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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.
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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