Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
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Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany. The New York Times Book Review - Deborah E. Lipstadt ...[A] devastatingly powerful book [that reveals how] genocidal violence can have its genesis in the smallest expressions of prejudice and hatred.
Preface and DedicationAcknowledgmentsIntroduction31In Public: Jews are Turned into Pariahs, 1933-1938172In Private: The Daily Lives of Jewish Women and Families, 1933-1938503Jewish and "Mixed" Families744The Daily Lives of Jewish Children and Youth in the "Third Reich"945The November Pogrom and its Aftermath1196War and the Worsening Situation of Jews1457Forced Labor and Deportations1738Life Underground201Conclusion229Notes239Bibliography265Index275
