The First Page: Home After Fascism by Anna Koch

THE FIRST PAGE

Home After Fascism
Italian and German Jews After the Holocaust

by Anna Koch

22 April 2024

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. On 25 April 2024, Anna Koch, Lecturer in Modern German History at UCL, launches her first book Home After Fascism. Italian and German Jews After the Holocaust. In her book she draws on a rich array of memoirs, interviews, correspondence, and archival research to tell the stories of Italian and German Jews who returned to their home countries after the Holocaust. It reveals Jews’ complex and often changing feelings toward their former homes and highlights the ways in which three distinct national contexts – East German, West German, and Italian – shaped their answers to the question, is this home?

INTRODUCTION

In April 1945, Thomas Geve, a fifteen-year-old former inmate of Buchenwald concentration camp, drew a picture book depicting his experiences. On the last page of the booklet, we see a car with two signs that read “we are free” and “we are going home.” Several people head toward the vehicle, suitcases nearby. Below the picture Geve wrote again, “we are going home!” In June 1945 Thomas left Buchenwald, spending the summer at a Red Cross home for teenage refugees in Zug, Switzerland. At the end of August 1945, he reconnected with his father, who had managed to immigrate to England in 1939, and a few months later, Geve left Switzerland to reunite with him. He did not return to Beuthen, the Silesian border town where he grew up, or to Berlin, where he had lived with his mother before their deportation. I asked him what he thought about when he wrote about returning home and if he considered living in Germany. He wrote to me, “After the liberation I first of all wanted to find out about my mother. I would have joined her anywhere, even in Berlin.” Home for him was not a place. It was his family. Without his mother, there was no reason to remain. Like Geve, many Jewish survivors desperately wanted to go home after the war. Yet they grappled with the questions of what and where home was.

Hans Winterfeldt, a Berlin Jew and Auschwitz survivor, asked himself, “Home? Did I still have a home?” Goti Bauer, an Italian Jew who, like Winterfeldt, had been deported to Auschwitz, felt similarly: “We were liberated,” she wrote, “but the emotions of this moment were overshadowed by an incredible sadness and by fear of a future full of uncertainties: The return home? But which home? With whom?” Bauer returned to her hometown of Fiume (Rijeka) in the hope of finding her brother, but he had not survived the war. She soon left what was now a Yugoslavian city, eventually settling in Milan. Similarly, Winterfeldt went to his hometown to search for relatives; luckier than Bauer, he soon reunited with his parents. Three years later, Winterfeldt left Berlin and emigrated to New York.

Like Bauer and Winterfeldt, other Italian and German Jews depicted the difficulties they faced when trying to return home after the war. Home…

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ANNA KOCH is DAAD Francis Carsten Lecturer in Modern German History at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. In her research and teaching, she examines histories of displacement, exile and return, often employing a transnational or comparative lens. She has published on Italian and German Jewish history and currently co-edits a volume on Holocaust Memory and the Cold War. Home after Fascism is her first book.

The joint book launch – with Helen Finch, Professor of German Literature at the University of Leeds, launching her book German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust – will take place on 25 April 2024 at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Lead Image: Drawing by Thomas Geve, titled Wir fahren heim (We are going home).
© Thomas Geve. (From the collection held at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem)