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This project focuses on German Jewish refugees who fled Germany between 1933 and 1941, and resettled in the U.S. before the war’s end. The people who are the subjects of my inquiry escaped Europe before the Nazis began the mass deportations and implemented the Final Solution. Although many public domain definitions of “Holocaust survivor” include these refugees under their rubric, often they refuse the term “survivor” and prefer instead to think of themselves as immigrants. I analyze 64 largely unpublished memoirs archived at the Leo Baeck Institute and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and read the relevant entries for two essay contests. These narratives concentrate on diaspora, exile and resettlement juxtaposed with Holocaust memory.
This coming year I want to focus on what some have called "last letters" and "first letters". Last letters refer to the last correspondence between people who had safely escaped from Nazi-controlled Europe and the family and friends left behind. First letters refers to the first correspondence between suriving kin and friends and newly arrived immigrants in the U.S. What do these letters tell us about what people had experienced, what they were feeling?
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