Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe by Bob Moore

Excerpt

The academic study of Jewish survival during the Holocaust has, unsurprisingly, been an emotionally charged topic. Although the Holocaust’s death toll of six million is widely accepted, the vastly different mortality rates across Europe have long been a puzzle to historians. The fact that more than half of the Jews in Western Europe survived the War, while Eastern European Jewry was decimated, has traditionally been explained through single-country studies of who was killed. In an attempt to advocate for the agency of Jewish victims and establish the existence of Jewish resistance and self-help, more nuanced discussions of the how and why of Jewish survival have often been brushed aside. Bob Moore’s Survivors, however, seeks to shed light on who lived and why through a comparative study of nearly every major Western European Jewish community. While emphasizing the importance of both escape and hiding, Moore’s book highlights the significance of interconnected Jewish self-help networks along with aid from non-Jews, and uses a critical mass of painstaking national studies to argue that idiosyncratic national and local circumstances were key to determining chances of survival. …