Many Jews coming from various parts of Eastern Europe found refuge in Germany, of all places, in huge “displaced-persons camps.” They made up as many Jews as had lived in the country before the war, only they were younger and unexpectedly active. While few German Jews returned to the “land of the murderers,” the new migrants took their place. This chapter tells the tale of their settlement in Germany, parallel to the building up the Federal Republic, especially under the the US military occupation. They could only observe with unease the signs of antisemitism in the new German state, and support the early acts of restitution as well as the financial agreement with Israel signed in 1952. They were also the first to demand some sort of confrontation with the Nazi past. Fritz Bauer, a Jewish jurist who fled to Denmark and later to Sweden during the war and finally returned to Germany afterwards, took it upon himself, as the Prosecutor of the State of Hessen, to organize and then serve as prosecutor in the so-called Auschwitz trials. The chapter ends with his life-story.

The Eichmann trial is oftentimes cited as a turning point in the emergence of Holocaust consciousness in France. That’s not wrong, but it misses other ways in which the early 1960s were important in shaping a new narrative about the genocide, one more centered on Jewish experience and pain. Schwarz-Bart’s literary breakthrough opened the path for others, for writers and documentarists like Piotr Rawicz, Anna Langfus, and Frédéric Rossif. All three were Jews who had, like Langfus and Rossif, lost family members to the Holocaust or who had spent time in a concentration camp as had Rawicz. The first two wrote novels which drew on their life experiences: Le Sang du ciel in Rawicz’ case (1961), which won the Prix Veillon, and Les Bagages du sable (1962) in Langfus’, which won the Prix Goncourt. Rossif made a documentary about Warsaw Ghetto survivors, Le Temps du ghetto (1961), which was shown first in Paris theaters and then on French TV in 1964. The stories they had to tell were not ones of martyrdom or heroism but ones of fear, irretrievable loss, and abandonment. This Deportation admitted neither of heroics nor of redemption. It was a story without a happy ending.