front cover of Waiting for Hope
Waiting for Hope
Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany
Angelika Konigseder
Northwestern University Press, 2001
After the defeat of Germany in World War II, more than a hundred thousand Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were transported to camps maintained by the allies for displaced persons (DPs). In this new history, historians Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel offer a social and cultural history of the post-WWII displaced persons camps.

Starting with the discovery of death camps by Allied forces, Königseder and Wetzel describe the inadequate preparations made for the survivors. The soldiers were ill equipped to deal with the physical wreckage and mental anguish of their charges, but American rabbis soon arrived to perform invaluable work helping the survivors cope. The historians also devote attention to autonomous Jewish life in and near the camps: theater groups and orchestras prospered, schools were founded, a tuberculosis hospital and clinic for DPs was established, and underground organizations handled illegal immigration to Israel and trained soldiers to fight in Palestine.

Drawing on original documents and the work of other historians, Waiting for Hope sheds light on a largely unknown period in postwar Jewish history and shows that the suffering of the survivors did not end with the war.
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The Warsaw Ghetto's Little Nurse
The Memoirs of Alina Margolis-Edelman
Alina Margolis-Edelman
Central European University Press, 2026
The memoirs of the Polish-Jewish writer, physician, and humanitarian aid activist, Alina Margolis-Edelman (1922–2008), present the life of its author from her childhood in .ód., Poland till the end of the World War II. Soon after the beginning of the war her father was shot by the Gestapo, and her mother moved to Warsaw Ghetto with Alina and her younger brother. Alina enrolled in the Jewish School of Nursing and worked as a nurse and a courier for the Resistance movement. In a rescue action she describes in the book, she saved the life of Marek Edelman – one of the leaders of the Ghetto Uprising (1943), and he later became her husband.
The stories told in her book illuminate issues of anti-Semitism, Holocaust, and Jewish resistance to oppression. She writes about solidarity in times of great danger, resilience in dire situations, dignity of love and care.
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Wayward Threads
Robert Goldmann
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Wayward Threads is the story of Robert Goldmann's youth in Reinheim, a small German village; his experience in the early Nazi years in Frankfurt; his forced emigration in 1939; and his subsequent career in the United States, including service with the Voice of America, brushes with McCarthyism, and a brief tenure as head of the European bureau of the Anti-Defamation League. Goldmann also discusses his later experiences and encounters with his native Germany. Full of arresting vignettes, Wayward Threads stands out among other Holocaust memoirs for its strong American dimension.
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We Only Know Men
The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust
Patrick Henry
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
Patrick Henry, working with more than one thousand unpublished autobiographical pages written by key rescuers and with documents, letters, and interviews never before available, reconsiders the Holocaust rescue of Jews on the plateau of Vivarais-Lignon between the years 1939 and 1944
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The Weavers of Trautenau
Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust
Janine P. Holc
Brandeis University Press, 2023
A sympathetic history that focuses on the experiences of women and girls during the Holocaust and draws on new archival sources.
 
Beginning in late 1940, over three thousand Jewish girls and young women were forced from their family homes in Sosnowiec, Poland, and its surrounding towns to worksites in Germany. Believing that they were helping their families to survive, these young people were thrust into a world where they labored at textile work for twelve hours a day, lived in barracks with little food, and received only periodic news of events back home. By late 1943, their barracks had been transformed into concentration camps, where they were held until liberation in 1945.
 
Using a fresh approach to testimony collections, Janine P. Holc reconstructs the forced labor experiences of young Jewish females, as told by the women who survived and shared their testimony. Incorporating new source material, the book carefully constructs survivors’ stories while also taking a theoretical approach, one alert to socially constructed, intersectional systems of exploitation and harm. The Weavers of Trautenau elucidates the limits and possibilities of social relations inside camps and the challenges of moral and emotional repair in the face of indescribable loss during the Holocaust.
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When Night Fell
An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories
Linda Schermer Raphael and Marc Lee Raphael
Rutgers University Press, 1999

Both survivors of the Holocaust and those who were not there agree that it is impossible to tell what happened as the Nazi Final Solution was put into effect. No writing can adequately imagine the concentration camps, ghettos, and death camps. And that is precisely why writers must tell-and retell-what happened there.

In When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories, Linda Schermer Raphael and Marc Lee Raphael have collected twenty-six short stories that tell of the human toll of the Holocaust on those who survived its horrors, as well as later generations touched by its memory. The stories are framed by discussion of the current debate about who owns the Holocaust and who is entitled to speak about it.

Some of the stories included here are by internationally acclaimed authors. Others may be new to many readers. When Night Fell is a fitting memorial to this genocidal horror, putting eloquent voice to human endurance that is-almost-beyond words.

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Witnessing the Disaster
Essays on Representation and the Holocaust
Edited by Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
    Witnessing the Disaster examines how histories, films, stories and novels, memorials and museums, and survivor testimonies involve problems of witnessing: how do those who survived, and those who lived long after the Holocaust, make clear to us what happened? How can we distinguish between more and less authentic accounts? Are histories more adequate descriptors of the horror than narrative? Does the susceptibility of survivor accounts to faulty memory and the vestiges of trauma make them any more or less useful as instruments of witness? And how do we authenticate their accuracy without giving those who deny the Holocaust a small but dangerous foothold?
    These essayists aim to move past the notion that the Holocaust as an event defies representation. They look at specific cases of Holocaust representation and consider their effect, their structure, their authenticity, and the kind of knowledge they produce. Taken together they consider the tension between history and memory, the vexed problem of eyewitness testimony and its status as evidence, and the ethical imperatives of Holocaust representation.
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Women and the Holocaust
New Perspectives and Challenges
Andrea Pető
Central European University Press, 2015

Women and Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges expands the existing scholarship on women and the Holocaust adopting current approaches to gender studies and focusing on the texts and context from Central-Eastern Europe. The authors complicate earlier approaches by considering the intersections of gender, region, nationa, and sexuality, often within specifically delineated national settings, including the Czech/German, Hungarian, Hungarian/Austrian, Lithuanian, Polish/Israeli, Romanian/US-American, and Slovak. In these essays, the communist regimes after WWII often provide a productive framework for studying women and the Holocaust. This truly international volume features contributions by eminent authors, including pioneers in the field, as well as upcoming literary scholars and historians who delve into previously unmapped archives, explore cinematic representations and digital testimonies. 

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The World of Aufbau
Hitler's Refugees in America
Peter Schrag
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Aufbau—a German-language weekly, published in New York and circulated nationwide—was an essential platform for the generation of refugees from Hitler and the displaced people and concentration camp survivors who arrived in the United States after the war. The publication served to link thousands of readers looking for friends and loved ones in every part of the world. In its pages Aufbau focused on concerns that strongly impacted this community in the aftermath of World War II: anti-Semitism in the United States and in Europe, the ever-changing immigration and naturalization procedures, debates about the designation of Hitler refugees as enemy aliens, questions about punishment for the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes, the struggle for compensation and restitution, and the fight for a Jewish homeland.

The book examines the columns and advertisements that chronicled the social and cultural life of that generation and maintained a detailed account of German-speaking cultures in exile. Peter Schrag is the first to present a definitive account of the influential publication that brought postwar refugees together and into the American mainstream.
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Writing against Hitler
Hermann Budzislawski and the Making of Twentieth-Century Socialism
Daniel Siemens, Translated by Ben Fowkes
University of Wisconsin Press, 2025
In Writing Against Hitler, Daniel Siemens reconstructs the history of the struggles of socialist intellectuals in Germany from the 1920s through the post–World War II era by focusing on the life of one influential member of that group, Hermann Budzislawski (1901–78). In the 1930s, Budzislawski served as the editor in chief of the prominent antifascist journal Die neue Weltbühne. After the German occupation of France, he worked in exile in the United States until 1948, when he moved to East Germany. He became influential in training a new generation of journalists and worked as a politician.

Through the twin stories of a highly ambitious figure and the legendary publication he headed, Siemens charts the course of the intellectual Left’s rise and decline in power during the decades that shaped the political divides of the mid-twentieth century. Crucially, his account challenges the widely held belief that post-1989 German unification has represented a victory over the traumas of the past. Instead, Siemens shows the complexity of different strains of socialist thought and activity and reveals the contested place of Nazi Germany’s exiles at the center of Cold War Germany’s cultural history.
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