Never Again

A History of the Holocaust

Martin Gilbert

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780795346743
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

A work forty years in the making—Sir Martin Gilbert's illustrated survey of the pre- and post-war history of the Jewish people in Europe. Masterfully covering such topics as pre-war Jewish life, the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, and the reflections of Holocaust survivors, Gilbert interweaves firsthand accounts with unforgettable photographs and documents, which come together to form a three-dimensional portrait of the lives of the Jewish people during one of Europe's darkest times. "This volume introduces the crime to a new generation, so that it knows of the atrocities and the seemingly futile acts of defiance taken, in the words of Judah Tenenbaum, 'for three lines in the history books.'" — Booklist

Chapter One

European Jewry

The story told in these pages is of a people—the Jews—who had lived in Europe for many hundreds of years. Some Jewish communities in early twentieth-century Europe dated back more than a thousand years. Jews had been living in the central and southern areas of the European continent since Roman times, and in the Aegean and Mediterranean area since Greek times more than two and a half thousand years before the outbreak of the Second World War.

The Holocaust witnessed the savage destruction of six million Jewish lives—of men, women, children and babies—as well as the destruction of Jewish life itself—of long-established patterns of religious worship, ethics, culture, languages and livelihoods.

Chapter One looks at some of the Jewish experiences and contributions to life in Europe up to the moment in 1933 when Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. Until then, Jewish life in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, had not been free from external struggle and conflict, but it had seen a growth and a flourishing, a pattern of vigorous participation and the hope of even more fulfilling times to come. It had seen a variety of Jewish experience that stimulated literature and art, music and science, commerce and self-confidence—vibrant manifestations of Jewishness in more than a dozen countries, as well as confident assimilation in the national life of all the countries of Europe, both before and after the First World War.

The prevalence of anti-Semitism, the two-thousand-year-old Christian hostility to Jews, was challenged by Pope Pius XI when he told a group of Christian pilgrims on 20 September 1938: ‘Abraham is our patriarch and forefather. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with that lofty thought. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. Spiritually we are all Semites.’

Jewish youngsters photographed in western Russia in the early 1920s. Their homes and their lives were to be devastated following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

JEWISH LIFE IN EUROPE

Some of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe were in Greece: they had been in existence for more than two thousand years, since the flourishing of Ancient Greece, at a time when there was still a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. In the late nineteenth century, and during the inter-war years, the Jews of Salonika played a central part in the life of the port, as dockworkers and stevedores as well as merchants.

Jews had lived in Italy for more than two thousand years. They had been an integral part of the life of the Roman Empire, at a time when the Temple was destroyed by Rome and the city of Jerusalem reduced to rubble. Jews had spread with the Romans to every corner of the Roman world, benefiting from the law and order, relative tolerance and social peace of Roman rule.

Jews were to be found living in scattered communities throughout the Roman provinces that later became France, Hungary and Roumania. Indeed, large Jewish communities existed in every European country many hundreds of years before the founding of the national States of which they were later to be a part.

The Jews of Germany had already been living continuously in different parts of Germany for more than 1,500 years when the German Empire was established in 1870.

The contribution of Jewish life to the new Germany was appreciated. Bismarck, the architect of German unity, had been present at the opening of the Oranienburger Strasse synagogue in Berlin in 1866. It was a triumphal moment for him, as Prussian troops were even then on their way back to Berlin, having defeated the Austrian army and paved the way for a united Germany. Berlin Jews welcomed this unification, and were as patriotic as any Germans in their national fervour. Their service in the Prussian army in the war against France in 1812 had led to an edict that gave them equality within the Prussian domains.

Jews fought as national patriots in all the armies of the First World War. They were to be found in the opposing trenches on both the western and eastern fronts. Jewish soldiers died on the battlefield fighting in the ranks of the Entente armies (Britain, France, Italy and Russia) and as part of the forces of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey). In each of these armies, Jews won the highest awards for bravery. In the German army, 12,000 Jewish soldiers were killed in action on the battlefields.

Jewish life, with its own inner religious and cultural experiences and links, was also intertwined with the life of the nations among whom the Jews lived. The Biblical prophet Jeremiah had expressed this aspect of the Jewish experience when he declared, after tens of thousands of Jews had been carried off as captives from Jerusalem to Babylon: ‘Seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it; for in the peace thereof shall you have peace.’

No Jewish community had a continuous, entirely peaceful existence in the two thousand years from the ascendancy of the Roman Empire to the creation of the modern nation States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Again and again, local rulers, the Church or a population incited by hatred and prejudice, turned against the Jews and drove them out. Central European cities such as Prague saw several expulsions, but the Jews always returned, re-founding—often three or four times—their broken communities, rebuilding their homes and re-creating their shattered livelihoods.

By the opening years of the twentieth century, many Jewish homes and livelihoods were as secure as they had ever been, yet there were still large areas of poverty, particularly in eastern Poland and western Russia, nor had anti-Jewish prejudice disappeared, even in the most modern and cultured States of Europe.

Jewish life in Europe had survived two millennia since Roman times. Despite continual upsurges in persecution and expulsion, it had flourished, but, even in the age of parliamentary democracies, liberalism and enlightenment, it was far from secure.

Three postcards published in Salonika at the end of the nineteenth century: a Jewish lady, a ninety-year-old Jew (on another version of this postcard he is described as being a hundred years old) and three Jewish fruit sellers. In 1943 almost all Salonika’s Jews were deported to Auschwitz, where more than 43,000 were murdered.

The Oranienburger Strasse synagogue (the New Synagogue) in Berlin: opened in 1866, the scene of a violin recital by Albert Einstein in 1930, ransacked during Kristallnacht, 1938, but saved from burning by the courage of a non-Jewish German police lieutenant, Wilhelm Krützfeld, the main hall was destroyed during a British bombing raid on Berlin in 1943, restored and reinaugurated (as a museum) in 1995. This photograph was taken in 1996.

A Jewish physician, Issahar Beer Teller, who practised in Prague (top). He died in Prague in 1688. The detail above is from his tombstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague. The bear (Beer) is holding a pair of medical pincers.

LANGUAGES AND CULTURE

As the Roman Empire spread north of the Alps, the Jews also moved north. Many of those who settled in Germany, particularly along the river Rhine, were later expelled eastward. They settled in what became Poland and Lithuania, bringing with them their own medieval German language, known as Yiddish.

After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Spanish Jews settled throughout the south of Europe, North Africa and Holland, where they continued to speak a version of the Spanish language of the time of their expulsion: it was known as Ladino.

However remote were the places in which Jews settled, as the result of expulsion or migration, they also maintained the Hebrew language—the language of their religion, of the Old Testament and their prayer book. Biblical Hebrew provided a link between all Jewish communities. With the advent of printing in the fifteenth century, Jewish prayer books were printed in Hebrew throughout Europe. The first Rome prayer book was printed in 1486, the first Cracow prayer book in 1592, the first Berlin prayer book in 1798. Many of the towns in which such printing took place were to see mass deportation during the Holocaust.

The cultural impact of Hebrew throughout the Jewish world ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Author’s Note
• Contents
• Introduction and Acknowledgements
• Chapter One European Jewry
• Chapter Two Nazi Germany
• Chapter Three The Coming of War
• Chapter Four The Holocaust Intensifies
• Chapter Five Survival: Hope, Resistance, Refuge
• Chapter Six The Deportations Continue
• Chapter Seven The Last Year of the War
• Chapter Eight Liberation: Bearing Witness
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Other Books by Martin Gilbert