3 Layers of Concealment: Post-War Cultures of Surveillance and Secrecy in the Lives of Jewish Refugees, as Exemplified by the Case of Steffi Dinger

The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Union is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate through these writings are: the refugees’ reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only be published abroad, following the authors’ emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland’s Eastern borderlands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in – and about – exile is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their coping with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation. What emerges from all the literary texts published in post-war Poland, even despite the cuts and omissions caused by (self)-censorship, is an image of a postwar Jewish community affected by deep trauma, hurt and – so it seems – split into two groups: survivors in the East (vicarious witnesses), and survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland (direct victim witnesses). The article discusses on samples the necessity of extending and broadening of that image by adding to the reflection on Holocaust literature (which has been underway for many years) the reflection on the accounts of the experience of exile, Soviet forced labour camps, and wandering in the USSR contained in the entire corpus of literary works and memoirs written by Polish-Yiddish writers.

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Svenska judars berättelser om flyktingar, överlevande och hjälpverksamheter under och efter Förintelsen

Nordisk Judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies ◽

10.30752/nj.90024 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 31 (2) ◽

pp. 60-84

Author(s):

Malin Thor Tureby

Keyword(s):

Research Field ◽

Empirical Knowledge ◽

Ongoing Debate ◽

Relief Work ◽

Historical Perspectives ◽

Jewish Refugees ◽

The Holocaust ◽

Asking Questions ◽

Post War ◽

Aid Relief

Swedish Jews’ supposed inactivity over Europe’s persecuted Jews during the Holocaust has been a prevalent discourse during the post-war period. This article ponders the origins of that discourse and how it affects how and what Swedish Jews narrate about aid and relief work, and Jewish refugees and survivors, when recounting their memories from the 1930s and 1940s. This investigation also examines how previous research has addressed and represented the aid efforts of the Jewish minority in Sweden and discusses what new empirical knowledge about Swedish Jewish aid and relief work during the Holocaust we can ascertain by using oral history. Hence, it is also a contribution to the ongoing debate in the research field of ‘refugee studies’, initiated by the historians Philip Marfleet and Peter Gatrell, who emphasise both the importance of working with historical perspectives and asking questions about the sources at the disposal of historians and what sources they choose to work with when writing about aid, relief work and refugees.

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‘The fight on educating the public to equal treatment for all will have to come later’: Jewish Refugee Activism and Anti-Immigration Sentiment in Immediate Post-War Canada

London Journal of Canadian Studies ◽

10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2019v34.006 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 103-122

Author(s):

Antoine Burgard

Keyword(s):

Immigration Policy ◽

Minority Groups ◽

Equal Treatment ◽

Canadian Immigration Policy ◽

Jewish Refugees ◽

Canadian Immigration ◽

The Government ◽

Post War ◽

Set Up ◽

Anti Jewish

Canadian immigration policy of the 1930s and 1940s was the most restrictive and selective in the country’s history, making it one of the countries to take the smallest number of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi persecution. After the war, Canada slowly opened its borders, but only through small token gestures in 1947 and 1948. This article explores how the main Canadian Jewish organization lobbied for the welcoming of more Jewish refugees and migrants in the immediate aftermath of the war. It examines how their perception of the public’s anti-Jewish immigrant sentiment and of the Canadian immigration policy’s discriminatory mechanisms informed their strategies. During that period, the Canadian Jewish Congress prioritized constant and subtle action with the government instead of trying to set up mass mobilization campaigns. This strategic shift is an overshadowed but essential chapter of both Jewish and human rights histories in Canada. This article invites a re-evaluation of Jewish activism’s role in ending ethnic selection in the Canadian immigration policy and promoting refugee rights. It contributes to broadening our understanding of how minority groups lobbied and worked with hostile media and authorities.

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Sands of Sorrow

10.1093/oso/9780198797005.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Lyndsey Stonebridge

Keyword(s):

Refugee Camps ◽

Humanitarian Crisis ◽

Palestinian Refugees ◽

Christian Churches ◽

Human Rights Regime ◽

Jewish Refugees ◽

Mass Displacement ◽

Palestinian Refugee ◽

Post War ◽

State Of Israel

In 1950, the American Council for the Relief of Palestinians produced the first international documentary on the Palestinian refugee camps, Sands of Sorrow. Directed primarily at Christian churches and charities, the film’s tone was lightly didactic, its images striking and ethnographically attentive. An early example of the then relatively new genre of humanitarian advocacy, Sands of Sorrow invited its audience to focus on the human consequences of the mass displacement of the Palestinian Arabs, caused by the war and the creation of the State of Israel. That moral injunction came with some authority. The film was introduced by the American journalist, Dorothy Thompson, famous in the war years for her internationalism, anti-Nazi campaigns, and tireless support of Jewish refugees. This chapter discusses the politics of humanitarian compassion through Thompson’s writing and advocacy. One of the first to advocate for the rights of Jewish refugees in the late 1930s, Thompson scandalized U.S. opinion when she campaigned for Palestinian refugees. Refugees, she argued, were not simply one more humanitarian crisis, but the consequence of the failure of the post-war human rights regime to deal with the violence of state formation and the persistence of nationalism.

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Orwell’s Jews

10.1093/oso/9780198797005.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Lyndsey Stonebridge

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Social Democracy ◽

The Novel ◽

Jewish Refugees ◽

Jewish Refugee ◽

The Mediterranean ◽

Post War

Everybody remembers the rats in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four but few recall that Winston Smith begins his resistance by writing about an attack on a Jewish refugee boat in the Mediterranean. Orwell understood that the citizenship on offer in the mid-twentieth century was fragile, based on a defensive fantasy that not only threatened people on boats in the Mediterranean, but also questioned what kind of social democracy was possible in the post-war world. Criticizing readings of the novel that have focused exclusively on the travails of the liberal conscience under totalitarianism, this chapter argues for an anti-colonial Orwell whose imperfect solidarity with the Jewish refugees was more globally imaginative than critics have supposed.

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The Socio-Historical Contexts of Czech Anti-Semitism and Anti-German Sentiments Following the Establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic and their Reflection in Contemporary Caricatures

Slovenský národopis / Slovak Ethnology ◽

10.2478/se-2019-0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 67 (1) ◽

pp. 5-21

Author(s):

Blanka Soukupová

Keyword(s):

World War I ◽

Traumatic Experience ◽

World War ◽

Anti Semitism ◽

Jewish Refugees ◽

Political Relations ◽

The Republic ◽

Post War ◽

Anti Jewish ◽

Czech Lands

Abstract The Czechoslovak Republic was created as the national state of the Czechs and Slovaks. Although it was based on the ethnic principle, the new state simultaneously assured relatively extensive rights for its national and religious minorities; in the Czech lands primarily for Czech Germans and the structured Jewish minority (in the new state, Jews could claim Jewish nationality and religion, or only Jewish religion). Although the Jewish minority was ideologically and politically heterogeneous and absolutely loyal to the state, it repeatedly became, not for the first time historically, the target of largely socially and ethnically motivated attacks after the foundation of the Republic. However, their nature was escalated even more by the difficult social conditions following World War I and the generally traumatic experience of the unexpected world war. Contemporary journalism helped disseminate the image of Jews as the main culprits who had caused the world war and were responsible for the general post-war destabilisation and shortages, Jews as non-state building residents of the republic, disloyal, pro-German orientated asocial elements, intensified by the image of Jewish refugees from Galicia and Bukovina, justly or unjustly accused of operating chain businesses. Contemporary journalism also emphasised the traditional image of Czech Germans as the ancient enemy of the Czech nation, currently accused of starting World War I. The fact that most Czech Germans were truly disloyal citizens of the new state after the foundation of the republic (and again in the 1930s) was balanced by the efforts of the Czechoslovak government to “win the Germans over for the new state” and therefore controlled the suppression of anti-German sentiments which were often linked to anti-Jewish sentiments. The text questions the significance of the image of the national enemy at a time in history that saw the destabilisation of existing socio-political relations, undoubtedly represented by the dissolution of the monarchy and the rise of new national states in Central Europe and their contemporary visualisation.

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