Spectra Undergraduate Research Journal
Category
Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences > Liberal Arts > History
Received
October 19, 2020
Accepted
January 18, 2021
Published
February 26, 2021
Copyright
Articles in Spectra are freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0) which allows others to re-use the work without permission as long as the work is properly cited.
Data Availability Statement
The author of this article confirms that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restrictions.
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares that he has no conflict of interests.
Ethical Considerations
Given that this project did not involve human or animal subjects, no IRB or IACUC approval was needed. All research was derived from publicly shared sources.
Funding
No funding was provided for this research.
Abstract
This article examines how the Jewish community redeveloped its perspective towards Jews that assisted the Nazis in the Holocaust. These ‘assistants’ include those the Nazis either forced or coerced into helping complete their genocide. It argues that in the time since the Holocaust, survivors moved from a negative opinion of these Jewish workers to understanding their situation and allowing the recording of their survival stories along with other victims of the Holocaust. In examining contemporary works such as diaries or journals and the memoirs survivors published years later, these changed emotions reveal themselves as the victims began to write about workers of the ghettos and the camps in lighter tones. These changes in perspective towards Jewish assistants reveal the community’s willingness to expand the historical recording of their experiences and concentrate on Nazi Germany as the singular perpetrators of the Holocaust. In recognizing this change, historians can perform more research into the overall Jewish experience of the Holocaust as other survivors no longer silence these important voices.
Keywords
Holocaust, Jewish workers, Ghetto, Camp, Nazi Germany, Genocide
Submission Type
Primary research article
Recommended Citation
Price, N. (2021). Welcoming assistants: Changing perspectives of Jewish workers in the Holocaust. Spectra Undergraduate Research Journal, 1(1), 34-46. https://doi.org/10.9741/2766-7227.1002
