The tragic fate of Jews during WWII remains an important source of historical research and inspiration. Relevant for an exhaustive coverage of the topic are the micro-stories of people that lived during those times and further participated at the historical events in the aftermath of the war.
Sons&Soldiers. The Jews who Escaped the Nazis and Returned for Retribution is an interesting book not only for the unique topic, but also for bringing back from historical facts to reality the life of German Jews that returned from America to help the Allies fight and, once the war was won, to interrogate the defeated and unrepentant Nazi officials.
Some of those young Jews, born in Germany but forced to leave under various circumstances, left together with their families. Most of them, though, had to leave behind their parents, siblings and relatives whose whereabouts they are looking for upon return. Unfortunatelly, in the vaste majority of cases there is a dramatic reality facing them, represented by the concentration camps.
Bruce Henderson is reconstructing the stories of those German Jews, the so-called ´Richie boys´, after the name of the training camp where they got their military and intelligence education before being send back to Europe. Their big advantage was the knowledge of the language as well as the familiarity with the German culture and history.
Besides the snapshots of Jewish life in Germany and the different biographies of the participants, new to me were the different ways in which some of the German Jews succeeded to escape.
The mental landscape of Germany and especially the ´no remorse´ attitude of those who were close to the decision-making centers of the Nazi machinery of war are maybe not new but equally relevant as well for the generation post-war and their everyday life attitude to the responsibility - of rather lack thereof - for the crimes committed against innocent people. The lion´s share of the American isolationism at the beginning of the war is as well a painful topic that costed way too many lives.
Once returned to America, the ´Richie boys´ preferred to build their lives mostly outside of the political turmoils of the Cold War. Sons&Soldiers does justice to their memory and outlines stories that together with many others creates a canopy full of insights and testimonies about Jewish life in Europe, particularly in Germany.
Personally, I was slightly disappointed that the book put so much weight on the pre- and during the war period of time, as I was rather curious about the period of return and, eventually, how they related to the category of ´retribution´ and the perception of Germany as the former homeland that betrayed them. Maybe will find more about this topic in another books and researches.
I had access to the book in the audio format.
Rating: 3 stars
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