Jewish Responses to Persecution: 1938–1940 (Volume 2)

FOR UNDERSTANDING the Holocaust, documents generated at the time of persecution have a special significance and expressiveness, particularly those stemming from the hands of victims rather than perpetrators. This series attests to that fact. Such documents recover the agency and subjectivity of those too often seen merely as the objects of Nazi policy. In them emerges the diversity and individuality of millions of women, men, and children whom their tormentors tried to treat as faceless, undifferentiated “Jews.” And they are evidence of the uncertainty, confusion, and disbelief of those confronted by measures and processes that until then had been unimaginable and only in retrospect have become an irremovable part of our mental landscape. The emphasis in the volumes of this series is on these contemporary witness statements, on sources created close to the events by those who, regardless of their self-identification, were discriminated against as Jews.