Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (review)

The number of publications on the subject of Jews and Jewish persecution could fill countless shelves. Thus one has to wonder why yet another book on this topic has now come out. The answer is that this book, despite the abundance of published scholarly literature, autobiographies, and personal accounts, fulfills an important function. It presents a view of the well-known historical events from an angle that until now has been completely overlooked: the perspective of women who personally experienced the events. The questions examined and the portrayal of persecution—feelings of abandon ment, efforts to emigrate, daily hardships—will be quite familiar to the interested reader, but each of these facets acquires a different, at times even new, interpretive context when, as Marion A. Kaplan has impressively demonstrated here, they are presented from the viewpoint of women.

The author has already published a number of books addressing the subject of Jewish women in Germany in various historical epochs, but this one, she says, “was the hardest book to write.” The reason for this “of course, has everything to do with its topic, the genocide of the Jewish people,” and also with the fact that Marion Kaplan reflects on her own family background—her parents managed to flee Germany in time.

This book does not tell the story of persecution from the perspective of Jewish associations, political factions, or perpetrators. The small episodes of daily life, the human tragedies between neighbors, married couples, playmates, schoolmates and fellow students, the countless autobiographical accounts, reflect a history “from below,” and effectively show how the ring around the Jewish population in Germany became tighter and tighter and the distance to the majority population, which was indoctrinated by National Socialism, grew wider with each day. The increased deprivation of the rights of Jews ended with their deportation, when their attempts to leave Germany for safety abroad proved unsuccessful.

Kaplan describes the individual phases of Jewish life under National Socialist rule, but she repeatedly allows the witnesses—primarily women—to speak for themselves. In the first chapter the author shows how the Jews in Germany are gradually reduced to second-class citizens and ultimately become lepers, but are nonetheless able to organize a number of remarkably diverse Jewish self-help initiatives. The next chapter examines the impact of these changes on private life, in particular the “duties” of Jewish women and the transformation of their role in the family through life under National Socialist rule. In addressing “Mischehen” and divorce in the following chapter, Kaplan touches on a problem that has only been treated peripherally, if at all, in publications on Jewish life in Germany from 1933 to 1945, despite the fact that it is an extremely important and little-researched facet of the insidious deprivation of rights.

In the chapter titled “Daily Lives of Jewish Children and Youth,” the differences between the feelings of fathers and mothers becomes distinctly clear when they are compelled to leave their children on their own, sending them off on one of the children transports to safety in England. At least 18,000 children left Germany this way, and many of them saw their parents for the last time on the train station platform. At the time they were setting off on an “adventure.” Not until much later did they realize that they had been left to fend for themselves and manage their futures alone. Kaplan depicts the emotions the parents experience during this farewell in the next chapter which addresses the November pogrom. Whereas the mothers describe their apathy and speechlessness, the fathers react more rationally, no doubt often out of a need to protect themselves. They lament their children’s loss of homeland and language—values of a bygone time (pp. 137–138).

The next three chapters cover the final deprivation of the rights of Jews up to the prohibition of emigration in October 1941 and finally, deportation, forced labor, and genocide. At the end Kaplan provides...