Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering. Ed. Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh. Borderlines: Russian and East European Jewish Studies. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2014. 268 pp. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $69.00, hard bound.

This chapter presents Hirsz Abramowicz’s compilation of essays, arranged in five chapters. The first chapter deals with Lithuanian Jewish life and traditions, examining among other topics rural occupations, the shtetl, diet, and mental illness. The second is an account of reform and upheaval before the First World War, with sections on Jewish public figures such as Joshua Steinberg, Hirsh Lekert, and Anna Lifshits, and on tsarist prisons, Jewish gymnasiums, and so on. The third examines the First World War and its aftermath, with sections entitled ‘Joining the Militia’, ‘The Germans’, and ‘April 1919’. The fourth is a description of Jewish vocational education, focusing on ‘help through work’, agricultural schools, and other programmes. The final chapter consists of profiles of Vilna Jews such as Mark Antokolsky, Eliezer Kruk, and Moshe Shalit.

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Exploring political rupture through Jewish children’s diaries: Kindertransport children in France, 1938-1942

Journal of Modern European History ◽

10.1177/16118944211017765 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 161189442110177

Author(s):

Laura Hobson Faure

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Childhood Studies ◽

Political Environment ◽

World War ◽

Daily Lives ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Nazi Occupation ◽

Jewish Children ◽

European Jewish ◽

Children's Testimony

This article focuses on France as a refuge for unaccompanied Central European Jewish children on the eve of World War II. Contrary to the United Kingdom, which accepted 10,000 Jewish children through Kindertransport, only 350-450 children entered France. This article utilizes children’s diaries and organizational records to question how children perceived and recorded their displacement and resettlement in France, a country that would soon be at war, and then occupied, by Nazi Germany. By questioning how these events filtered into and transformed children’s lives, I argue that the shifting political environment led to profound transformations in these children’s daily lives long before their very existence was threatened by Nazi–Vichy deportation measures. Most children were cared for in collective children’s homes in the Paris region in which left-oriented educators established children’s republics. Yet the outbreak of war triggered a series of events in the homes that led to changes in pedagogical methods and new arrivals (and thus new conflicts). The Nazi occupation of France led to the children’s displacement to the Southern zone, their dispersal into new homes, and the reconfiguration of their networks. This analysis of children’s contemporaneous sources and the conditions under which they were produced places new emphasis on the epistemology of Kindertransport sources and thus contributes to larger theoretical discussions in Holocaust and Childhood studies on children’s testimony.

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The Elusive Search for Evidence: Evgenii Khaldei’s Budapest Ghetto, Images of Rape, and Soviet Holocaust Photography

Slavic Review ◽

10.1017/slr.2017.11 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 76 (1) ◽

pp. 80-89

Author(s):

David Shneer

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Ethnic Group ◽

Social History ◽

The State ◽

World War ◽

Soviet Jews ◽

The Social ◽

History Of

I began studying Soviet photography in the early 2000s. To be more specific, I began studying Soviet photographers, most of whom had “Jewish” written on their internal passports, as I sought to understand how it was possible that a large number of photographers creating images of World War II were members of an ethnic group that was soon to be persecuted by the highest levels of the state. I ended up uncovering the social history of Soviet Jews and their relationship to photography, as I also explored how their training in the 1920s and 1930s shaped the photographs they took during World War II.

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Preface: The Historical Geography of the Hungarian Nation

Nationalities Papers ◽

10.1080/00905999608408453 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 24 (3) ◽

pp. 371-376

Author(s):

Andrew Ludanyi

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

World War I ◽

Status Quo ◽

World War ◽

East Central Europe ◽

East Central ◽

East European ◽

The Past ◽

French And English ◽

The Subject

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”

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