The testimonies of individuals who survived the Holocaust as children pose distinct emotional and intellectual challenges for researchers: as now-adult interviewees recall profound childhood experiences of suffering and persecution, they also invoke their own historical awareness and memories of their postwar lives, requiring readers to follow simultaneous, disparate narratives. This interdisciplinary volume brings together historians, psychologists, and other scholars to explore child survivors' accounts. With a central focus on the Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive's over 1,500 testimonies, it not only enlarges our understanding of the Holocaust empirically but illuminates the methodological, theoretical, and institutional dimensions of this unique form of historical record.

The testimonies of individuals who survived the Holocaust as children pose distinct emotional and intellectual challenges for researchers: as now-adult interviewees recall profound childhood experiences of suffering and persecution, they also invoke their own historical awareness and memories of their postwar lives, requiring readers to follow simultaneous, disparate narratives. This interdisciplinary volume brings together historians, psychologists, and other scholars to explore child survivors' accounts. With a central focus on the Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive's over 1,500 testimonies, it not only enlarges our understanding of the Holocaust empirically but illuminates the methodological, theoretical, and institutional dimensions of this unique form of historical record.

Many books on Holocaust survivors deal with their lives in the Displaced Persons camps, with memory and remembrance, and with the nature of their testimonies. Representing scholars from different countries and different disciplines such as history, sociology, demography, psychology, anthropology, and literature, this collection explores the survivors' return to everyday life and how their experience of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust impacted their process of integration into various European countries, the United States, Argentina, Australia, and Israel. Thus, it offers a rich mix of perspectives, disciplines, and communities.

Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded within families. Even after the war, sole survivors often described their losses and rebuilt their lives with a distinct focus on family. Yet this perspective is lacking in academic analyses.   In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.

Illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine prior to the founding of the State of Israel forms one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of Zionism and modern Jewish history. Bringing Jews from Europe to Palestine by land and by sea in defiance of restrictive British immigration policies was partly an undertaking of national rescue and partly a calculated strategy of political brinksmanship. In this compelling analysis, Ofer examines various illegal immigration and rescue efforts organized by the Palestinian Jewish community in both the beginning and latter phases of the war. Making exhaustive use of archival sources, Ofer provides invaluable insight into the struggles of the immigrants, the activists and supporters of the movement, the logistical obstacles, and the political forces working to halt or exploit the flow of refugees.

As Jews throughout Europe faced Nazi persecution, Jewish women-wives, daughters, mothers-encountered special problems and had particular vulnerabilities. This is the first book of original scholarship devoted to women in the Holocaust. By examining women's unique responses, their incredible resourcefulness, their courage, and their suffering, the book enhances our understanding of the experiences of all Jews during the Nazi era. The introductory essay by Lenore Weitzman and Dalia Ofer stakes out new intellectual territory and shows how questions about gender lead to a richer and more finely nuanced understanding of the Holocaust. Testimonies of Holocaust survivors, written especially for this book, shed light on women's lives in the ghettos, the Jewish resistance movement, and the concentration camps. The narratives personalize and exemplify many of the larger themes explored in other chapters by Holocaust historians, sociologists, and literary experts. These chapters explore the variety and complexity of gender differences during the Holocaust. The culturally defined prewar roles of Jewish men and women endowed them with different spheres of knowledge, expertise, and skills with which to face the Nazi onslaught. During the war the Nazis imposed different regulations, work requirements, and sanctions on the two sexes. Women had to assume new roles as family protectors during the ghetto period, when men were more vulnerable. In contrast women, and especially mothers, were more vulnerable in the concentration camps. The detailed portraits of women in these chapters show us their individuality, strength, and humanity. Contributors to this volume: Gershon Bacon Yehuda Bauer Daniel Blatman Gisela Bock Ruth Bondy Liza Chapnik Ida Fink Myrna Goldenberg Sara R. Horowitz Paula E. Hyman Marion Kaplan Felicja Karay Bronka Klibansk Lawrence L. Langer Dalia Ofer Renee Poznanski Joan Ringelheim Nechama Tec Michal Unger Lidia Rosenfeld Vago Lenore J. Weitzman