Stealing Home

As an historian of Vichy France, Shannon Fogg devotes this short, finely written book to the looting of Jewish-owned flats (apartments) in France and the return of properties after the Holocaust. The work is original, as it considers the topic—flats, looting, social history, intimacy and compensation—in a kind of longue durée, from the beginning of German occupation in 1940 to the 1950s. Contrary to many books on the topic, both despoilment and restitution are considered. Seventy-five per cent of Jews in France survived the Holocaust. The book describes their difficult return to a normal life after the persecutions, considered from the viewpoint of looted flats and furniture. Individual lives, and their memories of them, are confronted with state and communal policies. Fogg wants to ‘demonstrate the active role Jews took in the post-war process of rebuilding lives politically, socially and materially after the Holocaust in France’. The research relies on various archives: memoirs of survivors, administrative archives of the looting process, documents of restitution and compensation, documents from Jewish aid organisations

Ancient history · Archaeology · Genealogy · Judaism · Looting · Political science · Restitution · European history and politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law