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

Scholars continue to scrutinize Jewish and non-Jewish responses to the Holocaust. This research has swept aside shallow dichotomies of "good" and "evil." No longer do we accept interpretations that paint all Jews as the former because of their victimization and self-reliant resistance, and all Gentiles as the latter for their alleged passivity or their outright collaboration in the atrocities. Recently scholars have focused much more on Eastern Europe. Their work has helped dispel long-held myths about the relationship between Jews and non-Jews. Studies such as Gunnar S. Paulsson's Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945 force a reevaluation of simplistic characterizations.

Bob Moore continues in this vein, examining the role of Jewish self-help and of rescue by non-Jews in Nazi-occupied Western Europe. Survivors deepens his own research into Jewish survival in the Netherlands and broadens the inquiry to Belgium, France, Norway, and Denmark. Moore emphasizes that survival rarely occurred without non-Jewish help. The lone Jewish resister was the exception. Moore correctly points out the paucity of related monographs on Western Europe. What he adds to the scholarship is two-fold. First, he provides an analysis of how rescue and self-help worked in occupied Western Europe, illustrating the extent to which Jews relied on non-Jews for assistance. Second, and more important for advancing our understanding of the Holocaust, Moore examines the link between the general non-Jewish resistance movements in occupiedWestern Europe and rescue and self-help.

Moore has organized his study into three sections. After an introduction, chapters two through four analyze the chaos following the German conquest of Norway, the Low Countries, and France. The German invasion prompted attempts to escape the invaders. Here Moore illustrates the chaotic, and at the same time, organized nature of rescue and self-help. Caught off guard by the invasion and dealing with a massive and chaotic refugee crisis, resistance organizations originally rooted in the First World War (p. 50) quickly reconstituted themselves and provided the first assistance to those in immediate danger, such as political exiles from Germany, Jews, and others considered enemies by the Third Reich. Eventually these resistance networks assisted downed Allied airmen as well. While frustrating the reader who is searching for a clear depiction of events, these opening chapters at the same time provide an understanding of how the chaos felt for those engulfed in it. People at the time never developed a clear sense of what was happening around them. Perhaps the most important obstacle for resistance groups throughout Western Europe in general, and Jewish groups in particular, was their inability to gain reliable information about German intentions.

Chapters five through ten present three case studies in rescue and Jewish self-help. Chapters five and six detail the role of religious organizations in both France's Occupied and Unoccupied Zones. Moore views both the cooperation of religious welfare organizations under the so-called Nîmes Committee and (until 1942) the partitioning of France as crucial to Jewish survival. He argues that the antisemitic policies of the Vichy regime made Jewish organizations more aware earlier, allowing them to react sooner; Jews and their would-be helpers in the Occupied Zone generally came to appreciate the danger only later. Moore follows this with two chapters on Belgium and two on the Netherlands. These chapters best illustrate one of Moore's main points. Regional variations make it difficult to generalize, since locally prevailing social, political, economic, and religious conditions heavily influenced the assistance provided by Gentiles. Moore ably clarifies many aspects of the assistance rendered, for instance by churches or other welfare organizations; but, as he admits, local variations hinder explanations of why one parish priest helped Jews (for instance) and another did not. Generally, resistance organizations helped Jews as one of many ways of resisting the Germans, not as an end in itself. Moore does address the...