Abstract
In Eastern Europe, where the genocide of the Jews became an almost "ordinary", integral part of life during the war, as well as in Central Europe, removed from the direct proximity of the mass murder, the culpability of the Germans and their principal role in the Holocaust has not been doubted. After all, the Holocaust was an all-German story to tell.
Far more complex has been the recognition of the local majority societies' - that is non-Germans' - involvement in the persecution and extermination of the Jewish population, and of the majority societies' ambiguous responses to the return of the Jewish survivors (or refugees and exiles) after 1945. This essay opens a collection of eleven articles that provide diverse insights into Jewish-Gentile relations in Central and Eastern Europe from the outbreak of the Second World War until the reestablishment of civic societies after the fall of Communism in the late 1980s.
The interdisciplinary and comparative perspective of this issue enables us to scrutinize the interaction between the individual majority societies and the Jewish minorities in a longer time frame and hence we are able to revisit complex and manifold encounters between Jews and Gentiles, including but not limited to propaganda, robbery, violence but also help and rescue.