From Belsen To Buckingham Palace

This book explores Jewish refugee movements before, during and after the Holocaust and to place them in a longer history of forced migration from the 1880s to the present. It does not deny that there were particular issues facing the Jews escaping from Nazism, but in this enlightening study the author emphasises that there are longer term trends which shed light on responses to and the experiences of these refugees and other forced migrants. Focusing on women, children, and 'illegal' boat migrants, the author considers not only British spheres of influence, but also Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, South Asia, Australasia. The approach adopted is historical but incorporates insights from many different disciplines including geography, anthropology, cultural and literary studies and politics. State as well as popular responses are integrated and the voices of the refugees themselves are highlighted throughout. Films, novels, museums and memorials are used alongside more traditional sources, allowing exploration of history and memory. And whilst the importance of comparison underpins this book, it also provides a detailed history of many neglected refugee movements or aspects within them such as gender and childhood. Written in a lively and committed style, the book is accessible to both a general as well as a specialist audience, and will be of interest to those interested in the Holocaust, migration and generally in the growing crisis of ordinary people forced to move.

The Trajectory of Holocaust Memory: The Crisis of Testimony in Theory and Practice re-considers survivor testimony, moving from a subject-object reading of the past to a subject-subject encounter in the present. It explores how testimony evolves in relationship to the life of eyewitnesses across time. This book breaks new ground based on three principles. The first draws on Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” concept, transforming the object of history into an encounter between subjects. The second employs the Jungian concept of identity, whereby the individual (internal identity) and the persona (external identity) reframe testimony as an extension of the individual. They are a living subject, rather than merely a persona or narrative. The third principle draws on Daniel Kahneman’s concept of the experiencing self, which relives events as they occurred, and the remembering self, which reflects on their meaning in sum. Taken together, these principles comprise a new literacy of testimony that enables the surviving victim and the listener to enter a relationship of trust. Designed for readers of Holocaust history and literature, this book defines the modalities of memory, witness, and testimony. It shows how encountering the individual who lived through the past changes how testimony is understood, and therefore what it can come to mean.

When British troops arrived at Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 they found 40,000 desperately ill men, women and children and 10,000 unburied dead bodies. In a final act of cruelty the Germans had withheld food and water from the inmates for a week. Typhus was raging and conditions were chaotic. Muriel Knox Doherty arrived soon after as Chief Nurse with the task of creating a hospital, scrounging supplies and saving as many of the camp survivors as possible. In letters written to her mother and friends in Australia, Doherty describes her experiences at Belsen in moving detail. She tells of the plight of Jewish survivors unable to return home, and the challenge of rebuilding their health and their self-respect. She is inundated with appeals from desperate families trying to find their loved ones among the camp survivors and the many displaced people at Belsen. For one particularly memorable day she attends the Luneberg Trials as Belsen survivors gave evidence against war criminals. One of the few accounts of a concentration camp written by a non-Jew, this remarkable collection of letters is illustrated with drawings by one of the Belsen survivors and period photographs. It is a compassionate tale of the effects of war and the effort made to heal Europe after World War II.

Home after Fascism draws on a rich array of memoirs, interviews, correspondence, and archival research to tell the stories of Italian and German Jews who returned to their home countries after the Holocaust. The book reveals Jews' complex and often changing feelings toward their former homes and highlights the ways in which three distinct national contexts—East German, West German, and Italian—shaped their answers to the question, is this home? Returning Italian and German Jews renegotiated their place in national communities that had targeted them for persecution and extermination. While most Italian Jews remained deeply attached to their home country, German Jews struggled to feel at home in the "country of murderers." Yet, some retained a sense of belonging through German culture and language or felt attached to a specific region or city. Still others looked to the future; socialist and communists of Jewish origin hoped to build a better Germany in the Soviet Occupied Zone. In all three postwar states, surviving Jews fought against persistent antisemitism, faced the challenge of recovering lost homes and possessions, struggled to make sense of their persecution, and tried to find ways to reclaim a sense of belonging. Wide ranging and moving, Home after Fascism enriches our understanding of Jews' homecoming experiences after 1945. It reveals the deep affection and persistent love people feel for their homes, the suffering that comes with losing them, and the challenges of a return.

How has Europe shaped British literature and culture – and vice versa – since the Middle Ages? This volume offers nuanced answers to this question. From the High Renaissance to haute cuisine, from the Republic of Letters to the European Union, from the Black Death to Brexit -- the reader gains insights into the main geographical zones of influence, shared intellectual movements, indicative modes of cultural transfer and more recent conflicts that have left their mark on the British-European relationship. The story that emerges from this long history of cultural interactions is much more complex than its most recent political episode might suggest. This volume offers indispensable contexts to the manifold and longstanding connections between British and European literature and culture. This book suggests that, however the political landscape develops, we will do well to bear this exceptionally rich history in mind.