Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany, and: Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (review)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Summer 2004) 563–569 WALTER LAQUEUR. Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany. The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series. Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England [for] Brandeis University Press, 2001. Pp. xvii Ⳮ 345. ZEEV W. MANKOWITZ. Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii Ⳮ 335. Walter Laqueur’s study of what he terms ‘‘generation exodus,’’ young Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and Zeev Mankowitz’s exploration of the lives of survivors of the Holocaust in occupied Germany are each broad historical endeavors that mark the culmination of detailed research on the subject. Drawing upon their own observations and independent research, both authors have built upon earlier studies of child refugees or Holocaust survivors. Yet both studies are also innovative as well as synthetic , giving readers new information on each topic and presenting previously known information in a new and broader context. Each book is a great contribution to those studying and teaching the issues of Holocaust and Nazism, as well as to the educated public interested in Holocaustrelated topics. Although they both deal with in some way with the Holocaust , one prewar and wartime and the other postwar, the two volumes differ greatly in nature and in scope. Laqueur’s study is a relatively new topic of interest for the worldrenowned historian who has made his mark upon history as a specialist in topics such as terror, Zionism, and the Holocaust. In his attempt to sketch the portrait of a generation—young people born roughly between 1914 and 1928 from Germany and Austria who were forced to emigrate after the Nazis came to power—he uncovers the story of a remarkable generation of Jews which fate dispersed all over the globe. Many of those whose stories are included in the book he interviewed personally; others wrote memoirs that served as the basis for his analysis of their odyssey. This book also holds deep personal significance for the author, himself a child refugee from Nazism who made ‘aliyah to Palestine in the late 1930s. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 564 JQR 94:3 (2004) Laqueur’s book focuses on approximately 80,000 German and Austrian Jewish youth who left their homes in the wake of the Nazi takeover of Austria in March 1938. After describing what it was like to grow up in Germany during the Weimar Republic and the first years of the Hitler era, Laqueur devotes his early chapters to those young people who escaped from the Third Reich during the war years and those who went into the resistance. Here we encounter the story of seventeen-year-old Harry Zucker of Czernowitz, Romania. After his family was deported, Zucker heard there was a way to escape to Palestine; however, the route involving obtaining substantial funds. Remembering that his parents had hidden a sum of money in their front garden on the very day he had been born, he returned to his home to dig out dollars and pounds sterling from the ground. Since the sum he collected wasn’t enough, he had to add two golden watches and three fur coats to afford passage out of Romania. After bribing the necessary persons, he was given a berth on a little ship that sailed from the Black Sea shore to Turkey. The boat ran ashore on a small, rocky, uninhabited island off the Turkish mainland, where Harry was rescued and kept in a Turkish prison. Later, he was detained in Syria and spent months being held by the British in a Cyprus detention camp. Ultimately smuggled into Palestine wearing a British uniform, he hebraicized his name and chose a university career, becoming the famous historian Zvi Yavetz. The following chapters focus on the fate of ‘‘generation exodus’’ in different geographical areas which absorbed significant numbers of young German-Jewish refugees...