Surviving the Holocaust

<p>Surviving the Holocaust is a compelling sociological account of two brothers who survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. One brother the author’s father endured several concentration camps including the infamous camp at Auschwitz as well as a horrific winter death march; while the other brother the author’s uncle survived outside the camps by passing as a Catholic among anti-Semitic Poles including a group of anti-Nazi Polish Partisans eventually becoming an officer in the Soviet army. </p><p>As an exemplary theorized life history <em>Surviving the Holocaust</em> applies concepts from life course theory to interpret the trajectories of the brothers’ lives enhancing this approach with insights from agency-structure and collective memory theory. Challenging the conventional wisdom that survival was simply a matter of luck it highlights the prewar experiences agentive decision-making and risk-taking and collective networks that helped the brothers elude the death grip of the Nazi regime. <em>Surviving the Holocaust</em> also shows how one family’s memory of the Holocaust is commingled with the memories of larger collectivities including nations-states and their institutions and how the memories of individual survivors are infused with collective symbolic meaning. </p>