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Yad Vashem Studies XXXIII |
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Yad
Vashem Studies XXXIII - Table of Contents and Abstracts
Volume 33 of Yad Vashem Studies
is being published during the sixtieth-anniversary year of the end
of World War II and on the occasion of the opening of Yad Vashem’s
new museum complex. Indeed, our cover photograph was taken in the
immediate aftermath of the war and is currently exhibited in Yad
Vashem’s Holocaust History Museum.
Sixty years since the end of the
Holocaust, and sixty years on in the research, we might think that
scholars have already uncovered all the major documents and archives
relating to the Holocaust. With the opening of the archives in the
former Communist-bloc countries over the last fifteen years, much
important new material became accessible to researchers. Certainly,
it might be argued, we now know all the major aspects of the
Holocaust, and only some secondary details remain to complete the
story. Yet as the articles in this volume demonstrate, there is
still much important documentation to be discovered and analyzed and
entire stories that still have to be told.
Yad Vashem Studies
volume 33 is anchored on two foci--the Jews of
Warsaw; and postwar attitudes and memory of the Holocaust--along
with a variety of new research on a broad scope of subjects, review
articles, and letters that in themselves constitute a scholarly
discourse.
Whereas we might have thought that the
Warsaw ghetto and the major documentation on the Jews of Warsaw
under Nazi rule had already been thoroughly researched, two articles
in this volume present and analyze major new documentary discoveries
on Warsaw, while a third tells the story of the ŻZW (Jewish Military
Organization) in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Havi Ben-Sasson and Leah Preis have
discovered extensive missing sections from the well-known and
important diary of Avraham Lewin. The identification of these
sections is itself a fascinating detective story, while their
contents from mid-May through July 1942, on the eve of the major
deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka, constitute a contribution of
great importance to Holocaust scholarship. Lewin’s singular ability
to gather information and communicate it in writing, together with
his deep insight, is striking. His observations afford an unusual
window into the life and mood of the ghetto on the eve of the Great
Deportation, and they reflect the extensive information that Lewin
gathered.
Esther Farbstein has brought to our
attention the diary-memoir of Pnina Weiss, the wife of Avraham
Weiss, a member of the first Judenrat in Warsaw. Pnina Weiss
recorded notes during the events in the first weeks and months of
the occupation, and then wrote them out in longer form after she and
her family got out of Warsaw in early 1940. Her intimate knowledge
of early events in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and her fears for her
husband’s safety when he was summoned to a Shabbat-afternoon
Judenrat meeting with the Gestapo bring to light hitherto unknown
aspects of this early period. This also provides us with a rare
insight into the role of a prominent woman in the course of these
events.
Rounding out the section on the Jews of
Warsaw is Moshe Arens’s new research on the central role of the ŻZW
in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Although this organization’s
activities in the uprising have been mentioned in numerous sources,
little research has been done into the nature of its role in the
fighting. As Arens shows, the ŻZW’s part in the uprising was very
important, as they engaged German forces in what was certainly one
of the major battles.
In our last volume (32), Dariusz
Libionka analyzed the attitudes of Polish-Catholic intellectual
journals to the Jews in the 1930s, and found virulent antisemitism
in many of them. The Jews were described as “alien, hostile, and
dangerous.” In the present volume, Natalia Aleksiun examines the
attitudes of the Polish-Catholic Church to Jews in the immediate
postwar years and finds that attitudes changed little, even under
the impact of the devastation of Polish Jewry by the Holocaust. The
Church saw its struggle against the Communist takeover as
intertwined with its negative attitude toward Jews, and,
concomitantly, the needs of the surviving Jews were not taken into
account.
Alongside this examination of attitudes
toward Jews in postwar Poland, Sharon Kangisser Cohen draws a number
of interesting conclusions from her qualitative study of the
memories of hidden child survivors. She finds that hidden child
survivors continued to hide their experiences for fifty years. In a
sense, one of the lessons that many of them drew from the Holocaust
was the necessity for silence. Also, they were not encouraged after
the war to speak of their experiences. There were a number of
reasons for this--some unexpected--and the author analyzes them.
And, finally, in this section, Boaz
Cohen offers an analysis of the beginnings of scholarly Holocaust
research in Israel, within the context of efforts to create a joint
Yad Vashem-Hebrew University research institute. Cohen shows that
there was a clash between schools of thought represented by
survivors and by scholars at Hebrew University and that the
definition of Holocaust research required much discussion and
debate.
In addition to these foci, this volume’s
broad scope addresses the Holocaust in two East European towns
(Yehuda Bauer); the deportations from Italy (Liliana Picciotto);
Jewish rescue activities in Switzerland (Chaim Shalem); and new
approaches to reading diaries and memoirs (Amos Goldberg). Bauer
continues his monographic studies and analyses of the Holocaust in
smaller towns in his effort to encourage further research into this
relatively unexamined, yet central, arena of the Holocaust. In this
article Bauer engages in a comparative analysis of the Holocaust in
Buczacz, in pre-war eastern Galicia, and in Krzemeniec, in pre-war
Volhynia, and finds basic similarities as well as differences in
aspects of Nazi policies, the affiliation of the main implementers
of these policies, the conditions in which the Jews were forced to
live, and the reactions of Jews.
Liliana Picciotto analyzes and updates
the information and data regarding the deportations of Italian Jews
in 1943-44, while Chaim Shalem relates the fascinating story of the
rescue efforts of Chaim Yisrael Eiss, an ultra-Orthodox Jew who,
from his base in Switzerland, worked on behalf of a broader
constituency to obtain visas and passports for Jews to a variety of
countries. And, finally, Amos Goldberg suggests new and innovative
ways to read and understand autobiographical writing on the
Holocaust. He examines the disintegrative aspects of Holocaust
writing in diaries, which, he argues, mainstream research has
largely overlooked. Reading the diaries of the Holocaust requires a
new examination of the image of man, in order to confront the shocks
and upheavals to that image caused by the Holocaust.
The review articles on important new
books and a discourse on the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry in letters
to the editor round out this rich and varied volume. Richard Evans
analyzes Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the Final Solution,
on the development of Nazi policies toward Jews during the first
two-and-a-half years of the war, while Chava Baruch probes Tim
Cole’s Holocaust City, on the Nazi ghettoization policy in
Hungary. On the occasion of the publication of the Hebrew edition of
Ian Kershaw’s Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, Otto Dov Kulka
examines the author’s singular approach to analyzing and explaining
Hitler and his role in the murder of the Jews, while also addressing
the role of this book in Israeli historiography. Not all books on
the Holocaust are published in Hebrew editions, just as not all
books published in Hebrew are translated into other languages. Why
Kershaw’s book, and where does it fit into the Hebrew historiography
of the Holocaust? This is part of what Kulka discusses.
This volume closes with scholarly
discussions in letters from three people in reaction to articles on
the Holocaust in Hungary that appeared in our last volume: Yehuda
Bauer reacting to Randolph Braham’s article on rescue in Hungary;
Braham’s response; and Jehuda Deutsch’s reaction to László Karsai’s
article on postwar war crimes’ trials in Hungary.
All the articles,
reviews, and letters in this volume reflect only some of the many
aspects of the Holocaust that remain unclear or unknown. There is
much yet to be plumbed and analyzed and much yet to be researched.
Our collective knowledge is vast yet limited, with sources and
insights beckoning from both near and far. Whether in Warsaw or in
the shtetl; whether in Italy, Hungary, or Switzerland;
whether memory and attitudes in Poland, Israel, or among the Jews
themselves, survivors and those who did not survive, there is very
much still to be learned. It is to be hoped that the articles in
this volume can serve both as sources of information and as
inspirations to continue the pursuit of sources and knowledge on
this most enduringly shattering event in history. |
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| Copyright ©2004 Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority |