As we were completing the editing of Yad Vashem Studies, volume 41, number 1, the journal’s former editor, Livia Rothkirchen passed away. This issue is dedicated to her memory. Livia Rothkirchen was an important and pioneering historian of the Holocaust, whose expertise regarding Czechoslovakia and its component parts, as well as many other aspects of the Holocaust was renowned. Livia edited Yad Vashem Studies for fifteen years, and she played a major role in firmly establishing its place on the international scholarly map. After she retired from editing Yad Vashem Studies in 1983, she wrote and lectured widely and set out to research and write the Bohemia and Moravia volume of Yad Vashem’s Comprehensive History of the Holocaust. The fall of communism in Czechoslovakia enabled her to access archives that had been previously closed to scholars, and the result was a groundbreaking book on the subject. I had the privilege of knowing Livia during her last years as editor, and benefited from many conversations with her over the years afterward. One of her last articles, on the Czech government in the “Protectorate,” was published in Yad Vashem Studies, volume 27 (1999). Livia was a scholar and editor of the highest and most exacting standards, and hers was a hard act to follow. In this volume as in all others, we have tried to maintain the standards that she set so many years ago. This volume of Yad Vashem Studies opens with an article by Gila Fatran on Livia Rothkirchen and her work.
The research section of this issue includes five articles by scholars of a wide range of experience, from the doyen of research on Hungary, Randolph Braham, who was one of the early international scholars who published in Yad Vashem Studies during Livia Rothkirchen’s editorship, to Yuri Radchenko, a recently minted, young PhD graduate from Ukraine. The review articles themselves are historiographical discussions on various central aspects of the Holocaust: the person and thinking of Heinrich Himmler, recent research on Polish attitudes toward Jews during the Holocaust, debates regarding Vichy, and the singular and little-known genre of personal survivor accounts of ultraOrthodox rabbis.
The research section opens with Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s anthropological analysis of the participants in the Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946. She applies Victor Turner’s four-phased concept of social drama to a history of the Kielce pogrom in order to illuminate how and why it developed as it did, and who was involved. Turner’s analysis proceeds from a breach of some relationship regarded as crucial in the social group, through a rapidly mounting crisis, to the application of legal means of redress, and on to the final stage of either a public expression of reconciliation or schism. The internal postwar conflict in Poland that claimed thousands of lives was resolved in a sense by turning the aggression toward “Judeo-communism.” Although most of the Jews of Poland were dead, the remnant became conspicuous in the eyes of the general population as a result of the rights granted them by the provisional government in July 1944. This previously unfamiliar “visibility” of Jews, as manifested in the positions that some of them received in administration, the police, and the army, led to the widespread belief that Jews were “overrepresented” in these fields. The notion of a “Judeo-communism” plot to undermine independent Poland fell on fertile soil. As a result, three competing varieties of antisemitism — the traditional/religious, the racist/national, and the leftist — came together at Kielce, and participation in the pogrom was widespread, cutting across party and other affiliation lines.
Two articles look at police forces’ roles in the Holocaust: Yuri Radchenko on the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Kharkiv, and Stefan Klemp on the German Schupo in northern Italy. Radchenko was able to access previously untapped archival material in Kharkiv in order to present a profile and analysis of the Auxiliary Police in this region of Eastern Ukraine that was never attached to the Germans’ Reichskommissariat Ukraine administrative region. Radchenko finds that the various Ukrainian and Russian nationalists who tried to infiltrate and influence these forces met with only limited success. Interestingly, the competing and sometimes battling factions of the Ukrainian nationalist OUN in Western Ukraine often worked together in Kharkiv, almost as though they were unaware of the rivalry and animosity between the two groups. As elsewhere, the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in this region were deeply involved in the persecution, spoliation, and murder of the Jews, but unlike Western Ukraine, where Ukrainians were involved in murdering Jews from the first days of the German occupation, in the Kharkiv region their involvement began mainly in later 1942. The evidence indicates that these policemen participated in the murder of the Jews largely out of conformist rather than ideological motivations. A steady income was another significant motivating factor for many of these policemen.
Stefan Klemp demonstrates clearly that German policemen who served as guards on deportation trains from Italy to Auschwitz were witnesses to the murder of Jews and were well aware of the fate of the people in the cattle cars whom they accompanied from northern Italy. Moreover, the deportation escort job was highly desirable among the policemen because it usually gave them a few days’ home leave in Germany after the deportation run was completed. In this regard, both Radchenko and Klemp engage in the discussion regarding the perpetrators’ motivations, and their findings give us much food for thought. What emerges from their research is that a steady income or a few days of furlough were sufficient motivation to willingly play an active role in genocide. Klemp also looks at the social and regional profiles of the policemen, finding that the southern German policemen were far more prone to testify openly than their northern German counterparts, although the files do not provide sufficient data to reach conclusions as to why this was the case.
Randolph Braham undertakes an ambitious and necessary project — a comparative analysis of the policies toward Jews of six of Nazi Germany’s secondary allies: Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Braham notes that among the many factors that came into play to determine each country’s policies toward Jews and the Jews’ fate, the most important by far was the state leaders’ changing perception of Germany’s fortunes in the war. From his comparative analysis it is clear that the Jews living in the German-allied states that retained a broad measure of independence fared better during the Holocaust than those living in all other parts of Nazi-dominated Europe save Denmark. In the states that largely organized the deportation or direct murder of their own Jews — Croatia, Hungary, and Slovakia — the Jews fared worst, whereas the Jews of Old Romania owed their survival largely to luck, as Antonescu’s pragmatism and expediency in light of Germany’s waning fortunes in the war replaced the original ideologically driven plans to deport all the Jews. The remaining Jews came to be viewed as a bargaining chip and possible source of income. By contrast, the indigenous Jews of Bulgaria and Finland owed their survival to the independence of these countries and to the basic decency of their respective Christian populations.
Joel Zisenwine examines a completely different aspect of the events — the timing and extent of knowledge of British intelligence regarding the gas chambers. Whereas Allied leaders had publicly condemned the Germans in December 1942 for the murder of the Jews, they did not have clear intelligence regarding the mass murder in gas chambers until much later. In part the reason for this was connected to the fact that policy makers never made gathering intelligence about the murder of the Jews an operational priority. In addition, the intelligence coming in was not always clear about the gas chambers’ locations or purpose, and so the compartmentalized intelligence community failed to grasp in real time one of the emblematic elements that made the Holocaust what it was. They did not fully internalize the nature of the “Final Solution,” or the existence of extermination centers that made gassing their main instrument of murder. Such things were seen as inconceivable and hence the intelligence information about them was viewed as hyperbole that could be and was dismissed. In Zisenwine’s assessment, the intelligence community was influenced by the wartime goals its chief “consumers,” the senior policy and decision makers, whom it in turn misled with its faulty intelligence assessments and reports. When did they actually “know”? It was probably only after it was all over.
Omer Bartov reviews Peter Longerich’s massive biography of the head of the SS and police in Heinrich Himmler: A Life, and finds it to be a very important book for all scholars of the Holocaust. Bartov focuses especially on Longerich’s analysis of Himmler’s peculiar notion of decency — preserving German blood, values, and morality — that served as justification for mass crimes and genocide. This notion of decency helped inoculate the SS against the horrors of the atrocities they committed.
Samuel Kassow reviews three recent books on rural Polish attitudes toward Jews during the Holocaust: Jan Grabowski, Judenjagd: Polowanie na Żydów 1942–1945. Studium Dziejów Pewnego Powiatu; Barbara Engelking, Jest Taki Piękny Słoneczny Dzień: Losy Żydów Szukujących Ratunku na Wsi Polskiej 1942–1945; and Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, eds., Zarys Krajobrazu: Wieś Polska wobec Zagłady Żydów 1942–1945. He sees these books as a landmark of Polish scholarship on the Holocaust, providing an incisive and sensitive analysis of the betrayal encountered by so many Jews who fought for survival in the Polish countryside. In most cases the Poles who denounced Jews, turned them in, or killed them in rural areas were respected, decent, hard-working men in their villages. Similarly, these books shed much light on the negative roles played by the Armia Krajowa and Peasant Battalions armed undergrounds, as well as by the Polish Blue Police. Kassow also provides a deeply insightful analysis of the place of these studies in the development of Poland’s confrontation with the legacy of the Holocaust.
Laurent Joly and Sanford Gutman review recent books on Vichy: Joly writes on Alain Michel’s Vichy et la Shoah: Enquête sur le paradoxe français; Gutman on Julie Fette, Exclusions: Practicing Prejudice in Vichy France; and Shannon L. Fogg, The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Undesirables, and Strangers. Joly is very critical of Michel’s analysis of Vichy’s role regarding the deportation of Jews from France. Contrary to Michel’s belief that despite Vichy’s collaboration, the regime helped save most of the country’s Jews, Joly argues that Vichy’s chief crime was precisely in deporting the Jews who were not citizens, thereby trampling elementary principles of the right of asylum and basic human decency, in favor of pursuing a policy of national regeneration and collaboration. Gutman praises Fette for her analysis of the roles of the medical and legal professions before and during the war in excluding Jews, and Fogg for her insights into the rural region of Limousin, where personal, material interests determined the country people’s actions more than xenophobia or antisemitism. Taken together with the article by Kassow, we have the beginning of a basis for a comparative analysis of rural attitudes toward Jews, and together with the articles by Radchenko and Klemp, we can look toward a broader comparative analysis of motivations of various actors during the Holocaust.
Gershon Greenberg’s review article of Esther Farbstein’s The Forgotten Memoirs: Moving Personal Accounts from Rabbis Who Survived the Holocaust, takes us into a world unfamiliar to most readers of Yad Vashem Studies, yet central to our understanding of the responses of many Jews to the Holocaust. The book collates the prefaces of rabbinic books by ultra-Orthodox survivors as an independent genre of literature, which Greenberg sees as nothing less than brilliant. The often wrenching memoirs in these prefaces present personal accounts and the Halakhic thinking that arose both during the events and in reflection afterward.
Many years ago, after I had put out several volumes of Yad Vashem Studies, Livia Rothkirchen stepped into my office for a chat, making a point of praising the journal. We hope that the variety, cuttingedge nature, and international in-depth discussion engaged in by the authors in this issue — writing in five languages in six countries — are a fitting tribute to Livia Rothkirchen’s legacy.
