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Laura Jockusch, Historiography in Transit: Survivor Historians and the Writing of Holocaust History in the late 1940s, The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 58, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 75–94, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/ybt001
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INTRODUCTION
“The blood of our martyrs, our relatives, is still fresh. It screams to us and calls upon us not to forget!” the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Łodz exhorted the 100,000-150,000 Holocaust survivors still in Poland in October 1946. Whether they had “spent the German occupation in ghettos, camps, on the Aryan side, hidden in the woods, [or] fighting in partisan units”, every surviving Jewish woman or man should provide the Historical Commission with a full account of their personal experiences during these years. As “precious material on our bloody history”, these accounts needed to be “carefully collected and immortalised”. The Commission also sought “pictures, documents, community registers, diaries and other items[…]. This is a duty for every single individual. We hope that everyone will understand the importance of this and will fulfil this duty towards the Jewish past”.1
The Central Jewish Historical Commission originated in Lublin in August 1944, just weeks after the city’s liberation, when a small group of survivors gathered to chronicle and research the genocide of three million Polish Jews—ninety per cent of the pre-war Jewish population of Poland. The mere fact of their survival, the activists believed, made bearing witness, documenting, and researching the catastrophe a moral imperative and an obligation towards those who had been murdered and the generations to come. This urge to document, witness and testify was not confined to survivors in Poland. Immediately after their liberation from National-Socialist rule and with the end of warfare, Jews in fourteen countries established historical commissions, documentation centres and projects for the purpose of researching the recent annihilation of European Jews—the khurbn, kataklyzm, or umkum in the Yiddish terminology common at the time.2 These Jewish documentation efforts emerged as a grassroots movement created by a diverse group of survivors, dissimilar in their education, nationalities, and class status, as well as in their wartime experiences. By and large untrained in the historical profession, these activists were lawyers, accountants, teachers, writers, journalists, engineers, artists, medical doctors, manual labourers and homemakers who felt obliged to document the past.
