jewish policemen and camp
functionaries who harassed, beat, robbed, and even murdered their
brethren. But as the trials exposed the tragic experiences of the
kapos, over time the courts and the public shifted from seeing them
as evil collaborators to victims themselves, and the fervor to
prosecute them abated. Porat shows how these trials changed
Israel's understanding of the Holocaust and explores how the
suppression of the trial records-long classified by the
state-affected history and memory. Sensitive to the devastating
options confronting those who chose to collaborate, yet rigorous in
its analysis, Bitter Reckoning invites us to rethink our ideas of
complicity and justice and to consider what it means to be a victim
in extraordinary circumstances.
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