A hole in the heart of the world - The Jewish Experience in Eastern Europe after World War II

Jonathan Kaufman

Penguin Books

1997

328 páginas

10h 56m

ISBN-13: 0_14_025453_6

While many books on the Holocaust have focused on the attempted destruction of the Jews, this compelling book by Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Kaufman (Broken Alliance: Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America, LJ 10/1/88) examines how the Jewish people have survived through the reign of Communism. He studies the lives of five families, four Jewish and one Catholic, in West Germany, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, to learn why the families stayed in Eastern Europe and how they survived. The stories are fascinating, and Kaufman relates them objectively, detailing both the horrors and the surprises in the lives of these people. He begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall, then backtracks to pre-World War I to trace the history of the families up to the present day. This thorough study shows a side of history never before traced. [from: Library Journal]