Individuals and Small Groups in Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust: A Case Study of a Young Couple and their Friends

Description

This book aims to increase our knowledge and deepen the understanding of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust by examining personal circumstances and characteristics of Jewish resistance members and the formation of small Jewish resistance groups. It is a carefully researched case study, which examines primary and secondary sources, including evidence from interviews with resistance members and documentary evidence previously unavailable in English. It uses a qualitative analysis to investigate individual and small group manifestations of Jewish resistance during the German occupation of the Netherlands between 1940 and 1945. This study contributes to historiography, but its focus enables a different interpretation and displays a new view of history. It is a scholarly work but also accessible for the general reader interested in this subject.

Dr. Ben Braber is a historian and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. He is a recognised expert on Jewish resistance, a subject he has published on extensively.

The unique story of the couple whose story stands at the centre of this book makes it a very worthwhile story to tell. The history of the Jews of Holland during the war is known, so are many of the details that have to do with the resistance movement, particular through the book that I have recently edited together with Alan Schneider. However never has it been told through the story of a particular person or couple, making it a unique way of presenting the material. As such it is definitely a very original and useful contribution to the scholarship of the period, to the issue of resistance during the Holocaust, and the history of Dutch Jewry during the period in question. -Judy Baumel-Schwartz, Director, Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research; Abraham and Edita Spiegel Family Professor in Holocaust Research; and Rabbi Pynchas Brener Professor in Research on the Holocaust of European Jewry, Bar-Ilan University, Israel Braber offers great insight into a seldom-studied area of Holocaust history: Jews who resisted the Nazis to save other Jews. This tale of agency and courage will appeal to specialist scholars and researchers as well as general readers of World War II history. -Jeffrey Koerber, Assistant Professor, Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, Chapman University, California, USA