Laura Jockusch Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 Laura Jockusch Khurbn Forshung – Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 Introduction Contrary to the popular assumption that historical research on the Holocaust began in the early 1960s, the systematic study of the mass murder of European Jews started at least one and a half decades earlier.1 While the Eichmann trial played a seminal role in moving the Holocaust into the center of the historiography on the Nazi regime, it cannot be ignored, however, that Jews throughout Europe had already begun comprehensive research on the destruction of European Jewry as early as 1943: they founded historical commissions, documentation centers, and documentation projects for the purpose of gathering extensive collections of Nazi documents, several thousand eyewitness testimonies and questionnaires, Jewish folklore, photographs, and film material along with museum artifacts.2 These collections served as proof in claims for restitution and provided vital evidence in the principal war crime trials in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The numerous publications, yet another result of these early initiatives, included a great variety of memoirs, compilations of annotated documents, anthologies of ghetto and camp literature, historical periodicals, and large numbers of meticulous local studies covering the political, socio-economic, and cultural aspects of the persecution of the Jews in a great array of towns, cities, and regions. Furthermore, the archival collections compiled in the early postwar years laid the basis for the major Holocaust archives, museums, and research 1 On the claim that serious, comprehensive, and methodical research on the Holocaust began only in the 1960s, see, for example, Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History, New York 1987, 2 and 4 and Moishe Postone/Eric Santner (eds.), Catastrophe and Meaning. The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, Chicago/London 2003, 3. 2 The countries in which such documentation projects crystallized included Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Rumania, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Soviet Union. For an overview on the different initiatives, see: Philip Friedman, European Jewish Research on the Holocaust, in: idem, The Roads to Extinction. Essays on the Holocaust, ed. by Ada June Friedman, New York/Philadelphia 1980, 500–524, and Shmuel Krakowski, Memorial Projects and Memorial Institutions Initiated by She’erit Hapletah, in: Yisrael Gutman/Avital Saf (eds.), She’erit Hapletah 1944–1948. Rehabilitation and Political Struggle, Jerusalem 1990, 388–398. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007), 441–473. 442 Laura Jockusch institutions in Europe and Israel, such as the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Even though most of these historical commissions were short-lived, their work proved crucial in raising important questions regarding the decisionmaking and implementation of the “Final Solution,” the Jewish responses to persecution at different stages, the possibilities and constraints for rescue, and the relations between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors in the face of Nazi occupation. The work of these historical commissions and documentation centers thus serves as a call for a reevaluation of the supposed silence and speechlessness of the survivors in the early postwar years. Why did these early initiatives to document the Holocaust methodically and comprehensively during and after the war not receive the credit they deserved, and why have their numerous historical publications figured so little in the historiography of the Holocaust? There appear to be several reasons for this historiographic silence. For one, these commissions and documentation centers were by and large proto-professional, grassroots initiatives by people untrained in the methods of academic historical scholarship who acted out of the conviction that their survival of the catastrophe made bearing witness an imperative, and that their experiences qualified them to document the recent past. Only a few professional historians – those who had careers before the war like Philip Friedman or those who made careers as historians after the war such as Léon Poliakov, Nachman Blumental, Josef Kermisz, Isiah Trunk, and Josef Wulf – received any recognition among historians who were not survivors themselves. The fact that amateur historians constituted the backbone of the historical commissions and documentation centers devalued their work in the eyes of most professional historians. Another reason for the lack of recognition of these early endeavors of writing the history of the destruction of European Jewry has less to do with the commissions themselves than with the nature of the academic historiography of the Holocaust in Europe and the United States. Until recently, this scholarship has focused mainly on the perpetrators and their sources while it has given only marginal attention to the victims’ experiences. Since the works of these early Jewish documentation projects centered on the experiences of the victims, and to a large extent on survivor testimonies collected in the early postwar years, their approach now appears ahead of its time.3 3 On the debate over the idea that the victims’ sources are relegated to the realm of “memory” while the sources of the perpetrators pertain to “history” and are thus eligible for “historiography,” see: Saul Friedländer/Martin Broszat, Um die “Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus.” Ein Briefwechsel, in: Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 36 (1988), 339–372 and Martin Broszat/Saul Friedländer, A Controversy about the Historicisation of National Socialism, in: Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988), 1–47. This debate began in the 1950s, cf. Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschung Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 443 The lack of recognition might also have been due to the fact that the work of the historical commissions and documentation centers by and large did not exceed the level of collecting primary sources, documenting and chronicling the events and only rarely reached a more analytical and synthetic level of historiography which academic historians might have appreciated. These limitations should not take away from the important fact that these historical commissions and documentation centers pioneered in developing a blueprint for the field of Holocaust historiography from a Jewish perspective, which in many ways prefigured later research questions. Through their indefatigable efforts in retrieving any documentation pertaining to the persecution of European Jews left behind by the Germans and their collaborating governments, these initiatives laid the basis for later research into the functioning of those regimes as well as their treatment of European Jews. This essay analyzes the history of the Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers where they were largest and most significant in implementing their goals: in France and Poland, and in the Jewish Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy.4 After a brief overview of the genesis of the respective institutions, this study explores three questions. Who were the people involved in the historical commissions and documentation centers and what did they hope to gain from the meticulous study of their traumatic past? What methodological tools did they develop to research this European-wide catastrophe in the immediate wake of the event? How was this early documentation work received among the larger public of the She’erit Hapletah – the “surviving remnant” – in the respective countries? Concluding remarks discuss the wider significance of the early postwar documentation projects. und Erinnerung, Göttingen 2003, 343–345. While in the 1980s and 1990s oral testimonies of contemporaries gained popularity, only recently have studies on the Third Reich begun to integrate testimonies and other sources of the victims and sources of the perpetrators into the historical narrative. See, for example, Saul Friedänder, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939, New York 1997, and vol. 2: The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945, New York 2007. 4 Criteria for choosing these cases over others included to focus on initiatives taken a) by the survivors themselves not under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress or the Jewish Agency, b) by Jews who survived under Nazi occupation not by Jewish émigrés, c) by groups not individuals, and d) by institutions which had not existed before the war but which were founded toward the end of the war and in its aftermath for the sole purpose of documenting the cataclysm. 444 Laura Jockusch “Why historical commissions?” – Foundations and Motivations In the countries in question, two different types of historical commissions and documentation centers emerged: those whose main goal was to assemble documentary evidence for historical scholarship and those which aimed at using the data toward political ends such as the prosecution of war criminals, the fight for material compensation, and against anti-Semitism. The cases of Poland, Germany, and Italy are of the former type. In Poland, a group of five Holocaust survivors founded a historical commission – Historishe Komisye – in Lublin on August 29, 1944, five weeks after the Red Army liberated Eastern Poland from Nazi rule in late July. The commission, headed by the Communist Marek Bitter with the writers Szabse Klugman and Dawid Kupferberg as co-workers, aimed at collecting testimonies from the survivors who flocked the city in search for material and moral support from a newly founded Jewish Committee, the first representative body of the She’erit Hapletah in the liberated areas. Due to a lack of personnel and financial means and the difficult conditions of a population of traumatized survivors in a country devastated by war, these efforts had little success and the commission disbanded in early November 1944, less than two and a half months after it was formed.5 However, on December 28, 1944, the historian Philip Friedman6 who had gained a reputation as a historian of Polish Jewry before the war and who had recently come to Lublin from Lvov where he had survived the war in hiding, founded a new commission. The Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna eydowska Komisja Historyczna, C>KH), as this institution 5 See the protocols of the commission, August 29, 1944 through November 5, 1944, Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Central Jewish Historical Commission Collection (hereafter A>IH C>KH) 303/XX folder 10, 1–21 (Yiddish). Please note: In 2006, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw changed the cataloguing system for the collection of the Central Jewish Historical Commission, C>KH. Part of the present research had been undertaken before this change. Since it has not been possible to track the old archival call numbers into the new system, both systems are being used. The citation “A>IH CK>P KH” (Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute, Central Committee of Polish Jews Collection, sub-division of the Jewish Historical Commission) refers to the old call number. The citation “A>IH C>KH 303/XX” (Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Central Jewish Historical Commission Collection) refers to the new call number. 6 Philip Friedman (1901–1960), born in Lvov, received a doctorate in modern history from the University of Vienna. Prior to the Second World War he taught Jewish history in Jewish schools and lectured at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Warsaw. He survived the war in hiding in Lvov. In 1946, he left Poland and served as head of Education and Culture Department of the American Joint Distribution Committee in the U.S. Zone of Germany. In 1948, he left Germany for the United States where he became a lecturer in Jewish History at Columbia University. Cf. Congress for Jewish Culture (ed.), Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur [Dictionary of Modern Yiddish Literature], New York 1968, vol. 7, 485–489. Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 445 was named, continued the documentation work of its predecessor on a larger and more professionalized scale while its financial expenses were covered by the newly founded Central Committee of Polish Jews and the Union of Jewish Writers, Journalists, and Artists. The C>KH, now joined by Nachman Blumental, Josef Kermisz, Mejlech Bakalczuk, and Noe Grüss, and briefly also by the poet Abba Kovner, aimed at “researching and illuminating the German murders committed against the Jews of Poland. For that purpose any kind of printed matter, manuscripts, pictures, illustrations will be collected, and oral testimonies of people who suffered and witnessed the Hitler barbarities are written down [. . .]. The commission also has the task of editing the material in [. . .] brochures, monographs and larger publications which will be able to provide a picture of the tremendous atrocities [. . .], the annihilation of the Jewish population, both in terms of the physical extermination, as well as the systematic destruction of the material and cultural treasures of Polish Jewry. The works of the commission will also bring to light the ingenious and sadistic methods used for the first time in world history. Through lectures and publications [the commission will] popularize the results of its research and make it accessible to larger circles of the Jewish and non-Jewish population.”7 After Poland was completely liberated in spring 1945, the C>KH established up to twenty-five branches throughout the country, with Regional Historical Commissions in Kraków, WrocBaw, Warsaw, BiaBystok, and Katowice, and transferred its headquarters to NódU. The branches of Kraków, under the auspices of MichaB Borwicz, Josef Wulf, and Nella Thon-Rost, and Warsaw, headed by Hersz Wasser, played a particularly active role. In Allied-occupied Germany, historical commissions operated among the Jewish Displaced Persons (DP) population in the American and the British Zones. In the British Zone, a historical commission crystallized in the DP camp Belsen on October 10, 1945, in the framework of the cultural office of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone.8 The initiators – among them the Polish-born journalists Paul Trepman, Dovid Rosental, and Rafael Olewski along with the actor Sami Feder – aimed at recording the recent catastrophe by collecting “pictures, photographs, all kinds of publications, songs and stories in all languages, clothing and uniforms, urns of the dead and burnt, lists of people resettled, murdered, witnesses, prisoners; books and Torah scrolls – everything, relating to the Hitler era.”9 7 A>IH CK>P, KH, folder 1, 178, YPO Bulletin [Jewish Press Agency Bulletin], no. 6 (16), January 19, 1945, 3. – Translation of the present and all following quotations by L.J. 8 Yad Vashem Archives Jerusalem (hereafter YV) O70 folder 30, frame 19, Arkhiv fun der oysrotungs tekufe funem eyropeyshn yidntum baym yidishn tsentral komitet in bergnbelzn [Archives of the Time of Annihilation of European Jewry at the Jewish Central Committee in Bergen Belsen], November 1, 1945. 9 YIVO Archives New York Displaced Persons Camps Germany Collection, RG 294.2 446 Laura Jockusch Initially, the commission meant to function as an archival department of the Central Committee collecting documents on the recent cataclysm on behalf of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. It maintained correspondents in Celle, Bremen, and Göttingen and soon adopted the name Central Historical Commission at the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone (Tsentrale historishe komisye baym tsentral komitet fun di bafrayte yidn in der Britisher zone). In May 1947, the Polish-born Cwi Horowic10 established the Jewish Historical Commission for Lower-Saxonia (Jüdische Historische Kommission für Niedersachsen) in Göttingen as a regional branch of the commission in Belsen. In the U.S. Zone of Germany, on November 28, 1945, Israel Kaplan, a Byelorussian-born journalist and history teacher, and Moyshe Yosef Feigenbaum, a Polish-born accountant and former C>KH co-worker, founded a historical commission (historishe komisye) in Munich, as a sub-division of the cultural office of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria.11 They intended to prepare “materials for the future historian that would enable him to fathom the reason why liberalism turned into Hitlerism in Germany.”12 The group planned to collect both German documents and eyewitness accounts of the survivors and to place it at the disposal of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, in the hope that this way, the documentation material would not only be of value for the writing of Jewish history but would also serve “in the fight for our rights in the international arena.”13 Within several months, the commission turned into the Central Historical Commission (Tsentrale Historishe Komisye) supervising over fifty departments in the entire U.S. Zone. 10 11 12 13 (hereafter YIVO DPG), reel 114, frame 0354, work report of the cultural office of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone, June 1946 (Yiddish). Born in 1899 in Kraków, Horowic began to learn the furrier’s trade, and then tried his hand in tailoring, millinery, plumbing. He never practiced any of them, instead living the life of a little-known writer. In the interwar years, he briefly immigrated to Palestine but because of his left-wing political activities the British Mandatory powers forced him to return to Poland. He survived the Second World War in the Soviet Union, returned to Poland after the war, but left for the British Zone of Germany in 1947. Two years later, he immigrated to Israel. See S. Sh. Noam’s introduction to the Hebrew edition of Horowic’s novel, Mishpahat Horovits. Ha-Nefilah ha-Gedolah [The Horovitz Family. The Great Decline], Kiryat Tiv’on 1973, 14. Moyshe Yosef Feigenbaum, born 1908 in BiaBa-PodBaska, Poland, survived several ghettos, escaped from execution and deportation to Treblinka. In 1945 he left Poland for Germany, four years later he immigrated to Israel. Israel Kaplan, born 1902 in Volozhin, Byelorussia, a graduate of Kovno University, survived the Riga ghetto and the concentration camps Kaiserwald and Dachau. In 1949 he migrated to Israel where he died in 2003. Cf. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vol. 7, 342, and vol. 8, 94, and Lucy Dawidowicz, From that Time and Place. A Memoir 1938–1947, New York 1991, 304f. YV M1P, folder 2, p. 9, protocol of the founding meeting of the historical commission in Munich, November 28, 1945 (Yiddish). Ibid. Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 447 In Italy, the organization of former Jewish partisans Pakhakh (acronym for the Yiddish partizaner, khayolim un khalutsim – Partisans, Soldiers, and Pioneers) established historical commissions in Milan and Rome in fall 1945 under the leadership of the Lithuanian-born journalist Moyshe Kaganowicz.14 The Pakhakh movement had originated in Poland in spring 1945 when former Jewish partisans maintained their organizational structures for the purpose of mutual aid and preparation for immigration to Palestine.15 Although a historical commission had been set up in Poland with the goal of “collecting autobiographic tales and documents of surviving partisans, their comrades in arms, their way of life in the woods and steppes, their battles and methods of fight against the Nazis,”16 this effort bore little fruit as those involved chose to leave Poland as a result of their Zionist agenda. However, because of the difficulties in accessing Palestine even by means of illegal immigration, the majority of the Pakhakh members stayed in the DP camps of Austria, Germany, and Italy. As the most convenient point of embarkation for Palestine, Italy became the center of the movement and its historical commissions and the historical commission in Rome soon became Pakhakh’s Central Historical Commission (Tsentale Historishe Komisye bay Pakhakh) for all Italy.17 The cases of France and Austria are of the second type of historical commissions and documentation centers whose primary goal was to use the data they collected toward political ends. In France, the documentation work had already begun during the war when, on April 28, 1943, the Russian-born industrialist Isaac Schneersohn18 gathered a group of forty representatives 14 Moses Kaganowicz, born 1909 in Ivia, Byelorussia, a journalist for the Yiddish press in Vilna and Warsaw before the Second World War, he survived the war as a partisan in the Soviet Union. In 1945 he left Poland for Italy, four years later he immigrated to Israel. See Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vol. 8, 26. 15 F. Falk, Tsvey yor Pakhakh [Two years of Pakhakh], in: Farn Folk [For the People], no. 20, November 30, 1947, 4. On the history of Pakhakh, see Yehuda Bauer, Flight and Rescue, Brichah. The Organized Escape of Jewish Survivors of Eastern Europe, 1944–1948, New York 1970, 24f.; David Engel, Between Liberation and Flight. Holocaust Survivors in Poland and the Struggle for Leadership, 1944–1946, Tel Aviv 1996, 87, 198f. (Hebrew); Zeev Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope. The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany, Cambridge 2002, 158–160, and Itzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory. Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Berkeley 1993, 571, 585, 607–610, 637–640. 16 Yitskhok Kvintman, Tsvey yor tetikeyt fun der historisher komisye bey Pachach [Two Years of Work of Pakhakh’s Historical Commission], in: Farn Folk, no. 20, November 30, 1947, 18. 17 YIVO Displaced Persons Camps Italy Collection RG 294.3 (hereafter YIVO DPI), reel 26, folder 351, frame 0467, Informatsye Byuletin [Information bulletin], no. 1, November 25, 1945. 18 Isaac Schneersohn (1881–1969), born in Kamenets-Podolski to the Hassidic family of Lubavitch rabbis, trained as a rabbi and active as a communal leader, left for France in 448 Laura Jockusch of various official and underground Jewish organizations to form a documentation center (centre de documentation) in Grenoble which was then under the relatively benign Italian occupation. The group hoped to document the persecution of the Jews of France in order to provide those who would survive with evidence to buttress their legal and material claims in the postwar era. As an early mission statement asserted, “[a]bove all, we want to write the Great Book of the Martyrdom of French Judaism. Therefore we must unite large-scale documentation of what is going on in the two zones [. . .]. Assess the scale of [. . .] Aryanized Jewish property; portray the suffering of internees, deportees, of Jewish hostages shot dead; make the heroism of Jewish fighters visible [. . .] register the attitudes of governments, the administration, the various levels of public opinion; note the reactions of the intellectuals, the middle and working classes, [. . .] the [. . .] churches . . . In short, we maintain that everything having a favorable or unfavorable effect on the Jewish world of France must be brought to light in a strictly objective manner. [. . .] We must prepare the [juridical] demands of the Jews of France [. . .]. Thus, [. . .] the goal we suggest is to work together in compiling a vast documentation [. . .] which will eventually serve our representatives at the League of Nations.”19 Little was achieved, however, before the liberation of France. The actual work began when Schneersohn reconstituted the documentation center in Paris in fall 1944 and renamed it Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, CDJC). In Allied-occupied Austria, the Polish-born teacher and former C>KH affiliate Mejlech Bakalczuk20 established a Jewish Historical Commission (Jüdische Historische Kommission) in Linz in early 1946. In summer 1946, the Jewish Central Committee for the American Zone of Austria in Linz incorporated the commission in its cultural office and placed it under the leadership of the Galician-born engineer Simon Wiesenthal. The Jewish His1920 and became a successful industrialist; he survived the Second World War in hiding in the South of France. Cf. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vol. 8, 755, and Isaac Pougatch, Isaac Schneersohn, un grand seigneur hassidique, in: idem, Figures Juives de Théodore Herzl à Ida Nudel, Paris 1984, 107–141. 19 Archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris, Archives of the Consistoire Central during the Second World War (Maurice Moch Collection), microfilm reel 1, folder 4, Voici quelques mots en ce que nous voulons [1943]. There is virtually no documentation on the CDJC’s pre-liberation activity; see Renée Poznanski, La création du centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine en France (Avril 1943), in: Vingtième Siècle 63 (July–September 1999), 51–63. 20 Mejlech Bakalczuk, born in 1896 in Sernik, Polesia, studied at the University of Kiev and prior to the Second World War worked as a Hebrew teacher in Jewish schools; he survived the war as a partisan in the Soviet Union. He returned to Poland in 1945 and left for Austria later that year. In 1947 he left for Palestine, the following year he immigrated to South Africa. Cf. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vol. 1, 230f. See also his autobiography, Zikhroynes fun a yidishn partizan [Memories of a Jewish partisan], Buenos Aires 1958. Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 449 torical Documentation (Jüdische Historische Dokumentation), as Wiesenthal renamed the commission in January 1947, aimed at “fighting for Jewish rights in the world [. . .] and for the expiation of the crimes of the war years, as well as securing historical material for future generations.”21 In Vienna, the Polish-born Towia (Tadek) Frydman22 took a parallel initiative in July 1946 for the purpose of collecting evidence against war criminals in Austria.23 The commissions in Vienna and Linz, both named Jewish Historical Documentation, collaborated closely, establishing a network of correspondents in the DP camps of Austria. Despite their tendencies to place different emphases on historical research on the one hand and the fight for justice on the other – a separation which was not clear-cut and tended to shift in the course of their work24 – the survivors active in the commissions shared a set of common characteristics in terms of their organizational structures, motivations for the documentation work as well as in their social makeup. Even though some of the initiatives referred to themselves as “commissions,” others as “documentation” or “documentation project,” they all shared the organizational structure of commissions in the sense that they were provisional bodies of between less than a dozen and one hundred peo21 YIVO Displaced Persons Camps Austria Collection RG 294.4 (hereafter YIVO DPA), reel 4, frame 0962f, Simon Wiesenthal, Die Rolle der Jüdischen Historischen Dokumentation bei der Verfolgung und Bestrafung der Kriegsverbrecher (Beispiel Österreich), November 25, 1947. In its statutes the organization emphasized historical research as its main goal which seems to have been a means to appease the Austrian authorities. Cf. YV M9, folder 36, 1–3, 1, statutes of Jewish Historical Documentation in Linz, January 14, 1947 (German). 22 Towia Frydman, born 1922 in Radom, survived the ghetto of Radom and as a partisan, left Poland for Austria in spring 1946 and went to Israel in 1952 where he opened a documentation center in Haifa. Cf. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vol. 7, 476. See also his autobiography, The Hunter, ed. and trans. by David C. Gross, London 1961. 23 YV O5, folder 2, work report of the Jewish Historical Documentation in Vienna, May 16, 1947 (German). 24 For example, even though the CDJC had begun in pursuit of political goals, historical research became its major focus when Léon Poliakov joined the CDJC staff in fall 1944. However, the CDJC also supplied documentation to the French delegation at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Likewise, C>KH provided the Polish war crimes tribunals with documentation and some of its employees testified as experts in various war crimes trials, most notably the trials of Rudolf Höss and Hans Biebow in 1947, even though its major focus was the writing of Jewish history. The Central Historical Commission in Munich mainly focused on historical research, yet it also hoped to serve a general concept of “fighting for Jewish rights.” The Jewish Historical Documentations in Linz and Vienna named historical research as their official goal even though they focused almost exclusively on the prosecution of the perpetrators and only began to pursue historical research toward the end of the 1940s as they grew exasperated over the increasing leniency of the Allied and Austrian authorities in the prosecution of Austrian war criminals. 450 Laura Jockusch ple who charged themselves with the task of documenting and researching the catastrophe according to certain principles and methods they had agreed upon. Usually the group was guided by a central branch, headed by a board of directors, and maintained several correspondents or sub-commissions in different DP camps, cities, or regions. In all the countries in question, the commission activists were motivated by a strong conviction that their survival made bearing witness a moral imperative for every single survivor, a “holy duty” (heyliker khoyv) toward the dead and the generations to come. This sense of duty was a common theme of the calls which the commissions issued in the Jewish press for the purpose of encouraging the larger public of survivors to join the historical work. For example, an appeal of the C>KH in NódU of October 1946 argued: “Remember what Amalek did to thee! With a burning call the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland is urging all of those, who under the German occupation were in the ghettos, camps, lived on the Aryan side, hid in the woods or fought in partisan units [. . .] to hand over to the historical commission the accounts of your personal experiences as well as of others in the dreadful time of the German rule. [. . .] The blood of our martyrs, of our relatives is still fresh, it screams and calls upon us not to forget! The Jews of every town and village [. . .] who stayed alive are obliged to report all details of the events. The surviving Jews are obliged to give to the historical commission pictures, documents, community registers [pinkeysim], diaries and other items in their possession. This is a holy duty for every individual. We hope that everyone understands the importance of this and fulfills his duty toward Jewish history.”25 As indicated in this call, the survivors active in these commissions regarded historical documentation as a way of mourning and commemorating the dead. The act of collecting and recording in itself had the function of a symbolic “gravestone,” “memorial,” or “monument” for those who had been murdered. Given that their graves were unknown and that the majority of the victims did not have graves, the commission workers regarded their historical project as the epitaph which the survivors actually could erect for eternalizing the memory of their dead. For example, an undated call from the U.S. Zone of Germany stated: “Brothers! Remember that not a single detail of our life before, during and after the war must be forgotten! Do not forget that every document, picture, song, legend is the only gravestone which we can place on the unknown graves of our parents, siblings, and children! Therefore help the historical commission in its work! Describe the economic, social, and cultural life of the destroyed Jewish community from which you come. Describe the activity of the society or organization you used to be a member of before the war. Eternalize how the Jews lived, fought, and were murdered under the Nazi regime. Eternalize all expressions, legends, and stories from the bygone tragic days. Write down 25 A>IH CK>P KH 330/folder 28, 17, Zkhor et ’Asher ‘Asah lekha ’Amalek! [Remember what Amalek did to Thee!], October 30, 1946; emphasis in original (Yiddish). Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 451 the songs sung in ghettos, camps, and among the partisans during the Nazi era. Hand the material over to the historical commission which collects and preserves this material for the generations to come! Do not refuse your help when the historical commission turns to you!”26 Apart from eternalizing the memory of the dead and the culture and way of life that had been destroyed, the symbolic historical epitaph would also have the function of reminding the perpetrators of their deeds and of the fact “that we, the survivors, will never forget and never forgive!”27 as a call from NódU put it. Yet the survivors felt equally obliged toward future generations of Jews. Those who had not witnessed the cataclysm themselves needed to be provided with an accurate and comprehensive account of the tragic events or else future generations would not know what European Jews had endured and the memory of the dead would not be perpetuated. For example, a call from the U.S. Zone of Germany urged: “Brother Jew! Fulfill your duty toward the generation to come. Report to the historical commission about your survival of the concentration camps, in hiding, and about partisan life, so that your children will know your path of martyrdom.”28 The commission activists believed that this “holy duty” toward the dead and the generations to come could only be fulfilled if documenting become a communal project joined by every single survivor. Not only did they regard every testimony, document, poem, or photograph as a symbolic “stone” added to the “monument” they endeavored to build, but they regarded every survivor “as a piece of history”29 worthy of being preserved. Moreover, the historical truth exposed in the documentation was the most powerful charge against the perpetrators and the most poignant appeal to the “conscience of the world”30 to 26 YV M1P-N digital image M1P 789 for U.S. Zone of Germany. For the gravestone and memorial motive, see also YV M1P, folder 38, report on the first conference of historical commissions in the U.S. Zone of Germany, May 11–12, 1947, 10; A>IH CK>P KH, folder 31, 23f. Tsu ale yidn in Poyln![To all Jews in Poland!]; YV AM.1, folder 126, frame 0554, Fun der historisher komisye tsu ale partizaner! [From the Historical Commission to All Partisans!], July 20, 1947 and Yitskhok Kvintman, A denkmol dem umbakantn yidishn partizan un geto-kemfer [A Memorial to the Unknown Partisan and Ghetto Fighter], in: Farn Folk, no. 27, October 12, 1948, 10. 27 A>IH CK>P KH 303/XX folder 195, 11–13, Yisker leksikon [Memorial Encyclopedia] [1946]. 28 YV M1P folder 6I, frame 27, Yid! [Brother Jew!]. 29 C>KH (ed.), Metodologishe onveyzungen tsum oysforshn dem khurbn fun poylishn yidntum [Methodological Instructions for Research on the Destruction of Polish Jewry], NódU 1945, iv and A>IH CK>P KH, folder 31, 23, Tsu ale yidn in Poyln! 30 On the moral weight of historical documentation in the fight for the prosecution of the perpetrators see Wiesenthal, Die Rolle der Jüdischen Historischen Dokumentation, YIVO DPA, reel 4, frame 0962f. The argument of the historical truth being the best case against the perpetrators was a dominant theme also in Poland. Cf. A>IH CK>P KH, folder 31, 452 Laura Jockusch buttress the material and moral claims of the survivors in the postwar world. For the commission activists, historical documentation was a necessary precondition for the rebuilding of Jewish life because it helped them to fulfill their moral obligations toward the dead and the generations to come. In all countries, both in Western and Eastern Europe, the drive to document was spurred by activists who were survivors of Eastern European, predominantly Polish, backgrounds. With few exceptions, most commission affiliates had no training in history but were accountants, engineers, lawyers, writers, journalists, teachers, merchants, and medical doctors among other.31 This dichotomy between professional historians and socalled amateurs led to deep tensions among the researchers.32 This was further complicated by the fact that many of the younger co-workers were without higher education as a result of the persecution. The heads of the commissions, however, often nonetheless took pride in the diversity of their co-workers including not only diversity in social, religious, and educational backgrounds but also in age as well as gender.33 At times, female commission workers seem to have prevailed. For example, in November 1945, twenty out of the thirty co-workers of the headquarters of C>KH in NódU were women and its regional and local branches had fifty employees, men and women in equal parts.34 While it is most difficult to ascertain the exact number of the commission workers because of the high fluctuation in personnel and the lack of statistics, an estimated 500–800 people seem to have worked for the commissions in France, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy in the years 1944–1949.35 In most cases, it is virtually impossible to know 31 32 33 34 35 23f., Tsu ale yidn in Poyln! See also the protocols of the meetings of the Society of the Friends of the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Towarzystwo Przyjaciój Centralnej eydowskiej Komisji Historycznej) in NódU, A>IH CK>P KH, folder 15, 1, November 23, 1945, and folder 13, 11, November 29, 1945. Archives of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, Paris (hereafter CDJC), box 5, Moyshe Yosef Feigenbaum, Work Report of the Central Historical Commission in Munich, November 1945 through November 1947, dated March 15, 1948, 1 (Yiddish). Please note: The administrative archives of the CDJC have not been catalogued to date; the box numbers refer to a provisional numbering in the order in which the boxes were consulted for this study. See, for example, Philip Friedman, The European Jewish Research on the Recent Jewish Catastrophe in 1939–1945, in: American Academy for Jewish Research Proceedings 18 (1948–1949), 179–211, here 197, 200f., 203. Moyshe Yosef Feigenbaum, Barikhtn tetikeyt [Work Report], in: Fun Letstn Khurbn [Of the Latest Destruction], vol. 5, May 1947, 102. Feigenbaum mentioned the particular involvement of women among the 70–100 employees in the U.S. Zone of Germany at the time. Cf. A>IH CK>P KH, folder 85, 88, Philip Friedman to Raphael Mahler in New York, November 2 [1945] (Yiddish). An average of 80–100 people worked for the commissions in Poland and the U.S. Zone of Germany while between 30 and 50 people worked for the commissions in France, Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 453 the biographical and social backgrounds of the employees, not to mention their motivations for engaging in the historical work. Although rare, there is some evidence of what the historical commissions meant to some of the workers. For example, Zelig Pacanowski, a 38-year-old survivor of the NódU ghetto and the Birkenau extermination camp, where he had lost his wife and child, wrote to the C>KH in NódU in May 1946: “When Mrs. Hirsz visited us in the hospital she invited me to work for the Jewish historical commission. This invitation is the most beautiful present I have received these days. This work will give my life a purpose.”36 A young woman by the name of Gesja Grynwald, who had survived on “Aryan papers” in a Polish village together with her two small children, wrote to the C>KH in NódU after it had called upon the Jewish population to provide information on Jewish mass graves in Poland in July 1946: “I am very pleased that finally there is an organization interested in knowing where our brothers and sisters lie [. . .]. Back then, I often thought if I survive, I will do much for those who have so tragically perished. Yet, now I am simply ashamed in front of the dead because we, the survivors, have forgotten so quickly. [. . .] When I read [about your project], I cried with joy because finally people are taking an interest.” 37 Such revelations among the lower echelons of commission workers are very rare, however. Among the leaders of the commissions there was a tendency to see themselves as part of an Eastern European Jewish tradition according to which history writing was a communal project and a form of self-defense against persecution equaling armed resistance in its honorability and significance.38 Austria, and Italy while the British Zone of Germany had less than a dozen commission workers not differentiating between temporary and permanent workers. 36 A>IH CK>P KH, folder 93, 67–68, May 30, 1946 (Yiddish). 37 A>IH CK>P KH, folder 93, 168, July 1, 1946 (Yiddish). 38 The concept that documenting anti-Jewish violence provided a way for Jews to defend themselves because it had the potential of influencing world public opinion in favor of the victims, bringing the perpetrators to justice, and buttressing claims for material compensation was not entirely new in the wake of the Second World War. It had already crystallized among Eastern European Jews under the impact of several cases of mass violence in the twentieth century prior to the Holocaust and was a result of the Eastern European approach to the writing of Jewish history as it was developed by Simon Dubnow in the late nineteenth century. Dubnow had advocated Jewish historical writing as a national Jewish endeavor that was based on the popular support of large segments of Jewish society and strengthened the national cohesion, especially in times of crisis. Not only were “ordinary Jews” to carry out the research but Jewish society was also the recipient and subject of the research itself. See Simon Dubnow, Nahpesah we-Nahkorah Kol Koreh ’el ha-Nevunim ba- ‘Am ha-Mitnadvim La ‘asof Homer le-Binyan Bnei Yisra’el be-Polin we-Rusia [Let Us Search and Research! A Call to the Erudites Among our People to Collect Material to Build of the Edifice of the History of the Jews in Russia and Poland], in: Pardes 1 (Odessa 1891), 221–242. See David Engel, History Writing as 454 Laura Jockusch In fact, many saw themselves as continuing documentation projects which had originated during the war. For example, the historical commissions in Göttingen and Munich understood their work as a continuation of the Oyneg Shabes (Yiddish, “joy of the Sabbath”) archive directed by the Polish Jewish historian Emmanuel Ringelblum in the underground of the Warsaw ghetto in the years 1940–1943.39 In Poland, there was a direct link between the C>KH and Oyneg Shabes because the only survivors of Ringelblum’s staff, the writer Rachel Auerbach and the former secretary of the underground archive, Hersz Wasser, became active in C>KH’s Warsaw branch and helped to unearth portions of the archives under the rubble of the ghetto in September 1946 and December 1950. In Italy, Yitskhok Kvintman, secretary of the Central Historical Commission in Rome, asserted that Pakhakh’s historical commissions worked toward fulfilling “the last will of the famous Jewish historian, Professor Dubnow, who shouted on his last way: ‘Jews, write, record, and tell this to the future generations’.”40 At times the commission leaders expressed their own sense of superiority over Western European Jews who did not share this Jewish cultural heritage in which historical documentation equaled resistance. At least this must have been Feigenbaum’s rationale when he rebuked German Jewish survivors for a National Mission. The Jews of Poland and Their Historiographical Traditions, in: Yisrael Gutman (ed.), Emmanuel Ringelblum. The Man and the Historian, Jerusalem 2006, 109–130 (Hebrew), esp. 118–120. 39 On Emmanuel Ringelblum’s concept of documentation equaling armed resistance, see Emmanuel Ringelblum, O. Sh., in: idem, Ksovim fun geto [Writings From the Ghetto], Warsaw 1963, vol. 2, 102. For comprehensive analysis of Ringelblum’s endeavors see, for example, Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Bloomington/Indianapolis 2007. On the claim of some commission activists that their work was a continuation of Ringelblum’s efforts, see: Stadtarchiv Göttingen, Records of the Cultural Office of the Municipality of Göttingen, file no. 475, Report by Cwi Horowic on the Activities of the Historical Commission in Göttingen [1947], (German); CDJC box 4, Protocols of the Conference of Jewish Historical Commissions and Documentation Centers in Paris, December 1947; MichaB Borwicz, Protocol of the Third Day of the Conference, Paris, December 3, 1947 morning session, 11, and Moyshe Yosef Feigenbaum, Protocol of the Fifth Day of the Conference, December 7, 1947, morning session, 2. The CDJC emphasized that its work was part of the Résistance and gradually made Schneersohn the “Ringelblum of France,” cf. Marcel Livian, Le Centre de Documentation Contemporaine à Quatre Ans, in: Le Monde Juif, May–June 1947, nos. 9–10, 20; Message André Spire, in: Le Monde Juif, March–April 1953, 25; Michel Mazor, Historique du CDJC, in: Le Monde Juif, nos. 34–35 (1963), 43f. See also Poznanski, La création du centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine en France, 52–54. 40 Kvintman, A denkmol dem umbakantn yidishn partizan,10. Simon Dubnow is said to have exclaimed before he was murdered in the Riga Ghetto in December 1941: “Good people – do not forget, good people – tell, good people write.” Cf. Sofia Dubnov-Ehrlich, The Life and Work of S.M. Dubnov, ed. by Jeffrey Shandler, Bloomington/Indianapolis 1991, 247. Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 455 neither founding historical commissions of their own nor supporting the commissions initiated by Jewish DPs of Eastern European backgrounds in occupied Germany.41 He explained the apparent disinterest of the German Jews in the historical work and the absence of secret Jewish archives in Germany, arguing that German Jews lacked the “dynamics of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe,” were “brought up in discipline” and therefore “far from revolutionary and conspirational deeds.”42 While Feigenbaum certainly oversimplified the nature of the encounter between the German and Eastern European survivors in the realm of historical documentation in postwar Germany, comparable popular grassroots initiatives to document the recent catastrophe were virtually absent among Western European survivors.43 “Sewage workers” of Holocaust Research Just as many commission activists shared a sense of acting in a distinct tradition of history writing they also had a sense that they were “pioneers of a new science that is being born,”44 as MichaB Borwicz,45 director of C>KH’s 41 Barikhtn tetikeyt, in: Fun Letstn Khurbn, vol. 10, December 1948, 169. 42 Ibid., 163. 43 While there were a number of survivors in Western and Central Europe who began research on an individual level, most importantly H.G. Adler, commissions of the type discussed in this essay were absent in Western Europe, and if they existed, they were usually initiatives taken by Eastern European Jews. No commission existed in the Netherlands and Belgium; in Sweden, a historical commission was founded by the World Jewish Congress but run by Polish Jews formerly affiliated with the C>KH; in Great Britain, Alfred Wiener and other German Jewish emigrants had set up the Central Jewish Information Office, or Wiener Library, in 1939 (originally founded 1934 in Amsterdam), which collected information for the fight against Nazism and anti-Semitism and took a different perspective than the commissions in question. On the idea that the commissions were the result of a specifically Eastern European Jewish tradition of history writing, see Boaz Cohen, Holocaust Survivors and the Genesis of Holocaust Research, in: JohannesDieter Steinert/Inge Weber-Newth (eds.), Beyond Camps and Forced Labor. Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution, Osnabrück 2005, 290–300. 44 Cf. CDJC (ed.), Les Juifs en Europe (1939–1945). Rapports présentés à la première conférence européenne des commissions historiques et des centres de documentation juifs, Paris 1949, 174. 45 MichaB Maksimilian Borwicz (Boruchowicz) born 1911 in Kraków, studied history and history of literature at the University of Kraków, worked as a writer and journalist before the Second World War, and was affiliated with the Poale Zion movement in interwar Poland. He survived the Janowska camp and fought among Polish Socialist partisan units. He left Poland for France in 1947, where, together with Josef Wulf, he established a documentation center for the history of Polish Jews Centre d’étude d’histoire des Juifs Polonais in Paris. In 1953, he earned a doctorate in sociology from the Sorbonne. He died in 1987 in Paris. Cf. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vol. 1, 245f. 456 Laura Jockusch Kraków branch formulated it – or, to use the less idealizing words of a CDJC co-worker, the commissions were doing the work of “sewerage workers”46 for a new field of Jewish historiography. To be precise, the unique difficulty lay in the unprecedented nature of the destruction of European Jews in terms of its numbers of victims, geographic scope, and the method and planning which had exceeded all previous catastrophes of the Jewish past.47 The quality of the atrocities seemed to render conventional methods of historical inquiry defective and even the language appeared inadequate to describe what had occurred.48 The new field of research – khurbn forshung (destruction research, also Churbnforschung, études churbaniques)49 in Philip Friedman’s nomenclature – needed to draw from an eclectic methodology combining history and sociology and using a broad array of historical sources. Among these were questionnaires, folklore, photograph and film material, sound recordings, museum artifacts, statistical and legal records.50 In establishing a methodology for the new field, the commissions returned to and reinvigorated the social science-oriented approach to studying Jewish society both in the past and present developed by the YIVO Institute for 46 CDJC box 10, Procès-verbal de la Réunion de la Commission de Presse, February 26, 1945, 6. The notion of the commission workers being “sewage workers” – égoutiers – came from the Russian Jewish writer Don Aminado, then a co-worker of the CDJC. 47 The characteristics distinguishing this catastrophe from previous ones were frequently discussed in the commissions and it was also a topic of debate at the occasion of the first conference of historical commissions in Paris in December 1947. Léon Poliakov, Technique et buts de la recherche historique, in: CDJC DCCXIV 714, 1. Philip Friedman, Les problèmes de la recherche scientifique sur notre dernière catastrophe, in: Les Juifs en Europe (1939–1945), 72–80, here 72. Mayer Halevy, Pour une lexicographie du ‘Churban,’ in: Les Juifs en Europe (1939–1945), 161–164, here 161f. 48 On the perception among the commission workers that the conventional language was inadequate to describe the cataclysm, see for example, Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Heidelberg, B.2/1.c, No. 527, Nella Thon-Rostowa, Badanie zbrodni, która nigdy nie przeminie [Research on Crimes that Will Never Wither], 3. On the perception of the inadequacy of “traditional methods” of historical inquiry, see MichaB Borwicz, Les tâches de la nouvelle historiographie juive, in: Les Juifs en Europe (1939–1945), 93–96, here 93, and CDJC box 4, Protocol of the Third Day, December 3, 1947, morning session, 11. 49 For Philip Friedman’s use of the term see, for example, Philip Friedman, Die grundsätzlichen Probleme unserer Churbnforschung (Kurzer Inhalt eines Vortrags gehalten in Paris auf der europäischen Konferenz der historischen Kommissionen), CDJC, box 13, 1 (German). Friedman conceived this field as a new sub-discipline of Jewish historiography (cf. Friedman, Les problèmes de la recherche scientifique, 74) while Borwicz spoke of a “new Jewish historiography” (cf. Bowicz, Les tâches de la nouvelle historiographie juive, 93). The term khurbn is the Yiddish version of the Hebrew hurban, “destruction.” Originally referring to the destruction of the First and Second Temple, the term became a synonym for catastrophe in the Jewish past in general and it became the term which Yiddish-speaking survivors used for the destruction of European Jews. 50 On this concept of historical sources cf. Friedman, Les problèmes de la recherche scientifique, 75, and Poliakov, Technique et buts de la recherche historique, 4. Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 457 Jewish Research in interwar Poland. Many commission workers had been affiliated with YIVO before the war or were at least familiar with YIVO’s works and the commissions stood in close contact with YIVO in New York which assumed an advisory function.51 Although the commission workers saw themselves in the Eastern European Jewish tradition of history writing and used research methods developed already in the interwar period, they nevertheless had a sense that they needed to build a new field of research in which “neither we nor anyone else in the world had had any experience”52 and that this was a process of “self-education” as the teacher Noe Grüss admitted in his first annual report on the work of the C>KH in early 1946.53 Early on in this process, the commissions placed different emphases on historical sources, some giving greater credence to perpetrators, others to victims. The CDJC focused almost exclusively on collecting perpetrator sources because, as Léon Poliakov,54 the CDJC’s research director explained, the CDJC’s research was based on the assumption that the Nazi mass murder of European Jews was the result of a grand scheme whose origins and implementation could only be understood through the “confessions of the perpetrators”55 which allowed the researcher “to penetrate the laboratory where the Nazi venom was distilled.”56 Consequently, the CDJC did not collect survivor testimonies and its publications were virtually all based on German and Vichy documentation. The commission activists in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy shared a fundamental skepticism as to the value of perpetrator sources for the de51 On YIVO’s concept of Jewish scholarship see Cecile Kuznitz, The Origins of Yiddish Scholarship and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Ph.D. dissertation Stanford University 2000; Lucjan Dobroszycki, YIVO in Interwar Poland. Work in the Historical Sciences, in: Yisrael Gutman et al. (eds.), The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, London 1989, 494–518, and Michael Brenner, Propheten des Vergangenen. Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Munich 2006, 150–155. 52 Noe Grüss, Rok pracy Centralnej >ydowskiej Komisji Historycznej [One year of work of the Central Jewish Historical Commission], NódU 1946, 9. Noe Shloyme Grüss (1902–1985), born in KieBków, Poland, was educated as a teacher at the University of Kraków, and worked as a history teacher and Yiddish journalist before the Second World War. He survived the war in exile in the Soviet Union but returned to Poland in 1944. In 1947 he immigrated to Israel but left in 1952 to settle in Paris where he worked as head of the Hebrew and Yiddish section of the National Library. Cf. Berl Kagan, Leksikon fun Yiddish Shraybers [Lexicon of Yiddish Writers], New York 1986, 182. 53 Grüss, Rok pracy Centralnej >ydowskiej Komisji Historycznej,10. 54 Léon Poliakov (1910–1997), born in St. Petersburg, migrated to France in 1920 where he was trained as a lawyer but worked as a journalist. He survived the war in the Southern Zone of France and joined the CDJC staff in 1944. In 1952 he left the CDJC for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; see his autobiography, Léon Poliakov, Mémoires, ed. by Gilles Firmin, Paris 1999. 55 Poliakov, Technique et buts de la recherche historique, 1. 56 Ibid., 2f. 458 Laura Jockusch scription of the Jewish cataclysm. They had realized that Nazi documents intentionally concealed the regime’s actual treatment of the Jews. For example, MichaB Borwicz observed that “all German documents are false, not in terms of their authenticity, but in terms of their content. First of all, they are full of pseudonyms or euphemisms. The murder is never indicated as such, the cremation is never named.”57 In fact, Borwicz believed “the German system was based [. . .] on a double accountancy of the murders in inversed proportionality to the actual importance of the events. Of the most dreadful acts very little traces were left while on the less significant issues there is extensive communication.”58 Apart from their faulty nature, German sources did not give an adequate description of the victims’ experiences and responses to the persecution at various stages. For example, Philip Friedman argued, “as worthy as the administrative documents might be, they are not capable of giving a thorough and truthful description of the most difficult, saddest chapters of our martyrdom. The administrative German documents have rarely reflected the atrocities of the Aktionen and concentration camps; on the contrary, these German documents were meant to conceal these atrocities through a camouflaging jargon of criminals.” 59 Consequently, Nazi documents could only be used if they complemented with Jewish sources. To that end, the commissions in Poland, Germany, and Austria concentrated on collecting both German and Jewish sources. However, the activists were aware of the dilemma that as a result of the annihilation process sources pertaining to the victims’ experiences virtually did not exist and the survivors were “left with empty hands.”60 Certainly, the remnants of Emmanuel Ringelblum’s secret ghetto archive soon assumed an iconic position among the commission workers also outside of Poland as the ideal Jewish source, because it was not produced after the fact but captured the Jewish experience of German occupation as the events unfolded.61 However, it was clear that Oyneg Shabes had been the notable exception to a devastating rule: together with the human beings, Nazi genocidal policies had targeted Jewish cultural treasures. Consequently, the survivors were deprived of “traditional” historical sources, such as institutional and adminis57 Borwicz, Les tâches de la nouvelle historiographie juive, 93. 58 Ibid. 59 Philip Friedman, Die Probleme der wissenschaftlichen Erforschung unserer letzten Katastrophe, (October 13, 1947), CDJC box 13, 8f. See also Meyshe Yosef Feigenbaum, Tsu vos historishe komisyes? [Why Historical Commissions?], in: Fun Letstn Khurbn, vol. 1, August 1946, 2. 60 Moyshe Yosef Feigenbaum’s comment, CDJC box 4, Protocol of the Sixth Day, December 8, 1947, morning session, 3. 61 Borwicz, Les tâches de la nouvelle historiographie juive, 95; Poliakov, Technique et buts de la recherche historique, 3f. Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 459 trative records, which had been destroyed along with Jewish archives, libraries, museums, organizations, and communal and cultural institutions.62 The commissions in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy therefore saw their main task in creating new, “non-traditional,” historical records drawn from the memories of the survivors, mainly in the form of eyewitness testimonies and questionnaires. In Poland and in the U.S. Zone of Germany, the commission leaders designed various kinds of questionnaires, either as guidelines for the commission workers who interviewed survivors to take their testimonies (as was the case in Poland), or as fill-in-questionnaires completed by the commission workers or the survivors themselves (as was the case in Germany). These questionnaires interrogated the survivors on a great variety of wartime experiences, among them ghettos, labor, concentration and extermination camps, bunkers, hiding places, life in partisan units, and on living with false papers among the non-Jewish populations – on the so-called “Aryan side.” The questions concentrated not on the physical persecution alone but on the socio-economic, cultural, and political effects of persecution on Jewish society and the relations between Jews and non-Jews.63 In their quest to map out the new field of research, the commission workers often debated whether or not they – as survivors and Jews – could be at all “objective” or “scholarly” historians given their painful emotional ties with the subject matter of their research. As Philip Friedman described this dilemma in September 1945: “The task of a historian – a Jew – regarding the recent past is particularly difficult. Writing history requires the guidance of reason and not that of emotions which creates 62 Feigenbaum, Tsu vos historishe komisyes?, 2. 63 As early as summer 1945 the C>KH published three separate questionnaires for zamlers (collectors) of historical material and folklore, and interviewers of child survivors. Josef Kermisz (ed.), Instrukcje dla zbierania materiaBów historycznych z okresu okupacji niemieckiej [Instructions for Collectors of Historical Material From the Time of the German Occupation], NódU 1945; Nachman Blumental (eds.), Instrukcje dla zbierania materiaBów etnograficznych w okresie okupacji niemieckiej [Instructions for Collectors of Ethnographical Material From the Time of the German Occupation], NódU 1945; Noe Grüss/Genia Silkes (ed.), Instrukcje dla badania przeRy1 dzieci >ydowskich w okresie okupacji niemieckiej [Instructions for Research on the Life of Jewish Children at the Time of the German Occupation], NódU 1945. In addition, a Yiddish version of all three questionnaires appeared: C>KH (ed.), Metodologishe onveyzungen tsum oysforshn dem khurbn fun poylishn yidntum [Methodological Instructions for Research on the Destruction of Polish Jewry], NódU 1945. In Germany, the Central Historical Commission in Munich modeled several questionnaires upon the Polish examples. It used a “statistical questionnaire” inquiring into the experiences of individuals, a “historical questionnaire” interrogating the survivors on the history of the places they had been during the war, and a questionnaire for collectors of folklore materials. In addition, the Central Historical Commission in Munich used a “questionnaire for postwar experiences” and one interrogating German officials on the fate of the Jewish population in their towns and districts. 460 Laura Jockusch numerous problems. In writing the history of the six years of German occupation, one cannot merely be a scholar having purely scholarly goals in mind, because a large role is played by factors of an emotional nature, such as personal experiences and personal loss.”64 Friedman’s colleague Noe Grüss was more radical in admitting that “scholarly objectivity” was virtually impossible for the survivors when he stated: “We are not ‘objective’ and cold scientists. We approach the material of our work not like a professor approaches a body in a morgue. Our historical material are the dead bodies of our children and parents, the bodies of our dishonored wives and sisters, the memories of the partisans and ghetto fighters, the courageous hearts and burning love for [our] people and the disdain for our tormentors.”65 Given these emotional constraints, many survivors questioned whether the time was ripe for historical research on the recent catastrophe.66 Yet in spite of its being a subject of heated debates, this question was a rhetorical one for most commission associates. In essence, they were convinced that they should not lose time under any circumstances because time was working against them; they needed to act immediately to seize memory while it was “fresh” and while documents were still available. Not only in the sense that memory would become less reliable as time went by, but also in the sense that once the survivors had adjusted to their new lives, testimony taking would become even more difficult. This imperative for immediate action was especially strong among those commission activists operating among the DP population, where large numbers of survivors being held “captive” made their interrogation relatively easy.67 Another reason why the commission activists believed that it was not too early to begin to research the recent past was the fact that despite its proximity to the present, the khurbn was a clear-cut event with a well-defined subject matter and it was already more thoroughly documented than other historical events in the more remote Jewish past.68 For some commission workers, the question of whether it might be too early for historical research on the recent catastrophe was irrelevant because they did not see themselves as historians. Instead, they saw their task in 64 A>IH CK>P KH, folder 29, 4, Philip Friedman, Der tsushtand un di oyfgabe fun undzer historiografye in itstikn moment [The State and Task of Our Historiography in the Present Moment], September 19, 1945. 65 A>IH, CK>P, KH, folder 7, 41, Noe Grüss, undated speech on the activities of the commission (Yiddish). 66 Friedman, Les problèmes de la recherche scientifique, 75f. 67 YIVO DPG, reel 13, frame 0154f. See also YV O-37 folder 8, frame 18, Vendung num. 1 [circular letter], January 27, 1947, and YIVO RG 294.2, reel 116, folder 1644, frame 1225, work report of the regional historical commission [in Frankfurt am Main] October 1946 through February 1947 (Yiddish). 68 Friedman, Les problèmes de la recherche scientifique, 73f., 76. Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 461 preparing the tools for future historians who would analyze this material from a greater distance.69 Others, most notably Philip Friedman, argued that personal experience as such did not necessarily prevent objectivity. Since all historical writing was a matter of interpretation, Friedman maintained, there was “no such thing as uncolored historiography.”70 What made any historian a good historian was “a clearly defined philosophical framework, within which he [sic] remains loyal to the documentary sources [and] does not let passionate, political or personal considerations influence him in his work of analysis and interpretation.”71 In the context of khurbn forshung, this meant refraining from hyperbole and over-sentimentalizing and withstanding the tendency to indulge in accusatory or idealizing descriptions – especially in the context of the Jewish leadership in the ghettos or Jewish resistance and heroism.72 Although natural from a psychological point of view, tendentiousness and emotionality were counterproductive for the endeavor of the khurbn forshers whose historical record could only convince through a factual description of the events, leaving the accusation to attorneys and judges.73 Ultimately, only an awareness of the shortcomings and weaknesses of their endeavor, an open methodological discourse, and careful training of their co-workers could lead to qualitative results. As early as 1947, many commission activists believed that the time had come to move beyond simple documentation and use the material compiled in creating a “great synthesis” on the presumably broader, deeper, and inclusive level of a more analytical and far-seeing historiography.74 Friedman encouraged his colleagues not to shy away from such a synthesis, since it constituted a mere starting point in establishing the new field: “No synthesis is perfect, none is eternal. All are subject to being revised, recast, modified in the course of centuries. This is one of the fundamental laws of the human spirit and of all spiritual creation. Our synthetic works will certainly not represent the last word in Jewish historical scholarship on this subject, but they must constitute a beginning.”75 The precondition for such a “synthesis” was the close collaboration of all historical commissions and documentation centers on a European level, for the geographic scope of the Holocaust necessitated a comparative perspective. After all, as Friedman argued, 69 CDJC box 4, Protocol, Sixth Day of the Conference, December 8, 1947, morning session, 2. 70 Friedman, Les problèmes de la recherche scientifique, 77. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 78f. 73 Ibid., 77–79. 74 CDJC box 4, Protocol of the Third Day, December 3, 1947, morning session, 11, and Poliakov, Technique et buts de la recherche historique, 5. 75 Friedman, Les problèmes de la recherche scientifique, 80. 462 Laura Jockusch “no Josephus Flavius would be capable of covering the full extent of the recent catastrophe on his own. [. . .] Such work can only be done by a collective of scholars.”76 Therefore, in December 1947, the CDJC hosted the First European Conference of Jewish Historical Commissions and Documentation Centers for the purpose of coordinating the research efforts. Thirty-two delegates from thirteen countries founded a “European Coordination Committee” for the purpose of exchanging documents, standardizing research methods, and publishing a scholarly journal.77 Despite the fact that the delegates shared a sense of unity as a “community of victims,” they were divided on various issues which caused the efforts at coordinating their research to fail. For example, there was a latent competition over leadership within the “community of victims”: Polish Jews felt entitled because the Polish Jewish community had suffered such extraordinary losses whereas French Jews claimed leadership on the basis of the republican and humanitarian values that France represented in postwar Europe. The delegates were divided on whether they saw the ultimate purpose of the documentation work in terms of Jewish historical scholarship as an end in itself or as a tool in the political fight against anti-Semitism, fascism, and reaction and in the struggle for bringing the perpetrators to justice. Furthermore, the delegates disagreed on the language and intended audience of the commissions’ publications. Some maintained that the studies on the Holocaust had to be in the language of the “Jewish masses,” Yiddish, to reach a Jewish audience throughout the world, while others opted for French and English to reach a broader, predominantly non-Jewish audience. A latent conflict among the delegates also arose from the general problem that a minority of professional historians and committed laypeople who saw historical scholarship as the main goal of their endeavors confronted a majority of amateurs who were primarily interested in the practical use of the documentation material the commissions had collected to date. These ideological divisions were further complicated by the burgeoning Cold War which made the interaction of the commissions in Eastern and Western Europe increasingly difficult. The European Coordination Committee also suffered from a chronic lack of funding which rendered it defunct before it could begin its work.78 The tragedy of this was that despite the 76 Friedman, Die Probleme der wissenschaftlichen Erforschung, 4. 77 See the resolutions adopted by the delegates of the conference: Textes des resolutions adoptées par la conférence, structure de l’organisation centrale, in: Les Juifs en Europe (1939–1945), 185–190. 78 This is the general picture gained from the presentations and debates of the delegates, cf. the conference volume Les Juifs en Europe (1939–1945) and the protocols of the conference in CDJC box 4. The delegates hoped for the support of the AJDC which had been the major funding institution of all historical commissions under discussion here. However, by 1948 when the European Coordination Committee began its work, the AJDC’s Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 463 European-wide scope of the Holocaust itself and of the documentation projects among the She’erit Hapletah in Europe, no European-wide collaboration emerged among the various commissions because this well-intended and deeply committed group of khurbn forshers remained divided by country of origin, language, approach, and even the ultimate goals of their efforts. What this intended “synthesis” would have looked like, had it been realized, remains opaque. Several oblique references by some of the commission activists, most notably Philip Friedman, suggest that the envisioned “synthesis” would have included comparative studies of Nazi polices against the Jews as well as of the instruments and institutions the Germans and their collaborating governments had created to implement these policies. “Synthetic” works would have been less localized and documentary, that is to say, they would not have been limited to annotated primary sources, but have given more of a historical narrative covering not only towns or cities but entire countries, or even Nazi-occupied Europe at large. They would also have considered the behavior of the Germans, the response of the Jews to persecution, and the role of non-Jews in and outside of the Nazi orbit in either assisting the Jews or collaborating with the Germans. Last but not least, “synthetic” works might have integrated both official sources of the Germans and their collaborators as well as Jewish sources from during and after the war.79 funding priorities had shifted from Europe to the Middle East. Cf. Isaac Schneersohn to Philip Friedman, February 17, 1948, YIVO RG 1258, box 6, folder 296. 79 The only attempts at such synthetic works include: Philip Friedman’s essay ZagBada >ydów polskich 1939–1945 [The Destruction of Polish Jews 1939–1945], published in Biuletyn GBównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce 1 (1946), 163–208, which gave an overview of the Holocaust in all of Poland; and Léon Poliakov’s La Bréviaire de la haine (1951), which was the first study to discuss the “Final Solution” on a European-wide level, making the case for a tradition of racial hatred as the root of the German mass murder of European Jews. In September 1950, on the occasion of an international conference hosted by the Netherlands Institute of War Documentation in Amsterdam on “World War II in the West,” Philip Friedman presented a paper entitled “Outline of Program on Holocaust Research.” He envisioned Holocaust research to cover six major fields: the origins of Nazi ideology of annihilating European Jews (considering the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic as precursors of the Nazi regime); legislation and economic actions against the Jews of Europe 1939–1945; acts of terrorism and extermination; the impact of Nazi persecution on Jewish life; the behavior of the “outside world” (including the Allies, international relief organizations, and the governments of German satellite countries); and the relations between Jews and non-Jews in German-occupied countries. Cf. Friedman, The Roads to Extinction, 571–576. See also Friedman’s later essay, Problems of the Research on the European Jewish Catastrophe, in: Yad Vashem Studies 3 (1959), 25–39. 464 Laura Jockusch The Historical Commissions in the “Jewish Street” of Postwar Europe Most survivors in the respective countries were ambivalent toward the historical commissions, even though both commission activists and outside observers of the She’erit Hapletah noted, the survivors had a great urge to speak and write about their recent past, an urge sometimes described by activists and observers as being pathologic and obsessive.80 Philip Friedman interpreted this sudden interest in history writing among the survivors as a “dynamic tension comparable to the messianic movements which followed our earlier national catastrophes.”81 He further observed: “Today we have hundreds of Nathan Neta Hanovers, who feel a need to write down their exceptional experiences. Hundreds and hundreds of people, who in their entire lives have never mustered any interest in historical research, now out of an inner, irresistible urge, grab a pen to write.”82 By referring to the seventeenth-century chronicler of the Chmelnicki pogroms, Friedman indicated that he deemed the masses of antiquarians and chroniclers among the She’erit Hapletah inadequate for twentieth-century khurbn forshung. In fact, Friedman and other commission workers saw a certain danger in this sudden and amateurish interest in history writing because it might turn into “graphomania and a people’s plague”83 and a “psychosis of publicity”84 which could result in a “flood of publications by people without scholarly responsibility.”85 However, despite the fact that the recent past was omnipresent in the lives of the survivors and was the subject of popular writing, cultural events, and commemorative celebrations, when the commissions asked the survivors to engage in systematic documentation and methodical research in the form of testimonies and questionnaires, the majority showed indifference or even reluctance. There appear to be several reasons for this paradox. Of course there were different levels of involvement with the commissions, from either a one-time donation of a testimony or questionnaire to permanent work as a zamler (col80 For example, AJDC workers who visited the DP camps of Germany noted a “compulsion to speak” about the recent past among the survivors, cf. Koppel S. Pinson, Jewish Life in Liberated Germany, in: Jewish Social Studies 9 (1947), no. 2, 108f., and Dawidowicz, From that Time and Place, 303f. 81 Friedman, Die Probleme der wissenschaftlichen Erforschung, 7. 82 Ibid., 5. 83 Ibid. 84 Moyshe Yosef Feigenbaum’s speech on the occasion of the first European conference of historical commissions and documentation centers in Paris, December 8, 1947, YV AM.1, folder 128, frame 0641. 85 CDJC box 4, Protocol of The Sixth Day, December 8, 1947, morning session, Borwicz’ comment 2 and Friedman’s comment, 4. See also Feigenbaum in: Les Juifs en Europe (1939–1945), 175. Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 465 lector) of historical material. On the level of one-time cooperation, many survivors were apparently reluctant to submit their experiences to the historical commission as an institution with co-workers who might ask questions and raise issues which the survivors did not want to talk about.86 It was less burdensome if the survivors could choose what they would write about rather than have a commission worker follow a complex questionnaire touching on a comprehensive array of subjects. The official appearance and scholarly behavior of the commission workers, the official stationery, that the testimonies received a stamp and were signed by the witness and the protocol writer, and were often verified by another witness, might have intimidated some survivors from cooperating with the commissions.87 Many survivors neither seem to have understood what the commissions were looking for nor grasped the significance of methodical historical work.88 As time went by, commission workers noted a growing “passivity” and “forgetfulness” among the survivors, which seemed to prevent people from following the commissions’ invitations to give testimonies.89 They believed that survivors had been most responsive immediately after the liberation while their willingness to testify declined as their lives resumed normalcy.90 In the DP camps – despite the obvious already stated advantage of having so many survivors so close at hand – the historical commissions had to compete for the attention of the survivors against political parties, educational facilities, and entertainment as well as the urge of many to concentrate on the future through founding families.91 86 Barikhtn tetikeyt, in: Fun Letstn Khurbn, vol. 10, December 1948, 163. 87 Feigenbaum observed an “inferiority complex of the man in the street” toward the historical commissions, cf. Les Juifs en Europe (1939–1945), 175. See also CDJC box 4, Protocol of the Sixth Day, December 8, 1947, morning session, 3. 88 YV M1P, folder 1, frames 8 and 10, Tetikeyts berikht fun der historisher komisye [Work Report of the Historical Commission] [1947], and Farn Folk, no. 8, February 10, 1947, 5. 89 See the letters by co-worker Helen Fuchsman to Simon Wiesenthal reporting on her difficulties in collecting survivor testimonies which she attributed to “a certain passivity, a negligence and a decrease in the feelings of revenge among the former Jewish inmates toward their tormentors and murderers,” cf. YIVO DPA, reel 5, folder 153, frames 1000 and 1016, February 17, 1948 and March 12, 1948, and YV M9, folder 49, 271f. (April 17, 1948) and 334 (May 31, 1948) (German). 90 Kvintman, A denkmol dem umbakantn yidishn partizan, 10. In the U.S. Zone of Germany, 2,540 testimonies were collected between December 1945 and December 1948. 1,500 testimonies were collected in the course of the first eleven months while only a little less than 1,000 were collected in the following 25 months. This might indicate that the willingness of the survivors had waned but it might also be due to the fact that as of early 1947, the majority of the DPs in the U.S. Zone were Polish Jews who had survived in the Soviet Union, an experience which was not addressed in the questionnaires of the commission. 91 For an analysis of the multifaceted activities of the survivors in the DP camps of Germany, see, for example, Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope, and Hagit Lavsky, New 466 Laura Jockusch As far as the recruiting of permanent workers was concerned, the psychological burden of the historical work seems to have been the greatest obstacle, perhaps even greater than the fact that the research was time-consuming and paid poorly. Working for the historical commissions on a daily basis meant literally “going back into the graves,” as Feigenbaum described it.92 Similarly, Noe Grüss of the C>KH in NódU noted: “A person who engages in the monotonous work of the historical commission is depressed. Every document is a tragedy, every file is a murder. Tragedies of individuals and families, murders of entire generations. You look at photographs of people hanged or of those who were candidates for the ovens, you read reports on the amount of fuel used to burn people. There is no word which can possibly describe the state of mind in which we work – ‘graveyard atmosphere,’ ‘mood of the grave’ – all these do not express the experiences and thoughts evoked by our work.”93 This kind of work-related depression also affected the most committed of the commission workers.94 Permanent workers could not allow themselves the luxury of the “healthy symptom” (a gezunder symptom)95 of forgetting. With a good portion of self-irony Feigenbaum remarked that it required no small amount of insanity and stubbornness for a survivor to work for the commissions voluntarily.96 Only the conviction of the ultimate necessity to document the atrocities for the sake of the dead and the generations to come and for the historical truth could compensate the commission workers for the agonizing effects of the work itself. An integral part of the commissions’ public relations work thus focused on convincing the survivors that methodical historical documentation would benefit their postwar lives and on harnessing the general interest in the re- 92 93 94 95 96 Beginnings. Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-Belsen and the British Zone in Germany, 1945–1950, Detroit 2002, and Atina Grossmann, Trauma, Memory, and Motherhood. Germans and Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-Nazi Germany, 1945–1949, in: Richard Bessel/Dirk Schumann (eds.), Life After Death. Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s, Cambridge 2003, 93–127. YIVO DPG, reel 13, frame 0195, A yor tsentrale historishe komisye in der amerikaner zone, daytshland [One year of Work of the Central Historical Commission in the U.S. Zone], January 1, 1947. YV M1P, folder 38, 6, report on the first conference of historical commissions in the U.S. Zone (Yiddish). A>IH CK>P, KH, folder 7, 44f., Noe Grüss, Dokumenty wrodzonej szlachetno?ci [Documents of Congenital Nobleness]. “Vu es vert gezamlt [. . .] a geshprekh mitn leyter fun der tsentraler historisher komisye in minkhn M.Y. Feygnboym” [Where things are being collected [. . .] an interview with the director of the Central Historical Commission in Munich, M.Y. Feigenbaum], in: Undzer Veg [Our Path], no. 57, December 6, 1946. YIVO DPG, reel 116, folder 1644, frame 1225, Work Report of the Regional Historical Commission [in Frankfurt]. See also YIVO DPG, reel 13, frame 0195, A yor tsentrale historishe komisye, January 1, 1947. YV M1P, folder 38, 2, report on the first conference of historical commissions in the U.S. Zone (Yiddish). Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 467 cent past for the systematic documentation work pursued by the historical commissions. To that end, the commissions launched an indefatigable and multifaceted “propaganda work” (propagande arbet) which used publications,97 appeals and posters,98 historical exhibitions,99 and essay writing contests100 and sent commission workers to establish personal contacts with the survivors.101 In France and Poland, “Societies of the Friends” were estab97 Most notable are the commissions’ own periodicals Fun Letstn Khurbn published by the Central Historical Commission in Munich and Le Monde Juif published by the CDJC. The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, which replaced the Central Jewish Historical Commission as of October 1, 1947, published Bleter far Geshikhte (Pages for History, as of 1948) and Biuletyn eydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute, as of 1950). In addition to the periodicals the commissions in France, Poland, Germany and Italy engaged in a multifaceted and comprehensive publication project of memoirs, local studies, collections of documents and photographs, the most productive being France with 20 and Poland with 40 publications until 1949. 98 This was most common in the DP camps and in Poland. These appeals usually called upon the survivors from specific villages, cities, regions, ghettos or camps as well as on people who could testify on certain criminals of war to give their testimonies at the historical commission in their vicinity. Or they made a general case for the duty of the survivors to give their testimonies for the sake of documenting the recent catastrophe. See, for example, YV M1P folder 2, frame 34, Bakantmakhung [Announcement]; YIVO DPA, reel 5, folder 148, frame 0799; YV M1P, folder 9, 11, Achtung! Bensheimer Jdn! [Attention! Jews of Bensheim!]; YV AM.1, folder 126, frame 0554, dated July 20, 1947, Fun der historisher komisye tsu ale partizaner! [From the Historical Commission to All Partisans!]; YIVO DPA, reel 5, frame 0968, Toyte klogn on – lebendike zogn eydes! [The Dead Accuse – The Living Give Testimonies!]. The commissions in Germany and Poland also used colored posters, cf. YV M1P folder 2, frames 36 and 37, and M1P-N as digital copies of the originals, see figure. 99 For example, on the occasion of the First Congress of the She’erit Hapletah on January 27, 1946, the Central Historical Commission prepared a historical exhibition for the delegates; see YV M1P folder 7I, frame 8, Di Centrale historisze komisje [The Central Historical Commission], September 3, 1946 (Yiddish with Latin characters). In the British Zone, the commissions in Belsen and Göttingen followed suit in July 1947, see Undzer veg in di freyheyt (barikht fun der oyzshtelung) [Our Path to Freedom. Report on the Exhibition], in: Undzer Shtime [Our Voice], vol. 22, August 20, 1947, 3–6. 100 This was mainly aimed at recording testimonies of children and youth. For example, the Central Historical Commission in Munich urged teachers in the Jewish schools of the U.S. Zone to support the historical commissions by assigning the students written exercises on the topic “My experiences of the Nazi occupation” (cf. YIVO DPG, reel 69, frame 1366). Likewise, the Central Historical Commission directed its efforts to adolescents in vocational training schools and youth groups and kibbutzim in the U.S. Zone and opened essay writing contests for children and youth. Cf. YIVO DPG reel 13, frame 0211 and VY O37, folder 8. Kurce instrukcjes far naj ensztanene Historisze Komisjes [Short Instructions for Newly Founded Historical Commissions] (Yiddish with Latin characters); YV M1P, file 7I, frame 15, work report for July 1946, August 27, 1946 (Yiddish). YV M1P folder 10 II, frame 15, Tsu ale kibbutzim in der amerikaner zone [To All Kibbutzim in the American Zone], and YV M1P, folder 9, frame 3, September 17 [1947]. 101 In the DP camps, the commissions saw it as their mission to have their co-workers address the larger public by touring the DP camps in a car provided by the AJDC, see, for example, 468 Laura Jockusch “Help to write the history of the latest destruction.” Poster advertising the work of the Central Historical Commission in Munich, 1947. Yad Vashem Archives M1P/689. YV M1P, folder 2, frame 14, Protocol of the Second Meeting of the Historical Commission in Munich, December 3, 1945 (Yiddish); YV M1P, folder 6II, frame 16, Arbets-instruktsyes far historishe komisyes [Instructions for Historical Commissions], January 27, 1947, 2, and YIVO DPG, reel 13, frame 0189, A yor tsentrale historishe komisye, January 1, 1947. Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 469 lished to raise funds, sell commission publications, and enhance public awareness among the larger Jewish community.102 This way the commissions persuaded several thousand survivors to make one-time or short-term contributions. In the years 1944–1949, they collected around 16,000 testimonies and questionnaires.103 As a comparison, when Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Visual History Foundation began its work in 1994, it planned to have interviewed 300,000 survivors by the year 2000. By spring 1998, the foundation had collected only close to 40,000 interviews, although it had a staff of 240 full-time employees and a 60 million dollar budget for the years 1995– 1998.104 The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University gathered 34,000 testimonies between 1981 and 1995.105 Bearing in mind that the Jewish historical commissions worked at a time of extreme material shortages in countries devastated by war, with interviewers and interviewees who were not only traumatized by their experiences but also worried about their most basic needs, such as food, housing, and physical safety, their achievements are extraordinary. Conclusion The case of the historical commissions and documentation centers shows that immediately after the liberation, Holocaust survivors began to document the recent cataclysm because they believed that historical documentation was crucial in the reconstruction process, since it best served the present and future political, material, and moral needs of the survivors: chronicling the tragedy was a way to commemorate the dead and assure that the account of the events be passed on to posterity. The activists also believed that the 102 The “Society of the Friends” was modeled upon YIVO. In France, historical research was less dependent on the support of the French Jewish community because the CDJC did not collect survivor testimonies; however, the CDJC staff faced the problem that French Jews did not read the historical works it published. In 1950, Schneersohn sought to improve the situation by adding a memorial and museum to the documentation center which was not well received by the community, mainly because under the impact of postwar anti-Semitism many French Jews wanted to keep a low profile as Jews in public. 103 A rough estimate: 5,000 testimonies in Poland, 2,540 in Germany, 800 in Italy, 7,000 questionnaires roughly, 15,400 testimonies and questionnaires between 1944 and 1949. According to Philip Friedman, Holocaust survivors in Europe collected a total of 18,000 testimonies until the end of the 1950s. Cf. Raul Hilberg, “I Was Not There,” in: Berel Lang (ed.), Writing and the Holocaust, New York 1988, 7–25, here 18. 104 Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, Ithaca/London 2006, 96–144, esp. 107–118. 105 Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow. In the Aftermath of the Holocaust, New York 1996, 133. 470 Laura Jockusch data collected would serve the prosecution of perpetrators, buttress claims for restitution, and facilitate the fight for Jewish rights and would further constitute the basis for future historical research. While the commissions differed in their emphases on history writing on the one hand, and the fight for justice on the other, they also differed in their larger self-perceptions. For the commission workers in the DP camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy, it was clear from the beginning that their stay in Europe was temporary and that they planned on continuing their work outside of Europe, preferably in the framework of an independent Jewish state. Documenting the atrocities provided a justification for the otherwise involuntary and prolonged sojourn on the “cursed soil” of Europe, of Germany in particular, and it was a vibrant affirmation of Jewish survival. The DP commissions dissolved in the late 1940s and early 1950s and handed their collections to what would become Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.106 However, apart from contributing the nucleus of the Yad Vashem archives, the work of the DP commissions did not find its continuation in Israel. This was due to the fact that the Yad Vashem leadership, most notably its first director, the historian Benzion Dinur, rejected the former DP commission activists as amateurs and did not want them to participate in Holocaust research in Israel which Dinur sought to establish as an academic field under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.107 As a committed Zionist, Dinur saw the Holocaust as the outcome of the archetypical antipathy of non-Jews toward Jews, which was inherent in the exilic Jewish existence. Therefore, he conceptualized research on the Holocaust within a broad framework of galut study and the history of anti-Semitism rather than focusing on the specific history and development of the Holocaust as had been the concern of the historical commissions in the DP camps.108 In France, those who had initiated the CDJC’s documentation work, predominantly Jews of Eastern European backgrounds who had come to France 106 In Germany, the commissions dissolved in the year 1949. While it is unclear where the collection of the British Zone went, the Central Historical Commission transferred its collection to Yad Vashem. Kaganowicz left Italy for Israel in 1949 and transferred his collection to Yad Vashem as well. Towia Frydman left Austria in 1952 and opened a documentation center in Haifa, giving parts of his collection to Yad Vashem. Simon Wiesenthal closed his documentation center in Linz in 1954 and gave his material to the Yad Vashem archives. 107 Boaz Cohen, The Birth Pangs of Holocaust Research in Israel, in: Yad Vashem Studies 33 (2005), 203–243, here 205. 108 David Engel, On Studying Jewish History in the Light of the Holocaust, Maurice and Corinne Greenberg Inaugural Lecture, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C., 2003, 8–13, and Roni Stauber, Lesson for this Generation. Holocaust and Heroism in Israeli Public Discourse in the 1950s, Jerusalem 2000, 82–95 and 171–181 (Hebrew). Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 471 prior to the First World War or in the interwar period, strongly identified with France’s culture and republican values. While the CDJC activists had initially aimed at collecting evidence in order to bring the perpetrators to justice, reclaim legal equality, and gain reparations for despoiled Jewish property, they increasingly came to focus on historical research. However, the CDJC never abandoned its pursuit of postwar justice and provided the French delegation at the Nuremberg Trials and other local French tribunals with documentary evidence from its archives. The CDJC’s research methods differed from those applied elsewhere in that they did not use the help of non-professional zamlers and did not rely on testimonies but used institutional records of the Germans and the Vichy regime. For the CDJC activists, narrating the story of wartime Jewish suffering – and Jewish participation in the Résistance, as they increasingly emphasized – was a means of integrating the Jewish narrative into the general French narrative of wartime suffering and resistance. It was also a means of reintegrating the survivors into their surrounding society. For the CDJC activists it was beyond question that they would continue their research in France, for they saw themselves primarily as Frenchmen while their Jewish identity was secondary. In 1956, a memorial and museum (Tombeau du Martyr Juif Inconnu, today Mémorial de la Shoah) was added to the documentation center and even though it initially did not meet the support of the French Jewish community, it gradually became a central lieu de mémoire for the French Jewry’s commemoration of the Holocaust.109 In Poland, the C>KH activists understood the murder of over three million Polish Jews as a national Jewish catastrophe which had exceeded the suffering of non-Jewish Poles. However, because they conceived themselves as a national minority in Poland, they deemed the Jewish tragedy an integral part of the history of Poland under German occupation. From the outset of its work, the C>KH had placed major emphasis on scholarship, continuing the social science-oriented approach to the study of the Jewish past developed by YIVO in interwar Poland, using the help of non-professional zamlers from all echelons of the Jewish community. In addition, the commission in NódU pursued the fight for justice. To that end, it closely collaborated with the High Commission for Research on German Crimes in Poland (Gjówna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce), established by the Polish Ministry of Justice in March 1945 to research German war crimes, and some of its co-workers testified at Polish trials against German war criminals. In 109 Annette Wieviorka, Jewish Identity in the First Accounts by Extermination Camp Survivors from France, in: Yale French Studies 85 (1994), 135–151, esp. 149–151, and idem, Un lieu de mémoire et d’histoire. Le Mémorial du Martyr juif inconnu, in: Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles 1–2 (1987), 107–132. 472 Laura Jockusch the summer of 1947, the NódU-based headquarters of the C>KH moved to Warsaw and as of October that year, the historical commission was replaced by the Jewish Historical Institute (eydowski Instytut Historyczny, >IH) Warsaw. Until 1949, the Institute maintained branches in NódU, Kraków, WrocBaw, Katowice, BiaBystok, Szczecin, and WaBbrzych and as of April 1948, the Institute also housed a Jewish museum in addition to its archives and research facilities.110 The growing repression of the Communist regime and the shrinking autonomy granted to the Jewish minority in Poland caused most of the former commission workers, especially those who were committed to scholarship and unwilling to compromise their scholarly standards by political agitation, to leave the country. By the early 1950s, most of the original staff of the C>KH had emigrated. Some found employment at Yad Vashem: Josef Kermisz as director of the archives, Nachman Blumental as researcher and editor, and Rachel Auerbach as head of the testimony division. Others continued their research in France, as MichaB Borwicz and Noe Grüss, in Germany, as Josef Wulf, and the United States as Philip Friedman, Isiah Trunk, and Hersz Wasser. The Institute in Warsaw was tolerated by the Communist authorities on the condition that it followed the general line of the state ideology. It widened the scope of its research and, rather than exclusively focusing on the Holocaust, its research covered the history of the millennium-long Jewish presence in Poland.111 Despite the fact that the commission activists had a clear notion that documenting the destruction of European Jews required the close collaboration of the Jewish documentation projects on a European-wide level, they did not manage to step beyond their local and national contexts. Given the instability of some of the research institutions – especially those in the DP camps – and the migration of most of the commission affiliates in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Poland, the first generation of khurbn forshers remained scattered over Europe, Israel, and the United Stated and those who continued their work beyond the 1950s worked in isolation from each other. In the long run, Israeli Holocaust research adopted approaches to studying the Jewish catastrophe which were similar to those of the khurbn forshung developed by the commissions and documentation centers in the immediate wake of the war. Unlike Holocaust research in Europe and the United States, 110 Archives of the AJDC New York, AR 45/54 file 729, Jewish Historical Institute in 1948, Report by the Polish Research and Information Service, New York, December 1948. 111 For an analysis of the C>KH and the Institute’s works in the larger context of Holocaust historiography in Poland, see Natalia Aleksiun, Polish Historiography of the Holocaust. Between Silence and Public Debate, in: German History 22 (2004), 406–432. On this widening of the research scope, see Josef Kermisz, Trois années d’activité de la Commission Centrale Historique et du l’Institut Historique Juif auprès du Comité Central des Juifs en Pologne, in: CDJC (ed.), Les Juifs en Europe (1939–1945), 140–144, here 144. Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1943–1949 473 which mainly concentrated on the perpetrators and their sources, Israeli Holocaust research focused on an internal Jewish perspective on the Nazi onslaught. It explored the Jewish responses to persecution and mass murder, studying in particular the behavior of the official Jewish leadership and the resistance activities of the Jewish underground, integrating both Jewish sources, such as testimonies and memoirs, as well as sources of the perpetrators. However, this was less the result of continuity in the work of former commission workers in Israel and their connections with Israeli researchers, but more a product of developments in Israeli society in the 1960s and 1970s. Initially, Benzion Dinur and his colleagues in Yad Vashem were extremely skeptical of the value of Rachel Auerbach’s testimony division and testimonies did not play an important role in Yad Vashem’s research.112 Only in the 1960s did “oral documentation” (ti‘ud be ‘al peh) become valued by academic historians in Israel. This change occurred under the impact of the Eichmann trial, which raised public awareness of the role of the witness and the potential value of oral testimony in presenting the history of the Holocaust.113 Thus, ultimately, the most significant legacy of the early postwar documentation projects in France, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy were their collections of Nazi documents which still constitute the archival basis for the academic field of Holocaust studies in Europe and Israel. The thousands of compiled survivor testimonies, their research questions and agendas formulated in the early postwar years, as well as their numerous publications have yet to be fully delved into and analyzed by historians and scholars of literature, cultural studies, and psychology. 112 On the history of Yad Vashem’s testimony division and Rachel Auerbach’s work see Boaz Cohen, Rachel Auerbach, Vad Vashem, and Israeli History, unpublished manuscript (to be published in Polin), 2–6, and on the criticism of Auerbach’s work by Benzion Dinur, see Orna Kenan, Between History and Memory. Israeli Historiography of the Holocaust. The Period of ‘Gestation’ from the Mid-1940s to the Eichmann Trial in 1961, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 2000, 166–168. 113 On the general developments of Holocaust research in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s see Boaz Cohen, Holocaust Research in Israel 1945–1980. Characteristics, Trends, Developments, Ph.D. dissertation, Bar-Ilan University, 2004, 241–328 (Hebrew).