Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941-1946
Kateřina Králová
Chronicles the lives of the Jews of Greece who returned after surviving persecution, combat, and exile during World War II.
During World War II the Jews of Greece went into hiding, survived as far-flung refugees, fought as partisans, or were deported to Nazi death camps from which few returned. Though they wanted more than anything to return home, those who did faced isolation, anguish, deprivation, and hostility in the midst of the Greek Civil War. Their stories, which rarely feature in histories of the Holocaust, raise important questions about the aftermath of the war across Europe. Based on exhaustive archival research, and new testimonies and interviews with Holocaust survivors across several continents, this book brings new understanding of the genocide.\
"A moving account of an important coda to the Holocaust in Greece: the difficult return of the very few Greek Jewish survivors to their homeland. More than half of those who returned stayed only briefly. This book tells us why and shows what Greece—and its Jews—have lost as a result." — K. E. Fleming, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust and author of Greece: A Jewish History.
"With wisdom and elegance, Katerina Králová's Homecoming explores the wartime and immediate post-wartime experience of Greek Jewish survivors, resisters, and the hidden and displaced as they returned home and struggled to confront shattering post-war realities. Homecoming is a feat of painstaking research and a great contribution to Greek, Jewish, and Holocaust histories." — Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Distinguished Professor of History, Viterbi Endowed Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies, UCLA, and author of Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century
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About the Author
Kateřina Králová is professor in Contemporary History at the Balkan, Eurasian and Central European Studies Department of the Institute of International Studies at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Her publications include Stegnosan ta dakrya mas:Ellines prosfyges stin Tsechoslovakia (Our tears dried up: Greek refugees in Czechoslovakia) and Das Vermächtnis der Besatzung: Deutsch-griechische Beziehungen seit 1940 (The legacy of the occupation: German-Greek relations since 1940).