![]() But it does retell the liberation of Morocco by the Allied forces. The book by Hassine, who immigrated to Israel and whose family donated his book to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, does not have a happy end. On a long strip of parchment, he penned a seven-chapter text he titled “ The Book of Hitler.” It uses archaic biblical language to chronicle the history of the Holocaust and of North African Jewry in the first half of the 20th century. One of the most striking syntheses between Purim and the Holocaust was made in 1944 by a Moroccan Jewish teacher and scribe from Casablanca named Prosper Hassine. “A number of photographs document scenes of Hitler hanging from the gallows, Hitler and Joseph Goebbels as paupers begging in the street, or Hitler burned in effigy.” “In the DP camps, these plays sometimes took the form of revenge fantasies against Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders,” the museum’s website says. Nonobservant Jews would often stage Hitler-themed Purim spiels, creating an “intersection of secular showmanship and religious ritual,” according to the U.S. The child posed for photos smiling next to men dressed up like soldiers who firmly held a refugee portraying Hitler while wearing uniforms and a swastika-shaped necktie. ![]() That spiel, which was one of numerous Hitler-themed spectacles put on for Purim by Jews in the postwar years, also featured at least one child wearing an oversized concentration camp inmate’s uniform. Not even a year after the Nazis’ defeat, Jewish Holocaust survivors living in Landsberg put on a Purim spiel dramatizing the arrest and execution of Hitler, who had committed suicide 11 months earlier. One striking example of a Purim-related Hitler depiction was documented in 1946 at a displaced persons camp in Landsberg, Germany, near Munich. 30, 1944, radio speech that wrongly identified the Persian king as Jewish, the Fuehrer said that if Nazi Germany did not prevail, “the devastating Jewish Ahasuerus could celebrate the destruction of Europe in a second triumphant Purim festival.” Hitler himself suggested that he saw himself in Haman. “But in the immediate aftermath of World War II, it was a more natural sentiment, especially for people whose lives were torn apart because of the Nazis,” he added. Today, many in Europe, and especially Jews, would find it inappropriate to make and display Hitler puppets, Buijs said. And seven decades later, Mayer-Hirsch’s childhood work is in the collection of the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam, where curator Peter Buijs says the Hitler puppet is a “unique item” that provides a window into how Holocaust survivors used Hitler imagery to work through their traumas. The puppets joined a storied tradition of fashioning Haman after real-life oppressors that peaked in the immediate postwar years.
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