Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust

Joskowicz (history, Vanderbilt Univ.; The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France) traces the relationships between Jews and the Roma group before, during and after their parallel genocides under the Nazi German regime. This book takes a scholarly examination of the politics and economics at that time. The author demonstrates how the inequality of access to resources and the treatment by post-war European governments produced starkly divergent results as the two survivor groups sought some measure of justice, compensation, and better legal status. Joskowicz does an excellent job of explaining the early mistrust, occasional alliances, and diversity of positions between and within the two groups in ways that shed light on current conflicts. The author’s extensive research encompasses an astonishing breadth of interviews of survivors and their relatives, oral histories, trial transcripts, national and international archives, books, and articles in multiple languages.