Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (review)

Perhaps, as the author says, it was because the move from Holocaust to the nation's rebirth seemed ineluctable that the events in between have been neglected by historical scholarship. Whatever the reason, at least with respect to survivors of the Holocaust in occupied Germany, May 1945–May 1948, Life Between Memory and Hope balances out the neglect in majestic fashion. The author assumed the daunting challenge of bringing identity to the era for posterity, and met it. Basing his work largely on untapped published and unpublished resources, Mankowitz formulates the course of events and structures the driving ideas with depth, thoroughness, and sagacity. This one-person effort, demonstrably a life-long work, brings the she-erit hapeleitah era into the scholarly universe inhabited by the Holocaust itself on one side and the establishment of the state in the wake of the catastrophe on the other. He defines it for Jewish historical consciousness and sets the standard for measuring future research.

The central motif is that the community of Jews of the she'erit hapeleitah—largely survivors of Lithuanian ghettos who were transferred westward with the Red Army's July 1944 advance and Auschwitz inmates marched to Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and Dachau—caught between an abandoned past and undefined future, defined its own history in terms of the surge towards the Land of Israel. Divided between death and life, the community took its stance in life of the future as grounded in the national home in the Land of Israel, and related back towards death from out of that future. In the words of Hayim Yahil (referring to the Brichah), the Jews were thrust into a vacuum from which there was no way out except to surge forward. While the suffering and losses were points of departure, the people of she'erit hapeleitah devoted their best energies to reconstructing personal lives and redeeming their people, and to setting the stage for the future. The process had a cyclical character: Anchored by hope for the return to Zion, the past was drawn into the future, while labor for the Land and enacting the hope in the present invigorated the surge towards the future.

Beginning with the description of an "almost obsessive" will to live normally (the Jews of Europe neither lived nor died as others) with the rights of free human beings as bound up with Zionism, the author traces the genesis of self-help organizations, undertaken already by the end of 1944 without outside help, and the delineation of a common fate which mandated that the people of Israel change itself from an object of history to its subject—a subject rooted in a national center. The grounding of a cohesive, national subject and its reflection in the reconstructed Land helped to alleviate the deplorable conditions—including internment with the persecutors themselves. It coincided with the survivors' confrontation with Germany's failure to express regret and the way in which the Nuremberg trials neutralized and universalized the Jewish tragedy. The survivors did not seek revenge lest they descend to the Nazis' level. They sought to separate themselves and root themselves in their own national future in the Land on their own terms.

In Chapter 4 the author probes the Holocaust's mandate to establish a national home as the sole means of overcoming the vulnerability of the people tied to minority status and landlessness. The dead, the author writes, left a last will and testament which constituted a categorical imperative to redeem the senseless deaths, to restore worth out of the chaos. That would be accomplished by establishing a national home—the struggle for which had precedents in acts of resistance within the realm of death. Hope, grounded in the Land, moved the community from death (past) to life (future) and to subsume the past into the future. And the Land was the practical, real means of building past into...