Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath

By Eliyana R. Adler, Natalia Aleksiun, Viktoria Banyai and 9 more

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781978819528

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Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath

Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath

EDITED BY ELIYANA R. ADLER AND KATEŘINA ČAPKOVÁ

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, 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.gov/2020004888

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

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Contents

Introduction: Why the Family?

Kateřina Čapková and Eliyana R. Adler

PART 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

Volha Bartash

2 Separation and Divorce in the Łódź and Warsaw Ghettos

Michal Unger

3 Narrating Daily Family Life in Ghettos under Nazi Occupation: Concepts and Dilemmas

Dalia Ofer

4 Uneasy Bonds: On Jews in Hiding and the Making of Surrogate Families

Natalia Aleksiun

PART II

Intervention of Institutions

5 Siblings in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath in France and the United States: Rethinking the Holocaust Orphan?

Laura Hobson Faure

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

Viktória Bányai

7 For Your Benefit: Military Marriage Policies, European Jewish War Brides, and the Centrality of Family, 1944–1950

Robin Judd

PART III

Rebuilding the Family after the Holocaust

8 Return to Normality?: The Struggle of Sinti and Roma Survivors to Rebuild a Life in Postwar Germany

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

Joachim Schlör

10 Looking for a Nice Jewish Girl …: Personal Ads and the Creation of Jewish Families in Germany before and after the Holocaust

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 Czechoslovakia

Helena Sadílková

Acknowledgments

Notes

Notes on Contributors

Index

Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath

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 family of eight: her parents, two sisters, and three brothers. 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 family 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 family.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 family 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 those experiences. These 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.

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 trouble, strife, dislocation, and loss when people 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 family studies, because it analyzes the meaning of family and family relations during genocide and its posttraumatic aftermath. All wars lead to family 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 violence 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 these extreme conditions, pressures, and uncertainties, the family was a fragile site of protection and solidarity—and of possible 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 family, 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. After the destruction of large family 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 limited 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 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 these 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 earlier research on the family and the Holocaust and should contribute to the further development and cross-fertilization of these fields.

SCHOLARSHIP

There are numerous sociological explanations and interpretations of the family. The conservative definition of family, 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 family to include the partnerships of gays and lesbians, as well as any number of non-normative relationships. This expansion led to an emphasis on family ties as chosen relationships.⁵ A similar emphasis is typically found among authors who criticize family as an anachronistic concept, because, 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 family. Thus, one of the broader questions to be explored is how social belonging and membership were redefined during and in the aftermath of the violence of the Holocaust. This question brings under one analytical umbrella not only studies of nuclear and extended families but also particular constructions of people 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 these statements obviously emphasize the tremendous losses and radical aloneness of the two survivors, but additional meaning can be extracted from the diverse definitions of family 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 and cultural settings. Although family is crucial in all of their narratives, she notes that their understandings of family differ: in narrating the family, 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 family, 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 these Yiddish-Lithuanian testimonies gives credence to foster-kinship 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 after the Holocaust must take into account prewar understandings of the family 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 family, 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 shaped 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 limited phenomenon in the interwar period. At the same time, it seems that there were only a few larger Romani organizations (most notable are those in Romania, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, and Serbia) that could offer an alternative community to family networks.¹³

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 were 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) were expected to perform manual labor for the godparent whenever needed.

During the Holocaust period, these 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 these intimate bonds and changing power dynamics during and after the war. In many cases, those 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 these 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 whole families, because the importance of these 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 wartime and postwar experiences. Especially regarding the genocide of the Jews, current historiography takes into account local contexts, interactions with the 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 were understood as people 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 women, children, and the family 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 until 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 women 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 household 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 family 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 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 women, 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 people 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-known 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 women 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 sister.

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 women’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 family 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—the 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 family to survive. My father was too ill to consider fleeing. Instead, he, and my mother, Aunt Bela, her daughter 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 not haunt many surviving men after the war.³⁰ Rather, the family 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 family members in the highly uncertain conditions of war and genocide.³¹

Survivors faced major decisions after the war as well. In chapter 11, Helena Sadílková 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 Czechoslovakia, even when this meant temporary or longer-term separation. As with the case of the men who fled the German army above, there were certainly gendered and generational aspects to these 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 things 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 whether 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 women by focusing on the allegedly specific roles of women 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 these 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 simultaneously 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, children, partners, siblings, and more distant relatives was felt by all, although perhaps in different ways.

Pioneering scholarship on children as victims of the Holocaust by Debórah Dwork and, more recently, by Joanna Michlic, Tara Zahra, Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Boaz Cohen, and others 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. According to such research, Jews mainly left Europe because of their Zionist commitments, antisemitism, fear of communism, or a combination of these factors. Those who stayed were 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 were 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 toward elderly or sick relatives or because 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, family 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, until 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, because 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 stereotypically 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 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 family 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 after the Holocaust, looks at the responses of the survivors to their postwar status. As becomes clear from reading the individual chapters, there 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 were 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 those who had very close relations to people outside the family 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 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 human 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 those 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 because 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 limited 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 sisters who became orphans during the war and who were cared for by charitable organizations under 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 sisters spent some time during and after 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 children 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 family 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 family lives in the immediate postwar period. She shows how Allied military structures hindered the efforts of their soldiers to marry Jewish Holocaust survivors. In these cases, the official policies of an occupying army combined with unofficial prejudice to impede the ability of these survivors to rebuild their lives.

It is no coincidence that there 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 Organization (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 these 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 these migrants’ families. This migration route of thousands of 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 Heilbronn during and after the prewar emigration of one member and in the postwar period. When Liesel Rosenthal emigrated to Great Britain in 1937, shortly after 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 family 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 family 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 historiography. Based on the correspondence, he shows persuasively that this was not how these people interpreted their situation. Especially after the war, when the fate of distant family members—aunts, uncles, 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 others with similar experiences after 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 Auschwitz 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