Holocaust Archives - Not Even Past

Hidden Children and the Complexities of Jewish Identity

My grandmother, Ewa Janik, was born in late August 1942 to a Jewish family in the heart of Nazi-occupied Poland. As the Gestapo approached her family’s ghetto, her parents arranged for her to be smuggled away by members of a local underground organization opposing Nazi rule. From two weeks old, my grandmother was raised by a Catholic adoptive family, and she remained unaware of her true origins until the age of sixteen, when her surviving relatives hired a lawyer to contact her. Over the following decades, she reunited with her original family, eventually moving to the California Bay Area to live near her birth mother, who had escaped there after the war.

Ewa Janik’s story fits into the general category defined by Holocaust researchers as Hidden Children. At the onset of World War II, approximately 1.7 million Jewish children under the age of 16 were living in Europe, and would become major targets of Hitler’s genocidal agenda.^[1] As anti-Jewish policies were increasingly enforced in Nazi-occupied Europe, these children and their families adopted various strategies to evade German forces, and a significant portion survived by living in hiding. Those who were young or fair enough to blend in with the wider European society were able to hide “in plain sight,” sheltered by Christian families or religious organizations. After the war, these children often found themselves caught between two worlds, with conflicting cultural and familial ties to both their adopted Christian upbringings and their Jewish family heritage.

Janik with her adoptive mother Zosia, ca. 1945. Source: Zofia Graham

My grandmother has recorded her life story in several oral history interviews, both through the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project in 1997 and in recent interviews with me. A major tool used by historians and memorial organizations, oral testimonies can help convey the personal and emotional experiences of Holocaust survivors in ways that written history often cannot. Analyzing individual stories provides insight into how survivors respond to their circumstances and how these effects can persist throughout their lifetimes. The topic of personal identity is a major theme throughout the testimonies of former Hidden Children, such as my grandmother, revealing the psychological impact of their shared childhood experiences on future self-conception.

My grandmother’s interviews reveal complex and changing attitudes toward her personal and cultural identities throughout her lifetime. Upon first learning of her history and original family as an adolescent, she describes feeling intense fear and instability, stating in her account of that time, “I always [felt] like I don’t have a ground under my feet. Something will happen and everything will collapse.” Due to the pain of this revelation, she expressed that she wished both sets of parents had taken greater pains to make sure she would not find out her history. These feelings reflect many Hidden Children’s experiences of alienation due to the fracturing of their childhood identities, as demonstrated by historical and psychological research on the subject. For example, a 2005 study by psychologists Marianne Amir and Rachel Lev-Wiesel revealed that child Holocaust survivors who lost their prewar identities faced significantly higher rates of depression and anxiety compared to those who knew their birth families.

After discovering her Jewish identity, my grandmother faced additional difficulties due to the resistance from her adoptive parents. Even after the secret was revealed, her parents refused to acknowledge or speak about the topic, viewing such questions as an affront to the effort they put into raising her. As she began communicating with her birth relatives, she had to proceed in secret, and she shared the great pain this brought her, stating, “I felt like both my mothers would cut me in half.” Even as an adult in 1997, she expressed shame for hurting her adoptive family by moving to the United States, stating that “no matter what I do and where I am, I’m here and my mother in Poland is hurting.”

Cultural and religious identifications presented another source of strain. Unlike many Hidden Children, my grandmother was not raised in an antisemitic environment. Still, she had little knowledge of Judaism as a child, and what little she knew was influenced by the society around her. In our recent interview, she described an instance from her childhood when another child called her Jewish in a derogatory way, and she didn’t understand what he meant or why he was saying it. Once she learned of her true heritage, she had to become newly acquainted with Judaism as a member of the community, and with new traditions and practices which were completely foreign to her.

Janik with her biological mother Irene, 1978. Source: Zofia Graham

These cultural differences brought on struggles when trying to reconnect with her biological family. She describes the difficulty of her first visits to the United States, when she finally met with her American-born siblings, but had no language with which to communicate or the ability to understand their vastly different life perspectives. Such experiences of separation led her to speak negatively about her divided identities in her 1997 interview, stating, “What else is painful, that I belong to two cultures, and I don’t belong anywhere really.”

However, despite these challenges, my grandmother has more recently emphasized the positive aspects of her mixed cultural identities. She has become more comfortable claiming her Jewish identity along with her Polish one, largely through the help of her American Jewish family, who she has always described as supportive and accepting of both their cultural differences and commonalities. She celebrated her ability to traverse and learn from multiple cultural and religious communities, reflecting that this perspective has allowed her to see the value in multiple traditions and beliefs without becoming attached to dogma. These constructive takeaways are also reflected in the academic literature. While much research studying Hidden Children has rightly focused on their trauma and pain, there is also significant evidence for the resilience and success of this group. Psychiatrist and researcher Robert Krell describes the “enduring mystery” of how child Holocaust survivors have been able to find general success as adults despite their immeasurable trauma in early development.^[2] Perhaps the influence of distinct cultures and life perspectives in the development of Hidden Children has played a part in their lasting psychological fortitude.

Janik (third from left) with her siblings, 2024. Source: Zofia Graham

This past summer, my entire extended family returned to Poland, where my grandmother led us through sites from our family’s history: her birth parents’ apartment in the Jewish Ghetto, the work camp where her mother was held during the war, and the memorial site where Nazi soldiers shot her biological father at the start of the occupation. These recollections brought back pain and trauma for all involved, but my grandmother reflected with surprise that her loved ones’ care and interest in these stories helped to ease her mental toil. For someone who felt alone for much of her life, the ability to share the burden of the past with all of her diverse family members has been an essential element in healing.

Zofia Graham is a 4th year undergraduate student at UT Austin. She is majoring in Linguistics and Plan II Honors, with a minor in Law, Justice, and Society. Her research mainly focuses on Latin American linguistics and language policy, but she has enjoyed diving more into her family history through this project.

^[1] Greenfeld, Howard. The Hidden Children. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993, p. 2.

^[2] Glassner, Martin Ira, Robert Krell, and Holocaust Child Survivors of Connecticut. And Life Is Changed Forever: Holocaust Childhoods Remembered. Edited by Martin Ira Glassner and Robert Krell ; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006, p. 8.

Additional bibliography:

Amir, Marianne, and Rachel Lev-Wiesel. “Does Everyone Have a Name? Psychological Distress and Quality of Life Among Child Holocaust Survivors with Lost Identity.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 14, no. 4 (October 2001): 859–69.https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013010709789.

Janik, Ewa. Interview by Author. April 3, 2025.

Janik, Ewa. “Oral history interview with Ewa Janik.” By Liz and Peter Ryan. The Bay Area Holocaust

Oral History Project. March 23, 1997. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn508375 Libicki, Henry. Remembering my Parents. Self-published. 2010.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

When Answers are not Enough: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

By Jimena Perry

(All photos are courtesy of the author.)

The only facts we know about Rosalia Wourgaft Schatz are that she was raised by Jewish parents in the city of Tulchin in southwestern Ukraine. In 1919 her family emigrated to France and in 1940 when the Germans occupied Paris and began their anti-Jewish politics, she, like many other Jews, was forced to wear the yellow star. In 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered at age 67.

Rosalia’s brief life story is registered in the Identification Card #1847, found at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, founded in 1983 in Washington, D.C. Her IC is one of thousands that can be find in a shelf near the venue’s second floor elevators, that take you up to the main floors of the permanent exhibit. Before starting the tour, visitors can take an identification card like Rosalia’s, to go through the display with an actual target of the Nazi regime in their hand. The idea is that every person who enters the exhibit will get to know at least one victim. The short biographical information found in these cards are the only data we will ever know of many of the casualties of the Nazis, aside from the fact that they were one of the approximately 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust.

Once on the main exhibit floors, people can see the atrocities of the Nazi regime against Jewish, Roma, Armenian, and other minority populations. One of the main purposes of the curators of the United States Holocaust Museum is to encourage and promote the audience to keep asking “Why?” There is plenty of evidence of the torture and brutality committed by the Germans against their target populations but the basic question, why? still remains unanswered. The need to elucidate responses, find more explanations, and ignite further discussion fuels the intention of the museum professionals. This is evident at the very entrance to the building where vistors see two big posters that state: “This museum is not an answer but a question” and “What`s your question? #AskWhy”

As basic as these inquiries may seem and despite the myriad answers they have produced, there is something missing for the victims and their families. The basic Why? is still hovering in the back of the minds of those who endured and survived the Holocaust.

It is a question that the curators, employees, and researchers of the museum use to create historical memory narratives that include the victims, remember and honor them, and counteract versions that deny that these violent events did actually happen.

Raising awareness of the past to understand contemporary issues is one of the bridges built by memory museums because they demonstrate with facts, testimonies, documents, and images that atrocities like the Holocaust occur. In this sense, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is considered a pioneer in display and representation of difficult topics. Another of the main objectives of the professional team of the museum is that the world will not allow the repetition of these brutalities. In the current political climate not only in the United States but in Latin America, for instance, where racism, discrimination, and exclusion are acquiring strength, to know that genocide is real and can happen is key. To deny or distort the Holocaust or other violent conflicts invalidates the victims’ voices, and prevents people like Rosalía and many others from finding justice.

This museum, as most memory sites, however, generates polemics. Should the past be relived in a setting like a museum? Do the survivors feel retraumatized by the displays? Is it not better to forget what happened? Apparently not since during the last decades there has been a huge proliferation of memory museums and displays, which demonstrates that diverse communities want to know what happened in order to restore the social fabric of their societies, to decide what to pass on to future generations, and to attempt to prevent atrocities from happening once more.

Dagmar Lieblova, Survivor

Dagmar Lieblova, Czech Girl’s Home, Terezin, Czech Republic 2014

by Dennis Darling

Dagmar Lieblova was a child prisoner at Terezín, deported to Auschwitz, then dispatched as slave labor to Hamburg, a city then in the daily cross-hairs of Allied bombers. There she cleared the streets of debris from the previous night’s air raids. Dagmar was finally liberated, sitting among the dead, by British troops at the notorious Bergen Belsen concentration camp. The eighty-year old Lieblova died last month in Prague, beating the odds after having been forced as a teenager to dwell four desperate years in harm’s deadly way.

The ranks of the generation that lived through the horrors of World War II are rapidly thinning. Soon, all those who have experienced the war’s seminal events will be gone. For the past five-years I have photographed the remnants of a group that endured the unprecedented terror of Nazi Germany – survivors, like Dagmar Lieblova…prisoners of Terezín.

Why am I interested in survivors of this particular concentration camp, located forty miles north of Prague, above all others?

Of the more than 40,000 detentions centers, concentration, work and death camps located throughout German occupied Europe, Terezín was unique in a number of ways, most notably because of the large number of artists and creative types imprisoned there and the legacy of art and music they produced that survived. The camp also became known, although far from the truth, as the “country club” of German camps; a reputation gained partly due to the fact that the walled prison town was skillfully staged as a “model Jewish ghetto” by the Nazi propaganda machine to successfully fool the International Red Cross inspectors into believing that all Jewish camps resembled the sham they viewed at Terezín.

Although Terezín was not an extermination camp, death was far from a stranger. Terrible conditions of depravity and evil prevailed there as well. More than 30,000 inmates perished from exposure, malnutrition and disease while awaiting transport to the East. Nearly 90,000 others were eventually deported east to Auschwitz–the vast majority murdered. Of the 155,000 Jews who were processed and held at Terezín, less than 8 percent survived the war.

The portrait of Dagmar Lieblova was taken in the doorway of the Czech Girl’s Home located on Terezín’s town square. It was here that young Czech girls, including Lieblova, were housed, more than twenty-five to each small room, after they were deemed old enough to be separated from their mothers. The chalk drawing on the building’s wall, a butterfly (motyl in Czech), has become the symbol associated with Terezín because of a poem that survived the camp and an author who didn’t. The poem I never saw another butterfly was written by Pavel Friedman, a teenager imprisoned at Terezín and later murdered at Auschwitz.

When I first started the Terezín project I was timid about approaching the survivors to ask them to talk about their experience, then sit for a portrait. I found it hard to comprehend why they would be interested in speaking to a person from rural upstate New York, raised Irish Catholic and who, at the time, really couldn’t precisely express why he was interested in making their photograph.

I was even more reluctant to ask those survivors who lived in the vicinity of Terezín to accompany me for their portrait session to the place of such personal sorrow. Much to my surprise, nearly everyone I asked made that journey of forty miles and seventy years, including Dagmar Lieblova.

I later happened upon a 2010 editorial in the New York Times that put precisely into words not only the reason for the Terezín survivors’ willingness to be a part of my project but, why I was compelled to attempt the series as well. In that editorial, the author and Holocaust survivor Samuel Pisar lamented, ‘that after 65 years, the last living survivors of the Holocaust are disappearing one by one,’ and he points out that at best, ‘only the impersonal voice of a researcher will soon be left to tell the Holocaust story’. At worst, he warns, it will be told in the “malevolent register of revisionists and falsifiers.” He cautions that this process has already begun. “This is why those of us who survived have a duty to transmit to mankind the memory of what we endured in body and soul, to tell our children that the fanaticism and violence that nearly destroyed our universe have the power to enflame theirs, too.”

Reliable sources estimate that only a few hundred Terezín inmates still survive to tell their stories. To date, I have made more than 150 portraits, in eight countries. I am honored to have been the recipient of their trust and feel fortunate to have been able to make some of the last visual records of their unique histories–The last of living memory.

This Thursday, April 12, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Dennis Darling has taught photojournalism, social documentary and graphic design in the School of Journalism at UT Austin since 1981. He has published two books of his work: “Desperate Pleasures” and “Chameleon With Camera.” Darling’s most recent documentary work, a photography series on Holocaust survivors entitled “Families Gone To Ash: Giving voice to the survivors of Terezin” was exhibited at the American Center of the American Embassy at Prague during June and July of 2014.

On the “Polish Death Camps” Law

Picture of barbed wire fencing and buildings from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp — (Auschwitz-Birkenau, via Pixabay)

By Natalie Cincotta

Last Thursday, the Polish senate passed a bill that would outlaw public statements that acscribe responsibility or complicity to the Polish nation or state in crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. If signed into law by President Anrzej Duda, who supports the measure, using terms like “Polish Death Camp” would become punishable by fines or jail time up to 3 years. “The point I must stress most emphatically is that there was no complicity in the Holocaust,” explained Duda in a statement, “either on the part of Poland as a state, a non-existent state, or on the part of Poles perceived as a Nation.”

The pending legislation has prompted a diplomatic spat with Israel and is considered an “attempt to rewrite history” by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. State Department has also expressed disapproval, citing concerns over the potential strains on Poland’s relationship with the U.S. and Israel, as well as freedom of speech.

Around the same time, state-owned Polish Radio (Polskie Radio) launched an interactive website “aimed at debunking misconceptions about Poland’s role in the Holocaust,” according to a release. The site is available in Polish, English, and German.

Titled “Germandeathcamps.info,” the first section shows a map of the Nazi camp network established across occupied Europe, followed by thematic sections including profiles of German perpetrators, a short timeline of the Final Solution, video footage of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, and oral histories of victims. The last section, titled “distortion of history,” refers to two cases of the usage of “Polish death camps” in the recent past – once by German broadcasting company ZDF and by President Obama in a 2012 speech.

Map featured on germanydeathcamps.info showing Nazi concentration and extermination camps in Europe — Map featured on germanydeathcamps.info

This public history project has a clear political agenda – that is, to show that camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau were Nazi, not Polish, camps, and thus attest that the Polish state bore no responsibility for complicity in the Holocaust. Opponents agree that the term “Polish death camps” is indeed inaccurate, but worry that the law would silence instances when Poles were culpable in Jewish persecution, whether by aiding local German authorities in rounding up their Jewish neighbors, denunciation, or, in some cases, killing. In a joint statement issued by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, Dariusz Stola and Piotr Wiślicki warned of a chilling effect in difficult discussions of crimes committed on Polish soil, calling for honest and open discussion.

The larger implications of a law banning the suggestion of Polish complicity is much larger than simple phraseology. Distilling the conversation into categories of “collaborator” and “victim” precludes a more difficult public conversation on the wide range of actions, experiences, and responses on part of gentile Poles in relation to the persecution of Jews during the war. Poles were victims of Nazi persecution, as they were also helpers, rescuers, and participants, and their motivations as such were complex and contradictory in ways that defy easy categorization. Two major studies illustrate this complexity.

Book cover of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross

Jan T. Gross’ Neighbors intensified the debate about Polish “complicity” in the Holocaust. Neighbors tells the story of how on one day in July 1941 a group of Polish residents in Jedwabne murdered 1,600 of their Jewish neighbors, about half of the population. According to Gross, it was Poles who did the killing, not the local German gendarmes. At a time when Poland’s national self-image of WWII was, and is, one of victimhood, the revelation of an instance in which Poles had brutally murdered their Jewish neighbors stirred a debate about “complicity” and “collaboration” that, as the proposed law might suggest, has not yet been resolved.

In Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in Occupied Poland, Jan Grabowski recounts the role of Poles in the rounding up and murder of Jews in Dabrowa Tarnowska, a county in southeast Poland. After the ghettoes in the area were liquidated in 1942, Germans relied on local Poles to hunt Jews (referred to as Judenjagd) who had escaped liquidation and hid among the gentile population or in the forest. The Polish Blue Police, the Baudienst, and local Polish peasants played an active role in denouncing Jews, participating in searches, or even killing. Jewish property was often a motivation for participating, as the Germans instituted a reward system. Importantly, there are also many instances of rescue: some Poles hid Jews from the Nazis, and their motivations for doing so varied, sometimes altruistic, sometimes materially-driven. Sometimes, if the hidden Jews were no longer able to compensate their Polish hosts, they were denounced to the local authorities.

The Polish state does not share some kind of equal “co-responsibility” with the Nazis (the state was actually in exile in London), because the Germans were the “undisputed bosses of life and death” in occupied Poland, as Gross argues, and “no sustained organized activity could take place without their consent.” Even if the law emphasizes the role of the Polish state, the law seems to be a pretext to stifle the discussion of the participation of Polish people, as seen in Jedwabne and Dabrowa Tarnowska. As works like Neighbors argue, we must account for the Holocaust both as a system of mass murder and also for its discrete episodes of impromptu violence carried out by local people. It is also important to note that Polish responses, actions, and attitudes are not easily distilled into categories like “collaborator,” “bystander,” or even “victim,” it is possible that individuals can be any or all three of these things to different extents, at different points in time, and for different reasons. Allowing space for honest, evidence-based discussion is vital to this kind of constructive engagement with difficult pasts, which has already been taken on by several Polish scholars and institutions. As these voices in Poland urge, ignorance is best challenged through education, not silence.

Also by Natalie Cincotta on Not Even Past:

Review of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler
Review of Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia

Virtual Auschwitz by David Crew
Looking into the Katyn Massacre by Volha Dorman
David Crew reviews The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer

Virtual Auschwitz

By David Crew

Ralf Breker wearing the VR headset in front of his VR view of Auschwitz (via BBC News).

The Bavarian State criminal office (LKA) in Munich, Germany has developed a 3D virtual reality model of the infamous Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp to be used in trials of Nazi era war criminals who still remain alive. Drawing upon original blue prints, laser scans of remaining buildings and contemporary photographs, this VR model allows prosecutors, judges and lawyers to view Auschwitz from almost any angle. The digital imaging expert, Ralf Breker, who developed this technology says that it can be used, for example, to determine whether someone who was a guard in Auschwitz in a specific watchtower could or could not see crimes committed in another part of the camp. Breker thinks the technology he developed will soon be used in other types of criminal proceedings because it allows investigators to re-create crime scenes that no longer exist as they were when the crime was committed. He hopes, however, that when the German legal system no longer needs his 3D model of Auschwitz, it will be given to a museum so that it does not fall into the hands of anyone wanting to turn it into a computer game.

For further details and an interview with Ralf Breker, see

Marc Cieslak, “Virtual reality to aid Auschwitz war trials of concentration camp guards”

Also by David Crew on Not Even Past:

The Normandy Scholar Program on World War II.
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007).
Normal Pictures in Abnormal Times.

Review of The Anatomy of Fascism (2004), by Robert Paxton

When people think about fascism, two men come to mind: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. However, as Robert Paxton shows in The Anatomy of Fascism, fascism was a practice that extended far beyond these two leaders. This is an original approach, as the majority of scholars focus on fascism as an ideology. Paxton instead examines fascism’s variations and focuses on fascists’ actions, and he compares them with other successful or unsuccessful versions of fascism. Paxton argues that fascism can be understood only through an examination at the local level. He builds his argument in stages by studying how these movements were created, how they were rooted in the political system, how they seized and exercised power, and if they were incorporated into the existing system.

Fascist propaganda in 1920s Italy. The text reads: "The misdeeds of Bolshesivm in 1919; the benefits of fascism in 1923." — Fascist propaganda in 1920s Italy. The text reads: “The misdeeds of Bolshesivm in 1919; the benefits of fascism in 1923.”
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Paxton argues that fascism is not like other political movements. It is not supported by any coherent philosophical system but is a product of mass politics invented only after the introduction of universal suffrage, the spread of nationalism, and the entry of socialist parties into coalition governments. Coalition politics disenchanted many workers and intellectuals, while many politicians did not have the skills mass politics required. After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the foundation of an anti-leftist movement that could adopt elements of the Left’s mass organization was necessary. The aftermath of the First World War and, later on, the Great Depression were critical for fascism’s spread.

As it was not based on any political program, fascism used rituals and ceremonies to appeal to emotions. Paxton demonstrates that fascists were preoccupied with community decline and victimhood. They sought unity, purity, and nationalist mobilization and wanted unquestioned devotion to the community and its leader. Many fascists played an active role during the First World War, and they adored violence and sought to materialize the final victory of their chosen race or nation over what they saw as its inferior opponents.

Benito Mussolini in 1917, as a soldier in World War I. In 1914, Mussolini founded the Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria that he led. Via Wikipedia — Benito Mussolini in 1917, as a soldier in World War I. In 1914, Mussolini founded the Fasci d’Azione Rivoluzionaria that he led.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Explaining the anatomy of fascism, Paxton deconstructs the myth that fascist movements seized power by force. It was liberals and conservatives, frightened not by fascism but by the Left, who accepted fascists into their coalition governments and gave them the opportunity to govern. In Italy, despite the fact that the pan-Italian fascist march into Rome turned into a fiasco, the conservatives gave Mussolini the chance to enter into a coalition government. What the Italian fascists had proved was that they could successfully crush the Left, as they did in North Italy, for the sake of the local great landowners and with the help of the local state apparatus. Similarly, other European fascists tried to convince conservatives and businessmen that only they could handle the communists and protect the social and economic order. German fascists were successful in that task and came to power in the early 1930s with the help of German conservatives and businessmen. In Romania, where the Left was not an actual threat, conservatives not only did not need fascists, but they crushed their three coups.

German fascists created a structure parallel to the state apparatus, while the Italians relied mostly on the existing bureaucracy. The problem that both faced was their radical party members, who did not want the reestablishment of the old authoritarian regimes but a “permanent revolution” that would succeed in maintaining radicalization in the fascist regimes. However, Mussolini never succeeded in gaining absolute control over his party; he chose normalization rather than radicalization. Hitler, on the other hand, personally controlled his subordinates and promoted competition between them as to who would prove the most radical. Fascist radicalization reached its ultimate stage in Germany, and the Holocaust is an example of what that radicalization meant. Nazi policy on “inferiors” evolved from discrimination to expulsion and to extermination. Hitler’s subordinates in eastern occupied territories competed with each other in implementing the Final Solution and came up with even more extreme actions than the Nazi leadership required, which led to a chaotic situation during wartime. Ironically, although the war was promoted as a means to benefit the nation, it was a war that destroyed the fascist regimes.

*Munich Marienplatz during the failed Beer Hall Putsch, 9 November 1923. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Paxton offers a thorough guide to fascism. In addition to earlier fascism, he also discusses the presence of fascism inside and outside of post-war and post-1989 Europe and argues that in all democratic countries, some citizens flirt with the idea of denying established freedoms to fellow citizens and social groups. He also reviews the various, but mostly short-lived, fascist or proto-fascist movements and parties in the United States and what he considers the paradox of not having a fascist movement against the Civil Rights movements in the 1960s.

Paxton’s study is crucial now, in an era of major freedom setbacks, massive xenophobia, and openly neo-fascist movements and parties gaining momentum and entering European parliaments and governments. As Paxton says, “[f]ascists are close to power when conservatives begin to borrow their techniques, appeal to their ‘mobilizing passions,’ and try to co-opt the fascist following.” That’s important to remember.

Charalampos Minasidis is a European Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for War Studies at University College Dublin, working on “The Age of Civil Wars in Europe, c. 1914–1949” ERC Advanced Grant Project. His research explores Greek historical actors’ involvement in different European civil wars, the international influences on their thinking and actions, and their life trajectories from the early 20th century until the Greek Civil War. Charalampos completed his PhD in History at The University of Texas at Austin in 2023.

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Great Books on Women’s History: Europe

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month. Since today is International Women’s Day, a celebration that began in Europe, we will begin with some terrific book recommendations on women and gender in Europe.

In no particular order:

Philippa Levine recommends:

Alison Light, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (2008)

In a brilliant reading of the great modernist novelist Virginia Woolf, Alison Light compares the absence of servants in Woolf’s published fiction with the constant references to them in her correspondence with friends and family. Woolf was still employing servants at the moment when what had been a veritable army of available female domestic labour began to shrink as women rejected the constraints of such work and sought better paid and less intimate work elsewhere. In detailing Woolf’s fraught relationship with her long-time live-in servant, Nellie Boxall, with whom she fought constantly, Light reveals the class and gender tensions that continued to shape British culture in the early twentieth century in elegant prose and with really sharp insights. A fantastic read!

Tracie Matysik and Yoav di Capua recommend:

Kate Evans, Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg (2015).

A compelling book, that introduces the reader to the passionate life and convictions of Rosa Luxemburg. And the illustrations are beautiful, even moving. Along the way, you’ll get a good glimpse of the aims and challenges of revolutionary thought in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century.

Tatjana Lichtenstein recommends:

Janina Bauman, Beyond these Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto – Young Girl’s Story (2006).

In this book — part diary, part memoir — Janina Bauman tells the fascinating story of how three Jewish women escaped the Warsaw ghetto and, assisted by a small network of courageous and devoted Polish helpers on the “Aryan” side, survived the war in hiding and by passing as non-Jews.

Mary Neuburger recommends:

Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (2015)

This book traces both the fascinating phenomena of women’s role in the largest resistance movement in Europe during World War II, and women’s postwar memory of the changes in gender roles caused by the war and the communist period that followed.

Andy Villalon recommends:

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth.

The most moving memoir (male or female) to come out of the Great War. Highly readable and easily obtainable, this is the story of love and unfathomable loss by a woman who saw all of her close male friends, including her fiancé and her brother, slaughtered in the holocaust of 1914-18. The book also sheds considerable light on the trials women faced in pursuing an education during the decades just before the conflict. It is the story of the making of a great crusader for pacifism. I have read Testament of Youth several times and have never been able to avoid crying at various passages.

Miriam Bodion recommends:

Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (2007)

This thoughtful, often surprising work makes use of a broad array of sources, from theoretical works on gender to ancient and medieval rabbinic texts, to explore how medieval Jews thought about birth, infant care, and the raising of children.

Julie Hardwick recommends:

Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (2006)

A leading medievalist takes a brilliant, lively, provocative, and very accessible look at the persistence of gender inequality and insists we can only understand that pattern by looking back — well back. Her topics range from work to sexuality, and she makes a very important and compelling argument.

The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007)

by David Crew

Saul Friedländer’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, argues that the Holocaust must be understood as a European event. Without murderous German anti-semitism and racism, the Holocaust would certainly not have happened, but German policies could not have been put into practice on such a previously unimaginable scale without the acquiescence, support, even active participation of a wide range of historical actors in all of the occupied countries.

Friedländer shows that “the events we call the Holocaust” cannot properly be understood as the step-by-step implementation of a preconceived plan. Certainly, Hitler was unwavering in his belief that the Jews were Germany’s most dangerous enemy and that they must be eliminated completely, first from German, then from European life. Yet what the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” actually meant was neither clear nor consistent, even in the minds of Nazi leaders, until the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. As late as the autumn of that year, it was still possible to imagine other (incredibly brutal but less systematically murderous) options, such as the mass deportation of Jews to northern Russia after the Soviet Union had been conquered. Yet the Nazi decision for genocide was not simply a response to the failure to defeat the “Jewish-Bolshevik” enemy in Russia. Friedländer argues that Nazi policies in occupied Poland between September 1939 and 1941 had already made genocide both thinkable and possible: “the ongoing violence in occupied Poland created a blurred area of murderous permissiveness that, unplanned as it was, would facilitate the transition to more systematic murder policies.”

However, it was the attitudes and behavior of Europeans in the occupied countries that permitted the Nazi fantasy of genocide to become a murderous reality. Many Europeans played active roles in the machinery of mass murder; the local governmental authorities in the occupied European countries who implemented the German racial laws, the local police forces who helped round up Jews for deportation to the death camps, the Eastern Europeans who functioned as guards in those camps, the ordinary Europeans who enriched themselves with Jewish property. Others simply remained silent, above all the political and religious elites. Some Europeans did resist. In Belgium, for example, resistance organizations worked with the Jewish underground to hide about 25,000 Jews. Nor did all the Jewish victims continue to follow German orders in the hope of surviving until the end of the war. In the eastern European ghettos, some Jews engaged in armed revolts. But the bitter irony of these courageous acts of Jewish resistance, such as the April 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, was that they convinced Himmler and Hitler to move even faster with the annihilation of European Jews so that Nazi Germany would not have to deal with more Jewish revolts.

Friedländer draws extensively from diaries written by Jews across Europe during the war. Their voices help to make this a powerful book. It deserves to be read by anyone interested in the Holocaust.

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Everyday Crimes: The Shop on Main Street (1965)

By Tatjana Lichtenstein

“They did it. Not us!” According to historian Tony Judt, this was the way Europeans tried coming to terms with the fate suffered by their Jewish neighbors during the Second World War. Pointing their fingers at the Germans, other Europeans chose to repress the memory of widespread participation or acquiescence in the persecution of Europe’s Jews. The role of ordinary people in betraying their Jewish neighbors, often in the hope of material rewards, appears in survivor testimonies and was remembered by families and communities as the war came to an end. Nevertheless, this knowledge was suppressed in the name of reconstruction, a process of social, political, and moral reconstitution after years of occupation and war. It took a generation before historians, writers, filmmakers, and other voices began questioning this public memory of the Second World War. In Germany, the Auschwitz Trial (1963-1965) confronted Germans with the Nazi past, and in France, the documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) created a storm of controversy and helped break the taboo surrounding collaboration with Nazi rule. In communist Eastern Europe, the 1960s witnessed similar challenges to popular memories by writers, artists, and other activists.

The Academy Award-winning, The Shop on Main Street was one of a series of Czechoslovakian films that looked critically at the participation of regular people in the Holocaust. Set in a small town in Slovakia, at the time a Nazi puppet state, the film suggests that ordinary men and women were deeply involved in the destruction of Jewish lives. In difficult conditions, good people do bad things; this is the tragic story of just such a person.

In 1942, Tono Brtko, an underemployed carpenter, embarks on his ‘career’ as an Aryanizer, the non-Jewish manager of a store belonging to the elderly, Jewish widow Rozalie Lautmann, played by the famous Yiddish actress Idá Kaminská. Driven by an ambitious, domineering wife and his own desire for greater status, Tono becomes a mild-mannered oppressor, but his affection for Mrs Lautmann grows. Unable to comprehend the new moral order and hence Tono’s real business in her shop, she embraces what she believes to be a new, helpful assistant as a long-gone son. Kaminská and Josef Kroner as Tono give us complex, powerful, and deeply touching performances. The film brilliantly investigates the ways people became morally and materially invested in the removal of Jews, the blurred boundary between bystander and perpetrator in moments of persecution, and the fragility of love and courage in times of fear. Although the filmmakers invited audiences to reflect on the limits of personal responsibility in Communist Czechoslovakia, The Shop on Main Street raised questions that we continue to ask ourselves today: Why do ordinary people become participants in the persecution and murder of their neighbors?

Normal Pictures in Abnormal Times

by David F. Crew

Private family photographs document events, such as births, marriages, and reunions, that are important in the history of individual families, but they can also teach us about the events we think of as real history. Jewish wedding photographs taken during the Second World War and the Holocaust take us into a world of private family events but also give us new ways to understand the big questions of the twentieth century.

The newly married couple, Herman de Leeuw and Annie Pais, pose with members of the wedding party shortly after the ceremony. [Photograph #08725]

The first photograph here shows a perfectly normal wedding scene. Visually, it is no different than thousands of other wedding pictures of both Jewish and non-Jewish couples taken all over Europe before the war—except for one crucial detail. At least four members of this wedding party are wearing Jewish stars. They, and presumably all the other Jews in this picture, have already become the victims of Nazi racial persecution and most, if not all, of them will not survive the war. The single detail of the Jewish star injects a chilling note into the private happiness recorded here.

I was surprised to find this photograph. Until I saw it, I did not know that Jews were still getting married in Nazi-occupied Europe or that they were having photographs taken to commemorate the event. I found this picture in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s photographic archive and it is not an isolated example. A search in the museum’s online data base for photographs of Jewish weddings produced 496 responses. The Holocaust Museum archive has photographs of Jewish couples getting married in many different occupied European countries, in foreign exile in Shanghai and Kenya, and in transit camps such as Westerbork, the Dutch way station on the deportation route to Auschwitz, and even in the Warsaw ghetto.

Portrait of a Jewish couple in the Warsaw ghetto taken at the time of their wedding. Pictured are Pawel Tabaczynski and Bela Szrut. The couple married in the Warsaw ghetto in November 1941.

The fact that these Jewish wedding photographs exist at all is quite remarkable. We would probably not expect Jews to be getting married despite Nazi occupation, and the threat of deportation and annihilation. Marriage presupposes an expectation of some kind of future, even in the darkest times. We know that many of the people in these pictures would not survive. Did they have no idea what might soon happen to them? Were they deluding themselves that they would survive? The caption attached to the second photograph here, which shows a couple in the Warsaw ghetto, certainly supports such a reading; “During the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, they were both deported to the Poniatowa concentration camp, where they perished.” Another picture of a wedding party in Salonika, Greece, taken in 1942-43, tells us that the couple’s “marriage was hastily arranged two months before their deportation so that they might be able to stay together. The couple perished in Auschwitz.” The caption of yet another wedding photograph tells us that no one in the picture survived.

Yet, knowing what happened after these photographs were taken makes it difficult for us to understand what the pictures originally showed. When we look at photographs of Holocaust victims who are still alive in a Polish ghetto we already know that they will soon be murdered, but most of the victims probably did not know their fate. Life in the ghetto was seen as a gamble with the future, a desperate attempt to stay alive long enough for the war to end. We know that this gamble would not succeed. The Jews in these photographs did not.

Recognition of the distance between our “now” and their “then” can allow us to understand why these Jewish couples and their relatives are smiling and why they devoted so much effort and ingenuity to finding the wedding gowns and all the other accoutrements of a “proper” wedding under the extreme conditions of wartime scarcity and Nazi persecution. These Jewish wedding photographs can be seen not as attempts to deny the horrible reality of the Holocaust but as conscious efforts to defy its grotesque abnormality by claiming a small scrap of normality, a tiny hope for the future.

The bride and groom, Victoria Sarfati and Yehuda (Leon) Beraha, pose with family members at their wedding.

Pictures of Jewish weddings might also suggest that Jews could sometimes use photography to challenge the vicious anti-Semitic images produced by Nazi propaganda. In these private photographs, Jews showed themselves as they wanted to be seen, not as the Nazis portrayed them. This does not mean that we should see these wartime wedding photographs as a previously undiscovered form of resistance to Nazi tyranny, but it does mean that we can see attempts to claim private happiness as something more than irrelevant, futile or misguided gestures.

If you want to learn more about these photographs, you can start at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; or you can read, The Years of Extermination. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (2008) by Saul Friedländer.

Photo info and credits:

Figure 1.
Date: 1942
Locale: Amsterdam, [North Holland] The Netherlands
Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Samuel (Schrijver) Schryver
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Figure 2.
Date: Nov 1941
Locale: Warsaw, Poland; Varshava; Warschau
Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Eugenia Tabaczynska Shrut
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Figure 3.
Date: 1942 – 1943
Locale: Salonika, [Macedonia] Greece; Saloniki; Salonica; Solun
Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Mary Beraha Rouben
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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