Return: Holocaust Survivors and Dutch Antisemitism, Dienke Hondius (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), xvii + 192 pp., $70.95.

Extract

Dienke Hondius’s work on deported Jews’ return to the Netherlands after the end of the Second World War and on Dutch reactions to these Jews was published in 1990 to overwhelmingly positive reviews. Her scholarship and attention to detail were exemplary, and a reprint, followed by a summary paper in Patterns of Prejudice, brought her work to a wider audience.¹ At that time, the academic study of the immediate postwar years was still in its infancy. Many authors would have been content to rest on their laurels as pioneers in a new field of enquiry. From the mid-1990s onwards, however, legal, economic and social questions surrounding “the return” of displaced persons to Western Europe from other parts of German-occupied Europe became highly politicized in the Netherlands. As a result of this public discourse, Hondius became involved in a government-sponsored inquiry into all aspects of the treatment of returnees to the Netherlands; this was part of a wider study under the aegis of the SOTO (Stichting Onderzoek Terugkeer en Opvang—Institute for Research into Return and Reception).²