Yad Vashem Studies, volume 43, no. 1, is dedicated to the memory of three important scholars who contributed much to the research and academic instruction of the Holocaust. Martin Gilbert, Ze’ev Mankowitz, and Feliks Tych were three very different personalities, from diverse backgrounds, whose personal trajectories intersected in the study of the Jews in the Holocaust.
Sir Martin Gilbert was an excellent speaker and a prolific author who was able to reach very broad audiences regarding all the many subjects that he addressed — be it the Holocaust, Soviet Jewry, Israel, Jewish history, and, of course, Winston Churchill. He was also a very fine mapmaker, with a quick eye and vast knowledge. I first encountered him personally when I was assistant editor of what was then a new journal, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. We had asked him to peer review an article on the Armenian genocide. Not only did he return a very thorough peer review quite quickly, he also sent drafts of two maps that he had prepared to accompany the article when it would be published. Over the years, whenever I had occasion to turn to him, Sir Martin was always prepared to help — and this was true not only in my case but for many others whose paths he crossed.
Ze’ev Mankowitz was one of the most engaging university teachers I have ever encountered. He had the rare ability to combine deep analytical skills with the gift of making complex issues accessible and understandable, combined with a riveting lecture style. The thousands of students whom he taught over his long career hung on to his every word, as did his colleagues at workshops and conferences. Ze’ev was a very thoughtful historian while remaining ever gracious and the consummate “mensh.” He will be sorely missed by all who knew him.
Feliks Tych was a child survivor of the Holocaust who came to the topics of Jewish history, Polish-Jewish relations, and the Holocaust professionally at a late stage in his already accomplished career. As director of the Jewish Historical Institute (ŻIH) in Warsaw, he contributed greatly to the study of the Holocaust by making his institution’s rich archival resources accessible to researchers, by publishing these resources extensively, and by promoting young scholars. He brought ŻIH back to the forefront of scholarship and research. For many years he was also a very important and active member of the organization now called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
This issue of Yad Vashem Studies opens with three articles on the contributions of these scholars to the study of the Holocaust: Bernard Wasserstein on Martin Gilbert; Gideon Shimoni on Ze’ev Mankowitz; and Eleonora Bergman and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska on Feliks Tych. The research section includes five articles. Three of the authors — Guy Miron, Anna Hájková, and Sara Bender — look at aspects of Jews’ experiences during the Holocaust; Jan Grabowski looks at the “bystanders”; and Doron Bar discusses a little-known aspect of postwar commemoration in Israel. The issue also includes five review articles on seven recently published books, as well as a letter to the editor.
Guy Miron introduces a new subject within the framework of the discussion on Jewish time in the Holocaust — the element of waiting as it affected the Jews of Germany under the Nazi regime. This is a central aspect of Jewish experience under the Nazis that has previously not been seriously addressed, although it has stared all scholars in the face for decades. Jews everywhere under Nazi control frequently found themselves in a waiting mode, and Miron’s focus on German Jews allows him to trace the phenomenon over time. He examines the interplay of the waiting experience in Germany and the question of identity, as decisions taken early on in that period as to whether to wait or to act quickly derived from basic identity, cultural, and political factors. The author examined newspapers and diaries in depth in order to discover the Jewish reactions to waiting in real time throughout the Nazi regime. He finds that the waiting impacted on Jews in a variety of ways, on their bourgeois ethic, their day-to-day lives, and their selfidentification.
Anna Hájková examines the experiences of Jews from the Netherlands in Theresienstadt. She notes that the 5,000 Jews deported there from the Netherlands in 1943–1944 were of two types — Dutch Jews and German Jewish refugees in Holland; the latter constituted the majority of these deportees. Whereas we might expect to find that the native Dutch Jews should have managed better than the others in Theresienstadt, Hájková finds that it was actually the German Jewish refugees who adapted better and were more adept in learning the ways of the camp. Moreover, the native Jews’ death rate was considerably higher. Hájková posits that certain aspects of the Dutch Jews’ culture and history, particularly their group habitus, hampered them in adapting to Theresienstadt. This was similar to their difficulties in Auschwitz, which resulted in their considerably higher death rate as compared to other groups.
Jan Grabowski examines the role of “bystanders” in the implementation of the “Final Solution,” particularly in Poland. He calls into question the use of the term for those who neither chose to be the murderers, nor were chosen to be the victims, but also the very idea that people could have maintained a neutral position. Grabowski notes that in most of Poland the murder of the Jews was quite public. Temptation, greed, and the awareness of impunity, drawing, too, from pre-war attitudes toward Jews, resulted in events where the local non-Jewish Polish population could not be neutral. The Holocaust was brought right into their homes, and the reaction was not a proliferation of indifference, he argues, but rather a relative lack of indifference. Grabowski suggests various alternative conceptual terms, but “bystanding,” he says, was not possible.
Sara Bender discusses the Holocaust in a small town, a shtetl, in central Poland. Staszów is illustrative of many elements in the experiences of shtetl Jews in Poland during the Holocaust. Surprisingly, although more than half the Jews of Poland lived in shtetlach, there is very little research on the Holocaust in the shtetl. One of the article’s main sources is a reconstructed diary of a survivor from Staszów, which provides much detail regarding the events in the town and the Jews’ reactions and coping mechanisms. Bender also conducts a comparative analysis with several other small towns in the same region near Kielce, in an effort to find common shtetl characteristics during the Holocaust. Although, of course, each town has its own story, in this pioneering study Bender is able to draw certain early, tentative conclusions regarding the Holocaust in the shtetl in Poland.
Doron Bar looks at the background and debates relating to the construction of a synagogue in Yad Vashem in its early years. The idea of a synagogue as part of Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust preceded the creation of the state. Bar examines the reasons behind the development of the synagogue idea in the 1950s; who was in favor of it; who was opposed; and why. The results are somewhat surprising — from the fact that a synagogue at Yad Vashem was not self-evident to the discernment that secular people were to be found on both sides of the discussion.
The reviews in this volume include Shannon Fogg’s positive assessment of Daniel Lee’s book, Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–1942; Jacek Leociak’s very favorable review of Rachel Feldhay Brenner’s The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers’ Diaries from Warsaw, 1939–1945; Jeffrey Kopstein’s positive review of Witold Mędykowski’s W Cieniu Gigantów. Pogromy 1941 R. w Byłej Sowieckiej Streifie Okupacyjnej; and reviews by Mariana Hausleitner and Ronit Fisher, each on two new books on Romania, which is a growing field in Holocaust research. Hausleitner reviews Armin Heinen and Oliver Jens Schmitt, eds., Inszenierte Gegenmacht von rechts. Die “Legion Erzengel Michael” in Rumänien 1918– 1938, and Hildrun Glass, Deutschland und die Verfolgung der Juden im rumänischen Machtbereich 1940–1944, finding merit in both, but serious flaws in the former. Fisher reviews Henry Eaton, The Origins and Onset of the Romanian Holocaust, and Simon Geissbühler, Blutiger Juli — Rumäniens Vernichtungskrieg und der vergessene Massenmord an der Juden 1941 positively, finding Geissbühler’s book to be particularly thoroughly researched. The volume concludes with a letter to the editor by Devin Pendas, Laura Jockusch, and Gabriel Finder clarifying a point in their article, “Auschwitz Trials: The Jewish Dimension,” which appeared in Yad Vashem Studies, volume 41, no. 2.
In discussing Jewish responses to the Holocaust, “bystanders,” survivors, and commemoration in cutting-edge new research, which covers much of the European continent, these articles reflect the rich variety of Holocaust research today, as well as the broad interests of Martin Gilbert, Ze’ev Mankowitz, and Feliks Tych. Indeed, they could have served as peer reviewers for most of the contents of this issue, and I am confident that they would have been pleased.
As this issue was going to press, we received the sad news that Władysław Bartoszewski had passed away. Bartoszewski, one of the Righteous Among the Nations, was a remarkable figure and a rare beacon of moral light during and since the Holocaust. Among his many courageous acts during that period, he was a founder and leading activist in Żegota, the Polish rescue organization that saved many Jews during the Holocaust. In addition, we received the sad news that historians Boaz Neuman of Tel Aviv University and Robert Wistrich of the Hebrew University and the director of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism, passed away. Their loss will be deeply felt among scholars around the world. The contributions to the scholarship and teaching of the Holocaust by Martin Gilbert, Ze’ev Mankowitz, Feliks Tych, Robert Wistrich, and Boaz Neuman were in a sense enabled by the humanity and bravery of Bartoszewski and people like him, and their work was imbued with the moral spirit that he represented.
