This book describes the vibrant activity of survivors who founded
Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers in Europe
immediately after the Second World War. In the first postwar
decade, these initiatives collected thousands of Nazi documents
along with testimonies, memoirs, diaries, songs, poems, and
artifacts of Jewish victims. They pioneered in developing a
Holocaust historiography that placed the experiences of Jews at the
center and used both victim and perpetrator sources to describe the
social, economic, and cultural aspects of the everyday life and
death of European Jews under the Nazi regime. This book is the
first in-depth monograph on these survivor historians and the
organizations they created. A comparative analysis, it focuses on
France, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy, analyzing the
motivations and rationales that guided survivors in chronicling the
destruction they had witnessed, while also discussing their
research techniques, archival collections, and historical
publications. It reflects growing attention to survivor testimony
and to the active roles of survivors in rebuilding their postwar
lives. It also discusses the role of documenting, testifying, and
history writing in processes of memory formation, rehabilitation,
and coping with trauma. Jockusch finds that despite differences in
background and wartime experiences between the predominantly
amateur historians who created the commissions, the activists found
documenting the Holocaust to be a moral imperative after the war,
the obligation of the dead to the living, and a means for the
survivors to understand and process their recent trauma and loss.
Furthermore, historical documentation was vital in the pursuit of
postwar justice and was deemed essential in counteracting efforts
on the part of the Nazis to erase their wartime crimes. The
survivors who created the historical commissions were the first
people to study the development of Nazi policy towards the Jews and
also to document Jewish responses to persecution, a topic that was
largely ignored by later generations of Holocaust scholars.
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