Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews

Reviews / Votes

"This is a rich volume that encourages us to look closely at the photographs and "read" them in detailed historical context, revealing layers of meaning for countless ordinary lives, which Gensburger painstakingly attempts to redeem from their silence."-Holocaust and Genocide Studies
"Sarah Gensburger's comments on each photograph are fascinating in light of the reproductions [...] The great value of this publication lies in providing original material on the history of the plundering, while cultivating prudence and distance in its gaze. Thus, it gives us access both to the traces of the past and to the work of the historian, who explores, supposes, deduces and sometimes lets a healthy doubt linger."-Claire Zalc, Vingtieme Siecle. Revue d'histoire
"The album, which was kept in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, depicts furniture and crates being loaded into trucks, as well as these images of everyday household objects, assembled in massive groups. . .Looked at this way, a photo of a room full of bedding is also an image of the erasure of Jewish homes."-Slate's "The Vault"
"The material for Sarah Gensburger's study is for the most part previously unseen: a collection of eighty-five photos taken in France during the Occupation [...] These are particularly powerful images. They are all the more so because of the meaning that is given to them through the analysis and historical commentary of the author"-Anne Grynberg, Etudes Photographiques
"The book serves as an important source for anyone interested in the Holocaust in France, looting, forced labor, or reading images as historical source."-H-France
"[Gensburger] masterfully turns this album of photographs into a dynamic history of Nazi looting, making it essential for both scholars and teachers of Holocaust history."-German Studies Review
"With piercing insight, Sarah Gensburger guides readers through this extraordinary collection of German photographs documenting the Nazi looting of Jewish homes in wartime Paris. At the operation's height up to eighty French moving vans a day hauled plunder to secret German depots in the heart of the city where Jewish prisoners were forced to pack the shipping crates bound for Germany. Gensburger's account captures what these pictures reveal, ironically, about a project designed to eradicate all traces of its victims and their world. A singular contribution to Holocaust history and a brilliant model of photographic analysis."-Herrick Chapman, editor, French Politics, Culture, and Society
"A wonderful and telling record. Only now are historians seriously engaging with the material plunder that accompanied the Holocaust. The remarkable text that accompanies the photographs, dry-eyed, precise, yet moving, consolidates Sarah Gensburger's reputation as one of the most insightful and innovative historians of the Holocaust in France today."-Mark Roseman, author Documenting Life and Destruction: Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933-1946
"These photographs reveal a whole new dimension of the Nazi spoliation of Jewish property in occupied France. Art theft is well known. Who knew that the Nazis also sent to Germany 674 trainloads of household goods from the apartments of deported Jews? The heaps of used toys, pans, chairs, and clocks are a pitiful final trace of destroyed families. They also show how the Nazis tried to anonymize their victims for annihilation, and to profit from their distress. Sarah Gensburger has edited them with precision and with a keen sense of multiple ways to read images."-Robert O. Paxton, author of Vichy France and The Anatomy of Fascism