Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War II - Softcover

Gay, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300180144 ISBN 13: 9780300180145

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2011

Synopsis

This book tells the little-known story of why a quarter-million Jews, survivors of death camps and forced labor, sought refuge in Germany after World War II. Those who had ventured to return to Poland after liberation soon found that their homeland had become a new killing ground, where some 1,500 Jews were murdered in pogroms between 1945 and 1947. Facing death at home, and with Palestine and the rest of the world largely closed to them, they looked for a place to be safe and found it in the shelter of the Allied Occupation Forces in Germany.

By 1950 a little community of 20,000 Jews remained in Germany: 8,000 native German Jews and 12,000 from Eastern Europe. Ruth Gay examines their contrasting lives in the two postwar Germanies. After the fall of Communism, the Jewish community was suddenly overwhelmed by tens of thousands of former Soviet Jews. Now there are some 100,000 Jews in Germany. The old, somewhat nostalgic life of the first postwar decades is being swept aside by radical forces from the Lubavitcher at one end to Reform and feminism at the other. What started in 1945 as a “remnant” community has become a dynamic new center of Jewish life.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Ruth Gay has turned her considerable talents toward post-World War II Germany and the question of how Jews could still live there after the Holocaust. Her book -- the first to focus on this -- is well written, both scholarly and poignantly human." -Marion Kaplan, New York University

An engrossing account of the relative safety that Jews found in Germany after World War II.

About the Author:

Ruth Gay has written extensively on Jewish history. Her other books include Jews in America A Short History and Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America, for which she won the 1997 National Jewish Book Award for nonfiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0300180144
• ISBN 13: 9780300180145
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368