Research on the Holocaust has recently become conceptually more informed. This is, however, mainly the case for perpetrator history; the history of the victims regrettably often remains told within the narrow frames of resistance and Jewish leadership, and deportation and death. These subjects thematise the political history of an elite of the persecuted society. Historiography also too often equates the moment when Jews were deported with their death, neglecting their last experiences in ghettos. This image is flatly false: the victims perceived and reacted to their environment. Neglecting the victims’ actions from the overall picture is another step in their annihilation.
Society in the ghettos is a particularly relevant and underresearched topic. Ghettos present an excellent case for scrutiny of social interactions and the dynamics of persecuted societies. The extensive literature on behaviour in Nazi concentration camps cannot be generalised for Nazi ghettos: the population in ghettos was still largely in familial units, and Jews continued to live with a semblance of normal life, because there was civilian housing, unlike the central topography of the camps. Moreover, the ghettos had a Jewish self-administration, and the range of reactions in the ghettos was broad, which is in contrast to camps, where severe structures meant that there was a more limited scope of reactions.
In our panel, we shall ask what the specifics of everyday social life in a ghetto were: how did people communicate? What were the patterns of behaviour and what factors caused them? What function did language, power, gender, age, cultural and ethnic background, and pre-war background have? According to which of the above categories did stratification of the society happen, and are there any generalisable patterns of ghetto community?
Anna Hájková, University of Pittsburgh & Terezin Initiative Institute Rachel Iskov, Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, Toronto, Ontario
Association for Jewish Studies 39th Annual Conference