Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Homecoming, a word that both appears in the title and serves as a key concept of Kateřina Králová's book on Jewish survivors in postwar Greece, is as much misleading and disturbing as it is inspiring and enlightening.After reading in the blurb that the book was "a moving account of an important coda to the Holocaust in Greece", I anticipated a Greek version of Łukasz Krzyżanowski's Ghost Citizens: Jewish Return to a Postwar City (2020), or Michael Brenner's After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Life in Postwar Germany (1999).I expected a narrative that would describe the actual process of homecoming in detail, including the return of survivors from their hiding places or deportation, their reception by non-Jewish neighbors, and the decisions they made regarding whether to stay and rebuild their communities or to leave and establish new lives elsewhere.Yet, the first of the four main chapters, which address four distinct groups of survivorsthose who returned home from hiding, from fighting in the resistance, from concentration camps, and from abroadalready indicates that this is not the book's primary focus.In this first chapter, titled "Coming Out of Hiding in Greece", the author meticulously details the process by which survivors emerged from concealment.The chapter delves into the various factors that influenced how feasible it was for different groups of Jews to hide, the role of non-Jews in this process, and the Jewish communities that were "doomed to eradication" (35) versus those with "high chances of survival" (41).The actual emergence from hiding is merely the final step in a complex process, and this scheme (and the space dedicated to it) is repeated in the other chapters as well.At the core of Králová's book are the survival strategies, motives, and resilience of the survivors.These individuals fought with great determination not only to survive, but also to return homeunderstood as a place their surviving loved ones would also return to, but also as a physical space and community.The author demonstrates great sensitivity in the treatment of her subjects, focusing her analysis on families rather than individuals.While this reflects the strong bonds that exist in traditional Jewish families living in Greece before the Second World War and the Comp.Southeast Europ.Stud.
Author: Anna Wylegała
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7105700856
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