Going Home: Jewish Survivors in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (original) (raw)

Survivors who contributed their polyphonic voices to the Lonka project make for a comprehensive record of Jewish experience in the Holocaust. Among them are people of diverse walks of life, age, culture, and language, born into religious or assimilated families, survivors of ghettos, concentration camps and death marches, former partisans and inmates of British internment camps on Cyprus. This encyclopedic diversity of life stories reveals the complex mechanics of Nazi terror that quickly progressed from disenfranchisement and despoilment to ghettoization and deportations to death camps. Individual trajectories of our characters illustrate the vast topography of the Nazi genocide, the specificity of German or Romanian occupational regimes, as well as the differences among various national contexts. This terrain dotted with the sites of destruction as well as of hiding and escape is mapped for us by the variety of personal survival strategies and the many postwar trajectories taking survivors to the USA, Palestine, Western or Eastern Europe. Some of our characters are famous and their biographies fully reconstructed, while others are very private and do not reveal much about their wartime experiences beyond a few sketchy lines.