Born Jewish: A Childhood in Occupied Europe

Description

This fierce memoir is both an elegy and an indictment. Marcel Liebman's account of his childhood in Brussels under the Nazi occupation explores the emergence of his class consciousness against a background of resistance and collaboration. He documents the internal class war that has long been hidden from history: how the Nazi persecution exploited class distinctions within the Jewish community, and how certain Jewish notables collaborated in a systematic programme of denunciation and deportation against immigrant Jews who lacked the privileges of wealth and citizenship.

Marcel Liebman (1929-1986) was a Belgian Marxist historian of political sociology and theory, active at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

An engrossing and moving yet coolly dispassionate memoir. Going against the grain of Holocaust orthodoxy, Liebman depicts Jewish life under occupation in all its hues - including the craven complicity of the Jewish council - as well as the many, if still too few, acts of solidarity by Belgian workers, Communists and enlightened Catholics. -- Norman Finkelstein