“Nature Was Helping Us”: Forests, Trees, and Environmental Histories of the Holocaust Cover Image
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„Przyroda nam pomagała”. Lasy, drzewa i historie środowiskowe Holokaustu
“Nature Was Helping Us”: Forests, Trees, and Environmental Histories of the Holocaust

Author(s): Tim Cole
Subject(s): Human Ecology, Environmental interactions, WW II and following years (1940 - 1949), History of the Holocaust
Published by: Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: World War II; Holocaust; environmental history; Eastern Europe; forest; survivor;

Summary/Abstract: How can environmental history contribute to Holocaust and genocide studies? Analysing memoirs and interviews with Jewish survivors who spent the wartime years hiding in the forests of Central and Eastern Europe, we can recognize three main problems: first, the experience of the forest as a strange place that still offers shelter from the even more dangerous world beyond; second, food supply: nature was generous, but it was still necessary to get additional goods from outside the forest; and third, adaptation to natural conditions, or, as many survivors put it, to become ‘an animal’.

  • Issue Year: 2017
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 203-226
  • Page Count: 24
  • Language: Polish