At the end of World War II, between two and three hundred thousand Jewish survivors of the Holocaust—men and women liberated from the death and concentration camps, or those who had survived the war in hiding, in partisan units, or in deep in the Soviet Union—ended up in Displaced Persons (DP) Camps, almost all of them in the American occupation zones in Germany and in Austria. These camps, officially under the aegis of the United Nations Relief and Restitution Agency, but in practice administered by the American Army and funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (known affectionately as “the Joint”), became the home of Jewish survivors, most of whom had no place to go. In Jüdische Lebenswelten 1945–1955: Flüchtlinge in der amerikanischen Zone Österreichs, Susanne Rolinek presents an extremely empathetic picture of Jewish displaced persons in Austria, their attempts to create a new life in the DP camps after the horrific losses they had experienced, and their desire to leave Austria for new homes in Palestine/Israel or the United States.

Rolinek's is a useful book. She deftly summarizes a very complex welter of policies pursued by the Americans, the British, the UN, the Austrian government (as it reestablished authority), the Zionist movement (especially the leaders of the Yishuv, the Jewish community of British Mandatory Palestine), post-1948 Israel, Jewish relief organizations, especially the Joint, and a large number of committees established by Jewish Holocaust survivors in Germany and Austria. Hence, we learn that although the UN and the British did not want to establish separate camps for Jewish Holocaust survivors, fearing that to do so would somehow legitimize Nazi racial categories or build a case for a Jewish state in Palestine, Jewish groups absolutely wanted to separate the Jews from the masses of German displaced persons, many of whom had been Nazis, or from other Eastern European refugees who harbored anti-Semitic views. The American authorities, after some hesitations, recognized that the Jews, who had been singled out for annihilation, had special needs, and hence they established separate Jewish camps. Jewish survivors, feeling that the Americans would protect them, flocked to the American zones.

Rolinek provides a good summary of the fate of the Jewish DPs in Austria. Many of them had been liberated from Mauthausen and its satellite camps, but others arrived later in 1945 and 1946, mostly Polish Jews aided in their flight westward by the Brichah, an underground Jewish organization that tried to get Jews into Palestine. Later, Romanian and Hungarian Jews also arrived, but Polish Jews always formed the overwhelming majority of the camp population. The number of Jewish DPs in Austria declined only after the establishment of Israel in May 1948, when about two-thirds emigrated to Israel, and most of the rest managed to go to America, leaving behind only a handful of Jewish survivors, many of whom were simply too sick to leave, until the last camps closed in the early 1950s.

Rolinek's main goal is to understand the complex ways that Jewish Holocaust survivors in the DP camps of Austria reconstructed their lives in the wake of catastrophe. Using memoirs, unpublished survivor testimonies, and reports of the American authorities and Jewish relief organizations, she describes how survivors, most of whom were young men and women who had lost their families, their friends, their social networks, and their homelands, created family and community in the DP camps. They rushed to get married and have children; they bonded with each other, especially with those who had come from the same place as they had; and they felt that they belonged to the community of survivors, who had more in common with each other than with anyone else who could not possibly understand what they had been through. Rolinek also argues that Zionism and the desire to create the state of Israel became the dominant ideology of the Jewish DPs, with Zionists controlling the internal camp administration, running the schools, the clubs, even the barracks themselves along Zionist lines, much to the chagrin of the orthodox. Zionists, of course, wanted to prepare survivors for life in the new state they hoped to create, and they assumed that only Zionism could provide new meaning to those who had lost so much.

Jüdische Lebenswelten is an engaging and compelling book. It would have been an even better book if Rolinek had spent more time fleshing out the inner lives of Jewish Holocaust survivors, providing a more comprehensive social history of the DPs. She also should have determined the extent to which survivors really had adopted a Zionist ideology. When immigration to Israel became a possibility in 1948–1949, many of the DPs eagerly wanted to go, but many of them did not, choosing instead to go to America (which had temporarily made it possible for some of them to do so) or to wait in Austria until they could get a visa to America or elsewhere. Rolinek might have explored the tension between support for Zionism and the lack of desire to live in the new Jewish state more fully. Her book would also have benefitted from a comparison to the situation of Jewish DPs in Germany. Criticism aside, Rolinek has done a good job explaining the situation of Jewish Holocaust survivors in the American occupation zone in Austria.