Recent decades have seen a surge of interest in the immediate post-World War II period (circa 1944 to 1948). What has come to be known as “early Holocaust” memory, documentation, and historiography has attracted particular attention. Speaking of Holocaust research in this context might seem somewhat anachronistic. But without question, such activities, many of them carried out by Jewish survivor historians and sharing a concern with the recent Jewish catastrophe known in Yiddish as khurbn, constituted a very real, large, and transnational phenomenon—and a phenomenon that is worthy of attention.
Taking stock of this, one of the latest collections of source material published by the Saxonian Academy of Sciences in their series “Archive of Jewish History and Culture”, focuses on so-called Khurbn-Forshung (literally, catastrophe-research) in early postwar Poland. In this volume, the series editors cooperated with one of the field’s best-known experts, Laura Jockusch, and chose to concentrate on the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland (CŻKH). The CŻKH was just one of the research institutions of this type created in Europe at this time. But it was unquestionably an important one. Not only were 90 percent of Polish Jews murdered and the most infamous National Socialist camps and ghettos located on Polish territory, but the CŻKH also brought together a group of professional historians who reflected deeply on their methods as well as their role in doing such research. Founded in Lublin in 1944, the CŻKH came to employ between 70 and 100 people, more than half of them women, and was the precursor of what is now the Jewish Historical Institute (ŻIH) in Warsaw.
The result is an 853-page publication comprising 50 annotated documents in the original Polish, Yiddish, or German—with, in the case of Polish and Yiddish documents, English translations—and a substantial introduction. Here, Jockusch presents the main aims, personalities, and achievements of early Jewish Holocaust research in Poland, as well as the challenges researchers faced. She thereby situates the CŻKH’s activities within the wider “complicated genesis of Holocaust research” (p. 18). Indeed, the urge to chronicle was significantly shaped by prewar traditions and wartime experiences. But it was also constrained by ongoing antisemitism, postwar domestic politics, and the onset of the Cold War. Ultimately, therefore, the Jewish historians failed both in their attempts to raise consciousness among the non-Jewish population and to institutionalise the field (p. 47 f.). As Jockusch concludes, “[b]eyond their own work, these survivor historians did not educate the next generation of Holocaust researchers” (p. 48).
Still, they left behind a wealth of fascinating material. Though able to present only a fraction of it here, Jockusch sought to be “exemplary rather than comprehensive” (p. 13) and give priority to unpublished material (p. 51). She therefore organised the collection thematically and chronologically into four parts. The documents in the first two parts (“The Minutes of the Meetings of the CŻKH” and “Research Guidelines, Questionnaires and Calls to the Survivor Public”), deal with the context, rationale, and methodology of early Jewish Holocaust research. In that sense, these documents do not reflect the results of the research itself, but rather the (changing) conditions and frameworks of their production. An especially interesting aspect is how self-consciously the historians and activists, in particular Philip Friedman, the founder of the CŻKH and its director until 1946, approached what he saw as “[their] historic task” (p. 115), and how much effort was put into encouraging Jews to bear testimony. Also fascinating is how reflectively information was collected, with great concern for a diversity of sources and perspectives; language (e.g., new words and meanings); and, as much as possible, objectivity and authenticity. Collectors were for instance warned against intervening or displaying emotion.
The third and fourth sections, in turn, present some of the source material and research produced by the institution. Part 3 contains 21 of the 3,000 testimonies collected by the CŻKH. This was the most difficult section to read. For one, many of the descriptions of traumatic experiences are detailed and harrowing. For another, the texts are highly disparate in style, and the quality of the translations varies greatly as well. Nevertheless, the selection covers a wide range in terms of the survivors’ genders, ages, education, and experiences (ghettos, camps, mass shootings, hiding, and passing), and they provide a unique insight into the effort (and struggle) to record and convey what had happened so soon after the events.
The final section, part 4, offers a small and diverse selection of research on the specific topic of camps and ghettos. This, for instance, includes a report on the former death camp of Treblinka, which historian Rachel Auerbach visited together with five survivors in November 1945 (p. 642). Here, Auerbach reflected—in a way that continues to resonate—on what traces of the crimes remain and how we might engage with them.
This is an impressive piece of work, which will be especially useful for teaching and research. Available in open access as a pdf and including an index of places and names, it is easy to use in a targeted manner. Explored more systematically, this collection also has a lot to offer. In particular, it reveals how many of the methodological issues we face today were already being grappled with in the early postwar period and how Jewish survivor historians themselves suggested we might address them.
Funding
Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.