Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany [Hardcover]

The remarkable story of Holocaust survivors in the American zone of occupied Germany.Zeev W. Mankowitz tells the remarkable story of the 250,000 survivors of the Holocaust who converged on the American Zone of Occupied Germany from 1945 to 1948. The survivors were ordinary people who had lived through experiences that beggar description. Despite the fact that they had often lost everything and everyone, they got on with their lives and worked for a better future. Using largely inaccessible archival material and with the help of illuminating illustrations, Mankowitz gives a moving and sensitive account of this special community of Holocaust survivors.Zeev W. Mankowitz tells the remarkable story of the 250,000 survivors of the Holocaust who converged on the American Zone of Occupied Germany from 1945 to 1948. The survivors were ordinary people who had lived through experiences that beggar description. Despite the fact that they had often lost everything and everyone, they got on with their lives and worked for a better future. Using largely inaccessible archival material and with the help of illuminating illustrations, Mankowitz gives a moving and sensitive account of this special community of Holocaust survivors.The 250,000 survivors of the Holocaust who converged on the American Zone of Occupied Germany from 1945-1948 rose to brief prominence in the immediate post-war years. They envisaged themselves as the living bridge between destruction and rebirth, the last remnants of a world destroyed and the active agents of its return to life. Much of what has been written to date looks at the Surviving Remnant through the eyes of others and thus has often failed to disclose the tragic complexity of their inner lives together with their remarkable political achievements. Zeev W. Mankowitz concentrates on this community of survivors, its people, movements, ideas, institutions and self-understanding, how it grappled with the unbearable weight of the past, the strains of the lÃ