The Cambridge History of the Holocaust: Volume 3, The Victims and Their Worlds: 1939–1945

Explores the experiences, responses, and fates of Holocaust victims across a wide geographical scope, examining their agency and its limits.

Marion Kaplan (Edited by), Natalia Aleksiun (Edited by)

9781108830225, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 June 2025

560 pages
23.5 x 16.2 x 3.2 cm, 0.99 kg

'… the editors have assembled a truly international and intergenerational roster of contributors that reflects the vigor and breadth of the field and the diversity of the people who work in it. One particularly salutary consequence is that numerous chapters make a great deal of research in languages that are not usually accessible to English-speakers available to them … a compendium of multi-faceted and hard-won learning.' Peter Hayes, H-Soz-Kult

Ordinary victims' voices from the Holocaust are still far less recognized than those of the perpetrators, Volume III of The Cambridge History of the Holocaust centers upon victims' perspectives, examining their experiences, responses, and fates. Chapters encompass the ordeals of a range of persecuted groups: Jews, Roma and Sinti, and homosexuals, as well as those with physical and mental challenges, Slavs, and Soviet prisoners of war. Covering a wide geographical scope, contributors underscore the differences between victim experiences in eastern and western Europe while highlighting national and regional complexities. Through a breadth of primary sources including diaries, letters, memoirs and interviews, readers gain insight into the diverse reactions and behaviors of victims as well as those who helped or hurt them. This volume offers an overview of Holocaust scholarship through victims' voices, while highlighting areas for further research.

General Editor's Introduction Mark Roseman
Introduction to Volume III Marion Kaplan and Natalia Aleksiun
1. The Jewish world under Nazi impact, 1930–1939 David Engel
2. The Churches and the holocaust Jonathan Huener
3. Lost in-between: refugee migration during the holocaust Michal Frankl
4. Jewish forced labor: from coerced segregated deployment to slave labor, 1938–1945 Wolf Gruner
5. 'To prevent something worse': strategies, constraints, and choices made by the Jewish councils in Western Europe Beate Meyer
6. Jewish councils and Jewish ghetto police in Eastern Europe Katarzyna Person
7. Diaries and chronicles Alexandra Garbarini
8. Jewish experience of segregation and ghettoization Andrea Löw
9. Religious practice during the holocaust Hava Dreifus
10. Cultural activity in the holocaust Samuel Kassow
11. Facing the unfathomable: victims' reactions to the deportations to death camps Dariusz Libionka
12. Jews in concentration camps, 1933–1945 Kim Wünschmann
13. Gray zones and sonderkommandos: power and morality in Auschwitz–Birkenau and other national socialist concentration camps Imke Hansen
14. Hiding and passing as non-Jews in Poland, 1942–1945 Jan Grabowski
15. Surviving in the Soviet Union Eliyana R. Adler
16. Uprisings and mass escapes in ghettos and camps David Silberklang
17. Jews in armed resistance movements and partisan units Daniel Lee and Natalia Aleksiun
18. Gender and Jewish experience during the holocaust Helene Sinnreich
19. Sexual exploitation and violence during the holocaust Regina Mühlhäuser
20. The Jewish family during the holocaust Dalia Ofer
21. Jewish children's experiences during the holocaust Joanna Beata Michlic
22. Mixed race, mixed marriage and Jewish Christians Susanna Schrafstetter
23. Mentally and physically disabled persons as victims of Nazism Paul Weindling
24. Homosexuals Geoffrey J. Giles
25. Roma Anton Weiss-Wendt
26. Slavs and Soviet POWs Waitman Wade Beorn
27. Help and rescue in Eastern Europe: the case of Poland Anna Bikont
28. Jewish self-help and rescue in Germany and Nazi-occupied Western Europe, 1941–1945 Beate Kosmala
29. International responses to the Jewish refugee crisis, 1939–1945 Avinoam Patt
30. The allies and the holocaust Richard Breitman
Index.

Subject Areas: European history [HBJD]