Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, 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: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry.
Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust and married an American soldier after liberation, introduces us to the Jewish women who lived through genocide and went on to wed American, Canadian, and British military personnel after the war. She 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 — and shows how they helped shape the postwar world by touching thousands of lives, including those of the chaplains who officiated their weddings, the Allied authorities whose policy decisions structured the couples’ fates, and the bureaucrats involved in immigration and acculturation. The stories Judd tells are at once heartbreaking and restorative, and she vividly captures how the exhilaration of the brides’ early romances coexisted with survivor’s guilt, grief, and apprehension at the challenges of starting a new life in a new land.
Nonfiction
Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides after the Holocaust
January 8, 2023
Discussion Questions
Women’s Studies:
We all know snippets of the war-bride stories — the gown of silky, white US Army parachute nylon, handsewn by the orphaned bride for her DP camp wedding; or the famous scene of Gertrude Klein, whose human dignity and will to live were restored when Kurt, an American rescuer (and, later, her husband) held open a door in Auschwitz for her.
But there is so much more to know. Each war-bride romance confronted challenges: onerous immigration laws, army rules about soldiers marrying “European” civilians, religious restrictions imposed on marriage, language barriers, and adjustment to a new life in an unfamiliar place.
Considering what an important part of the larger Holocaust story this is, it’s surprising that no one has undertaken this project until now. Consequently, there is little systematic or comprehensive literature on which to draw. Additionally, the time lag created its own problems — the plasticity of memory can lead to a skewed recollection of earlier times.
Professor Robin Judd addresses these matters in many different ways. For one, she begins by describing a wide range of survivors — refugee prisoners, camp inmates, hidden Jews, and displaced persons. She conducts independent interviews, tracking people down and compiling extensive logs to fill out the record. And to prevent the natural transformation of memory from undermining the accuracy of her subjects’ testimonies, she cross-checks everything — contemporary texts, personal memoirs, artifacts, and more.
Judd has recovered the authentic, unheard voices of a neglected population whose accounts of their experiences would otherwise have been lost to history. From her research, the reader draws an inspiring message: that most survivors chose life. They didn’t succumb to victimhood but rather created constructive lives with new families, in new countries, under new conditions — even as they faced daunting obstacles.
Writing with discipline and restraint, Judd offers portraits of bravery, not in military exploits or derring-do but in the challenges of daily life. Her book both offers accurate historical insight and attests to the resilience of human beings after suffering and setbacks.
Writing Based on Archival Material:
In Between Two Worlds, Robin Judd examines the postwar experiences of Holocaust survivor “war brides” and their American Jewish soldier husbands. Her writing is an intricately layered, meticulously researched history that’s threaded with deep sensitivity and superb narration. Utilizing sources from nearly three dozen archives in the US, Canada, England, and Israel, Judd tells a story of postwar love, courtship, grief, loss, and recovery — all against a backdrop of encounters with the American military, immigration policies, wartime trauma, postwar reconstruction, and resettlement in America.
Judd’s painstaking approach to archival research leaves almost no stone unturned. Incorporating documentation, oral history, press accounts, memoirs, and more, Judd crafts an innovative, path-breaking history of the postwar lives of the Jewish war brides and their families. By weaving together these touching stories and her reconstruction of the postwar world, Judd explores critical themes of “agency, strategy, religious authority, and familial rebuilding, as well as loss, exclusion, and restrictions.” Between Two Worlds represents excellent historical writing at its best, combining conscientious research with polished prose.
Jewish literature inspires, enriches, and educates the community.
Help support the Jewish Book Council.
