This issue of Yad Vashem Studies (42:2) addresses diverse aspects of people’s attitudes and behavior toward Jews and the Shoah during and after the event. Most of those analyzed in the articles herein were not the major leaders of their societies, and many of them were “ordinary” people, across a broad geographic and social spectrum. The research articles address Jewish calendars produced in Auschwitz-Birkenau; local Slovaks and their attitudes toward Jews; a German medieval scholar and his role in the Shoah; a rabbi’s theological thought in 1940; and survivors’ national identity through Yiddish in Israel’s early years. The authors represent a range of perspectives — historical, political, archival, literary, theological, and philosophical — and work in numerous languages.
Alan Rosen examines “Jewish Time” as expressed in two calendars that were handwritten by female Jewish prisoners in AuschwitzBirkenau in 1944 for the upcoming Jewish year 5705 (1944–1945). Surprisingly, whereas there has been research on “Jewish time” in the Holocaust, as well as some research on calendars made in Auschwitz, these efforts have overlooked Jewish calendars and their role in prisoner life. Rosen has discovered and here analyzes many aspects of the two calendars and their authors, and the deep concern with the Jewish way of tracking time that they reflect. The article examines both the authors and the calendars, including the biographies of the women who authored the calendars, and attempts to find what in their prewar lives and wartime experience prepared them to compose calendars under the most difficult conditions. With regard to the calendars’ content, Rosen finds that they both sought to provide the basic information that a Jew would seek — such as Sabbath times, dates of holidays, and Torah portions to be read in synagogues each week — and added comments and insight from each author. For one of the calendars, merely identifying the author is a research project in its own right, and Rosen successfully involves the reader in each stage of the fascinating research process. The authors’ comments in the calendars reveal a great deal about them and about Jews’ efforts to cope and remain Jewish human beings in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Rosen argues that the calendars are symptomatic of the importance of Jewish religious and cultural life in Auschwitz, as in the Holocaust generally.
Eduard Nižňanský analyzes the Holocaust in Slovakia on the local level, focusing on the relationships between the Slovak majority and the Jewish minority in the local social milieu and the resultant attitudes and behavior of the majority. The article discusses the changes in the majority society during the Holocaust in terms of social stratification and upward mobility. Local Slovak people acquired property as a result of “Aryanization” and the deportation of the Jews. Eliminating the Jews as economic competitors for the Slovak majority resulted in the formation of a more extensive and established Slovak middle class. This “new” middle class could attain its position only with the help of the national Hlinka Guard Party, which was politically connected with the Slovak regime and its antisemitic policies. Nižňanský draws a wide arc of the Slovak majority’s reactions toward the Jewish minority and toward what was done to the Jews during the period of Aryanization and deportations. His important findings and insight make for disturbing reading.
Cordelia Hess reveals the fascinating story of Dr. Kurt Forstreuter, a Königsberg archivist and medievalist who participated in the looting and destruction of Polish and Jewish archives during World War II. His approach to the archival material in terms of what to confiscate and remove from its original context and what to destroy and why, reflected Nazi ideology. Hess shows that Forstreuter was involved in various aspects of the persecution of Polish Jews as well. Forstreuter, like the Prussian archival administration in general, embraced Nazi ideology regarding control of historical research and the registration and treatment of the Jewish and Polish populations. His area of expertise was the German-occupied territories of northern Poland that the Nazis incorporated into East Prussia, and he worked diligently toward looting and instrumentalizing the region’s cultural goods for the purposes of the German colonialists and the use of the local non-German population as slave laborers. Forstreuter’s own Ostforschung helped shape the ideological framework for the archivists’ and researchers’ daily work. Hess demonstrates that Forstreuter willfully participated in the plunder and persecution based on Nazi racial philosophy. His work itinerary also sheds light on the archivists’ participation in the administration of the Holocaust.
Assaf Yedidya analyzes the little known theological writing on the Holocaust and World War II by Rabbi Dr. Aaron Kaminka, who fled Austria for Mandatory Palestine in June 1938, following the Anschluss and his release from five weeks in a Gestapo prison. Kaminka was a non-Orthodox, traditional rabbi in his outlook, and wrote about the Jews’ suffering and the war from both a specifically Jewish as well as a universal perspective. His theological thought was both conservative and audacious. Kaminka’s essays early in the war were among the first Jewish theological studies on the Nazis and the Jews’ suffering. He believed Israel’s suffering was punishment for sin, but unlike traditional Orthodox arguments, Kaminka said the sin lay in Israel’s failure over a long period of time to fulfill its mission of spreading Torah among the nations. The universal question of the prosperity and success of the wicked was also at the center of his theological writing. He explained this success as temporary and as a prelude to a terrible downfall. Kaminka’s work helped lay the foundations for some of the later theological thinkers on the Holocaust.
Gali Drucker Bar-Am looks at Holocaust remembrance and Jewish national identity in the Yiddish press in Israel in the first years of the State. One of her important findings is that ordinary Holocaust survivors in Israel were not silent in this period, and certainly not in their public self-expression in Yiddish. She finds that in appealing to and largely basing itself on a readership of Holocaust survivors, writing in Yiddish and promoting Holocaust commemoration did not reflect a clinging to the Diaspora or difficulty in integrating into the national identity of Israel. Rather, this press served as an expression of these survivors’ Jewish Zionist national identity, while seeking to mold Israeli Holocaust commemoration with a firm connection to the places from which the survivors had come. The survivors saw no contradiction between commemorating in Yiddish Israeli fallen soldiers and the destruction of whole Diaspora communities, all within an Israeli national framework. In this they went against Israel’s Zionist, Hebrew-speaking mainstream that saw Israel as a break with the Diaspora past. Drucker Bar-Am’s extensive research and keen insight break new ground and offer a new analysis of the role of Yiddish in the early years of the State.
Five review articles address recent books of note. Randolph Braham, the doyen of scholars on Hungary, finds Robert Rozett’s book, Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, to be a major contribution to the study of the Holocaust in Hungary. Michael Shafir is similarly full of praise for the anthology edited by John-Paul Himka and Joanna Michlic, Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, and especially for Omer Bartov’s concluding article, which the reviewer calls a tour de force. Michael Marrus finds Richard Breitman and Alan Lichtman’s FDR and the Jews to be the most balanced and reasoned book on the subject to date; and Eliot Nidam Orvieto finds Susan Zuccotti’s biography of Righteous Among the Nations French priest Marie-Benoît, Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue, insightful. Jan Grabowski is critical of Erica Lehrer’s book, Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places. And finally, Florent Brayard and Jan Láníček, have written letters to the editor in response to reviews of their recent books published in the last two issues of Yad Vashem Studies by Robert Jan van Pelt (on Brayard) and Anna Hájková (on Láníček).
With this issue we bid farewell to our English language editor David Brauner, who has asked to retire from editing Yad Vashem Studies in order to pursue other projects. During the five years and eleven issues that David has been with us, working with him has been a distinct pleasure both professionally and personally. We are very fortunate that our past editor, Leah Aharonov, has agreed to return to the job. Leah edited two articles for this issue, and her prior vast experience and close working relationship with us will be a great asset as we move ahead.
As this issue was being prepared, two important historians passed away — Walter Zwi Bacharach and Robert Kuwałek. Zwi was a professor at Bar-Ilan University, who had published extensively on the history of antisemitism and other subjects. He was a remarkable, sensitive, and insightful man of vast knowledge, to whom I turned many times for advice and peer reviews. His review article on five then new books on the popes, the Vatican, and the Holocaust (volume 31, 2003) still stands as a model for reviewing a body of literature on a current, important subject. Robert was a young, prolific Polish historian who passed away suddenly. He had contributed extensively to Holocaust research and commemoration both in his direction of the new commemoration site at Bełżec and with his publications and participation in research projects on Lublin and the region before and during the Holocaust, and on other topics. He was very helpful to me personally in the early stage of my own doctoral research, and we maintained a friendship over many years. Zwi and Robert will be sorely missed both personally and professionally.
