Yad Vashem Studies

Yad Vashem Studies XXX

Yad Vashem Studies XXX - Table of Contents and Abstracts

For more than a decade scholars have been discovering new material relating to the Holocaust in previously sealed archives, especially in the former Soviet Union and communist-bloc countries. Many authors, utilizing this newly available treasure trove of documentation, have published numerous articles in recent years—in this journal as well as in others—based on this material. Volume 30 of Yad Vashem Studies is no exception in this regard. Sometimes, however, scholars discover an important document or come upon a story that actually has been staring us in the face for years. Such was the case with Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbors, published in its original Polish two years ago and engendering an ongoing heated debate in Poland and elsewhere ever since.

Survivor testimony on the murder of the Jews of Jedwabne, Radziłów, and Wąsosz in July 1941, by their Polish neighbors was available in Polish archives as early as 1945. Other documentation and published sources have become available over the years, from the late 1940s through the 1980s. Many Holocaust survivors have testified to the deep and widespread hostility of their Polish neighbors and countrymen during the Holocaust--along with individual cases of aid and rescue that were taken at great risk. Western scholars have tended to try to balance the bleak picture that many Holocaust survivors have painted, while Polish scholars have often tended to emphasize only the bright lights in the story.

And then along came Gross’s book. Does his book mean that scholars need to rewrite the history of the Holocaust in Poland? Not necessarily. But the controversy over the meaning of Gross’s discoveries is reflected in Volume 30 of Yad Vashem Studies in five brief articles. Anna Bikont looks at Jedwabne today and finds a community that has passed on its secrets from one generation to the next. This self-professed innocence continues to resonate across a significant part of Polish society, even as the Polish National Memory Institute’s findings of Polish complicity in the murder begin to be released. Dariusz Stola analyzes the event in Jedwabne and suggests a typology of behaviors of Polish protagonists within it—who played what role, and why? Daniel Blatman examines the bases of the debate on Jedwabne and Gross’s book and sees a dissonance between Polish and Jewish interests during the war that continues into different memories of the period. The debate on how the events at Jedwabne should be understood has affected both scholars and the general public, and concluding this volume’s look at Jedwabne is an exchange between two prominent historians—Tomasz Strzembosz and Israel Gutman. Their language and tone are themselves a reflection of how deeply the story revealed in Gross’s book has affected the discussion of the Holocaust in Poland, and, as such, how essential this discussion is.

This volume’s research articles focus on three periods: the 1930s and intellectuals’ attitudes toward Nazi anti-Jewish policy; Jews in the last year of the Holocaust; and aspects of postwar Jewish policy and attitudes regarding the Holocaust. The authors and reviewers in this volume include scholars from around the world—both senior and new.

One question that has troubled Holocaust research is the role of intellectual elites in the events. Béla Bodo and Graciela Ben-Dror look at two aspects of the attitudes of intellectual elites to Nazi policies toward Jews, especially in the 1930s. In both cases anti-Jewish sentiment was endemic and widespread. Yet whereas Bodo finds pervasive prejudice and measures against Jews and Mischlinge among German university administrations, faculties, and student bodies, Ben-Dror finds that Jews were not a major subject of discussion among Catholic intellectuals in Brazil. Similarly, where the German students and universities acted as a vanguard of Nazism and helped legitimize it and its policy toward Jews, for Brazilian Catholic thinkers, Jews were not a major theme and were not perceived as the cause of all the country’s ills.

Jews who survived into the last year of the war often could sense that the end was near and that there was hope for rescue or survival. The three articles on the last year of the war help show just how trapped the Jews were and how futile, though creative, their rescue efforts could be. Judit Molnár and Karl Liedke use extensive, newly-discovered Jewish and non-Jewish (Hungarian and German) documentation to probe two issues that have interested researchers for many years—the role of the Hungarian Jewish Council in the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, and the nature of forced labor for private enterprises in Nazi Germany. Molnár’s re-examination of the creation and activities of the Hungarian Jewish Council and its relations and contacts with both the government and the local Jewish councils shows futile attempts to intercede with the government in the face of conscious and deliberate Hungarian perpetration. Liedke’s examination of the small forced-labor camp in the Büssing truck factory in Braunschweig is a micro-history that sheds light on the inter-relations between private businesses and the SS, with their pool of Jewish slave laborers. Civilian employees of the firm personally selected the workers at Auschwitz in August 1944, and played a direct role in those slave laborers’ lives and deaths. Yehoshua Büchler’s article relates to the same time as Liedke—the summer of 1944—and the same starting point—Auschwitz—to relate the remarkable story of immigration certificates for Palestine sent to Jews in Auschwitz, one of them actually being delivered to the addressee.

Three subjects, in three countries (Israel, the U.S., and the USSR), are examined in the articles addressing postwar questions—commemoration, confronting the recent past in literature, and survivors’ immigration. Mordechai Altshuler uncovers years-long fervent wishes and energetic attempts by Soviet Jews across the USSR to set up memorials and monuments in order to commemorate Jews killed in the Holocaust. In their indefatigable efforts to establish lasting commemoration of their brethren, they maneuvered against the authorities’ opposition in an attempt to have memorials to the Jews established. Moolie Brog examines the first substantive ideas—during the war—for the establishment of a Yad Vashem memorial to the Jews killed in the Holocaust. Mordechai Shenhavi was the driving force behind these ideas, which began to be discussed in the summer of 1942. To a great extent his proposals reflected the nature of the community that was to commemorate those Jews. Avner Holtzman analyzes Hebrew literary works in the pre-state Yishuv and the State of Israel relating to survivors and the Holocaust. He finds that the classic stereotypical image of snobby sabras looking down at the survivors coming to Israel is not reflected in this literature. Haim Genizi looks at the attitude of the American Jewish Committee toward the admission of Nazi collaborators into the United States under the DP legislation of 1948-1950. He finds that the compromises and coalition-building designed to allow Jewish DPs into the United States also led to acceptance of Nazi collaborators into the country under the same legislation.

Review articles on five recent and important books, collectively addressing both the perpetrators and the victims, conclude this volume. Peter Longerich analyzes the contribution of Ian Kershaw’s monumental two-volume biography of Hitler (Hitler. 1889-1936: Hubris; and 1936-1945: Nemesis) to our understanding of the man and of the Nazi period in general. David Bankier takes the examination of Nazi Germany down to the ordinary people and their Faustian pact with the Gestapo in his review of Eric Johnson’s Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans. Joachim Neander looks at the five-volume collection of articles (Auschwitz 1940-1945 – Central Issues in the History of the Camp) on the camp that has come to symbolize the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Beate Meyer analyzes Doron Rabinovici’s book on the Vienna prototype of the Judenrat (Instanzen der Ohnmacht. Wien 1938-1945. Der Weg zum Judenrat). And, finally, Dan Michman examines Lieven Saerens’s Vreemdelingen in een wereldstad. Een geschiedenis van Antwerpen en zijn joodse bevolking (1880-1944) on the development and destruction of the Jewish community of Antwerp.

All of the articles in this volume offer cause for reflection—on the failure of intellectual elites to view more critically the ideologies, prejudices, and ultimate actions that they shared; on the frustrating futility, alongside the determined creativity, of many Jewish rescue attempts; on the vicissitudes of the Jews’ entrapment as reflected in the last year of the Holocaust; and on the difficulties in addressing postwar issues, including the distasteful compromises that at times needed to be struck and the struggle to make sense of the event and to begin finding ways to process the Holocaust in the collective memory. As reflected in Jedwabne then and now and in the analytical questions addressed in the articles and review essays in this volume, this confrontation and processing are still actively continuing.

David Silberklang