A Companion to the Holocaust

Simone Gigliotti, Hilary Earl, Simone Gigliotti, Hilary Earl

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781118970508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Holocaust

Provides a cutting-edge, nuanced, and multi-disciplinary picture of the Holocaust from local, transnational, continental, and global perspectives

Holocaust Studies is a dynamic field that encompasses discussions on human behavior, extremity, and moral action. A diverse range of disciplines – history, philosophy, literature, social psychology, anthropology, geography, amongst others –continue to make important contributions to its scholarship.

A Companion to the Holocaust provides exciting commentaries on current and emerging debates and identifies new connections for research. The text incorporates new language, geographies, and approaches to address the precursors of the Holocaust and examine its global consequences. A team of international contributors provides insightful and sophisticated analyses of current trends in Holocaust research that go far beyond common conceptions of the Holocaust's causes, unfolding and impact.

Scholars draw on their original research to interpret current, agenda-setting historical and historiographical debates on the Holocaust. Six broad sections cover wide-ranging topics such as new debates about Nazi perpetrators, arguments about the causes and places of persecution of Jews in Germany and Europe, and Jewish and non-Jewish responses to it, the use of forced labor in the German war economy, representations of the Holocaust witness, and many others. A masterful framing chapter sets the direction and tone of each section's themes. Comprising over thirty essays, this important addition to Holocaust studies:

• Offers a remarkable compendium of systematic, comparative, and precise analyses
• Covers areas and topics not included in any other companion of its type
• Examines the ongoing cultural, social, and political legacies of the Holocaust
• Includes discussions on non-European and non-Western geographies, inter-ethnic tensions, and violence

A Companion to the Holocaust is an essential resource for students and scholars of European, German, genocide, colonial and Jewish history, as well as those in the general humanities.

Theme 1
New Orientations and Topical Integrations

Chapter One
“Final Solution,” Holocaust, Shoah, or Genocide? From Separate to Integrated Histories

Devin O. Pendas

How we label things determines in part how we understand them. There is no name for the mass murder of European Jews in the 1940s that is not also simultaneously an interpretation. “Final Solution,” Holocaust, Shoah, Genocide: each of these implies a certain analysis of what happened and why. Thus the changing (and contested) names attached to the mass murder of European Jewry over the past seventy years also suggest shifts over time in how the event has been interpreted. Similarly, these names reflect a series of debates among historians about how best to analyze the destruction of Europe’s Jews. Some of these debates have been more or less resolved, but many persist and seem likely to continue for the foreseeable future. It can thus hardly be the goal of this chapter to resolve these debates or to offer a definitive interpretation of the mass murder. Rather, I want to trace, in broad terms, the trajectory of Holocaust historiography from the first Jewish histories of the Holocaust to today in order to give a sense of where the historiography stands now and how it got here.

The First Histories

Writing the history of the murder of Europe’s Jews started even before the killing itself stopped. Jews, professional historians and amateurs alike documented their lives under Nazi rule and sought to preserve those documents for posterity. To the extent possible, they also sought to document their deaths.¹ These early efforts were generally either archival or testimonial in nature. Although this means these efforts were focused in the first instance on collecting and preserving historical sources for use by later historians, such archival and testimonial endeavors also proffered some initial interpretations of the unfolding tragedy, either implicitly in their choice of what to collect and preserve or explicitly through narrative observation.

The most famous such archival effort was that led by Emanuel Ringelblum (1900–1944) in the Warsaw Ghetto.² Ringelblum was himself a trained historian, completing his PhD at Warsaw University in 1927. In 1923, Ringelblum was one of the co‐founders of the “Seminar on the History of the Jews in Poland,” which evolved into the Warsaw Commission for the History of the Jews of Poland and affiliated with the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilnius (YIVO). Precluded from a university career because he was Jewish, Ringelblum taught high school and wrote articles for Jewish newspapers and magazines. The archive began with personal notes that Ringelblum started to take with the outbreak of war in September 1939, but was officially founded as Oyneg Shabes (Sabbath Delight) on November 22, 1940. Ringelblum assembled a volunteer staff to supplement his own note taking and collecting activities. After the Germans began deporting Warsaw Jews to their deaths in Treblinka, members of Oyneg Shabes buried part of their archive in ten lead crates in August 1942, and a further three milk tins of material were buried near the end of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in February 1943. Much of this material was recovered after the war.

Operating in the tradition of YIVO, Oyneg Shabes was conceptualized from the start as an interdisciplinary research institute intended to document “all aspects of the history of Polish Jewry in the Second World War,” though with a strong focus on the social and cultural history of Polish Jews, a history from the bottom up. This explains the wide net cast by the collectors of Oyneg Shabes, who gathered an astonishing array of materials, ranging from official documents (both German and Jewish) and personal testimonies of Warsaw Jews from all walks of life to material objects from everyday life, underground newspapers and pamphlets, and photos and sketches. The goal of this wide‐ranging collection was to gather a sufficiently diverse source base to document the full range of life and death among Warsaw Jews under German rule.

In December 1943, Ringelblum expressed his hopes for the archive: “With a little peace, we may succeed in making sure that not a single fact about Jewish life in this time and place will be kept from the world.”³ This hope – of recording and documenting Jewish life and death under the Nazis for a future world, one that might perhaps make sense of it all – was shared by other Oyneg Shabes chroniclers. Sometime after September 1942, Gustawa Jarecka, who worked for the Warsaw Judenrat and copied out their documents for the archive, wrote a brief essay titled “The Last State of Resettlement Is Death.” She wrote:

The record must be hurled like a stone under history’s wheel in order to stop it….One can lose all hopes except the one – that the suffering and destruction of this war will make sense when they are looked at from a distant, historical perspective. From sufferings, unparalleled in history, from bloody tears and bloody sweat, a chronicle of days of hell is being composed which will help explain the historical reasons for why people came to think as they did and why regimes arose that [caused such suffering].⁴

In addition to documenting Jewish life, Ringelblum and his collaborators also intended, at least in principle, to analyze those documents and to draft a preliminary history of the Jews under Nazi rule. In mid‐1941, Oyneg Shabes began what they called the “Two and a Half Years” project, which was to provide a comprehensive overview of Polish Jewry during the war, covering economics, cultural life, and mutual aid.⁵ Ringelblum asked, “Two and a Half Years…which goals? A photograph of life. Not literature but science.”⁶ This scientific photograph of Jewish life during wartime was intended not just as a memorial, but as a foundation for rebuilding after the war. “What kind of social order will reign after the war and what lessons can our two‐and‐a‐half‐year experience teach us to prepare for the [postwar] era.”⁷ The core idea was that even the most horrific of experiences could offer useful lessons for rebuilding Jewish communities after the end of the war.

That was a rather optimistic, not to say naïve, reading of the situation in late 1941 and early 1942, even if it was still possible to believe that most Polish Jews would somehow survive the war until the major deportations of Warsaw Jews started in July 1942. As the full scope of the murder became clear, it was more difficult to maintain such optimism. Shortly before he was killed in Majdanek in the summer of 1943, Ringelblum’s prewar mentor and Oyneg Shabes collaborator, the historian Ignacy (Isaac) Schiper told a fellow inmate that “everything depends on who transmits our testament to future generations, on who writes the history of this period. History is usually written by the victor. What we know about murdered peoples is only what their murderers vaingloriously cared to say about them. Should our murderers be victorious, should they write the history of this war, our destruction will be presented as one of the most beautiful pages of world history, and future generations will pay tribute to them as dauntless crusaders.”⁸ The job of Jewish historians was to write an alternate history, a history of the murdered, not the murderers. The problem was that even if Jews survived to write such histories, they might not be believed. Schiper continued: “[I]f we write the history of this period and tears – and I firmly believe we will – who will believe us? Nobody will want to believe us, because our disaster is the disaster of the entire civilized world….We’ll have the thankless job of proving to a reluctant world that we are Abel, the murdered brother.”⁹ Schiper here raised a question that would challenge Jewish historians into the postwar period: who was to be the audience for histories of the murder of the Jews? Was it the Jews themselves, for their collective reconstruction, as was implied in Ringleblum’s vision for the “Two and a Half Years” project? Or should it be the broader, “c...