It seems that Raul Hilberg's reflections on Jewish emigration during the Nazi era connects it to wider movements of refugees, the numbers of which would not be exceeded until the twenty-first century. Yet rather than link Holocaust studies with migration studies, Hilberg (a Jewish refugee himself), was doing the reverse. His aim was to show what he believed was the particular and peculiar path of non-resistance followed by the Jews during the years of persecution. Indeed, Hilberg's chronological overview continued by emphasising Jewish passivity as the murderous assault intensified during the war:

Hilberg concludes ‘In the main, the Jews looked upon flight with a sense of futility. The great majority of those who did not escape early did not escape at all.’

Journeys from the Abyss has queried Hilberg's analysis at many different levels. It has done so not only in relation to the number and percentage of Jews who were able to flee but also with regard to the importance of their own agency. As Gunnar Paulsson notes in his remarkable reconstruction of wartime Warsaw and its hidden Jews, a space and time which he describes as a ‘secret city’, Hilberg ‘treats the reactions of the two million or so people who fled or went into hiding – surely the most reasonable and human of all responses to an overwhelming hostile force – briefly and dismissively’. Yet it remains that, in spite of previous and subsequent scholarship, Hilberg, described as ‘the seminal figure in modern Holocaust historiography’, set a model which has proved extremely durable. The enormity of the Holocaust has led to a tendency to place it outside of history and therefore beyond comparison.