This emerges very clearly when one reads survivor testimonies from, e.g., Ukraine or Belarus: when Jews recall what it was that gave them away as Jews—beyond incontrovertible physical markers such as circumcision—they typically list the things that they (we) could simply not do, because they lived in a hermetically separated social space. Jews did not know the Lord’s Prayer; it was a rare Jew in this part of the world who could saddle a horse or plough a field. Jews who did survive were characteristically from that minority within the community who for some chance reason knew about such
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