The Balkans provided the escape route for tens of thousands of German, Austrian, Polish and Czechoslovak Jews, and remained a place of refuge until the Nazis brutally shut it off with the mass murder of Jewish refugees on the so/called Kladovo transport starting in September 1941, which can be considered as the beginning of the Holocaust in Europe. Responding to publications about the Western European and American exile experiences of the Jews after 1933, the book offers comparative insights into the less trodden paths of the persecuted, illuminating the cultural and political context of the Balkan host countries, the response of local Jewish communities, and the reactions of common people and assorted criminals. The Balkans, often marginalised and loathed, emerges in hundreds of personal accounts of survivors gathered here, supplemented by extensive archival research, as a welcoming getaway, where thousands survived thanks to the Italian occupiers, illiterate peasants, and Communist-led Partisan resisters.
Bojan Aleksov is an Associate Professor of South-East European History at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies and once an anti-war and human rights activist in Belgrade, Serbia. His previous books include Wars and Betweenness: Big Powers and Middle Europe, 1918-1945 (CEU Press, 2020, coedited with Aliaksandr Piahanau) and Religious Dissent between the Modern and the National – Nazarenes in Hungary and Serbia 1850–1914 (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006).