While there are plenty of published materials concerning survival in Ukraine during World War II, most of those bypass the Kherson region and focus primarily on the German occupation. This thesis is an attempt to study the complex history of people's survival in Ukraine during a large portion of the twentieth century, through a micro-history of the city of Kherson and the neighboring villages, and towns of the region. The study analyzes the actions and the consequences for the various social, political and ethnic groups of changes in the ruling regimes, emphasizing the period of the return of the Red Army to the region in 1943-1944. This work attempts to provide an answer to the question of why the population of a provincial city, which endured no major combat, was reduced from about 100,000 residents in 1941 to less than a hundred on the day of return of the Soviets in 1944? / text

On April 11, 1933, Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis delivered a sermon in Stockholm's Reform Jewish synagogue. The text was published by Bonnier's publisher with the title Malachi´s cry to the ages: a speech on old and new bondage. The sermon is a scathing confrontation with Nazism's racial political ideas that would lead to the Holocaust.   The sermon is delivered just a few days after the Nazi regime in Germany introduced its first discrimination laws against Jewish citizens. Malachi´s cry  uses the jewish religion, jewish history and jewish culture to argue for universal human values and rights. The sermon is a part of the Jewish celebration of Pesach - a holiday that aims to commemorate the liberation of the Jewish people from captivity and slavery in Egypt - which led to the Exodus from Egypt and the conclusion of the covenant with God on Mount Sinai. Ehrenpreis argues that a new Mizraim - a new Egypt - has come to plague the Jewish people in Germany. At a time when many believed that the Nazi dictatorship would not mean real and far-reaching persecution of German Jews, Marcus Ehrenpreis already had a clear idea that a catastrophe awaited. Marcus Ehrenpreis envisioned a development that would mean that the German jews were deprived of their civil rights and expelled from the country. He had also already a few weeks after the Nazis introduced their dictatorship in Germany realized that the legal system of the entire world was threatened. According to Marcus Ehrenpreis, no one could predict what consequences the abolition of human rights for the jews in Germany could have for the rest of the world's civilizational foundations.