On Emotion, Petition Writing, and the Holocaust: The Life and Death of a Jewish Family in Wartime Zagreb

Abstract

This article reconstructs the fate of the Schlenger family, a prosperous Jewish household in Zagreb, to explore how emotion and subjectivity can be integrated into Holocaust historiography. It situates their story within the broader context of antisemitic persecution in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), where legal discrimination, economic dispossession, and arbitrary arrests rapidly transformed Jewish life after 1941. Particular attention is paid to the arrest of 165 Jewish youths, including the Schlenger brothers, and their deportation to the Jadovno concentration camp, where most were killed.

The core of the study lies in a close reading of petitions submitted by Jewish families to Ustaša authorities. These documents reveal not only the strategies families used to appeal for the release of their relatives—emphasizing loyalty, usefulness, and Croatian identity—but also the emotional intensity underlying such appeals. The increasingly desperate petitions of Levin and Marija Schlenger illustrate the psychological toll of uncertainty, fear, and loss, as well as the gradual erosion of hope.

Engaging with historiographical debates about objectivity and affect, the article argues that such petitions provide valuable insight into the inner lives of Holocaust victims. Rather than treating them solely as administrative sources, it proposes reading them as expressions of trauma, subjectivity, and lived experience. In doing so, the study challenges conventional approaches that privilege detached analysis and instead calls for a more empathetic engagement with the voices of victims, restoring them to the centre of their own historical narratives.