By
– September 1, 2011
The varying rates of Jewish survival during the Holocaust has long been a subject of inquiry for scholars who have traditionally sought to explain this through a comparative approach that considers location, history, and the paradigm of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Survivors instead emphasizes those factors that helped Jews to avoid deportation, either through escape or by going underground. By examining the issue in a Western European context, the historian Bob Moore focuses on the situations in the Low Countries, France, Norway, and Denmark. He finds that although there are many similarities in these five cases, it was often minor variations in circumstances and structures that made real differences in the survival rates. He also argues that self-help as a form of Jewish resistance and assistance of non- Jews were seldom mutually exclusive.
It is in the exploration of Jewish self-help that Survivors makes its greatest contribution. While survival encompassed a myriad of individual stories, they can essentially be distilled to two basic narratives: escape to a neutral country such as Switzerland, Spain, or Sweden, or hiding with the assistance of Gentile rescuers and a network of Jewish self-help efforts. Most scholarship has focused on this topic primarily from the perspective of the “righteousness” of the Gentile rescuers, on the theme of altruistic behavior. While important, Moore contends, it misses several important features. It overlooks the relationship between the acts of rescue and the creation of an existence of networks; it minimizes the role of the structure and organization of the Jewish communities in Western Europe; and the interrelationship between rescue by Gentiles and Jewish selfhelp. Most scholarship to date has argued that the Jewish communities were largely passive in the face of the Nazi threat and did little to help themselves. As Moore points out persuasively, this was not the case. Perhaps the most important conclusion to emerge from the study is that it is impossible to understand rescue and survival by seeing the Jews purely as passive victims and the non-Jewish helpers as the sole active participants in this process. All along the way Jews remained active, engaged agents in their own survival. Bob Moore’s book makes important contributions to the developing and nuanced understanding of Jewish responses to the Holocaust. I recommend it highly.
It is in the exploration of Jewish self-help that Survivors makes its greatest contribution. While survival encompassed a myriad of individual stories, they can essentially be distilled to two basic narratives: escape to a neutral country such as Switzerland, Spain, or Sweden, or hiding with the assistance of Gentile rescuers and a network of Jewish self-help efforts. Most scholarship has focused on this topic primarily from the perspective of the “righteousness” of the Gentile rescuers, on the theme of altruistic behavior. While important, Moore contends, it misses several important features. It overlooks the relationship between the acts of rescue and the creation of an existence of networks; it minimizes the role of the structure and organization of the Jewish communities in Western Europe; and the interrelationship between rescue by Gentiles and Jewish selfhelp. Most scholarship to date has argued that the Jewish communities were largely passive in the face of the Nazi threat and did little to help themselves. As Moore points out persuasively, this was not the case. Perhaps the most important conclusion to emerge from the study is that it is impossible to understand rescue and survival by seeing the Jews purely as passive victims and the non-Jewish helpers as the sole active participants in this process. All along the way Jews remained active, engaged agents in their own survival. Bob Moore’s book makes important contributions to the developing and nuanced understanding of Jewish responses to the Holocaust. I recommend it highly.
Michael N. Dobkowski is a professor of religious studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is co-editor of Genocide and the Modern Age and On the Edge of Scarcity (Syracuse University Press); author of The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism; and co-author of The Nuclear Predicament.
