Livia Rothkirchen — In Memoriam

Several days before Passover 2013, the historian, Yad Vashem staff member, and former editor of Yad Vashem Studies, Dr. Livia Rothkirchen, passed away. Livia was a pioneering and important researcher in diverse fields, above all, the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia in its various respects; her reputation preceded her in this domain in Israel and the world over. Livia had been ill in recent years and found it difficult to connect with her admirers; consequently, she kept to herself. This was a harsh blow for her, her family, and all her acquaintances, who enjoyed hearing her views on controversial issues. Indeed, Livia always took a reasoned and clear position on any issue related to public values in Holocaust history and our lives today.

Livia Rothkirchen was born in 1922 to a family that owned land and vineyards, observed Jewish tradition, and sympathized with the Zionist idea. The family hailed from Sevljuš (Sevluš in the Jews’ pronunciation), a town in then Czechoslovakia. At the time Czechoslo vakia was composed of five provinces, the easternmost of which was Subcarpathian Rus’ (today part of Ukraine). Sevljuš was in the south-western part of this province, abutting Slovakia. In 1941, it had a population of 13,331, of whom 4,262 were Jewish.

Livia’s parents had five children — one son and four daughters. The son died suddenly at the age of twenty, his death shaking up the family. Livia was the third daughter. The vernacular at home was Hungarian, but German was occasionally heard as well. When the Republic of Czechoslovakia was established in 1918, the government schools in Subcarpathian Rus’ adopted Czech as the language of instruction. Livia’s consequent fluency in this language proved immensely useful to her later in life, when she pursued higher education in Prague. Her foundation in German from home served her well in her later high school studies in German as a foreign language.

Livia chose to attend high school at the gymnasium in nearby Chust, living with a “foster family” and going home on weekends. She began her studies in Czech, but when Hungary occupied Subcarpathian Rus’ in March 1939 the language of instruction and matriculation exams switched to Hungarian in one stroke. Not only did Livia navi- gate the transition successfully, it trained her to shift from language to language in thinking, study, and self-expression — a talent that would serve her well in her subsequent scholarly work. In 1942 Livia passed the matriculation exams in Hungarian but had no chance of being admitted to university in Hungary, which during the interwar period had established a numerus clausus for Jews. By then, too, Hungarian Jewry was already suffering under economic and social decrees, as well as compulsory “labor service” for Jewish men. The men were inducted into military units without weapons to carry out miscellaneous tasks for the army, and under the command of non-Jews, they were often subjected to harsh brutalities. Thousands of Jews lost their lives in the course of this service.

When Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, the Hungarians and the Germans marked the Jews of Subcarpathian Rus’ to be among the first for ghettoization and deportation to Auschwitz. The Rothkirchens’ and the Richters’ (the maternal family) turn for deportation came just before Shavuot, May 26, 1944. Along with hundreds of ghetto residents, they were marched, suitcases and all, to the railroad station, where they were packed into cattle cars (some 3,000 people — the number of victims in most transports out of Hungary) and taken to Auschwitz via Slovakia. When the train carrying the Rothkirchens stopped in Slovakia, Livia was sent out with an empty pail to fetch drinking water. Her father instructed her not to return to the train but relented when she began to cry in fear. Her parents perished; Livia and her three sisters survived the Holocaust.

After the war, the Soviet Union annexed Subcarpathian Rus’ and incorporated this territory into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, an act that prompted most Holocaust survivors in the area, including those from Sevljuš, to leave and cross into Czechoslovakia. The impending deportation  of the large German minority in the Czech Sudetenland, a population of some three million that had aided Nazi Germany, was expected to create a large inventory of vacant houses and factories. Indeed, no few survivors in Subcarpathian Rus’ seized the opportunity to settle there, albeit temporarily.

After the liberation, Livia and her three sisters returned to their hometown, Sevljuš, in the hope of finding some mementos with which to remember their parents. When their hopes were dashed, they settled in Prague and began to work for their livelihood until it became possible to leave for Israel. Livia was admitted to Charles University in Prague and obtained dormitory housing. Studying Russian and English language and literature, she received her Ph.D. in 1949 for a dissertation entitled “Modern England in the Light of J.B. Priestley’s Plays.” During her years of study in Prague, Livia became enamored with the city’s charm and continued to love Prague for the rest of her life. After completing her doctorate, Livia furthered her studies at Oxford University. Details about her stay and her activities there, however, are lacking.

Obtaining an exit visa from Czechoslovakia to Israel entailed a lengthy struggle; it took Livia, aided by her sisters in Israel, until 1956 to accomplish it. She settled in Jerusalem. By October of that year, she was already working at Yad Vashem and began to engage in research within two months. Enrolling in a Hebrew-language ulpan program even though she knew the language fairly well, she was privileged to have a special teacher — the author and poet Avigdor Hameiri (born in Hungary), whom she had admired before her emigration, and who subsequently was awarded the Israel Prize for Hebrew literature in 1968.

Livia Rothkirchen left her imprint on many areas of Holocaust research; here I wish to focus on three: research and writing; editing the scholarly journal Yad Vashem Studies; and delivering important documents and archives to Israel.

Livia’s first book, The Destruction of Slovak Jewry,1  was based on a collection of important documents that had made its way to Yad Vashem shortly before Livia reached Israel. The documentation had been gathered by the Documentation Department (Dokumentačná akcia) of the Slovakian Jewish Communities Center in Bratislava in preparation for the trials in Bratislava, starting in 1946, of the Slovakian war criminals (some of them German) who had been responsible for the Holocaust in that country. Photocopies of the documents were secretly collected at the Israel Legation in Prague and lay there for years until the early 1950s, when an opportunity arose to bring them to Israel. By the time Livia reached Israel, the documentation had been cataloged and recorded in the Yad Vashem Archives as Record Group M.5. Most of the 102 documents that she chose for inclusion in The Destruction of Slovak Jewry were taken from this record group. Twelve others originated in secret documentation from the German Foreign Ministry pertaining to Slovakian Jewry that were microfilmed and placed in the Yad Vashem Archives, and five were letters by activists in the “Working Group,” obtained from the Hechalutz Archives in Geneva and kept today at the Labor Archives in Tel Aviv.

Yad Vashem published Livia’s book as part of a series titled From the Yad Vashem Archives. The series was meant to bring to light documentation on the Holocaust, accompanied by a historical introduction and appropriate indices to facilitate their use. The Destruction of Slovak Jewry is a basic text in Holocaust history and has been quoted in all subsequent studies of importance. The 102 documents that Livia included in the book came with important explanatory notes that give evidence of Livia’s painstaking devotion as borne out by their clear and professional detail. These documents, published for the first time in this book, include the lengthy “eyewitness account of a young Jew from Slovakia recording the living conditions in the camp of Lublin-Majdanek and his experiences from the day of his deportation to the day he reached the Slovak frontier after escaping from the camp.”2 The testimony, written in the form of a letter, was reproduced in the middle of the war in Rabbi Armin Frieder’s 1942 diary (his diaries were deposited in Yad Vashem’s archive), the author’s name omitted due to concern for his personal safety. Today, we know that the escapee author was Dani (Dionys) Lenard of Žilina, who had been deported from Slovakia to Majdanek in early April 1942. In early June a rumor spread among the prisoners in Majdanek that their civilian clothing would be replaced with prisoner uniforms and Majdanek would be transformed into a concentration camp. Lenard planned to escape with a friend, but when the latter changed his mind at the last moment due to fear, he decided to flee to Slovakia on his own and did so successfully. He wrote to his sister in Sweden about his escape and his arrival in Slovakia in late June 1942. His sister survived the Holocaust in Sweden and emigrated to Israel. According to her testimony, Dani was afraid to remain in Slovakia and fled to Hungary, where his traces vanished.

Livia’s introduction  to this book was the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the Holocaust in Slovakia — an in-depth probe of the processes that culminated with the extermination of some 70,000 Slovakian Jews. The book carried the introduction in English as well, making it a basic text on the topic in Israel and the world over.3

The Destruction of Slovak Jewry was published in 1961 and, not surprisingly, it sold out quickly. It was the first of its type; the trailblazing and dedicated work invested in it was reflected in its quality and exactitude. The book was immensely helpful to researchers who wished to investigate the history of Slovak Jewry during the Holocaust; hardly any work on the subject is not based on it. I consult it as well. Livia was aware of the plaudits that the book earned and derived much satisfaction from them.

While writing The Destruction of Slovak Jewry, Livia worked in the Yad Vashem research division and also engaged in academic cataloging. In the 1960s she was officially appointed to the Yad Vashem research team. Among her activities, she delivered important documentation  to Yad Vashem relating to Czechoslovakia and Hungary, such as the archive of the Hungarian Zionist leader Ottó Komoly and documentation from Katrina Szenes (Hannah Szenes’s mother).

From her standpoint, however, the pinnacle of her work at Yad Vashem was her appointment as editor of Yad Vashem Studies, the institution’s scholarly journal and research flagship. She edited Yad Vashem Studies for fifteen years and published nine volumes (nos. 7–15) in Hebrew and English. During this period, the journal carried more than 100 articles, its academic quality improved immensely, and researchers all over the world began to regard being published in it as a prestigious achievement that would further their academic advancement. Among the leading foreign and Israeli researchers who published articles in this journal during Livia’s term as editor were Uwe Adam, Randolph Braham, Martin Broszat, Christopher Browning, John Conway, Louis de Jong, Isaiah Trunk, and Erika Weinzierl, alongside scholars such as Yehuda Bauer, Daniel Carpi, Yisrael Gutman,  Joseph Kermish, Uriel Tal, Aharon Weiss, and Leni Yahil. Livia’s initiatives and scientific meticulousness brought innovative studies to light and instigated thoroughgoing discussions, eventually establishing Yad Vashem Studies under her baton as an important international scholarly forum in its field.

It suffices to note only a few examples from the gamut of important articles to demonstrate her initiatives in publishing pioneering studies that triggered discussion on important  issues and were significantly ahead of their time. They include Nachman Blumenthal’s article on Adam Czerniaków’s diary concerning the Jewish leadership during the Holocaust; Isaiah’s Trunk’s and Aharon Weiss’s articles on the Judenräte; and Bela Vago on Ottó Komoly’s diaries.4 Most of these articles anticipated by many years the books that were published on these topics. On Jewish armed resistance and rescue responses, one may note Yisrael Gutman’s article on the inception of the armed resistance in the Warsaw ghetto and Yehuda Bauer’s on rescue operations via Vilna.5

Three of the most important articles on the evolution of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies were Uwe Adam on anti-Jewish legislation schemes in the early years of Nazi rule, Christopher Browning on the policies of the German Foreign Office between 1933 and 1940, and Martin Broszat on David Irving’s controversial book Hitler’s War.6  Livia initiated the publication of the last-mentioned article, which offered a pronouncedly functionalist analysis of the evolution of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies and touched off a turbulent debate. Pioneering articles were also published on the policies of the Axis states and the local populations toward the Jews, such as Randolph Braham’s on the first murder operations against Hungarian Jews at Kamenets-Podolsk and Délvidék.7  These are only a few examples of the rich harvest yielded by Livia’s initiatives, earning her an international reputation.

While editing the journal, Livia continued to engage in research and remained involved in delivering documentation to Yad Vashem. She published academic articles in many areas of study. A pioneer in research on Czechoslovakia and the Holocaust, she published articles about the government-in-exile, the Czech government in the Protectorate in Prague, and the Jewish leadership in Terezín, to name only a few.8 She was also a trailblazer in research on the death marches, the Vatican’s responses to the Holocaust, and the Holocaust in Subcarpathian Rus’.9 In all these topics, Livia was a pioneer, years ahead of the principal books that took up these matters.

The year 1973 saw the appearance of the Hebrew edition of The Catastrophe of European Jewry,  co-edited with Yisrael Gutman  and published in English in 1976. By dint of Livia’s  vast experience in academic editing, along with her international reputation and Israel Gutman’s international stature in research, the two of them managed to collect in this volume important research articles by the most renowned scholars in Israel and abroad, making it a basic text in Holocaust studies to this day.10

In Livia’s opinion her last book, The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust (English 2005, Hebrew 2008),11 was the research project of her life. As a world-renowned expert on the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia, Livia was the natural candidate to research and write this volume in the Comprehensive History of the Holocaust series, each title summarizing and analyzing Holocaust history in a specific country or on a main topic. One of the special features of this book is its broad investigation of the cultural background of the Jews and the Czech society that they inhabited. The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, who until the middle of the nineteenth century used German as their main vehicle of communication and artistic endeavor, began to produce works in Czech as an expression of their identification with the Czechs’ national independence struggle. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Zionist idea also attracted support among students, mainly those in Martin Buber’s circle, and their works expressed their yearning for Zion. Yehuda Bauer considers this book a “pioneering study” and lauds Livia for her ability “to span the field of prose, poetry, theatre, music, and the arts.” By describing the topic in this manner, Bauer says, “Livia prepares the reader for a more profound understanding of developments during the war years and the Holocaust.”12

According to historian Michael L. Miller, Livia’s first book and last book, published nearly forty-five years apart, should be considered two parts of one study: “Taken together, these two works provide an overarching history of the Holocaust in the former Czechoslovakia.”13

He continues:

Rothkirchen weaves much of the existing scholarship into a compelling narrative, and, in so doing, she also challenges some of the conventional views. Most importantly, she has written the first synthetic work in English on the Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia, ensuring that this will become the starting point and yardstick for any subsequent work on the topic.14

If it is true, as they say, that one does not die as long as one lives in the memories of the living, Livia Rothkirchen is yet assured longevity. The oeuvre she left behind guarantees it. May her memory be blessed.

Translated from the Hebrew by Naftali Greenwood

• 1. Livia Rothkirchen, The Destruction of Slovak Jewry: A Documentary History (He- brew with English Introduction) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1961).
• 2. Ibid., pp. 166–204.
• 3. Ibid., pp. vii–li.
• 4. Nachman Blumenthal, “A Martyr or a Hero? Reflections on the Diary of Adam Czerniakow,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 7 (1968), pp. 165–171; Isaiah Trunk, “The Organizational Structure of the Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe, ibid., pp. 147–164; Aharon Weiss, “Jewish Leadership in Occupied Poland — Postures and Attitudes,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 12 (1977), pp. 335–365; Bela Vago, “Budapest Jewry in the Summer of 1944 — Otto Komoly’s Diaries,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 8 (1970), pp. 81–105.
• 5. Yisrael Gutman, “The Genesis of the Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Yad Va- shem Studies, vol. 9 (1973), pp. 29–70; Yehuda Bauer, “Rescue Operations through Vilna,” ibid., pp. 215–223.
• 6. Uwe D. Adam, “An Overall Plan for Anti-Jewish Legislation in the Third Reich?” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 11 (1976), pp. 33–55; Christopher R. Browning, “Referat Deutschland, Jewish Policy and the German Foreign Office 1933–1940,” Yad Va- shem Studies, vol. 12 (1977), pp. 37–73; Martin Broszat, “Hitler and the Genesis of the Final Solution: An Assessment of David Irving’s Theses,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 13 (1979), pp. 73–125.
• 7. Randolph L. Braham, “The Kamenets-Podolsk and Délvidék Massacres: Prelude to the Holocaust in Hungary,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 9 (1973), pp. 133–156.
• 8. Livia Rothkirchen, “The Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile: Jewish and Palestin- ian Aspects in the Light of the Documents,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 9 (1973), pp. 157–199; “Czech Attitudes toward the Jews during the Nazi Regime,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 13 (1979), pp. 287–320; “The Zionist Character of the ‘Self- Government’ of Terezin: A Study in Historiography,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 11 (1976), pp. 56–90; “The Protectorate Government and the ‘Jewish Question,’ 1939– 1941,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 27 (1999), pp. 331–362.
• 9. Livia Rothkirchen, “Vatican Policy and the ‘Jewish Problem’ in ‘Independent’ Slo- vakia 1939–1945,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 6 (1966), pp. 27–53; “The ‘Final Solu- tion’ in Its Last Stages,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 8 (1970), pp. 7–29; “Deep-Rooted Yet Alien: Some Aspects of the History of the Jews in Subcarpathian Ruthenia,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 12 (1977), pp. 147–191.
• 10. Yisrael Gutman and Livia Rothkirchen, eds., The Catastrophe of European Jewry: Antecedents, History, Reflections (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976); Hebrew edition published by Yad Vashem, 1973.
• 11. The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust (Jerusalem and Lincoln, NE: Yad Vashem and University of Nebraska Press, 2005); History of the Holocaust: Bohemia and Moravia (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008).
• 12. Yehuda Bauer, “Preface to the Hebrew Edition,” ibid., p. x.
• 13. Michael L. Miller, “Czech Holocaust or Holocaust in the Czech Lands?,” Yad Va- shem Studies, vol. 35, no. 1 (2007), p. 206.
• 14. Ibid., p. 219.