Human relations during the Shoah — between Jews and their non-Jewish countrymen as well as among Jews — are one of the central themes that emerge from the articles and reviews in this issue of Yad Vashem Studies, 42:1.
The subject matter is varied and the geography far-flung, but questions of relations arise in every article. The articles address wartime Jewish eyewitness accounts, rabbinic responsa, camps, the destruction of a Jewish community and its ancient cemetery through the policies of local officials and Germans, and issues relating to Western Europe, Central Europe, the Balkans, and Israel, presenting both little known subjects and new documentation. The contributors come from six countries and provide insight from multiple perspectives.
Lea Prais analyzes two remarkable documents — the wartime accounts of Jakub Grojnowski (Szlamek) and Yaakov Krzepicki, escapees from the Chełmno and Treblinka extermination camps, respectively — as recorded for the Oneg Shabbat (Oyneg Shabbes) underground archive in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942. Grojnowski’s was the first report on Chełmno, and whereas Krzepicki’s was not the first to reach the ghetto, it was and still is by far the most comprehensive and detailed testimony describing Treblinka, stretching to 323 handwritten pages. Grojnowski’s testimony is known and has been discussed to some extent by scholars, though not in the detail or with the precision and insight that Prais brings to bear. But Krzepicki’s full testimony has yet to be analyzed, and as Prais shows, the innumerable crossed out words and lines, corrections, and marginal additions make the analysis all the more difficult. Prais engages in a multi-layered evaluation and comparison of the two documents, highlighting the different Jewish approaches of the two eyewitnesses. Whereas Szlamek’s account focuses on his fellow gravediggers in an atmosphere of compassion and mourning, Krzepicki’s is an outraged outcry against the surrender and sense of helplessness that overwhelmed the Jews on the way to the camp and in it. His comments are insightful, sometimes agonizing and sometimes harsh. The documents and the discussion are searing, leaving the reader with many questions.
Leon Saltiel recounts the story of the destruction of the vast, ancient Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki (Salonika) that began in December 1942, progressed rapidly, and was completed by the municipality after the end of World War II. More than 500,000 graves were uprooted; gravestones were used as building materials, even until very recently; and Aristotle University was built on the ruins of the cemetery. This is the first article to analyze this event in depth, probing the roles of the main German and Greek actors behind the decision to destroy the cemetery, the process of the destruction, and the subsequent reuse of the tombstones. Local and regional Greek officials, including Church figures, do not escape the scholar’s scrutiny, and their roles raise many multifaceted issues. The destruction of the Jewish cemetery of Thessaloniki serves as a case study for the triangular relations between the Jews, the German occupation forces, and the local elites on the eve of the deportations. The article utilizes heretofore unpublished documents from a wide variety of sources and clearly demonstrates that not only did the local leaders not protest against the deportations, but they initiated and benefitted from the destruction of the cemetery and subsequently turned a blind eye to their Jewish neighbors’ fate.
Judit Konya analyzes rabbinic responsa literature regarding local decrees in Hungary requiring the opening of businesses on Saturdays and their closing on Sundays. These decrees were clearly intended to harm Jews who observed the Sabbath, and therefore their plight engendered rabbinic efforts to find ways for Jews to cope with the threat to their ability to maintain a livelihood. Konya finds that the rabbinic discussion in Hungary in 1942 regarding these decrees was based on the understanding that they were economically based anti-Jewish measures, but not anti-religious. Although this was a convenient reading of the decrees, as Konya demonstrates, this understanding allowed the rabbis to reach a type of decision permitting Jewish shopkeepers to keep their shops open on Saturday under certain circumstances and restrictions. The basis underlying this decision was having a nonJewish business partner. In addition to its analysis of the responsa and their halakhic foundations and implications, the article analyzes the main responsum on this question in depth — that of Rabbi Israel Landau of Edelény. This erudite and informative close examination of his responsum and its broader context is illustrative of the importance of responsa literature as a historical source for understanding Jewish reactions to persecution during the Holocaust.
Liliana Picciotto provides the first English-language examination of the Fossoli concentration and transit camp in northern Italy. The camp was established in late 1943 and run by the vestige of the Italian government and police authorities, who later played a central role in the deportations of Jews from this camp that the Germans initiated in January 1944. Picciotto clearly demonstrates that the deportations began while the Italians were still in full control of the camp, and they continued to play a central role in the deportations even after the Germans took over command of the camp. Picciotto points incontrovertibly to the Italians’ role in the murder of Italian Jews. Some 2,801 Jews were deported from Fossoli in 1944, mainly to Auschwitz-Birkenau or Bergen Belsen, with the complicity of the Italian gendarmerie.
The review section in this volume includes five reviews of recent scholarly books in four languages. Avihu Ronen favorably reviews Mary Fullbrook’s A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, while Dalia Ofer writes very favorably about Ronen’s award-winning, unusual book in Hebrew, Condemned to Life: The Diaries and Life of Chajka Klinger. Both books contain distinct biographical elements that place them in special genres — Fullbrook because of her family’s relationship with the subject of her study, and Ronen because he is writing as both an analytical scholar and as the son of the subject of his book.
Anna Hájková has written a critical, mixed review of Jan Láníček’s Czechs, Slovaks and the Jews: Beyond Idealisation and Condemnation, finding that it offers a wealth of information and succeeds in breaking the myth of the benevolent Czechoslovak treatment of Jews, but stops short in its analysis. Maud Mandel favorably reviews Emmanuel Debono’s Aux Origines de l’Antiracisme: La LICA, 1927–1940, finding that it provides us with a compelling, well-researched analysis of the beginnings of the anti-racist movement in France. And finally, Bob Moore praises Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller’s Jodenvervolging in Nederland, Frankrijk en België 1940–1945: Overeenkomsten, verschillen, oorzaken, for its comprehensive comparative analysis of the Holocaust in Holland, Belgium, and France, seeing it as an essential text for future discussion of this subject, while critiquing various important aspects of the book.
These nine articles address some of the central questions of the Holocaust and geographically cover nearly all parts of the European continent. As such, the insights they provide reflect on the Shoah as a whole, shedding further light on some of its most troubling issues.
