Safe Among the Germans

This volume tells the little-known story of why a quarter of a million Jews, survivors of death camps and forced labour, 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 1500 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 Germany: 8000 native German Jews and 12,000 from Eastern Europe. Ruth Gay examines their contrasting lives in the two post-war 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 post-war 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 centre of Jewish life.