Early Attempts at the Historical Documentation of the Holocaust

image
Friday, 21 December, 2012
Budapest, 27.-28. November 2012, Holocaust Memorial Centre (Holokauszt Emlékközpont, www.hdke.hu)
International workshop within the framework of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI)

The EHRI workshop, which aimed to reconstruct the activities of the Jewish post-war documentation projects and to place them into a comparative context, was a vivid illustration that the history of archival collections can be anything but boring. The history of the archival documentation of the Holocaust testifies to the Nazi attempts to destroy evidence of their genocidal policies during World War Two. It also shows the degree of fragmentation of documentation which resulted from the destruction, as well as the flight and migration, of Jewish survivors. At the same time it demonstrates the agency of many Jews who – barely liberated – set up historical committees, interviewed other survivors, collected documents and visited the sites of former ghettos and camps.

From its inception, the EHRI project has been centred on the high degree of fragmentation of Holocaust-related sources and of the significance of Jewish documentation initiatives. EHRI also strives to make access easier to sources representing the views of the persecuted Jews, or the agenda of Jewish organisations during the Holocaust.

The workshop was coordinated with the more broadly conceived conference ‘Before the Holocaust had its Name... Early Confrontations of the Nazi Mass Murder of the Jews’ of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies which took place in Vienna from November 29 to December 1, 2012.

Several panels were devoted to the early documentation projects, from personal initiatives, through historical committees to institutional ones. In her key-note speech based on her recently published book Collect and Record1, Laura Jockusch (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) provided a comparative overview of the initiatives in France, Poland, and in German DP camps. She highlighted both the complex situation of Holocaust survivors and the agency with which some of them – from amateurs to professional historians – engaged in documentation projects which started immediately after liberation and were often related to war-time, clandestine documentation. The activists and zamlers (Yiddish for ‘people who helped collect material’) shared a common understanding of the necessity of Jewish documentation projects and were related to the pre-WWII Jewish documentation initiatives, but they were led by diverse world views. Whereas the ultimate aim of French activists around the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine was the restoration of full civic rights of French Jews and their integration into the post-war society, members of the Polish historical committees tended to understand Jews as a separate nation and to view the integration into Polish society with scepticism. Many of them documented while ‘sitting on their suitcases’ and preparing to emigrate to Palestine/State of Israel, United States or other Western countries. Jockusch highlighted the significance of the testimony and documents collected by survivors in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and argued that the early documentation projects were partly forgotten and overshadowed by the rise of oral history projects since the 1970s.

The documentation of the Holocaust was distinctly related to post-WWII investigation of war crimes and the process of retribution. While a full discussion of this subject was beyond the format of the workshop, a panel with three papers explored selected aspects and introduced further national contexts.

From the very outset, documentation of names of victims and survivors were an important facet of war-time and post-war documentation. The discussions demonstrated the need for further comparative research and to explore the connections of the Jewish documentation projects to non-Jewish documentation and wider phenomena, such as the relationship between archives and concepts of citizenship and how the shift towards ethnicisation of citizenship in war-time and early post-WWII Europe influenced archiving of the traumatic events from the recent past. The participants stressed the significance of the early testimonies and the urge to analyse these unique collections on a comparative basis.

A more extended review of the EHRI workshop ‘Early Attempts at Historical Documentation of the Holocaust’ will be published in the EHRI e-Newsletter for Experts in Holocaust Documentation in 2013.

1. Laura Jokusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford University Press, USA 2012).