Description: Jewish Responses to Persecution: 1941-1942, Volume III sheds light on the personal and public lives of Jews during a period when Hitler's triumph in Europe seemed assured, and the mass murder of millions had begun in earnest. The primary source material presented here makes th...
Review Quotes: 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.