Jewish Survival:
5 Case Studies

Internet Project

for Prof. Marcuse's lecture course
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Holocaust
UC Santa Barbara, December 6, 2005

(course homepage; web projects index page)

Project Overview (back to top)

The Holocaust forced Jews to take extreme measures in order to survive. The methods of survival varied from person to person.  Some Jews physically hid themselves, some hid their identity, and others complied with authorities. Their will to survive led them to perform feats that otherwise could not have happened. Through our group's research, we found numerous accounts of Jews who did whatever was necessary to endure. These examples teach us the will of the human spirit and the price that some people pay for it.

The following five papers, each based mainly on one book, comprise our group's project:

• In Marianne Strauss' account of her survival, as captured in Mark Roseman's A Past in Hiding, she shows how Jews and the non-Jewish population were able to work to together to allow some Jews to hide persecution.
   –By Kristine Arnold
• Peter Wyden's biographic novel Stella is the story of Stella Goldschlag, an infamous Jewish "catcher". Stella was recruited as a Jewish catcher which resulted in her turning over hundreds of Jews to their death.
  –By Diana Tovar
• Bryan Mark Rigg's book Hitler's Jewish Army explores the numerous 'half-Jewish' and 'quarter-Jewish' men who were part of the Nazi army and what they did to receive exemption from persecution.
  –By Mark Enmeier
• I Will Bear Witness is the diary of Victor Klemperer, a former Jewish professor who is spared deportation due to his "privileged status" as the husband of an Aryan woman.
  –By Gabriel Austin
• In Europa Europa, Solomon Perel retells his own story of the years of the war in which for a time he was forced to conceal his Jewish identity while pretending to be a ‘good’ Nazi.
  –By Ruth Geffner