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  • The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust
  • Michal Frankl
The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust, Livia Rothkirchen (Lincoln; Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press; Yad Vashem, 2005), xvi + 450 pp., $39.95.

Unfortunately, very few studies on the Holocaust in the Bohemian Lands or the history of the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto are available in English. This monograph by Livia Rothkirchen thus fills a significant gap in the English-language historiography. The book presents a summary of the author's research on the Holocaust; most of the chapters have been published earlier as articles and touch upon a broad array of topics.

Livia Rothkirchen, born in Czechoslovakia, was a member of the founding generation of Yad Vashem researchers and one of the first historians who came to be interested in the topic of the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia at a time when this topic was considered taboo by the communist regime. Not surprisingly, only after the fall of the Iron Curtain was Rothkirchen able to consult documents stored in Czech archives. Most of her chapters are therefore based on sources found in Israeli, British, or other archives, and on memoirs or secondary literature. The book is rich in detail and written in a very personal style, with a fine sense for paradoxical situations and irony. Rothkirchen's text is also notable for her deep interest in cultural life and in the ways intellectuals react to tragic historical events.

The book consists mainly of articles written at various times and with a variety of foci, which inevitably invites numerous overlaps and inconsistencies. In some cases (for instance passages about refugees from Germany), Rothkirchen deals with the same topic in several chapters and employs varying interpretations. Such problems notwithstanding, the book provides a historical narrative of the Holocaust of Czech Jews that differs significantly from those of most previous historians. Whereas most histories of the Holocaust in the Bohemian Lands deal only cursorily with the period of persecution preceding the deportations, and devote most attention to the ghetto of Terezín (Theresienstadt),1 Rothkirchen focuses much more on the participation of Jews in the resistance, the Czech "Righteous Among the Nations," and the relationship of both the government of the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia" and of Eduard Beneš's exile government in London to the persecution of the Czech Jews. Without a doubt, these are the book's most original chapters. The author also provides an overview of the history of the Jews in this region (focusing on the interwar Czechoslovak Republic) and an analysis of the history of the Jews in postwar Czechoslovakia. [End Page 146]

It is striking that Rothkirchen avoids analyzing the Czech and Czech-Jewish resistance strictly along the lines of political ideologies and allegiances, in contrast to earlier Czech historiography, which focused mainly on the communist resistance. Instead, she looks at the reactions of journalists, writers, or poets and describes cases of courage and self-sacrifice in the resistance and of help extended to persecuted Jews. Rothkirchen resists the temptation to generalize, but based on her account it would appear that the cultural and intellectual elites were much more involved than other groups in assistance to Jews and in the resistance. Although the topics of Jewish resistance and non-Jewish aid deserve a more analytical approach, Rothkirchen's book provides an important contribution to an understanding of these phenomena.

One of the most debatable aspects of this book is Rothkirchen's tendency to overemphasize and idealize the relationship between the Czechs and the Jews, an approach already apparent in the prologue, "Prague and Jerusalem." The author stresses the spiritual ties between Czech and Jewish intellectuals and specifically highlights the role of Thomas G. Masaryk, who repeatedly expressed his interest in Zionism as an ideology of national revitalization and bravely intervened against antisemitism during the Hilsner blood libel affair in 1899 and 1900. The "Czech-Jewish symbiosis" should have reached its apex during the interwar period, when Masaryk served as the first president of the newly created Czechoslovak Republic. According to Rothkirchen, "along with the president a range of Czech intellectuals related to Jewish nationalism in their writings and public activities, giving...

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