Microhistories of the Holocaust

How does scale affect our understanding of the Holocaust? In the vastness of its implementation and the sheer amount of death and suffering it produced, the genocide of Europe’s Jews presents special challenges for historians, who have responded with work ranging in scope from the world-historical to the intimate. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a willingness to study the Holocaust at scales as focused as a single neighborhood, family, or perpetrator. This volume brings together an international cast of scholars to reflect on the ongoing microhistorical turn in Holocaust studies, assessing its historiographical pitfalls as well as the distinctive opportunities it affords researchers.

How does scale affect our understanding of the Holocaust? In the vastness of its implementation and the sheer amount of death and suffering it produced, the genocide of Europe’s Jews presents special challenges for historians, who have responded with work ranging in scope from the world-historical to the intimate. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a willingness to study the Holocaust at scales as focused as a single neighborhood, family, or perpetrator. This volume brings together an international cast of scholars to reflect on the ongoing microhistorical turn in Holocaust studies, assessing its historiographical pitfalls as well as the distinctive opportunities it affords researchers.

Acknowledgments
List of tables
List of photos

Introduction: Towards a Microhistory of the Holocaust
Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann

PART I: BIOGRAPHIES, GROUPS, TRANSPORTS, GHETTOS: THE SCALES OF ANALYSIS

Chapter 1. An Inconceivable Emigration. Richard Frank’s flight from Germany to Switzerland in 1942
Christoph Kreutzmüller

Chapter 2. Pursuing Escape from Vienna: The Katz Family’s Correspondence
Melissa Jane Taylor

Chapter 3. Moving Together, Moving Alone: The Story of Boys on a Transport from Auschwitz to Buchenwald
Kenneth Waltzer

Chapter 4. Dehumanizing the Dead. The Destruction of Thessaloniki’s Jewish Cemetery
Leon Saltiel

Chapter 5. Reconstructing Trajectories of Persecution: Reflections on a Prosopography of Holocaust Victims
Nicolas Mariot and Claire Zalc

Chapter 6. Microhistories, Microgeographies: Budapest, 1944 and Scales of Analysis
Tim Cole

PART II: FACE-TO-FACE: VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS

Chapter 7. Microhistory of the Holocaust in Poland: New Sources, New Trails
Jan Grabowski

Chapter 8. Jewish Slave Workers in the German Aviation Industry
Daniel Uziel

Chapter 9. The Devil in Microhistory: The “Hunt for Jews” as a Social Process, 1942-1945
Tomasz Frydel

Chapter 10. On the Persistence of Moral Judgment: Local Perpetrators in Transnistria as Seen by Survivors and Their Christian Neighbors
Vladimir Solonari

Chapter 11. Defiance and Protest. A Comparative Microhistorical Reevaluation of Individual Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution
Wolf Gruner

Chapter 12. The Murder of the Jews in Ostrów Mazowiecka in November 1939
Markus Roth

Chapter 13. Échirolles, August 7 1944: a Triple Execution
Tal Bruttmann

Chapter 14. The Beginning: First Massacres against the Jews in the Romanian Holocaust. Level of Decision, Genocidal Strategy and Killing Methods regarding Dorohoi and Galati Pogroms, June-July, 1940
Alexandru Muraru

PART III: THE MATERIAL FOR SHIFTING SCALES: SOURCES BETWEEN TESTIMONIES AND ARCHIVES

Chapter 15. The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland in Three Acts
Andrew Kornbluth

Chapter 16. The Small and the Good: Microhistory Through the Eyes of the Witness. A Case Study
Hannah Pollin-Galay

Chapter 17. The Witness against the Archive: towards a Microhistory of Christianstadt
Jeffrey Wallen

Bibliography
Index