Yad Vashem Studies volume 43:2 features five research articles that highlight personal perspectives on the Holocaust and four review articles with an emphasis on East-Central Europe (Poland, Ukraine, the USSR, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia). These articles also present a variety of both fresh and familiar sources, as well as new methodologies for understanding the Holocaust and how it is remembered.
As we neared the end of preparations for this issue of Yad Vashem Studies, three important scholars in the field passed away — David Cesarani, Alfred Gottwaldt, and Hans Mommsen.
David Cesarani was a widely respected scholar of great breadth and depth, who died suddenly on October 25, 2015. He was renowned for his erudition and eloquence, and was a widely sought-after advisor, peer reviewer, interviewee, and commentator. When he spoke, people listened. His research and numerous publications spanned a broad spectrum of subjects relating to the Holocaust, British Jewish history, and the history of Zionism and Israel. David advised the Imperial War Museum with its Holocaust Exhibition and was a historical consultant for numerous documentary films. He also successfully guided young Ph.D. students through their research and dissertations, many of whom have taken their own places in research and academia. In that sense, together with his extensive publication résumé, David Cesarani left a rich legacy. Yet David’s sudden death is also a deep personal loss; he was a close friend of long standing, and his passing will be felt not only around the world but very particularly here.
Alfred Gottwaldt died suddenly on August 16, 2015. He was the world’s leading expert on the German Reichsbahn during the Nazi regime and its involvement in the deportations of Jews during the Holocaust. He published ground-breaking studies on the German railways, their organization, leadership, and manpower, and he was a regular advisor to Yad Vashem’s Pan-European Deportation and Database Online Research Project. We participated together in a Yad Vashem workshop in June 2015, where his paper on the German railroads in the early part of the war was very well received, as was all his research over the years. We had been discussing an article submission by him, and he had intended to have it ready by the beginning of 2016. Sadly, we will probably never see this article, nor the results of numerous other projects on which he was working.
Hans Mommsen, a doyen of German Holocaust scholarship, passed away on November 5, 2015. He was one of the most articulate spokesmen of the “functionalist” school of thought regarding the roles of Hitler and ideology in the decision-making process. He saw Hitler as a weak dictator and argued that a process of cumulative radicalization, rather than a decision by the leader, had led to the “Final Solution.” He modified this stance in the late 1990s, and thereafter accorded ideology and Hitler a more significant function in his analysis. Mommsen also played a prominent role in the Historikerstreit, the German historians’ debate in the second half of the 1980s, about the singularity of the Holocaust and of Germany. I first met Mommsen and heard him speak at Yad Vashem in the mid-1980s, and, like any historian of the Holocaust, I read and was impressed by his publications. He was a central figure in the study of the Holocaust, and he will be sorely missed.
We hope to publish more extensive articles on these scholars in the next issues of Yad Vashem Studies.
The research articles in this issue address a wide variety of subjects, yet all of them are grounded to a great degree in personal writing on the events. In their discussions and analyses, these articles demonstrate the importance of oral history for understanding the Holocaust, highlight some of the problems to be considered by scholars in this respect, and suggest new methodological approaches.
Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe examines Jewish and Ukrainian personal accounts of the Holocaust in western Ukraine and the role played by organized Ukrainian nationalist militias, such as OUN and later UPA, as well as by local Ukrainians. He conducts a comparative analysis of wartime writing, early postwar testimonies and memoirs, and later memoirs by Jews and Ukrainians. Whereas the fact that the stories told by Jews and Ukrainians are radically different might not be surprising, the substantive consistency of these memories over time is striking. Rossoliński-Liebe further notes that individual Jews’ memory of widespread Ukrainian participation in the murder of the Jews was not influenced by collective commemoration or other later information. Their story remained consistent in its essentials. Ukrainian individual memory has been more influenced by the collective narrative spun over time — that Ukrainian nationalists during World War II were freedom fighters and heroes who never participated in murder. Ukrainian participation in the murder of the Jews is omitted from this narrative. The politics of memory among Ukrainians from western Ukraine has encouraged these émigrés to forget this murderous aspect of their history.
Vadim Altskan traces the fate of the surviving Jews of Northern Bukovina and its capital city, Czernowitz, in the first two postwar years. It is clear that the survivors’ experiences here were different than in other parts of the USSR, as here the Soviet authorities encouraged the Jews to leave. Regional and NKVD officials competed in imposing a “repatriation,” “evacuation,” or, more accurately, “expulsion” policy on all Jewish survivors who had returned to Bukovina. They were sent over the border to Romania. Bribery and extortion slowed the process, but a regional official’s damning report in November 1945, to Ukrainian Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev helped lead the way to speeding up the forced-emigration process. Altskan has utilized newly available documentation, such as regional and party records, as well as numerous testimonies and memoirs of Holocaust survivors. This rich documentation helps Altskan try to answer fundamental questions, such as why the Soviet authorities pursued expelling Jews from Northern Bukovina to Romania; why Jews were permitted to leave the Soviet Union at all; and why so many Jews chose to go to Romania, the country that had murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.
Eliyana Adler examines how Polish Jews who fled to the Soviet Union early after the German occupation of Poland related to themselves afterward. Did their crossing the physical border from the German to the Soviet occupation zone also constitute creating a conceptual identification border between them and Holocaust survivors? By examining Shoah Foundation interviews (in its Visual History Archive) with such people and paying special attention to the final, broad questions, she defines three groups among these Polish Jews who fled to the USSR early in the war: those who see themselves as Holocaust survivors; those who do not; and others who are unsure of their identity as survivors. Adler also notes that, in at least some cases, the apparent uncertainty of some survivors regarding their identity as survivors results from the ignorance or confusion of the interviewers; they did not always allow the survivors to express their thoughts unimpeded by contrary guidance or intervention. At the same time, it is clear that these Polish Jews share much with Polish Jewish survivors who remained under German occupation in 1939. Both groups shared the experience of the initial German attacks on Poland and then shared their postwar experiences of loss, searching for family, leaving Poland, resettling in other countries, rebuilding lives, and commemorating their lost communities. This leads Adler to argue for reconsidering how survivor testimonies are read and understood, and to how the borders of survival and “survivors” are defined.
Monika Rice examines two purported Holocaust diaries by Polish Jewish doctors who took two different postwar paths — one left Poland, and the other tried to stay. A close examination of these diaries reveals that, although they were written by Holocaust survivors, they are in fact not really diaries or memoirs. One is fiction, and the other creates a conglomeration of characters and experiences based on a true story. Through these books, written by highly educated and culturally literate people, Rice is able to examine the ways in which educated Polish Jewish survivors dealt with their dual identities — Jewish and Polish — after the war. These Jews’ efforts to live as Polish Jews in the antiJewish atmosphere of postwar Poland are a central part of the story. Rice also discusses questions regarding the authorship and authenticity of Holocaust diaries in general, distinguishing “original” Holocaust experiences from those of “fictionalized” stories of survival.
Daniel Reiser takes a new look at the development of the theological thought of Rabbi Yisachar Shlomo Teichtal, the author of the well-known wartime book Em ha-Banim Semeha, during the Holocaust. The rabbi’s change to a Zionist-religious theological stance from his earlier, pre-war anti-Zionist position was influenced by events in Slovakia and Hungary during the war. Reiser traces the change to several of Teichtal’s earlier writings, some of which are reproduced here for the first time. He demonstrates how the Holocaust served as a catalyst for Rabbi Teichtal to rethink his ideas and to come out in favor of religious Jews joining the Zionist enterprise. This change grew out of Teichtal’s earlier thinking, which in many ways was similar to that of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the chief rabbi of mandatory Palestine.
As Reiser shows, anti-Zionist Agudas Yisroel leaders in Budapest kept Teichtal away from all positions of influence, despite his prior prominence, precisely because of these views.
This issue also includes four review articles on recent noteworthy books. Karel Berkhoff favorably reviews Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult, finding the book both comprehensive and insightful, despite some weaknesses. Antony Polonsky positively reviews Joshua Zimmerman’s The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945, considering it to be thorough, fair, and dispassionate. Nathan Cohen favorably analyzes Alan Rosen’s edited collection of essays, Literature of the Holocaust, praising its breadth as providing a good infrastructure for future research. Arkadi Zeltser reviews two books on Soviet film and the Holocaust — Jeremy Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946, and Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe. He commends the books for showing that Jewish themes and the Holocaust were present in Soviet films during the Cold War period and for providing new methodologies to examine these films.
The new sources and methodologies reflected in the articles in this issue break new ground in Holocaust research. We hope our readers will find the contents of this issue interesting and valuable.
