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Drawing on testimonies, memoirs, and personal interviews of Holocaust survivors, Françoise S. Ouzan reveals how the experience of Nazi persecution impacted their personal reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reintegration into a free society. She sheds light on the life trajectories of various groups of Jews, including displaced persons, partisan fighters, hidden children, and refugees from Nazism. Ouzan shows that personal success is not only a unifying factor among these survivors but is part of an ethos that unified ideas of homeland, social justice, togetherness, and individual aspirations in the redemptive experience. Exploring how Holocaust survivors rebuilt their lives after World War II, Ouzan tells the story of how they coped with adversity and psychic trauma to contribute to the culture and society of their country of residence.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Archives and Abbreviations
Introduction: Humiliation and Life Reborn
1. From Victims to Survivors and Social Actors
2. Struggling to Rebuild in France: Concentration Camp Survivors
3. High Achievers among "Hidden Children" in France
4. Death Camp Survivors and Partisan Fighters in America
5. Visibility of Hidden Children and Refugees in America
6. "To Build and to be Built" in Israel
7. Israel, Jewish Identity, and the Diaspora
8. International Impact of Survivors and Universal Issues
9. An Unbroken Chain?
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Françoise S. Ouzan is Senior Researcher at the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University. Ouzan has published widely on displaced persons, antisemitism and American Jewry and recently co-edited
Holocaust Survivors, Resettlement, Memories, Identities and
Postwar Jewish Identity and Rebirth.
