(Source: HUP)
Harvard
University Press has published a new book on the kapo trials in Israeli legal
history.
ABOUT THE
BOOK
Beginning in 1950, the state of Israel
prosecuted and jailed dozens of Holocaust survivors who had served as
camp kapos or ghetto police under the Nazis. At last comes the
first full account of the kapo trials, based on records newly declassified
after forty years.
In December 1945, a Polish-born commuter on a
Tel Aviv bus recognized a fellow rider as the former head of a town council the
Nazis had established to manage the Jews. When he denounced the man as a
collaborator, the rider leapt off the bus, pursued by passengers intent on
beating him to death. Five years later, to address ongoing tensions within
Holocaust survivor communities, the State of Israel instituted the criminal
prosecution of Jews who had served as ghetto administrators or kapos in concentration
camps.
Dan Porat brings to light more than three dozen
little-known trials, held over the following two decades, of survivors charged
with Nazi collaboration. Scouring police investigation files and trial records,
he found accounts of Jewish policemen and camp functionaries who harassed,
beat, robbed, and even murdered their brethren. But as the trials exposed the
tragic experiences of the kapos, over time the courts and the public shifted
from seeing them as evil collaborators to victims themselves, and the fervor to
prosecute them abated.
Porat shows how these trials changed Israel’s
understanding of the Holocaust and explores how the suppression of the trial
records—long classified by the state—affected history and memory. Sensitive to
the devastating options confronting those who chose to collaborate, yet
rigorous in its analysis, Bitter Reckoning invites us to
rethink our ideas of complicity and justice and to consider what it means to be
a victim in extraordinary circumstances.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Porat is the author of The Boy: A Holocaust
Story, which the New York Times called “a gripping, harrowing Holocaust story”
and Elie Wiesel praised as “a poignant and riveting investigation.” Porat is a
teacher and researcher at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. From
Revenge to Retribution in Post-Nazi Europe
2. Tensions
among Survivors in Mandatory Palestine
3. The
Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law
4.
Preliminary Court Examinations
5. Weighing
the Actions of Jewish Collaborators
6. Can a
Jewish Kapo Commit a Crime against Humanity?
7. The
First Doubts about the Kapo Trials
8. Judging
a Nazi and Reframing Collaboration
9.
Absolving Ordinary Functionaries
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Illustration
Credits
Index
More info here
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