(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 80, #2, Summer 2025) Unlike countries like America and Australia, owing to discriminatory laws to stop Jewish immigration, few Holocaust survivors came to South Africa. Even though the Holocaust had removed the threat of thousands of unassimilable aliens swamping
(Author: Michel Levine, Vol. 80, #2, Summer 2025) During World War I, antisemitic nationalist movements largely suspended their usual rhetoric in the name of the “Sacred Union” declared at the war’s outset. Following Action Française’s example, they redirected their hostility from Jews to Germans—shifting
(Author: Yakub Nowakowski, Vol. 80, #1, Autumn 2025) “Time doesn’t pass over me, over us. It doesn’t erase anything, doesn’t undo it. I’m not alive. I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it.” These haunting words of Charlotte Delbo, a French survivor of
(Author: Omi Morgenstern Leissner, Vol. 80, #1, Autumn 2025) I have hurled myself into something I have been meaning to do for years – a wad of papers that answers to name of “Granny’s and Grandpa’s.” They come in a cone, the kind
(Author: Alon Shapira, Vol. 79, #2, Summer 2024) Editor’s Note: In the Winter 2024 issue, JA published Alon Shapira’s in-depth exploration of a famed but often misrepresented act of heroism during World War II by South African POW Corporal Bernard Friedlander (“WHAT ON EARTH
(Author: Miriam Herzfeld, Vol. 79, #2, Summer, 2024) Bochum is a coal mining town in Western Germany. Jews had lived in Bochum since 1349, and there were 1152 Jews there in 1933. They included my parents, Moritz and Anna Samson, my brother Klaus, who
(Author: Rasa Jankauskaite, Vol. 79, #2, Summer 2024) Every year we in Lithuania commemorate an important and painful anniversary – ZYDU GENOCIDO DIENA, REMEMBRANCE DAY OF THE LITHUANIAN JEWISH GENOCIDE. This is the day on which, on 23 September 1943, the Vilnius ghetto was liquidated.
(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 79, #2, Summer 2024) A picture of a metal box had been sent for identification to Cape Town Holocaust Centre director Richard Freedman. What was it? Prof Arie Alexander Galles and his wife Sara were to be guests of
(Author: Emma Wilkins, Volume 79, #2, Summer 2024) Oral history is unique in its ability to individualise and emotionalise the experiences of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs). Within the unlikely space of occupied Germany, the surviving Jewish population began the process of reclaiming its
(Author: Stuart Buxbaum, Vol. 79, #2, Summer 2024) The Context This article is part of a larger, multi-year project of researching the history of the camp system, such as concentration camps, internment camps and displaced persons’ camps, by the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide