All tagged Kobe

Holocaust refugees in a global context

There has been a recent global turn within Holocaust Studies: a growing body of scholarship focuses on Jewish refugees and the Holocaust in contexts that had been previously ignored, and highlights how those experiencing the war in Europe did so in different ways to those living through the conflict in other parts of the world. This post focuses on Jewish refugees who travelled to Japan, and who in the process often made journeys covering multiple countries across land and sea. For example, many Jews who arrived in Kobe, a city in Japan, in the early 1940s arrived via Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union, having used the Trans-Siberian railway and sea travel to cross multiple borders.