Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath

Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded within families. Even after the war, sole survivors often described their losses and rebuilt their lives with a distinct focus on family. Yet this perspective is lacking in academic analyses.
 
In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.

ELIYANA R. ADLER is an associate professor in the Department of History and Program in Jewish Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Adler’s first book, In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia received the Heldt Prize for the Best Book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women’s Studies in 2011. She co-edited volume 30 of Polin as well as Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades and Jewish Literature and History: An Interdisciplinary Conversation. She is completing a project on Polish Jews who survived World War II in the un-occupied regions of the Soviet Union and starting a new one on memorial books.

KATEŘINA ČAPKOVÁ is a senior researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Prague, and teaches at Charles University and  NYU in Prague. Her book Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia received the Outstanding Academic Title of 2012 from Choice magazine. With Michal Frankl, she co-authored Unsichere Zuflucht, a book about refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria to Czechoslovakia. With Hillel J. Kieval she is co-editor of Prague and Beyond. Jews in the Bohemian Lands, a collective monograph on history of Jews in the Bohemian Lands from the early modern period up to present times. In 2016 she established Prague Forum for Romani Histories (http://www.romanihistories.usd.cas.cz/). Currently she is working on a project on entangled history of Jews and Roma in Central Europe in the 20th century.