After the Holocaust

Challenging the Myth of Silence

David Cesarani, Eric J. Sundquist, David Cesarani, Eric J. Sundquist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136631719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

For the last decade scholars have been questioning the idea that the Holocaust was not talked about in any way until well into the 1970s. After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence is the first collection of authoritative, original scholarship to expose a serious misreading of the past on which, controversially, the claims for a 'Holocaust industry' rest. Taking an international approach this bold new book exposes the myth and opens the way for a sweeping reassessment of Jewish life in the postwar era, a life lived in the pervasive, shared awareness that Jews had narrowly survived a catastrophe that had engulfed humanity as a whole but claimed two-thirds of their number.

The chapters include:

• 
  
  

• an overview of the efforts by survivor historians and memoir writers to inform the world of the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews of Europe

• 
  
  

• an evaluation of the work of survivor-historians and memoir writers

• 
  
  

• new light on the Jewish historical commissions and the Jewish documentation centres

• 
  
  

• studies of David Boder, a Russian born psychologist who recorded searing interviews with survivors, and the work of philosophers, social thinkers and theologians

• 
  
  

• theatrical productions by survivors and the first films on the theme made in Hollywood

• 
  
  

• how the Holocaust had an impact on the everyday life of Jews in the USA

• 
  
  

• and a discussion of the different types, and meanings, of 'silence'.

A breakthrough volume in the debate about the 'Myth of Silence', this is a must for all students of Holocaust and genocide.

1

CHALLENGING THE ‘MYTH OF SILENCE’

Postwar Responses to the Destruction of European Jewry

David Cesarani

Jews began documenting Nazi policies of racial persecution and the destruction of their communities in Europe even while these horrors were occurring. This was not simply a passive reaction, chronicling their fate as it was played out. Acting individually and collectively they also made Herculean efforts to disseminate the information or at least to preserve it for a time when it could be used. The work of the Oyneg Shabes group in Warsaw is the most famous example. Tragically, as Samuel Kassow observes, Oyneg Shabes ‘had more luck in saving documents than in saving people’.¹

The Centre de Documentation Juive in France was more fortunate. It was the brainchild of Isaac Schneersohn, an Orthodox Jew of distinguished rabbinic lineage who had fled from German-occupied Paris to Grenoble. In April 1943 he called a meeting of Jewish organizations and convinced them that it was essential to chronicle the depredations of the Vichy Regime and the Germans so as to provide a basis for restitution proceedings and retribution after the war. However, little could be achieved under wartime conditions. In December 1944, Schneersohn resumed operations in liberated Paris. He was assisted by a small team of gifted young men, some with academic (though not necessarily historical) training, including Leon Poliakov and Joseph Billig. Within a short time the centre, renamed the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) published several groundbreaking collections documenting Vichy and German anti-Jewish measures.²

Schneersohn was a shrewd political operator. He realized the importance of forging links with the French state and put the Centre’s resources at the disposal of the French delegation to the Nuremberg Tribunal. This co-operation paid dividends. One of the French prosecutors, Henri Monneray, ensured that the Centre received the documentation assembled to support the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. By 1949 the CDJC had amassed several tons of this material.³

The same sense of history animated the survivors of Polish Jewry. As early as August 1944 Philip Friedman, a historian of pre-war eminence, and several others with historical training set up a Jewish Historical Commission in Lublin. Its immediate aim was to collect eye-witness testimony from Jewish survivors to supply evidence for postwar trials and to ensure that the Polish authorities were fully appraised of Jewish suffering and losses under the German occupation. Like Schneersohn, the Commission realized the importance of cooperating with state authorities in war crimes investigations, both to further the achievement of justice and to legitimate its own activity.⁴

In February 1945, the Commission became a branch of the officially recognized Central Committee of Polish Jews. Friedman was appointed director. The founders were now able to network a number of other committees that had sprung up in newly liberated cities. At its height, the central historical commission presided over 25 branches and employed around 100 staff. Amongst the professionally trained historians working alongside Philip Friedman were Rachel Auerbach and Hersz Wasser, the sole survivors of Oyneg Shabes; Josef Kermisz; Natan Blumental; Artur Eisenbach; Michel Borwicz; Isaiah Trunk; Nella Rost; and Josef Wulf. All would go on to make major contributions to historical research. Between 1944 and 1949, the commission distributed numerous questionnaires and conducted about 5,000 interviews. Given that the number of survivors of the camps and ghettos in Poland was 40,000–50,000, this demonstrates a significant willingness to record and talk, but certainly not ‘silence’.⁵

Under Friedman’s direction, the central commission made a great effort to recover hidden Jewish archives. With the assistance of the official Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland it also amassed captured German records. Commission members participated in the state investigations at Auschwitz, Chelmno and Treblinka. They supplied material to the Polish delegation at Nuremberg and were essential to the subsequent prosecution of Hans Biebow and Rudolf Hoess. At the same time, they churned out publications at a staggering rate. A visitor from America, Jacob Pat, recalled that ‘They all work in a kind of fever, as if they feared that every day, every hour’s delay, might make them late.’ If to some in the West the death camps remained shrouded in mystery, it was not for lack of effort by Polish Jewish historians.⁶

A parallel movement developed amongst Jewish survivors in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps in allied-occupied western Germany. The first historical commission there was initiated in October 1945 at Hohne-Belsen, in the British Zone. A month later a commission was established in Munich in the American Zone. They soon spread. At their greatest extent there were 47 historical commissions in both zones, employing well over 60 people. About 40 were based in Munich which became the coordinating centre. As in Poland, the commission activists (who were mainly untrained), prioritized the collection of eye-witness accounts. Over a four-year period the Central Historical Commission collected 2,250 testimonies. It also drew up and distributed statistical surveys and questionnaires. Around 8,000 completed forms were returned to individual branches and collated centrally.⁷ The Munich office even published a journal, Fun Letsten Hurbn, dedicated to disseminating testimony and encouraging further submissions. Inaugurated in February 1946, it ran to ten issues, each of many pages, with a print-run of about 1,800. Copies were circulated throughout the Yiddish-speaking world, reaching the USSR, France, Palestine, North and South America.⁸

The survivors of the Jewish partisan groups formed their own association, with the acronym PAHAH (from Partizanim, Hayalim, Halutzim – Hebrew for partisans, soldiers, pioneers), and used the Jewish DP journal Farn Folk as a vehicle for publishing testimony and accounts of armed Jewish resistance. The story of Tuvia Bielski appeared there as early as 1946. PAHAH accumulated no fewer than 700 biographies of individual resisters and 100 depositions. These reports in Yiddish were quickly picked up and translated into English by the first historians of Jewish resistance. Several appeared in the pioneering anthology, The Root and the Bough, edited by Leo Schwarz and they supplied much of the material for Marie Syrkin’s history of Jewish resistance, Blessed is the Match, which appeared in 1948.⁹

For other survivors, like Tuvia Friedman in Vienna, and Simon Wiesenthal in Linz, the impulse to collect documents and to amass depositions came from the hope of achieving retribution. Their work may have been eccentric and unprofessional but it resulted in the capture of significant information that later historians would utilize.¹⁰ In Italy the drive towards historical research began with inquiries into the fate of the Jews deported from Italian territory. A few months after Rome was liberated Colonel Massimo Adolfo Vitale established the Comitato Ricerche Deportati Ebrei (CRDE) under the auspices of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities. His methods were rather erratic but gradually the CRDE accumulated an impressive archive. With the assistance of the Italian Ministry of Justice, in March 1947 Vitale traveled to Cracow to attend the trial of Rudolf Hoess. While there he obtained an interview with Hoess and collected important documents from the Polish prosecution team. On this basis he was able to compile the first account of Auschwitz to be made available in Italian. Vitale also arranged for over 190 testimonies to be taken from Italian Jewish survivors (nearly a third of the total).¹¹

Efforts at documentation and the collection of testimony were almost ubiquitous, spanning areas under Soviet influence, countries of the Atlantic alliance, and former neutrals. In Budapest, the National Relief Committee for deportees in Hungary (DEGOB) established an office which eventually employed around 30 interviewers who took depositions from over 3,600 Jewish survivors of forced labour, ghettoisation and deportation.¹² In London, staff at the Central Jewish Information Office (later known as the Wiener Library) sporadically collected eye-witness statements, some to assist war crimes investigations. They also published half a dozen testimonies during 1945–46.¹³ There was even a centre in Sweden where Nella Rost set up a small unit to document the rescue efforts of Norwegians, Danes and Swedes, and collected testimony from Jews evacuated to Sweden from camps in Germany in 1945.¹⁴

The transnational character of the catastrophe, the migration of survivor-historians, and the knowledge in each centre that similar efforts were underway elsewhere was a spur to international cooperation. Within a short time the work of historiography was globalized. Philip Friedman was possibly the first to realize the potential and importance of establishing cross-border networks. In July 1947, the Yad Vashem Foundation convened a conference in Jerusalem to discuss the progress of research and to establish Jerusalem’s claim as the eventual repository for all relevant document collections. Due to the troubled state of Palestine few Europeans or Americans could attend. Nevertheless, Friedman was able to represent the historical commissions in Germany (where he now resided), Natan Blumental attended on behalf of the Polish historians, and the CDJC was represented.¹⁵

The early efforts of Yad Vashem to monopolize research did not deter Isaac Schneersohn from pursuing his own vision of making Paris the centre for scholarship and commemoration. At the invitation of the CDJC, between 30 November and 9 December 1947, 32 delegates representing Jewish historical commissions and research centres in 13 countries assembled in Paris for a conference. This gathering represents a crucial moment in the postwar research effort and the formation of an early historiography. For a short while it focused a transnational enterprise of remarkable dimensions. However, apart from unanimity that the record of Jewish resistance should be at the forefront of any joint efforts, the delegates could not find common ground. There was not even agreement on which language to use for their own discussions. Although the conference concluded with a resolution to set up a European coordinating committee, its members never met. Schneersohn was running short of funds and, in any case, the Jewish historical commissions proved to be transitory. Following the establishment of Israel, many of the historians emigrated and arranged for the archives to be sent to Yad Vashem. Others moved to America. Those who stayed in eastern Europe found their work suffocated by forced conformity to the Soviet version of the war.¹⁶

In hindsight the Paris conference marked the high point of early efforts to document the wartime catastrophe using the most modern methods of collective historical research, including the mobilization of grass roots activists and the writing of history on an industrial scale by teams of historians. It would be 40 years before a similar undertaking would be attempted. Yet the failure of the 1947 initiative and the disintegration of the historical commissions was not inevitable. Circumstances rather than an imposed or voluntary silence conspired to derail a promising bid to embark on a global historiography.¹⁷

Even under the best of conditions, time would have been needed to process the mass of raw material obtained by the commissions and documentation centres. Much of what they collected went into archives in New York, London, Paris, Warsaw and Jerusalem, where it was subject to the whims of archivists, fluctuating budgets, and fashions for historical research. It would necessarily take time before the stories locked away in these files would impinge further on public awareness. For this reason it is important to look at early memoirs, reports, and testimony that were published in Europe and to investigate their wider dissemination.

Despite the disruption of communications and disputed borders, authors, witnesses as well as manuscripts criss-crossed war-shattered Europe. With extraordinary speed, accounts by survivors from one country appeared in another, frequently translated into a third language. The westward migration of survivors itself aided the dissemination of information about events in Eastern Europe. Consequently, the focus of many of these accounts was overwhelmingly on Eastern Europe – ghettos, ma...