Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War II

by Ruth Gay

This book tells the little-known story of why a quarter-million Jews, survivors of death camps and forced labor, sought refuge in Germany after World War II. Those who had ventured to return to Poland after liberation soon found that their homeland had become a new killing ground, where some 1,500 Jews were murdered in pogroms between 1945 and 1947. Facing death at home, and with Palestine and the rest of the world largely closed to them, they looked for a place to be safe and found it in the shelter of the Allied Occupation Forces in Germany. By 1950 a little community of 20,000 Jews remained in 8,000 native German Jews and 12,000 from Eastern Europe. Ruth Gay examines their contrasting lives in the two postwar Germanies. After the fall of Communism, the Jewish community was suddenly overwhelmed by tens of thousands of former Soviet Jews. Now there are some 100,000 Jews in Germany. The old, somewhat nostalgic life of the first postwar decades is being swept aside by radical forces from the Lubavitcher at one end to Reform and feminism at the other. What started in 1945 as a "remnant" community has become a dynamic new center of Jewish life.

Genres: History

368 pages, Hardcover

First published August 11, 2002

About the author

Ruth Gay (born Ruth Slotkin) in New York in 1922, was a Jewish writer who wrote about Jewish life and won the 1997 National Jewish Book Award for nonfiction for Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America.

Ruth Gay attended Queens College in 1943 and received a master’s in library science from Columbia University in 1969. From 1948 to 1950 she was the editor of the JDC Review of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

She died in 2006.

Reviews

[Katharine Holden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and important book. Unfortunately, it's a little hard to follow because the timeline and settings skip around so much.