Jews of Kaiserstrasse vividly details the fate of the Jewish residents of single street in Mainz, Germany from 1939-45. This book is the culmination of Michael Phillips' meticulous research into the lives of approximately 300 individuals that at one point during the period covered lived on the impressive boulevard. It catalogues the destruction of the wealthy Jewish community, which, before the rise of German National Socialism and the implementation of viciously anti-Semitic legislation from 1933 until the end of the Second World War and the defeat of Germany in September 1945, had been active in the Rhineland town's commercial, social and municipal life. Jews of Kaiserstrasse draws from numerous academic, popular and genealogical sources.

In 1942 & 1943, after nine years of merciless harassment, persecution, starvation & deprivation, 1336 Jewish people living in Mainz, Germany were deported, tortured and murdered. For hundreds of these innocent victims, who had no surviving family members, all traces of their lives were reduced to ashes & fragments of bone. They have no graves, no tombstones, and nobody to remember them. It is as though they never existed.The scant bits of discoverable information about 20 such former residents of Mainz without descendants, are presented in this book along with personal accounts, original Nazi anti-Jewish edicts and archival photographs, which will give the reader some feeling for what it was like to be a Jew living in Nazi Germany.

The narrative of this book moves backwards across the generations from two brothers – George and Richard Dreyfus – who came to Australia from Germany on a Kindertransport in 1939. The circumstance of their forced migration situates that narrative squarely in relation to the Second World War in general, and the persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust in particular. Untimely death dominates the stories of many of these ancestors, relatives whom the brothers never knew. The chronicle of the extended European Dreyfus family provides a template for German Jewish history across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It includes rural Jews, people living in small towns or village communities, who were very different in outlook and lifestyle from those assimilated, secular, affluent, urban Jewish relatives who George remembers better. Using materials from George Dreyfus’s extensive personal archive and the collections of other family members, supplemented by the resources of the internet, the book aims to capture as much as is possible of the story of the European family for the sake of the generations to come, since such history can be so quickly and easily forgotten. In Jewish culture, remembering is a duty, a collective responsibility, a mitzvah, even when – as in this book – remembering is discomforting and confronting. In those familiar words of Immanuel Kant, “Tot ist nur, wer vergessen wird” [Only those who are forgotten are dead].