Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

A 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist One of Smithsonian Magazine's Best History Books of 2021 "An uplifting tale, suffused with a karmic righteousness that is, at times, exhilarating." —Wall Street Journal "A gripping narrative that reads like a page turning thriller novel." —NPR In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States. During the first ghetto massacre, Miriam Rabinowitz rescued a young boy named Philip by pretending he was her son. Nearly a decade later, a chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn would lead Philip to find the woman who saved him. And to discover her daughter Ruth was the love of his life. From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story.

Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem The Holocaust in the Soviet Union is the most complete account to date of the Soviet Jews during the World War II and the Holocaust (1941-45). Reports, records, documents, and research previously unavailable in English enable Yitzhak Arad to trace the Holocaust in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union through three separate periods in which German political and military goals in the occupied territories dictated the treatment of the Jews. Arad's examination of the differences between the Holocaust in the Soviet Union compared to other European nations reveals how Nazi ideological attacks on the Soviet Union, which included war on "Judeo-Bolshevism," led to harsher treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union than in most other occupied territories. This historical narrative presents a wealth of information from German, Russian, and Jewish archival sources that will be invaluable to scholars, researchers, and the general public for years to come.

When we think of Nazi camps, names such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau come instantly to mind. Yet the history of the Holocaust extends beyond those notorious sites. In the former territory of Transnistria, located in occupied Soviet Ukraine and governed by Nazi Germany’s Romanian allies, many Jews perished due to disease, starvation, and other horrific conditions. Through an intimate blending of memoir, history, and reportage, So They Remember illuminates this oft-overlooked chapter of the Holocaust. In December 1941, with the German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in its sixth month, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy named Motl Braverman, along with family members, was uprooted from his Ukrainian hometown and herded to the remote village of Pechera, the site of a Romanian death camp. Author Maksim Goldenshteyn, the grandson of Motl, first learned of his family’s wartime experiences in 2012. Through tireless research, Goldenshteyn spent years unraveling the story of Motl, his family members, and their fellow prisoners. The author here renders their story through the eyes of Motl and other children, who decades later would bear witness to the traumas they suffered. Until now, Romanian historians and survivors have served as almost the only chroniclers of the Holocaust in Transnistria. Goldenshteyn’s account, based on interviews with Soviet-born relatives and other survivors, archival documents, and memoirs, is among the first full-length books to spotlight the Pechera camp, ominously known by its prisoners as Mertvaya Petlya, or the “Death Noose.” Unfortunately, as the author explains, the Pechera camp was only one of some two hundred concentration sites spread across Transnistria, where local Ukrainian policemen often conspired with Romanian guards to brutalize the prisoners. In March 1944, the Red Army liberated Motl’s family and fellow captives. Yet for decades, according to the author, they were silenced by Soviet policies enacted to erase all memory of Jewish wartime suffering. So They Remember gives voice to this long-repressed history and documents how the events at Pechera and other surrounding camps and ghettos would continue to shape remaining survivors and their descendants.

On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military. Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought-perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the "race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers. The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous "exemptions" were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on many of these "exemption" orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich. Based on a deep and wide-ranging research in archival and secondary sources, as well as extensive interviews with more than four hundred Mischlinge and their relatives, Rigg's study breaks truly new ground in a crowded field and shows from yet another angle the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of Hitler's rule.

While fear and anxiety have historically been associated with authoritarian regimes, Frank Biess demonstrates the ambivalent role of these emotions in the democratization of West Germany, where fears and anxieties about the country's catastrophic past and uncertain future both undermined democracy and stabilized the emerging Federal Republic.

The Nazi regime and local collaborators killed 800,000 Belorussian Jews, many of them parents or relatives of young Jews who survived the war. Thousands of young girls and boys were thus orphaned and struggled for survival on their own. This book is the first systematic account of young Soviet Jews' lives under conditions of Nazi occupation and genocide. These orphans' experiences and memories are rooted in the 1930s, when Soviet policies promoted and sometimes actually created interethnic solidarity and social equality. This experience of interethnic solidarity provided a powerful framework for the ways in which young Jews survived and, several decades after the war, represented their experience of violence and displacement. Through oral histories with several survivors, video testimonies, and memoirs, Anika Walke reveals the crucial roles of age and gender in the ways young Jews survived and remembered the Nazi genocide, and shows how shared experiences of trauma facilitated community building within and beyond national groups. Pioneers and Partisans uncovers the repeated transformations of identity that Soviet Jewish children and adolescents experienced, from Soviet citizens in the prewar years, to a target of genocidal violence during the war, to a barely accepted national minority in the postwar Soviet Union.

On June 22, 1941, Germany launched the greatest land assault in history on the Soviet Union, an attack that Adolf Hitler deemed crucial to ensure German economic and political survival. As the key theater of the war for the Germans, the eastern front consumed enormous levels of resources and accounted for 75 percent of all German casualties. Despite the significance of this campaign to Germany and to the war as a whole, few English-language publications of the last thirty-five years have addressed these pivotal events. In Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East, Stephen G. Fritz bridges the gap in scholarship by incorporating historical research from the last several decades into an accessible, comprehensive, and coherent narrative. His analysis of the Russo-German War from a German perspective covers all aspects of the eastern front, demonstrating the interrelation of military events, economic policy, resource exploitation, and racial policy that first motivated the invasion. This in-depth account challenges accepted notions about World War II and promotes greater understanding of a topic that has been neglected by historians.

A systematic study of bystanders during the Holoaust which analyzes why individuals, institutions and the international community remained passive while millions died. The work illustrates the terrible consequences of indifference and passivity towards the persecution of others.

One of the most common assumptions about World War II is that the Jews did not actively or effectively resist their own extermination at the hands of the Nazis. In this powerful book, Benjamin Ginsberg convincingly argues that the Jews not only resisted the Germans but actually played a major role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The question, he contends, is not whether the Jews fought but where and by what means. True, many Jews were poorly armed, outnumbered, and without resources, but Ginsberg shows persuasively that this myth of passivity is solely that--a myth. Instead, the Jews resisted strongly in four key ways: through their leadership role in organizing the defense of the Soviet Union, their influence and scientific research in the United States, their contribution to allied espionage and cryptanalysis, and their importance in European resistance movements. In this compelling, cogent history, we discover that Jews contributed powerfully to Hitler's defeat.