Mitigating Persecution: Intermarried Families and the Significance of Social Networks during the Holocaust in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

Holocaust and Genocide Studies · 2024-02-16

Abstract This article focuses on the wartime experience of an intermarried family in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. It examines the intermarried couple Marie and Jiří Klouda, their daughters, Helena and Mariana, and their closest relatives among the Eisner and Klouda families. Using a microhistorical perspective, this study focuses on the experiences and strategies of particular individuals and their social circles to understand their responses to shifting circumstances. Although I focus on these two families, my questions pertain to the significance of non-Jewish friends and relatives for Jews during the Holocaust. In short, what difference did these social and familial bonds make to Jewish family members? The study shows that familial and social bonds had tangible outcomes in terms of facilitating important, lifesaving contacts and favors within the forced Jewish societies in the Terezín ghetto and Prague. Prewar professional, familial, and cultural networks, and the social capital they embodied, carried over into the lives of Jews forced into Terezín and into the ghettoized society in Prague. Family and friends provided significant material and emotional support for each other. This support was especially important in a family like the Eisners-Kloudas, which experienced multiple forms of victimization during the war. During the Holocaust, non-Jewish relatives and friends could not stop the processes of genocide, but they could mitigate the effects of dispossession, isolation, deprivation, and deportation.

Sarah A. Cramsey. Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the “Ethnic Revolution” in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936–1946. The Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. ix, 410pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. $95.00, hard bound. $49.00, paper.

Slavic Review · 2024-01-01

Sarah A. Cramsey. Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the “Ethnic Revolution” in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936–1946. The Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. ix, 410pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. 49.00, paper. - Volume 83 Issue 3

The Limits of Soft Power

S I M O N Shoah Intervention Methods Documentation · 2023-12-13

Boycotts remain an important way for ordinary people to express their opposition to the decisions and policies of businesses and governments. It allows individuals as economic agents, most significantly as consumers, to assert soft power. While the impact of a boycott movement or action might vary, it is a tool within reach of most people. In Židovský bojkot nacistického Německa, 1933–1941 (The Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany, 1933–1941), the outcome of a multi-year grant-funded project at the University of Pardubice, authors Tomáš Jiránek, Zbyněk Vydra, and Blanka Zubáková explore the global Jewish boycott movement against Germany as a response to Nazi antisemitism between 1933 to 1941.

Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands. Ed. Kateřina Čapková and Hillel J. Kieval. Jewish Cultures and Contexts Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. ix, 382 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Photographs. Maps. Tables. $80.53, hard bound.

Slavic Review · 2022

• History
• Classics
• Archaeology

Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands. Ed. Kateřina Čapková and Hillel J. Kieval. Jewish Cultures and Contexts Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. ix, 382 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Photographs. Maps. Tables. $80.53, hard bound. - Volume 81 Issue 3

Wolf Gruner. The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses. New York: Berghahn, 2019. Pp. 454.

Austrian History Yearbook · 2022

• Political Science
• Political Science
• Art

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Židé v českých zemích po šoa: identita poraněné paměti (Jews in the Bohemian Lands after the Shoah: The Identity of Wounded Memory)

East European Jewish Affairs · 2020

• History
• Theology
• Art

Shortly after the end of the war in the Bohemian town of Kolin, Rabbi Richard Feder (1875-1970) sought to make sense of the new reality facing the remnants of his community that had survived the Ho...

Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944−1948

Holocaust and Genocide Studies · 2016-12-01 · 1 citations

A number of recent works documenting the postwar return of Jews to their homes have shaped understandings of antisemitic violence and more quotidian hostility in Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II. In Beyond Violence, Anna Cichopek-Gajraj focuses our attention away from the well-known episodes and onto the everyday encounters awaiting survivors in Poland and Slovakia. At the center of the book lies the dynamic relationships among the survivors, their Gentile neighbors, and the new state authorities, a perspective that highlights the broader social, political, and economic contexts of return. By focusing on survivors’ efforts to reconstruct their lives, Cichopek-Gajraj brings a much needed corrective to existing scholarship that emphasizes antisemitism and the virtual inevitability of a Jewish exodus from Poland and Slovakia. As she shows, while large numbers of Jews did leave Poland and Slovakia in the immediate aftermath of the war, it was not until the consolidation of Communist rule1 in 1948 that many more gave up and left. Poland and Slovakia presented Jews with very different circumstances (both before and after the war), and yet the Holocaust—especially the plundering and redistribution of Jewish property among local populations—as well as the difficulty of postwar conditions more generally, complicated Jewish readjustment in both.

Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia: Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging

2016-04-18 · 5 citations

AcknowledgementsList of Place NamesIntroduction: Making Jews at Home1. The Jews of Czechoslovakia-A Mosaic of Cultures2. Jewish Power and Powerlessness: Zionists, Czechs and the Paris Peace Conference3. Mapping Jews: Social Science and the Making of Czechoslovak Jewry4. Conquering Communities: Zionists, Cultural Renewal, and the State5. Stateless Nation's Territory: Zionists and the Jewish Schools6. Making New Jews: Maccabi in Czechoslovakia7. Promised Lands: Zionism and Communism in Interwar CzechoslovakiaEpilogue: A Storm of BarbarismNotesBibliographyIndex

Shumsky, Dimitry: Zweisprachigkeit und binationale Idee: Der Prager Zionismus, 1900-1930

Collegium Carolinum · 2016-12-21

‘It Is Not My Fault That You Are Jewish!’: Jews, Czechs, and the Memory of the Holocaust in Film, 1949–2009

Dapim Studies on the Holocaust · 2016-04-05 · 4 citations

This article examines the ways in which Czech filmmakers have shaped the memory of the Holocaust in the Bohemian lands. It does so through an analysis of four films: Distant Journey (1949), Romeo, Juliet, and Darkness (1959), The Death of Beautiful Deer (1986), and Protector (2009). The narratives of all of these films center on a mixed couple or an intermarried family, a site where the fate of Jews and non-Jews intersected during the Holocaust. These films thus constitute productive sites for the investigation of the representation of Jews and non-Jews’ relations during the war. I argue that in the immediate postwar period, filmmakers asked probing and difficult questions about Czech complicity and defiance under German occupation. Before long, however, the mixed couple became a staging ground for narratives that privileged Czech victimization and used references to the Holocaust primarily to allude to German genocidal intent against Czechs. As such, the Jewish experience was marginalized as a historical event in favor of the ‘real’ Czech history of the war. Analyzing the films as manifestations of historical memory, I show that these narratives serve not only to silence Czech complicity in the social death of Jews during the war, but also to legitimize the violent un-mixing of German- and Czech-speakers after World War II. This narrative of parallel victimization of Jews and Czechs was first developed in the immediate aftermath of the war, and despite the monumental political changes experienced by the country, it has become entrenched in Czech historical memory until today.