Newly published in 2024, two important books offer different aspects of women’s Holocaust experiences. Dr. Robin E. Judd documents the story of Holocaust survivors who married liberators, and Dr. Bożena Karwowska gives readers the opportunity to learn from early survivor testimonies about the body in the context of Auschwitz.
Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust by Robin Judd
Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust by Dr. Robin Judd introduces us to the Jewish women who lived through Nazi genocide and went on to marry American, Canadian, and British military personnel after World War II. Meant for academic and popular audiences, it highlights the disorderliness of liberation, migration, and building new lives after the Holocaust in the homelands of the spouses. Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, as well as community and religious leaders and Allied soldiers, viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe, and they could help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry.
Historian Robin Judd offers an intimate portrait of how these unions emerged and developed, from meeting and courtship to marriage and immigration to life in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. She shows how they helped shape the postwar world by touching thousands of lives. In addition to the couples, others who were affected included the chaplains who officiated at their weddings, the Allied authorities whose policy decisions structured the couples’ fates, and the bureaucrats involved in immigration and acculturation. Judd documents the stories of these unions, including that of her survivor grandmother and American soldier grandfather, and how the brides’ happiness coexisted with survivor guilt, grief, and concern about the challenges of starting a new life in a new country.
Dr. Robin E. Judd is Associate Professor of History, The Ohio State University; Director, Hoffman Leaders and Leadership in History Program; and President, Association for Jewish Studies. Between Two Worlds is available for from UNC Press, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever you get your books. UNC Press has a 40% off discount code, 01DAH40 (use at checkout).
The Witness and the Body in Auschwitz: Early Literary Accounts of the Camp Experience by Bożena Karwowska
The Witness and the Body in Auschwitz: Early Literary Accounts of the Camp Experience by Bożena Karwowska examines bodily descriptions from early testimonies of concentration camp survivors, focusing on questions related to meanings of corporeality. She links the discourse of the body with a social cartography of the Auschwitz camp complex. The heart of the book is comprised of memory-based texts written by survivors in the early years after the war. The early texts discussed were written in Polish and while some became internationally recognized, others, had remained unknown, especially outside of Poland.
These early memoirs and literary works help navigate the space of the Auschwitz camp complex from the victims’ perspective, based on their experiences in spaces of “total annihilation.” Literary accounts and early testimonies allow us to map the space of the camp differently than through the documents produced by the Nazi-perpetrators. Such a social cartography also includes specific gendered differences and allows Karwowska to critically analyze sensitive questions related to the body, gender, and sexuality of a prisoner.
Dr. Bożena Karwowska is a feminist-oriented professor of Holocaust Studies in the department of Central, Eastern and Northern European studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Order The Witness and the Body in Auschwitz from Lexington Books at https://Rowman.com/Lexington. To get a 30% discount, use code LXFANDF30 when ordering.