Winner of the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize from the Wiener Holocaust Library​

Jewish Childhood in Kraków is the first book to tell the history of Kraków in the second World War through the lens of Jewish children’s experiences. Here, children assume center stage as historical actors whose recollections and experiences deserve to be told, analyzed, and treated seriously.

Sliwa scours archives to tell their story, gleaning evidence from the records of the German authorities, Polish neighbors, Jewish community and family, and the children themselves to explore the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland and in Kraków in particular. A microhistory of a place, a people, and daily life, this book plumbs the decisions and behaviors of ordinary people in extraordinary times.

Offering a window onto human relations and ethnic tensions in times of rampant violence, Jewish Childhood in Kraków is an effort both to understand the past and to reflect on the position of young people during humanitarian crises.

Eliezer Gruenbaum (1908–1948) was a Polish Jew denounced for serving as a Kapo while interned at Auschwitz. He was the communist son of Itzhak Gruenbaum, the most prominent secular leader of interwar Polish Jewry who later became the chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee during the Holocaust and Israel’s first minister of the interior. In light of the father’s high placement in both Polish and Israeli politics, the denunciation of the younger Gruenbaum and his suspicious death during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war add intrigue to a controversy that really centers on the question of what constitutes—and how do we evaluate—moral behavior in Auschwitz. Gruenbaum—a Jewish Kapo, a communist, an anti-Zionist, a secularist, and the son of a polarizing Zionist leader—became a symbol exploited by opponents of the movements to which he was linked. Sorting through this Rashomon-like story within the cultural and political contexts in which Gruenbaum operated, Friling illuminates key debates that rent the Jewish community in Europe and Israel from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Jews and Other Germans is the first social and cultural history to probe the parameters of Jewish integration in the half century between the founding of the German Empire in 1871 and the early Weimar Republic. Questioning received wisdom about German-Jewish assimilation and the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany, van Rahden’s prize-winning book restores some of the complexity and openness of relations between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews before World War I.

            Closely analyzing the political, social, and cultural life in a major German city, van Rahden shows that Jews were a part of a broad urban community that encompassed diversity within unity, at once offering them a large measure of equality while permitting them to remain meaningfully Jewish. Jews and Other Germans also substantially revises the chronology of anti-Semitism in Germany, showing that Jews only began to experience exclusion from Breslau’s social world during World War I.

            Yet van Rahden not only illuminates Breslau’s multicultural fabric; he also tells the story of this remarkable city as one of cultural and religious conflict and coexistence. Recounting the experiences of Jews, Protestants, and Catholics within a single narrative, he offers a critical intervention into scholarship on liberalism and civil society in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe.

Jews in Polish Culture was and in large measure remains an essentially pioneering work. Despite the passage of many years, the book's thrust has retained its initial, original freshness. 

Jews have long seen the interwar years as a “golden age” for Polish Jewry and hold it in special reverence because of the community’s heroic struggle against the encroaching darkness of antisemitism. During the years 1918 to 1939, Polish Jews constituted the largest Jewish community in noncommunist Europe and were the leading cultural and political force in the Jewish Diaspora. In this volume distinguished American, West European, Israeli, and Polish scholars combine forces to explore the politics, antisemitism, economic and social life, religious patterns, and cultural creativity of a period whose relevance is heightened because of current changes under way in Eastern Europe.

Written during World War II, Justyna's Narrative is a compelling account of the Krakow Jewish resistance. From February through April 1943, Gusta Davidson Draenger (aka "Justyna"?) composed the narrative on scraps of paper smuggled into her prison cell. Between sessions of torture and interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo, she recorded the activities and spiritual aspirations of the clandestine group of young Jewish idealists who forged documents, acquired weapons, and committed acts of defiance against the Nazis.