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Yad
Vashem Studies XXXII - Table of Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
Volume 32 of Yad Vashem Studies is dedicated to the memory of Emil
L. Fackenheim, one of the towering Jewish philosophical figures of
the twentieth century, who passed away in September 2003. Fackenheim
is perhaps best known popularly for coining the 614th
commandment--that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jews are
commanded to Jewish fidelity and to avoid granting Hitler a
posthumous victory by ceasing to be Jews. Of course, his
philosophical grappling with the Holocaust was far richer and more
complex than this early, major contribution to Jewish philosophical
thought on the era of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of
Israel. This volume opens, therefore, with Michael Morgan’s
analytical essay on the roots of Fackenheim’s thought in connection
to the Holocaust. He traces the development of that thought from its
origins and demonstrates that it commenced earlier than was
previously believed.
Fackenheim argued for the uniqueness of the Holocaust and saw in it
an epoch-making event, after which the world--as well as his
philosophical world--could never be the same. Among the many
disturbing aspects of the Holocaust with which he wrestled was the
radical evil it displayed. One of the stark expressions of that
radical evil was the Nazis’ dogged determination to murder the
Hungarian Jews, who were rapidly dispatched to their deaths by the
hundreds of thousands in 1944. With their empire collapsing on all
fronts and defeat staring them in the face, the Nazis still devoted
vast energies and much of their now-scarce resources in order to
accomplish their central goal--the completion of the murder of
European Jewry.
Sixty years since those events in Hungary, we devote nearly half of
volume 32 of Yad Vashem Studies to various aspects of the Holocaust
in that country. Six articles by both established and lesser-known
scholars break new ground in Holocaust research and analysis.
Randolph Braham reassesses rescue operations in Hungary, focusing on
six major operations. He makes penetrating, critical observations on
the motivations, objectives, strategies, and tactics of the Jewish,
Hungarian, and German participants involved. Most importantly,
Braham differentiates between what he sees as the myths and the
realities that were related in many postwar accounts of the rescue
of Jews in Hungary.
László Karsai presents a first analysis of war crimes’ trials in
Hungary by the Hungarian People’s Courts. He demonstrates that
neither the antisemitic right-wing claim that these were
“Jewish-Communist” courts engaged in a witch-hunt, nor the opposite
allegation that nearly all the war criminals escaped justice is
true. The most important criminals were prosecuted, while others,
especially lower-ranking perpetrators, escaped abroad. Judit Molnár
offers a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the implementation
of the anti-Jewish measures in two southern regional capitals in
Hungary--Szeged and Pécs. She examines the way in which the local
police and civilian officials received and carried out the
government’s decrees against the Jews. Although she finds
differences in attitudes (enthusiasm in implementing decrees and
deporting Jews versus a measure of circumspection), the end result
was the same. Ghettos were established, property was confiscated,
the Jews were deported, and few survived.
Guy Miron and Anna Szalai look at Jewish reactions to the
anti-Jewish laws passed in Hungary and, in the process, reveal a
great deal about Hungarian Jewish identity on the eve of the
Holocaust there. Miron shows that many Hungarian Jewish spokesmen
harked back to the supposed liberal history of Hungarian attitudes
toward Jews, grounded in the tradition of the first Hungarian king,
St. Stephen. They argued that negative attitudes toward Jews were
actually foreign imports. Yet ultimately not only the Zionists and
the Orthodox, but also the liberal Neologists were forced to
reassess the emancipation era and its vision of integration in order
to cope with the crisis of the late 1930s and early 1940s and to
invest the decline of emancipation with meaning. Szalai looks at the
written responses of Hungarian Jewish intellectuals to the
anti-Jewish laws of 1938-1942, and finds an ongoing effort to assert
Jewish integration and loyalty to Hungary. Yet the impact of the
Holocaust on writers that survived was profound in engendering a
complete re-evaluation of this approach after the war. Finally, Rita
Horvath examines the genre of the family novel in contemporary
Hungarian Jewish literature. This genre re-emerged in Hungarian
Jewish writing in direct response to the Holocaust, offering an
avenue to address Jewish history and family history—which have been
ruptured by the Holocaust, yet continue.
Three articles in this volume relate to Polish-Jewish relations and
interactions before and during the Holocaust. Dariusz Libionka’s
analysis of the attitudes of the Polish Catholic intellectual press
toward the Jews in the 1930s makes for devastating reading. The Jews
were viewed as an existential threat to Poland, and the writers
looked for “solutions” to this problem. The Jews were portrayed as
alien, hostile, and dangerous, and the struggle against them was
therefore a national duty. The language of this press became
increasingly martial and strident, while any accusation of
persecution of Jews in Poland was rejected as completely groundless
“insinuations” that stemmed from Jewish “perfidy.” Ultimately, the
Catholic intellectual press was instrumental in disseminating
anti-Jewish stereotypes and mythologizing reality.
Felicja Karay discusses the fascinating and strange case of the
HASAG-Kielce forced-labor camp. The commandant was described by some
Jewish inmates as “almost a father,” while Polish inmates remember
him and the camp in almost uniformly negative terms. Karay traces
the origins of these surprisingly vastly different testimonies and
tries to arrive at the truth regarding this camp. Edward Kossoy
tells the remarkable story of a group of 400 Jewish prisoners in the
Gęsiówka camp in Warsaw, who were liberated by a volunteer Polish
force during the first days of the Polish uprising in Warsaw in
August 1944. Most of these Jews immediately joined the uprising and
later fell in battle.
Three articles address the impact of new battlegrounds on the
Holocaust as perceived from three different perspectives--the
Germans, the Jews, and the Allies. Dan Michman returns to one of the
best-known documents from the Holocaust--Heydrich’s Schnellbrief--and
asks the simple yet heretofore unaddressed question: why was it
written? Michman’s conclusion fits well with our understanding of
several other pivotal documents from the Holocaust and sheds light
on the Schnellbrief. The late Raquel Hodara analyzes the activities
and reactions of Polish Jewish women to the Nazis during the first
months of the occupation. This is a generally neglected period in
research on the Holocaust, but, in many ways, it provided a
formative experience for Polish Jews in their later reactions to
Nazi policies. The changes wrought in the Jewish woman’s familial
and societal role and the special dangers that she faced are a
significant factor in our understanding of Jewish responses to the
Holocaust. And finally, Nicholas Terry re-examines the level of
information and comprehension of the Holocaust in British military
intelligence circles during the first months of the systematic
murder of the Jews. Based on decodes of German police radio traffic
in 1941 and 1942, he disputes Richard Breitman’s earlier findings
and argues that these decodes did not provide British intelligence
with clear evidence of the murder of the Jews.
The volume concludes with five review articles on books by German,
American, and Israeli authors. Joachim Neander reviews three new
books on the SS economic administration and the forced labor that it
employed; Yaacov Lozowick reviews Isabel Heinemann’s book on the
SS-Race and Resettlement Main Office; Judith Baumel reviews Nechama
Tec’s book on women, men, and the Holocaust; Michael Berenbaum
reviews Dan Michman’s book on Holocaust historiography from a Jewish
perspective; and Nathan Cohen reviews the encyclopedia of Holocaust
literature edited by Lillian Kremer.
Two important aspects of the Holocaust that are highlighted in the
contents of this volume--the Holocaust in Hungary and the
individual--are reflected in the cover photos. Sándor Markovits’s
pocket watch individualizes fourteen Hungarian Jews from Simleul
Silvaniei (Szilágysomlyó) whom the Nazis set out to murder in 1944,
in their last-ditch effort to complete the “Final Solution.” In the
background we see the faces of Hungarian Jews deported from the
Carpathian Mountains to Birkenau at nearly exactly the same moment
in history at which the Markovits family was deported.
Many of the articles in this volume are particularly concerned with
the activities of individuals in the Holocaust--whether the
criminals, the Jews in their struggles to cope with their
ever-worsening situation and with death, the Christian fellow
citizens and neighbors of the Jews, and the Allied officials. It is
a grim story that is told, yet with a few small dots of light
flickering in the deep darkness of those days. Emil Fackenheim
wrestled with the implications of the actions of such individuals,
as a pioneer in philosophical and theological reflection on the
Jewish responses to the Holocaust and on radical evil. It was
through the actions of individual victims that he was able to
propose avenues for Jewish responses in the era of Auschwitz and a
new Jerusalem (as he referred to it).
Emil Fackenheim was a close personal friend and a mentor, as well as
a deep and challenging thinker. His monumental contribution to
post-Holocaust thought will be sorely missed, as will his burning
desire to make the world a better place.
David Silberklang |
