Jewish Responses to Persecution

Volume Introduction: From Persecution to Annihilation
Part I: Jews and the Expansion of the German Empire: January to June 1941
Chapter 1: Facing Increased Pressure
Chapter 2: Struggling in the Lódzand Warsaw Ghettos
Chapter 3: Confronting New Challenges
Part II: Escalating Violence: June 1941 to July 1942
Chapter 4: Mass Murder in the Occupied Soviet Union and Deportations to “the East”
Chapter 5: Widening Circles of Persecution
Chapter 6: In the Grip of Germany’s Allies
Part III: Beyond Compliance and Resistance: Interactions after June1941
Chapter 7: Elites and Ordinary Jews
Chapter 8: Support Networks
Chapter 9: Deference, Evasion, or Revolt?
Part IV: Glimpsing the Abyss: Patterns and Perceptions
Chapter 10: The Role of Religion
Chapter 11: Limits of Language
Chapter 12: Making Sense of the Unthinkable
List of Documents
Bibliography
Glossary
Chronology

This book’s numerous documents, some previously published but many translated from archival sources for the first time, include heart-stabbing expressions of pain,fear, despair, doomed hope, and innocent delusion. They flow mainly from Jewish sufferers’ pens, with none from the perpetrators’ bureaucracy. The voices are mostly Central or East European, but there are also gripping testimonies from southeastern Europe, the Netherlands, and France. . . .Otherwise, the political documents expose, though without recrimination, the self-delusion and sometimes self-serving attitudes of Jewish leaders in Allied lands, and of members of Judenräte and the Jewish Police in the ghettos. This collection puts myriad significant documents into teachers’ and students’ hands. . . .[T]hese documents illuminate individual fates in a wide range of geographical and socio-cultural settings. Reading such sources, we need not reject the challenge of fashioning a wide-ranging interpretation of Hitlerism and the Holocaust—a historical and philosophical tool much needed if the barbed wire is to be cut. At the start, however, we must recognize that individual fates possess their own existential and epistemological autonomy.