Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
Hello, and welcome to Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust, brought to you by the History Department and the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University, and the magazine Origins, Current Events in Historical Perspective. My name is Nick Breyfogle. I'm an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching, and I'll be your host and moderator today. Welcome to everyone and thank you so much for joining us. Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe. It would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry. Today, historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust, and married an American soldier after liberation, will introduce us to the Jewish women who lived through the genocide, and went on to wed American, Canadian and British military personnel after the war. She offers an intimate portrait of how these unions emerged and developed, from meeting and courtship, to marriage and immigration, to life in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, and shows how they helped shape the postwar world by touching thousands of lives. The stories of Professor Judd will tell us today are at once heartbreaking and restorative as she vividly captures how the exhilaration of the bride's early romances coexisted with survivor's guilt, grief and apprehension at the challenges of starting a new life in the new land. Let's take a moment to get to know our speaker. Robin Judd is the author of Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust, and contested rituals, circumcision, kosher butchering, and the Making of Modern Jewish political, sorry, making of German Jewish political life, as well as several articles and book chapters. She currently serves as the vice chair of the faculty advisory committee of the Leo Baeck Institute, and the immediate past president of the Association for Jewish Studies. She's also a past president of the Columbus Jewish Day Schools Board of Trustees. At The Ohio State University, Robin teaches classes in Holocaust studies, Jewish history, immigration history, and the history of leadership, and currently directs the Hoffman Leaders and Leadership and History fellowship program. She is the recipient of seven teaching awards, a service award and two Leadership Awards. In recognition of her work and Holocaust studies, Governor Mike DeWine appointed her to Ohio's Holocaust and Genocide Memorial and Education Commission in 2021. Robin is an accomplished speaker, and has lectured to a wide range of audiences across the US, Canada, Israel and Europe. She lives in Bexley, Ohio, with her husband Kenny, and their two marvelous dogs, Stanley and Stella. With that introduction, let me mention the plan. Professor Judd will open with a presentation on Jewish War brides after the Holocaust, and then she'll take your questions. If you're interested in asking a question, please write it in the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen on Zoom. We'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can. We save several in advance and we'll start with those. As a reminder to everybody here this event will be recorded and posted at a later date on YouTube. We'll make sure it's made available to everyone who's registered for the webinar, whether they're here today or not. Also, we'd like to take a moment to acknowledge that the land The Ohio State University occupies is the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe and Cherokee peoples. Specifically, the university resides on land seeded in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, and the forced removal of tribes for the Indian Removal Act of 1830. We want to honor the resiliency of these tribal nations and recognize the historical contexts that have and continue to affect the indigenous peoples of this land. Now, let me pass you over to Professor Robin Judd, over to you.

Dr. Robin Judd  
Thank you so much, Nick. Let me share my screen. So welcome, everyone. And thank you so much, Nick, for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to speak with you today. I'm really delighted to be speaking about my new book Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust. And my thinking was that today, I would first sort of introduce some general historical background, talk a little bit about why I became interested in this project in the first place, and then walk us through two stories, because in many ways, that's what I love to do as a historian, and certainly that was my hope for the book, which is to tell the stories that hadn't really been told before. So to begin with the question of what is a war bride or who were these war brides, when we're talking about war brides and usually, the term war bride was used by the US and Canada. During the period that I study, we're referring to a sporran civilian who marries in military personnel abroad. And in the case of the United States, the term war bride is used as early as the late 19th century. In Canada, it's used in the early 20th century. And in Britain, they don't tend to use the term war bride as a terminology. But the kind of category of war bride is something that dates back in terms of British military law for centuries. There were hundreds of thousands, of war brides during the Second World War. And indeed, it's during the Second World War itself, that the war brides come into the kind of attention that they had never come into before. There are over 200,000 War brides who come to the United States, around 20,000 that go to the United Kingdom, and about 40,000 or so who come to Canada plus all of their dependents. So we're talking about hundreds of thousands of individuals who are leaving their homes, and going to the United States, Britain and Canada during and after the Second World War. Most of these individuals are coming from Britain and Australia that themselves and going to the US and Canada. Most are Protestant and white, we're not looking at a huge population of Jewish War brides. Which kind of raises the question then of why I was interested in researching this topic in the first place, right? There's a fabulous literature on the war bride population more generally. So what was it that made me interested in the Jewish women themselves? And some of it has to do with this woman right here, and indeed, this photograph. This woman right here was is was my grandmother, Arlene Judd, a woman that I incredibly admired and loved and wanted to emulate as a child. I always knew that she had been a war bride, I thought her experience was very unique. And indeed, this photograph, which was a photograph that not only I was familiar with, but in some ways, was a photograph that we ritualized in our home in that when we used to visit my grandmother, she would take us to a visit with her Americanization teacher, her English teacher, when we would come to visit in the summer, so it was a phenomenon that I was aware of, but I never really knew of other Jewish War brides. And I assumed that the war bride phenomenon was one that was tended to be of a kind of Christian normative population, and hadn't really thought about the Jewish War brides as a topic worth studying. And then everything changed when I started to teach history of the Holocaust. And slowly but surely became kind of overwhelmed by the number of memoirs or stories that were written by female Holocaust survivors who ended their books with mentioning that they themselves had met and married, either the men that liberated them or the men that they met soon afterwards. So the first book that I taught in my history of the Holocaust class was Gerda Weissmann Klein's All But My Life, an incredible memoir, and she ends it with meeting Kurt Klein after her death march. Soon afterwards, I taught Gina Turgal's I Light a Candle. Gina Turgal was a Holocaust survivor who made her way to Britain. She ends her memoir with meeting her husband. When soon after liberation, literally the day or so after liberation, and so on and so forth. Leisha Rose's, The Tulips are Red. Leisha Rose was a survivor, resistance fighter who marries a chaplain that she meets literally on the lines of fighting. Judith Magiar Isaacson's Seed of Sara, Lala Fishman's Lala Story, right all of them talk about the military personnel that they meet and marry. And of course, we can't forget the woman who is introduced to a wide American public in the 1950s Hannah Kohner, who is the first Holocaust survivor featured on the American television show This is Your Life. She also was a war bride. She's a survivor who marries the childhood sweetheart who has returned to Europe as a refugee soldier. So once I started teaching the history of the Holocaust and began to collect all of these memoirs, it became so clear to me that my grandmother's story, while unique, because, of course, every story is unique, it shared some similarities with other Jewish women. And I really wanted to know more. And so it became increasingly clear to me and I mentioned Leisha Rose before, this is Morris the Jewish Chaplain that she meets. And you can see this incredible Star of David on the I'm sorry, Isaac Rose, you can see the Star of David on his Jeep, it became clear to me that there's a real reason to study these Jewish War brides. First of all, their unique in how they engage with the problem of survival and the aftermath of trauma. I became so interested in the course of this research with the ways in which families remember narratives of trauma and how they sort of both tell about the trauma but also engage with the trauma itself. The stories all kind of spoke to the very uneven, prolonged and sometimes really unhappy experiences of reconstruction and recovery. For me, and this is why I call it a book Between Two Worlds, the Jewish War brides take part in multiple communities. And they never really feel a sense of fully belonging and any one of that. So they belong to war bride communities and survivor communities, military personnel communities and Jewish communities. The Jewish War brides and their spouses often serve as a sort of touchstone for all kinds of larger issues concerning things like marriage, or immigration or citizenship, even though there's a really few number of them. And so what I do in the larger book, and I hope you'll all read it is I look to five moments, I look to liberation. So what happens kind of at the moment in which the survivors experience their liberation, I look at encounter asking the question of how is it that these men and women meet one another? And I should say as an aside, that one could be a male war bride.

Dr. Robin Judd  
I look at courtship and marriage. So how is it that these individuals meet one another and marry? And I look at immigration oops, there we go. I look at immigration, how it is that these individuals receive permission and travel to their new homes. And then if we'll use the language of acculturation I look at that last stage. What happens when these men and women get to the US, Britain or Canada, and I studied the US, Britain, and Canada in part because of my language skills, which is that I don't have Russian. It would have been an amazing project if I could have looked at the women then who then married Russian military personnel, those were languages that I don't have. So I look at women who and men who come from North Africa and all over Europe, who meet American, British and Canadian military personnel, marry them, and then eventually go to their new homes in the US, Britain and Canada.

Dr. Robin Judd  
So to tell the story of the larger project, I actually want to look at two sets of stories themselves at Florrie and Harry, and that's the beautiful photo that is on the cover of the book. And I'm just so grateful to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum for letting me use this photograph, for the book's cover. And also to look at Salah and Abe Bonder. I love these two stories, because they allow us to see that sense of unbelief longing that I was talking about earlier, to see the ways in which there's tremendous unevenness in stories. They're fabulous stories, and that they also kind of highlight two different trajectories in terms of immigration, Florrie and Harry come to the United States, Salah and Abe eventually get to Canada. So they're kind of wonderful in all of those respects. They're also wonderful because they emphasize that liberation and reconstruction happen on very different timetables. So this sense that not all historical narratives that I'm looking at take place at the same time table is something that was really important to me, when I was writing the book and Florrie and Harry, Salah and Abe really throw that into relief. So let me start with Florrie Yagoda. So Florrie Acabillo Yagoda. And this is a photo of her here with her accordion. And Florrie as many of you may have known Florrie in one way or another if your children or grandchildren have ever sung the song Ocho Candelikas. That was Florie Yagoda's song. She was a incredibly well known Ladino folk singer, and often is photographed with one of her musical instruments. This was her accordion. So Florrie is actually born in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia in 1926. But she grows up in Zagreb, and it's in Zagreb, in 1941, where she lives when the Nazis and their allies invade Yugoslavia. And very soon after the invasion in 1941, she and her father, her mother and stepfather go first to split she actually travels by herself first and then is joined by her parents. They soon afterwards have to evacuate and go to Corsola, which is under Italian occupation. And it's really there where the family is hopeful that they'll remain for the rest of the war. They're kind of in a detention center, refugee camp on the island. But they have some movement there. But in October of 1943, they're evacuated by partisans to Bari, with the as the Germans are moving into the area. It's in Bari, that they are eventually experience their liberation. It's hugely uneven for them. When Florrie arrives in Bari, she actually arrives with her mother, her stepfather was unable to travel with them. He does join them later, but they don't know that that will happen. And it's in Bari, where they barely have the Italian language, they have no funds, they recognize that it's going to be impossible for them to return anytime soon. to Yugoslavia. The war is still ongoing. But it's also in Bari, that she meets her soon to be husband, Harry Yagoda, who arrives at a depot center where Florrie has been working. Now in sort of an interesting way, Salah Solartes Bonder has a very different story. When Florrie experiences her s- called liberation in Bari in October of 1943, Salah is in her 10th month of in confinement in Auschwitz and her 36th month of confinement under Nazi occupation. Salah came from a town outside of Warsaw that have setup and she experiences the war as early as 1939. In 1939, when the Nazis invade Poland, she and her family go to Warsaw hoping to find safety in numbers, but indeed do not find that at all. And indeed, within a year, she first is experiences ghettoization in the Warsaw Ghetto. Eventually, she is deported to Madjanek. She's deported from Majdanek to outfits from Auschwitz to Ravensbruck from Ravensbruck to Dachau and then on from Dachau she is forced on a death march to all shots of to essentially to Dresden, but they only make it as far as Oh shots. She experiences the war's end in April of 1945, she so at this point, Harry and Florrie are already engaged. Salah is in Oh shots, she's in Saxony. She's trying to figure out where she should go next. She doesn't have the language. She's been on this death march. There are a number of the women with whom she has been on the march, if they've survived are ill. And she eventually will make her way first to Berlin and then to Hanover where she is in a DP camp. That leads us to this moment of encounter. Harry and Florrie meet one another while the war is still ongoing in Bari, Italy. There are no controls over how they might engage with one another. The fraternization laws there are pretty relaxed. Harry is able to become very involved in the DP the displaced person community. He can bring goods to the Yagoda family. He can I'm sorry to the Cabillo family. He can procure a new apartment for them.

Dr. Robin Judd  
He helps find sort of additional clothing and food for Florrie's parents. This is incredibly different than how Salah and Abe me, Salah and Abe meet at the displaced person camp where Salah is living. They meet in the fall of 1945. At that point, Salah is pretty despondent, she had tried to migrate illegally to Palestine in the summer of 1945. She was a fervent Zionist and believed in the creation of a Jewish state and imagined that it would be in Palestine where she might be able to create a new home for herself. And, she is sorted at the border. She's unable to migrate. She doesn't have the correct papers. At this point, Palestine was a mandate of Britain, and they controlled migration. She's unable to go there. And so she has to return back to the DP camp. And it's over the Jewish holidays that she meets Abe, who is a Canadian soldier and he goes to the DP camp for the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. And he seeks out the various survivors and speaks with Salah in Yiddish. He grew up in a Yiddish speaking home, so he's able to talk with Salah. It's really different than Harry and Florrie who didn't share a language and instead are trying to communicate using several different languages. But certainly, Florrie did not speak English nor did Salah. So encounters looked really different. And one of the questions that I asked in the project was, well, how do we get from encounter to courtship and marriage like, what does courtship and marriage look like? Well, it looked really different depending on where the couple was. For Florrie and Harry, there are no restrictions on they're engaged in on their sort of relationship in terms of their courtship. So they're able--Harry is able to take Florrie to the base, she they can go to if there's a cafe that is open, they're able to go there, they can walk on the streets, they can be in her apartment. It's really different for Salah and Abe, Salah and Abe have to restrict their courtship to the DP camp. There are very strict non-fraternization policies in place when the Bonders meet one another. And so they're not going to be able to go to if there is a something that's open or walk comfortably on the streets, and so their courtship is mostly going to be taking place in the DP camp. Marriage is going to look somewhat similar, but there are going to be some important differences. The Allies agree on marriage policies, namely, when the military personnel petitions for the right to marriage to marry, how is it that he will get that permission to marry, and so this is going to be something that will be slightly different as we move into 1945 and 1946. Florrie and Harry are going to be able to get married without any difficulty. Salah and Abe face some difficulty have because of those very strict non-fraternization policies. When he petitions for permission to marry Salah, he is refused, and so he is demobilized before the couple is able to marry.

Dr. Robin Judd  
Eventually, there we go. Eventually, the couple is able to emigrate, and this could take months, if not years. When I look at the different couples in my book project, one of the things I really tried to emphasize is how very different the immigration policies kind of found themselves looking like or materializing over this period. Harry and Florrie apply for Florrie's right to emigrate almost as soon as they get married and they're able to. The United States had passed the War Brides legislation in December of 1945, Florrie was able to take advantage of this. This meant that not only could she circumvent already existing quotas, but also that she would be able to travel on a war bride ship funded by the government, the US government. And this would have also been the case for any of the Canadian couples that had received permission to marry if they were well vetted. Salah and Abe did not have the same kind of immigration story because Salah was not granted permission or Salah and Abe were not granted permission. Abe demobilizes eventually he comes back to Europe. He goes to Paris, Salah migrates illegally to Paris, they then go to Palestine for a few years, are there through the wars of 1948. And so they eventually will leave the state of Israel and go to Canada, which is where they settle. For some couples, they will stay. They will be apart for in Europe or North Africa for several years. So Salah and Abe are a good example of a couple that are apart for over a year. Florrie and Harry are apart for several months. The last sort of moment that I want to take a nod to and then I'll turn back to Nick is that last moment when they're settling. One of the things that really fascinated me about the project was the ways in which when the couples came to the new homes they would both be living with and a part of their communities. So Florrie travelled on that war bride ship. She first had been in a war bride kind of hotel. It was a clearing center for war brides that was based in Naples, and she travels from Naples eventually to Ellis Island, where she is met by Harry's family. Harry and his family, schlepped to Ellis Island from Youngstown, Ohio. And lo and behold, Florrie gets off the boat and her very fancy green suit, and as she is surrounded by a language that was unfamiliar to her, namely, not English, but Harry and his family spoke Yiddish. Florrie didn't speak Yiddish, she was from Yugoslavia, she spoke Ladino and Croatian and Serbian, and a host of other languages. It was remarkable. She had a few words of English, but she had no Yiddish. And in some ways, that tells you a little bit about her acculturation story, because Florrie wasn't only going to be acculturating into a sort of, if you will, an American Protestant landscape. But she was also going to be acculturating into a Yiddish speaking Jewish household in Youngstown, Ohio, where she herself was a Ladino speaker. And as she said to me, you know, everything was different, the foods were different. The songs were different, the music was different. For Salah and Abee, their story's a little bit different because they go first to Palestine. And then which, after the creation of the State of Israel, they come to Canada, they do settle in a first mostly-Yiddish and English-speaking community. So Salah and Abe continue to speak Yiddish to one another. But Salah is also going to be struggling to acculturate in her own way. She is there without family without siblings, and will be acculturating into Abe's family, mother's family, his father had passed away when he was serving in the war. So their stories are going to be an entirely different. So I'm hoping that these two narratives sort of gave you a little bit of a taste of the project. I try to draw on a number of different stories in this book, and trace them from this moment of liberation and again, moment of liberation being a very different moment, depending on whether you're in Italy, Northern France, southern France, Germany, Belgium, into encounter. Where are they meeting? What does that look like? How did in some cases are these very Jewish spaces to courtship and marriage? What are their marriages look like? What are their courtships look like to immigration? How do they travel to the United States, Canada and Britain? What does that experience like, and then into their new homes? So let me stop sharing there. Let me see Nick's beautiful face and background again, and we can take it from there. 30 minutes to the dot, as promised.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
Robin, thank you so much. I mean, those are amazing stories of, you know, well, really, of all those people, but particularly the four that you highlight. And we really appreciate you sharing those stories with us. We have a lot of questions. If you're with us today, and you'd like to ask one, please just type it into the to the Q&A, there's a button at the bottom, you can click and type it in, and we'll work our way through as many as we can in the time that we have. We had a few questions that that came in during registration. And I just wanted to ask from those to start with. The first one I want to ask, is, is I think quite a heartfelt one. It's so I'm just going to read it here. It says, as a young person or student what are some of the takeaways, Robin, that you'd want my generation or my peers to get from the stories and perspectives that are that that you've talked about today?

Dr. Robin Judd  
So first, I want that young person to take my classes so please young person, if you haven't enrolled at Ohio State, come to Ohio State, become a history major, and enroll in my classes. I'd love to see you. It's such a wonderful question. And in some ways, I'd have to kind of answer the question by putting kind of putting them in buckets or categories. So, one sort of general takeaway, which I really focus on it in the second to last chapter, concerns questions of migration and, and acceptance, that there are I look at sort of those couples where the US doesn't allow them to enter or Britain in the end doesn't allow them to enter this sort of the fear of difference, the fear of, of what might happen if these women and men came to the US, came to Britain, came to Canada. And for me there, the the takeaway is the emphasis on what these couples do bring, and the dangers of course, of xenophobia, othering, of sort of hating the unknown. And so certainly, I think that's, that's a larger lesson when we study genocide more generally. But I think particularly with this project, that was that was something. I tried not to romanticize these couples. But if we were to kind of look at that second category of answers, I would talk about the lessons of resilience, you know, what does it mean, to be resilient, and resilience means very different things for very different people. And certainly, depending on who this young individual is. This is, that's the COVID generation, they know resilience, right? They've, had to learn that firsthand. And sort of thinking about the ways in which couples found ways not to get over things, right. And I think this is something that's really important in trauma studies, when talking about resilience, it's not about kind of getting over, it's about the ability to sit with, and create, from, and so, for me, that was something that I really sat with, is how do we how do we understand resilience? How do we appreciate it? How do we recognize different forms of resilience in different individuals? And then the last thing that I will say, and perhaps, you know, with the exception of you, Nick, and your, you know, perfect marriage and my perfect marriage, right, marriages are hard. And that, certainly, when I began the book, and people kept saying to me, you know, how many of them were successful? You know, one of the takeaways, for me with this project had, has to do with the amount of work that's required in creating lasting relationships, whatever those lasting relationships might be, however, one might define them. And sort of owning and recognizing that work, and not seeing it as a negative thing, but rather, just the reality of it. I'll kind of stick with those as the takeaways.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
Those are amazing takeaways, Robin, and I hope that young person does take your classes too. Just we had a question, actually, which really builds off what you were just saying, which was really so how did these marriages work out? Did the kind of hard work that you're talking about that needs to go into relationship? I mean, do we see high or low rates of divorce? Do you have kind of data about that? How did this play out? Ultimately?

Dr. Robin Judd  
It's a great, it is a good question. I mean, I think often the question about, you know, do these marriages last sometimes has more to do with us as the questioner than than the narrative itself. One of the important differences between these marriages and many of the others is that these women and men don't have homes to return to. So there's a point at which and the scholarship on the war brides deals with this like really beautifully. I mean, they deal with it, the majority experience really beautifully. There's a point at which the Red Cross actually will help fund the return of some of those war brides who, you know, get to sorry Saskatchewan, but get to Saskatchewan, or get to Idaho from London and are miserable. And there's there are a number of events in the US and Canada including kind of a grisly murder and kidnapping story that sort of will lead to the sort of openness of some more war brides to return. And there are some who return. The Jewish war brides, they're not, I mean, Salah's not going back to Serac. Right? Like, there's nowhere for them to return to, many of them don't have siblings or parents, they've been murdered in the war. And so, do most of the couples that I look at remain married? Yes, I do have some cases of divorce. I had of the cases of divorce that I've seen most of them divorce after their children are already grown. I have one case that I've seen in the late 40s and another in the early 50s. But the majority of these couples do kind of remain married. And so I don't know if that to the questioner means that they've worked out. But but they do remain kind of in households together.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
Hopefully sticking together is a good thing.

Dr. Robin Judd  
Absolutely.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
We had a couple of core questions kind of about your sources for this. So let me let me give you kind of two. So one person is with us today asks, so is this information from oral histories or interviews or from written diaries? Could you tell us a little bit about the research behind these stories? How you uncovered these stories? And then a related question. And here I'll also read where it says, I'm interested in the publication history of these memoirs. Did any of the later authors read the earlier Memoirs of Jewish War brides? And if so, did specific tropes develop for telling their stories? Were any  co-written or kind of as told to?

Dr. Robin Judd  
Great questions. Okay, so first for the sources. The answer is sort of all of the above. When I started this project, I knew that I could begin with the memoirs. And those were texts that I could read. But I was very interested in collecting my own oral histories if I could, and so I did. I did interview on a number of women and men, both kind of war brides and military personnel but also nurses who had served on the war bright ships, individuals who had been chaplains, folks who had worked in immigration policy in the period. I relied very heavily on chaplaincy materials, the Jewish chaplains kept records and I should say as an aside, that the marriage policies during the Second World War very much involved the military chaplains and so we tend to see less intermarriage Catholic. chaplains tended to encourage marriage among their Chaplain soldiers, Jewish among Jewish etc. And, and of course, there are intermarriage cases, but there are exceptions to the rule. So I looked at the Jewish chaplaincy materials and that was a treasure trove because they were the ones doing the interviews of these couples. I looked at a lot of immigration materials, petitions for immigration, requests for visa applications, letters from parents, etc. Soldiers' letters, there were collections of soldiers letters, diaries, if they have them. Ships, the war bride ships, a number of them have created war bride magazines, materials from war bride clubs, you know, the cookbooks I mean, the materials were pretty diverse. And they were exactly the kinds of stuff that I love to get myself, you know, surrounded by which is, you know, how do you take all of this different kind of material and figure out a story, the best of the stories, if you will, were those where I had lots of layers, right where I had my own interview, somebody else had done a series of interviews over time. So you could kind of track where there would might be you know, letters or there might be photographs, right? Florrie Yagoda is is an example of that, although she did not have her own kind of memoir, but there are multiple interviews of and in very different kinds of settings, right? Like the Smithsonian has an interview of her that really focuses much more on music. There have been people who have written about her in terms of music, right. So that, you know, I was able to interview her there are other interviews, in terms of the publications memoirs. I have an article that I'm working on now that deals with this a little bit. I can't be 100% Sure, but I'm guessing that there's something about these women's forced accelerated acculturation that inject that encourages them to be some of the first to publish their memoirs. Like there may be a reason why some of the very first women to publish memoirs--Holocaust survivors to publish memoirs--are these war brides. Some of them do co-write and, and so I would say yes, there's a way in which Gerda Weissmann Klein's All But My Life may set the stage for that kind of, and reader I married him, kind of last line. So we have in a number of the memoirs, this sort of romantic ending. Clara Isaacman's Clara's Story is a great exception to the rule. You wouldn't even know from her memoir, the first edition that she met and married Daniel. She ends at the moment, really at the moment of liberation, and she meets her husband not that long after there are bombs still dropping on Antwerp when they meet, but when she sort of sees herself as liberated is when she ends, so yes, there are tropes. But there are also exceptions.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
Kind of related to that. We have questions, so do the brides mentioned how they processed what they had experienced in the camps, while also processing what they're going through with a new marriage and relocations to new places?

Dr. Robin Judd  
I love that question. Because that question kind of puts their finger on one of the challenges that I face when doing these interviews, I write about this in the book, you know, there's a kind of a general phenomenon of the survivors, tending not to sort of narrate their stories in a public arena, into the 1960s or so. And, but for many of the survivors, who do begin to narrate their stories in the 60s or 70s, in a public arena, meaning, you know, beginning to give to talk about it outside of the family, etc. Maybe giving interviews, maybe speaking at schools, for those survivors who do, that becomes their story. And so one of the things that I had to kind of work with and if there's anyone on this call, who knows me, they know that I'm not super patient, and Nick, you know that I'm not super patient. But I really had to fight that lack of patience, because often, I had to let them tell the story that they were used to telling, which is their story as a Holocaust survivor. And it's possible, by the way, that part of the reason why they so asserted that story was because often in the survivor community, they weren't seen as survivors, they were seen as war brides. And it's only in like the 70s, 80s, 90s, that they're able to take on that identity as survivor. So I had to let them tell that survivor story. And then when they were done, say, tomorrow, can we talk about, you know, 1945, and when you meet Daniel, or when you meet Morris when you meet Isaac. So that was certainly a challenge. And many of them were not necessarily outwardly reflective of how they remembered their war bride experience. But that's one of the things that I really think about a lot in the book, which is how is it that these couples over time create memories that allow them to, to kind of remain with this individual and we asked this often in trauma studies and memory studies, you know, how is it that people sort of create retail reshape their memories? So that when the veteran says to me, and she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, he absolutely means that, and yet it's unlikely that in Bergen Belsen in her uniform at the point of starvation that she really was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Right? And so how do these emotions play in? And how do they tell that story? So that's something that I really think about a lot in the book.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
I wanted to pass on just a couple of questions that had to do kind of with the question of reception you were talking about earlier in your advice? The first is, so did the Jewish War brides entry to the USA fall under the sort of Jewish allocated quota for immigration for the USA? Or is this something somehow separate? And were the war brides generally welcomed by the British, Canadian, and American soldiers' families? What was that dynamic like? So once you've met your most beautiful person in the world, do the in-laws like them? So these two that I wanted to kind of raise?

Dr. Robin Judd  
Great. So in terms of the quota in Britain, in Canada, throughout the war, the war brides can circumvent already existing quota, immigration restrictions. There are a separate category. In the United States that gets created in December of 1945 for the war brides and in 1946, for the war fiances. So in Britain and the US have pretty clear fiance legislation, Canada's fiance legislation is pretty murky. And they often fall under the other categories. And that's part of the one of the many challenges that Salah and Abe face. The in-laws. The in-laws story is a complicated one, in most cases, there's some hesitation and concern when they're mostly sons announce that they have met their love of their life in France, in Bergen Belsen, in Antwerp, at a DEP cap, choose your location. And so we do have a fair number of cases of parents trying to dissuade their sons from marrying. And that dynamic then gets sort of exaggerated or exacerbated or worsened when, after the war, given the worldwide housing shortage, most military personnel are not able to settle with their new spouses in their own homes, most are settling in the homes of--they're moving into their parents house. And, that's in general, that is a phenomenon that in 1945, and 1946, cultural critics are writing about that there are all these, you know, soldiers who are coming home with their their new their, their families, and what does that dynamic look like? And so, for, you know, for Florrie, for example, right? She's living in Youngstown, Ohio, in this Yiddish-speaking household, where, you know, mostly there's a good bit of love that showered on her that's a pretty positive, but it's still very unfamiliar, and kind of almost frightening, although I don't know that she was really ever frightened by anything. In some of the cases that I look at they knew of their husband's family's trying to prevent the marriage from taking place. And now they're essentially sharing a bathroom kitchen and living room with those same individuals.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
Yes, that makes for cramped quarters, doesn't it? I want to stick in one last question that we have from the audience today. You mentioned at the very beginning of the presentation of how you in some ways you grew up with the sort of sense that your grandmother's story was perhaps different than others around. And the question is this, and so if you're comfortable, if you're comfortable sharing. What did the liberation of your grandmother and encounter with your grandfather look like? Was it in fact, as it turned out to be quite similar to others? Do they have what is specific about their, their experience if you're willing to share?

Dr. Robin Judd  
So I'm totally willing to share because I do in the conclusion of the book. So I absolutely encourage the reader to get the book and read the conclusion in its entirety because that's in fact, how I frame it. I talk about my grandmother's story and where it departs and where it doesn't, but I will kind of give this teaser and perhaps this will explain why. For me, I did think that my grandmother's story was unique that my grandmother and father survived hiding in Slovakia. Technically, my grandparents, my biological grandfather survived as well. But he dies from typhus within days of liberation. And my grandmother and my father make their way slowly but surely back to my biological grandfather's hometown, where my grandma, my grandparents had been married and where my father had been born in humana. And it's in humaneness that my grandmother will eventually meet the man that I knew as my grandfather. And, and in some ways, it was that dynamic. And that sense of loss of her first husband, of my father's father of, you know, the totality of loss in the family that kept the story as a family story. And then there were other kind of pieces in dynamics about it as well that if if people are interested, I encourage them to kind of read the conclusion, because that's, that's where I hide all the juicy secrets.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
I think we all can't wait to dive in. To find out, we'll start at the back and work our way to the front. So, Robin, let me think, thank you so very, very much for for joining us today for sharing this, the stories with us and for all the work you've done to bring these stories to life. I hope all of you who are with us today will join me in giving Robin a virtual round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to everyone who's here today for joining us and for your excellent questions. If you'd like to learn more, we will send out an email soon with information about how to access the book and also a link to the recording of this event. And we'd also just to to end by thanking the College of Arts and Sciences, especially Alex Stacklane, the Department of History, the Goldberg Center and Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, for their support. Again, thank you all for coming. Stay safe and healthy. And we'll see you all next time. Thanks so much. Goodbye.