The field of Holocaust studies has been so deeply shaped by the work of Raul Hilberg that sixty years later, historians are still grappling with his formulation of Jewish reactions to persecution. Most famously, he declared that Jews failed to adequately grasp the gravity of the Nazi extermination program and, as a consequence, failed to actively resist their oppressors. Among the reactions in Hilberg's typography—one cited frequently by historians—was that victims drew on the longer Jewish tradition of petitioning local and national authorities to mitigate their subjugation. Hilberg argues that during the Holocaust, these attempts were futile and showed the victims' unwillingness to truly confront the reality of their situation. This has been the conventional wisdom in the decades since.
This welcome volume convincingly argues against Hilberg's understanding of petitions. The contributors argue that, in order to understand Jewish reactions more fully and to grasp what it meant to resist oppression, historians need to pay more attention to the thousands upon thousands of petitions and entreaties that victims of Nazism wrote and sent throughout the Nazi era. Unpacking case studies from across Nazi-occupied Europe and beyond, the chapters show the richness of petitions as a historical source, and the many ways petitions can help reshape or deepen our understandings of the victims' experiences and of the dynamics between victim and perpetrator. Responding to Saul Friedländer's call for an integrated history of the Holocaust, the contributors to this volume use petitions to uncover the complicated interactions between victim and perpetrator and aim to paint a fuller picture of how the Holocaust unfolded.
The petitions discussed (and reproduced in appendices) give insights into the lives, anxieties, and hopes of the victims, those deemed to be Jews under Nazi racial laws. Although the volume focuses on Jewish petitioners, some authors rightly point out that by looking at the petitions, we come to better appreciate the diversity and discord among the victims of Nazism. Many of the petitioners, for example, wrote precisely because they did not identify as Jewish and were seeking exemptions from the laws targeting Jews. Some even reproduced the Nazis' own antisemitic language and tropes in trying to emphasize their distance from the Jewish community.
The petitions sought a range of outcomes: to improve material circumstances, to seek greater allocations of rations, or to resist ghettoization. Some petitions were aimed at local functionaries, others at national rulers. As the editors argue, we should view the petitions as a means to resist the Nazi onslaught; by using all the tools at their disposal, victims contested their persecution and retained some agency in the face of despair.
The sheer breadth of these materials is fascinating. The petitions were written from all over occupied Europe. Central Europe was a center of these petitioning activities, with thousands of documents showing strong feelings of attachment to the dominant cultures. As chapters by Wolf Gruner, Benjamin Frommer, and Maximilian Strnad show, petitioners were likely to declare their attachment to their home country and point out their sacrifices and contributions to its wellbeing, such as military service in World War I or contributions to the economy.
Other chapters highlight the use of concepts of civil and minority rights. Stacy Renee Veeder's chapter on petitions by Jews in France offers a fascinating insight into how petitioners drew on the language and ideas of their surroundings to appeal to the authorities. In this instance, it was the republican ideas of rights and universalism that distinguished French Jewish petitions. In the case of Romania, Stefan Cristian Ionescu shows, local Jewish leader Wilhelm Filderman applied his deep understanding of local laws to influence the authorities' policies toward Jews.
Petitions also took place in more surprising places. Svenja Bethke investigates the thousands of petitions by ghetto inhabitants in Lodz to the Jewish Council led by Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. These petitions, Bethke argues, help reframe our understanding of the ghetto inhabitants' attitudes toward Rumkowski and his policy of survival through work. Petitions were also, as Thomas Pegelow Kaplan's chapter shows, transnational phenomena. He highlights the case of the Philippines, where around 1500 Jews managed to find refuge, largely due to petitioning efforts of individuals and organizations in Asia, Europe, and the United States.
The contributors argue collectively that petitions—broadly defined—have been undervalued by historians of the Jews under Nazi occupation. Scholars have not only overlooked petitions as a valuable source, but in general, they have dismissed them as futile efforts by European Jews to mitigate their suffering against impossible odds. One reason that petitions have been largely overlooked is that is difficult to measure the success of petitions. Just as in the case of armed resistance, petitions cumulatively did not halt the Nazi extermination program. In isolated cases, requests were granted, and at times, lives were saved. But the chapters in this volume show that for the most part, petitions, even if they were considered by authorities, rarely succeeded in overturning anti-Jewish measures or exempting victims from persecution.
What the contributors show, however, is that petitions highlight the complex and multifarious understandings that victims had of the situations they faced. The authors argue that it is difficult to measure the impact that the petitions had on the victims' sense of morale and possibility. The fact that they had this avenue likely meant that they maintained hope that they might survive the Nazi occupation. Certainly, the existence of petitions helped to delay ghettoization and deportation in many instances. But just as in the case of armed or spiritual resistance, the intangible effects that petitioning had on victims can be difficult to quantify.
Part of the strength of the argument is also its weakness: petitions are an absolutely prevalent source connected to so many different populations of Jews, and were a common response by the victims of Nazism. And yet it is this proliferation and the diversity of the sources that also make them difficult to assess. Although the editors, in their finely argued conclusion, tie together a range of common features among the case studies that comprise the volume, the reality is that there are so many variations that it is almost impossible to draw generalized conclusions based on the petitions. As the editors point out, so much depends on the circumstances in which they were being written, both geographically and historically.
These sources, however, provide possibilities for historians to tell as-yet untold stories of life under Nazi occupation and, crucially, to show the direct interactions between victims and perpetrators. Some of the most fascinating discussion comes when the annotations of the petitions' recipients indicate how petitions were received. These instances, which are not always available to the scholar, show the dynamic nature of the petition process and give an indication that, even if the petitioners' requests were mostly not granted, the ruling forces (be they Nazis or their satellites) devoted precious resources to processing the requests. In the case of Budapest, as Tim Cole's fascinating chapter reveals, petitions were likely crucial in helping shape the policy of ghettoization and, by extension, contributing to the survival of the city's Jews. Some of the most interesting chapters use discrete collections of petitions as their starting point to tell microhistories, finding surprising conclusions about the lives of small groups of victims. Others use the petitions alongside other archival sources and oral histories to trace the fates of victims and survivors, which helps measure the impact of petitions.
Overall, this volume coheres nicely. The editors acknowledge in their conclusion that this is only the beginning of a conversation, that much more work needs to be done to understand how petitions function and how they might help reshape our understanding of the Holocaust. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan and Wolf Gruner are to be commended for opening this conversation.
