|
Yad Vashem Studies XXXI |
|
Yad
Vashem Studies XXXI - Table of Contents and Abstracts
What was it like to be a Jew during the
Holocaust? Nathan Cohen and Gershon Greenberg use heretofore-unknown
documents by Jewish individuals in order to gain insight into
specific aspects of the Jews’ experience under the Nazis. Cohen
presents the reader with extensive annotated excerpts from the diary
of Gabik Heller, a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy in the Vilna ghetto.
The diary entries cover the last weeks of the Vilna ghetto and
provide a window onto the mood in the ghetto as it breathed its
last. As the date of the liquidation of the ghetto approached, the
boy’s increasingly frantic search for rescue is palpable. He was not
a member of the underground, nor apparently an active member of a
youth movement, and so could not join those groups as they escaped
from the ghetto. He had no father, and his patron, the well-known
Hermann Kruk, could not save him. The last we read of Gabik is
written in his hiding place in the ghetto library, hours before the
final liquidation of the Jewish community of Vilna--and, apparently,
of Gabik Heller himself.
Gershon Greenberg brings to light and
analyzes the wartime writings and sermons of Rabbi Shlomo Zalman
Unsdorfer, one of the prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Bratislava.
Unsdorfer attempted to fit the events of the Holocaust into his
theology, but found it difficult to maintain a consistent view of
God’s role in history. He was able to offer the Jews of Bratislava
only theological advice for ways to approach God in the crisis. The
structure of his response to the Holocaust remained unchanged during
the war.
Yehuda Bauer’s monograph on the Jewish
community of Baranowicze during the Holocaust tells the story of the
fate of the town’s Jews during the Holocaust and sheds light on the
Holocaust in medium-sized and large towns in Europe. It can serve as
a model for such monographs and for delving into the stories of the
thousands of small and average-sized communities that were destroyed
in the Holocaust. Such research provides the basis for a comparative
analysis of the Holocaust in such communities.
Havi Ben-Sasson relates the little-known
story of the Christian communities of the Warsaw ghetto. These were
converts who did not regard themselves as Jews but were,
nonetheless, “racial” Jews by Nazi definition. They were largely
shunned by the Jewish community in the ghetto, and, although their
physical conditions were somewhat better than the other ghetto
residents, thanks to aid from the local Catholic Church apparatus,
they remained a community apart. Ultimately, their conversion did
not save them.
The above four articles tell four very
different stories. Yet the ultra-Orthodox rabbi, the secular
teenager, and the Christians in the ghetto, like all the Jews of the
town of Baranowicze, as well as Ringelblum and the fighters in the
Warsaw ghetto, had an identical fate prepared for them. They pursued
a variety of paths to cope with their plight--from Heller’s frantic
search for refuge, Unsdorfer’s search for a path to God amidst the
crisis, the Christians’ bewilderment at their shared fate with Jews,
the Baranowicze Jews who stayed and those who fled to the forests,
through to Ringelblum’s monumental archival work and the fighters
against all odds in the Warsaw ghetto. Yet the common denominator is
shared fate. To what extent there was also shared experience is left
to us, the readers, to decide.
Yad Vashem Studies continues its
examination of the roles of the neutral powers during the Holocaust
with Simon Erlanger’s critical look at Swiss labor camps for
refugees and Avraham Milgram’s examination of Portugal’s attitude
toward Jews of Portuguese nationality who were caught in the Nazi
web. Erlanger finds that the Swiss, in 1940, sent approximately
35,000 refugees, 70 percent of them Jews, to labor camps, all the
while preparing for their ultimate departure. The Swiss haven, he
shows, was limited. Milgram finds that the Portuguese government
expressed greater interest in the property of its Jewish nationals
in Europe than in their lives. In general, humanitarianism seems to
have been in short supply.
Armin Nolzen and Milka Zalmon take
us back to the 1930s in their examination of Nazi policies toward
Jews in the field and not only at the center. Nolzen looks at the
Nazi party’s anti-Jewish violence, which attacked the individuals
and their property, businesses and possessions. It was calculated
violence, and one of the goals was to integrate inactive party
members into the party apparatus.
Zalmon provides a case study of the interaction between the center
and the periphery in policy-making toward the Jews. The local
results in Burgenland were that it became the first part of the
Third Reich that could boast that it was “Judenrein.”
Yad Vashem Studies continues to open its pages to a variety of
approaches to examining the Holocaust. In this volume we have Iris
Milner’s penetrating look at Hebrew second-generation literature on
the subject. She finds that much of this literature in the 1980s and
1990s was sensitive and insightful and provides an avenue to
understanding some of the psychological wounds left by the event on
survivors and the shadow that it cast on some of their children.
Our
examination of the neutral powers and of the perpetrators continues
in the reviews. How was it that the Vatican was neutral to the
Holocaust? Walter Zwi Bacharach examines five recent books on the
Pope, the Vatican, and the Holocaust and finds that in many ways new
research affirms earlier ideas. Yaacov Lozowick reviews Michael
Wildt’s book on the officer corps of the RSHA, and George Browder
reviews Lozowick’s book on Eichmann and his staff, opening an
important discussion on our understanding of the perpetrators.
Finally, David Cesarani reviews the new book on Holocaust sources by
Raul Hilberg, to whom Cesarani refers as the “doyen” of Holocaust
historians.
Volume 31 of Yad Vashem Studies
features several changes alongside continuity. We have moved to a
soft-cover format, with a new cover design that includes a set
framework together with elements that will change from year to year
(cover picture and colors). Our page layout has also been slightly
modified. We hope that these changes will help make the book more
“user friendly” for the reader. At the same time our contents
continue to adhere to the high standards that are the hallmark of
Yad Vashem Studies.
Not all changes are easy. With this
volume Professor Leni Yahil has retired from the Editorial Board of
Yad Vashem Studies. Leni Yahil has meant so much to YVS
and to the study of the Holocaust in general that it is
difficult to confine her contribution to words. She has brought
remarkable breadth and depth to her reasoned consideration of
articles and issues discussed by the editorial board and has
peppered her comments with a sharp wit and a keen insight. Leni
Yahil is a voracious yet exceedingly careful reader, who was able to
read and analyze at a pace that put many of us to shame. And if I
may add a personal note, I have greatly appreciated Leni’s
friendship and help in dealing with innumerable matters that would
arise. She is the kind of co-worker of whom one can only wish for
more. It has been an honor to work alongside her and to learn from
her limitless knowledge and experience. Although she will be very
sorely missed on the editorial board, all of us in the field can be
grateful that we will continue to benefit from her rich output, as
she devotes herself to her writing.
Along with marking the sixtieth
anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the theme
of Holocaust commemoration in Israel this year is Jewish armed
resistance. The first organized Jewish armed resistance movement
arose in Gabik Heller’s Vilna ghetto on New Year’s Eve 1942, while
the largest and most famous ghetto uprising was that in Emanuel
Ringelblum’s Warsaw. Yet neither Heller nor the Christians in the
Warsaw ghetto could benefit from these developments. Similarly,
Rabbi Unsdorfer could not benefit from the fact that Jews
constituted a very high percentage of the Slovakian underground in
1944, nor could the large majority of the Jews of Baranowicze
benefit from the fact that the area around them eventually became a
center of anti-Nazi partisan activity. Armed resistance could not
save even Ringelblum or most of the actual fighters in Warsaw,
although their courage and their vast contribution to the human
spirit will continue to be etched in our collective memory.
The groundwork for the destruction of
the Jews that was laid in the 1930s by various Nazi measures,
including organized violence and expulsions, found its
follow-through in what the Jews experienced in the East European
ghettos. And the neutral powers offered little succor. Ringelblum
feared that the murder and destruction would be so total that
everything would be “lost without a trace.” This volume, like its
predecessors and like those that will follow in the future, is part
of the evidence that at least Ringelblum’s worst fears did not
materialize. At least part of what they sought to preserve and to
pass on has survived. And we are all here to examine it.
David Silberklang |
|
| Copyright ©2004 Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority |