Welcoming Assistants: Changing Perspectives of Jewish Workers in the Holocaust

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.