Introduction
This book examines the choices and actions of Jews during the Holocaust at the individual and community levels. It considers the survival strategies that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust had to choose from, namely, cooperation and collaboration, coping and compliance, evasion, and resistance. Based on the underlying assumption that genocide is a complicated social and political process that unfolds over time, rather than a one-time event, the book asks what made individual Jews choose particular behavioral strategies, and why the distribution of these strategies varies across localities. To this end, it compares three Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust—those of Minsk, Kraków, and Białystok. This chapter explains why the Holocaust was chosen as the book's main case study, the methodology and data used, and the book's goals, contributions, and limitations.