Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust by Evgeny Finkel (review)

To entitle this book Ordinary Jews was a bold choice, evoking Christopher Browning's Ordinary Germans, which influenced a generation of Holocaust scholars and students. Evgeny Finkel does not shy away from big goals. Since most major genocide studies hitherto have not analyzed how members of targeted groups respond to violence, the author addresses an important gap. His aim is to contribute to the theoretical understanding of human behavior under mass violence as well as to empirical knowledge of the Holocaust. Finkel's revised doctoral thesis, which received an award for best dissertation in comparative politics from the American Political Science Association, attempts to bridge political science and history by using methodological tools of the former to analyze overlooked aspects of the Holocaust (p. 194).

The study returns agency to the victims by challenging the notion of their alleged passivity. Finkel questions the concept of "choiceless choices" (Lawrence Langer) by asking why did many people flee the Khmel'nik ghetto, for instance, while from other ghettos only a few Jews escaped? The study, thus, poses two main questions: why did Jews choose certain strategies, and why did those vary by locality? Finkel proposes a new typology of Jewish strategies: a) cooperation and collaboration; b) coping and compliance; c) evasion; and d) resistance (p. 7). He examines three ghettos whose prewar Jewish communities were comparable in size. During the war, the three ghettos were located in important administrative centers and each had a so-called Jewish council, a Jewish police, and an underground resistance.

Despite similarities, behavior varied. In Bialystok only a few Jews escaped, while in Minsk thousands fled. In Crakow, the underground acted outside of the ghetto, yet in Bialystok an uprising took place within the ghetto boundaries. Finkel claims that most of the variety was shaped by a few key variables, for example, prewar regimes: in Crakow the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Poland; in Bialystok the Russian Empire, Poland, and the USSR; and in Minsk the Russian Empire and the USSR.

Each chapter begins with a brief (and moving) story from the Kmiel'nik ghetto, where Finkel's grandfather was interned. The book is grounded in 500 videotaped or written testimonies, published memoirs, diaries, and letters from the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, collections at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Fortunoff Archive at Yale University, the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, and other collections. The sources are in English, Polish, Hebrew, and Russian; two important languages go missing: Yiddish and German. While Finkel claims he can make up for Yiddish by using testimonies in other languages, he purposely leaves out German documents.

Leaving the German sources aside underlies one of the few caveats of this study. Finkel studies the intentions of the Jews and thus does not want to rely on perpetrator documents. He admits that he argues against the call for an integrated Holocaust history; however, for him the Nazis did not know what was going on inside the ghettos, and therefore their documents would be negligible sources. Moreover, the German documents were biased, which is not a fully convincing argument since Finkel himself frequently reflects on the potential biases in Jewish documents. Excluding the German documents leaves out important sources regarding the specific development and behavior of each ghetto society, especially its interactions with the local Germans regarding labor, security, and alimentation. As the Jews employed diverse behaviors, so did the Germans.

Finkel dedicates each of his chapters to one type of behavior from his typology. Chapter one discusses "cooperation and collaboration." In Finkel's usage "cooperation" is seen as actions to preserve community, "collaboration" as actions to its detriment. From the testimonies, Finkel concludes that prewar political and social activists were more likely to cooperate than collaborate. Many of those who cooperated maintained relationships to the underground and are thus better understood as resistors than collaborators. Private collaboration with the authorities took...