![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The document presented here was created in 1945 in Bytom, Poland. It contains testimonies by Holocaust survivor children collected and put down in a notebook by their survivor teacher, Shlomo Tsam, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. The testimonies shed light on Jewish children's experience in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, describing oppression, flight, and survival in the words of the weakest segment of Jewish communities – children. The testimonies provide raw data on the encounters between Jews and non-Jews in the territories in which the “Final Solution” was carried out. It is thus an important source contributing to the burgeoning research on the involvement of local populations in the murder of the Jews, on one hand, and in saving Jews, on the other. The creation of this document, one of several collections of Jewish survivor children's testimonies produced in the immediate postwar years, is also indicative of post-Holocaust Jewish sensibilities and concerns regarding surviving children.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Dr. Boaz Cohen, historian, is head of the Holocaust Studies program of the Western Galilee College in Akko and a lecturer at the Shaanan College in Haifa, Israel. His work focuses on the development of Holocaust memory and historiography in their social and cultural context and on Jewish and Israeli post-Holocaust society. His current research is on early Holocaust historiography, Holocaust testimonies and early children’s Holocaust testimonies. He is the author of Israeli Holocaust Research: Birth and Evolution (Routledge, 2013) and of many papers on the above issues. He is also co-editor of volumes on Holocaust and Film (2013), Survivor Historians (2015) and editor of a volume on Early Children’s Testimonies (2016).
Dr. Beate Müller is Reader in Modern German Studies at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. Her research interests comprise literary theory, parody, censorship, GDR literature, modern German literature, as well as representations of the Holocaust. She is currently working on child voices and figures in fictional and non-fictional Holocaust narratives. Her recent publications on Holocaust testimonies include: “Trauma, Historiography and Polyphony: Adult Voices in the CJHC’s Early Post-War Child Holocaust Testimonies” (History and Memory, 24.2, 2012); (with Boaz Cohen): “The 1945 Bytom Notebook: Searching for the Lost Voices of Child Holocaust Survivors,” in Freilegungen: Überlebende – Erinnerungen – Transformationen, ed. Rebecca Boeling, Susanne Urban, and René Bienert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 122–37; “Translating Trauma: David Boder’s 1946 Interviews with Holocaust Survivors” (Translation and Literature, 23, 2014). For details, see http://www.ncl.ac.uk/sml/staff/profile/beate.muller.
Notes
1. This collection of about 7300 testimonies, of which more than 400 are by children, is today kept in the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny – ŻIH) in Warsaw (record group AŻIH 301); Yad Vashem has a copy (record group M.49.E). Maria Hochberg-Mariańska and Noe Grüss edited 55 of the child testimonies in The Children Accuse (Warsaw: Dzieci Oskarżają, 1947; Engl. transl. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1996). About a quarter of these testimonies are also included in Grüss's Yiddish edition of child testimonies, Kinder-Martyrologie (Buenos Aires: Unión Central Israelita Polace en la Argentina, 1947). In 2008, a further 55 child testimonies were published in German by Feliks Tych, Alfons Kenkmann, Elisabeth Kohlhaas, and Andreas Eberhardt, eds, Kinder über den Holocaust. Frühe Zeugnisse 1944–1948 (Berlin: Metropol, 2008). Summaries in Polish and English of all testimonies in the CJHC's collection can be found in ŻIH, Relacje czasów zagłady inwentarz: Archiwum ŻIH IN-B, zespół 301. Holocaust Survivor Testimonies Catalogue: Jewish Historical Institute Archives, Record Group 301, 6 vols (Warsaw [s.n.], 1998ff). http://www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/source_view.php?SourceId=32590.
2. YIVO Archives, Record Group 225: Hersch Wasser Collection, 1939–46, item 2.9. Judy Grossman and Sidney Lightman translated the Yiddish manuscript into English. We would like to thank these translators for their work. The translations and the archival work carried out for this project were financially supported by a Faculty Research Fund grant from Newcastle University. We would also like to thank the director and the archivists at YIVO for their help; Tsam's daughter, Rosaline Barron, for her help with establishing biographical information about her father; Robert Shapiro, who brought the manuscript to our notice; and Anat Shabo, who supplied us with materials written by and about Tsam.
3. Tsam's Bytom notebook is not the only text he wrote about the Holocaust. In his contribution to the Yizkor book on Olyka, he explains, “I have written extensively about the gruesome events that took place during the five-year war, pogroms and massacres. My writings, The Eternal Ban, Days of Awe, Stories Told by Youth and The Fiery Sunset, which were submitted to the historic commissions in Warsaw, Prague and München not only describe the tragedy of my town, Olyk, not only the tragedy of Ukrainian Jewry, but also the events from Vladivostok to Berlin.” Shlomo Tsam, “The Last Date: 15 Av, 1942” [July 29, 1942], in Pinkas ha-kehilah Olyka: sefer yizkor [Memorial book of the community of Olyka], ed. Natan Livneh (Tel Aviv: Olyka Society, 1972), 331. For an English translation of this memorial book, see JewishGen at: http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Olyka/Olyka.html (accessed March 3, 2012). The title Stories Told by Youth clearly refers to his Bytom notebook.
4. The text translates as “Compiled by the Principal of the Hebrew School in Bytom, S. Tsam.”
5. We give place names in their Yiddish version as used by Tsam in the manuscript.
6. Reading the testimonies, one can see that not all the children were proud of choices they made during the Holocaust and or felt at ease to speak about them. Children learned to hide their identity during the Holocaust and continued concealing their identity here.
7. We decided to give the children's names as given by Tsam: full names or initials where children requested. We believe that this is an important part of the historical and cultural record. Efforts were undertaken to identify and consult former pupils of Tsam who are still alive today. These activities included online searches, features and articles in the Israeli press, broadcasts on Israeli state radio, and a search in the Journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees (June 2011, 15, http://www.ajr.org.uk/journalpdf/2011_June.pdf). We also disseminated information about the project and a request for survivors to contact us via the following mailing lists: [email protected] and [email protected].
8. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see Beate Müller, “Trauma, Historiography and Polyphony: Adult Voices in the CJHC's Early Postwar Child Holocaust Testimonies,” History and Memory 24, no. 2 (2012): 157–95.
9. On the historical commissions see Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
10. See Boaz Cohen, “The Children's Voice: Postwar Collection of Testimonies from Child Survivors of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 1 (2007): 74–95.
11. Benjamin Tenenbaum, Echad me-ir ve shna'im me-mishpacha [One of a city and two of a family: a selection from amongst one thousand autobiographies of Jewish children in Poland] (Merhavyah: Sifriat Poalim, 1947). The testimonies collected by Tenenbaum are accessible in the archive of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in Israel.
12. Susan L. Berger, “The Children's Advocate, Janusz Korczak,” American Educational History Journal 33, no. 2 (2006): 137–42.
13. See Jeffrey Shandler, ed., Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
14. Genia Silkes, “Algemayner araynfir tsum fregeboygen far kinder,” in Metodologishe onvizungen tsum oysforshen dem khurbn fun poylishe yidntum [General introduction to the questionnaire for children, methodological instructions for the research of the destruction of Polish Jewry] (Łódź: Central Council for Jews in Poland, 1945).
15. Hochberg-Mariańska and Grüss, The Children Accuse, xxix–xxx.
16. See, for instance, Henry Greenspan, The Awakening of Memory: Survivor Testimony in the First Years after the Holocaust, and Today (Washington: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001); Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).
17. Joanna Michlic, Jewish Children in Nazi-Occupied Poland: Early Post-War Recollections of Survival and Polish–Jewish Relations during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008); Emunah Nachmany Gafny, Dividing Hearts: The Removal of Jewish Children from Gentile Familes in Poland in the Immediate Post-Holocaust Years (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009); Nachum Bogner, At the Mercy of Strangers: The Rescue of Hidden Jewish Children in Poland (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009); Müller, “Trauma, Historiography and Polyphony;” Boaz Cohen and Rita Horvath, “Young Witnesses in the DP Camps: Children's Holocaust Testimony in Context,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 11, no. 1 (2012): 103–25; Carsten Gansel and Paweł Zimniak, eds, Kriegskindheiten und Erinnerungsarbeit: Zur historischen und literarischen Verarbeitung von Krieg und Vertreibung (Berlin: Schmidt, 2012).
18. See e.g. Jürgen Matthäus, ed., Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and its Transformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Israel: “Finding their Voice” – Social Dynamics and Post-war Experiences (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2005). The well-known Kestenberg Archive of interviews with more than 1500 child survivors, conducted in the 1980s, is available online at: http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/english/units.php?cat=4328&incat=4252 (accessed November 21, 2015).
19. For philosophical debates surrounding testimony and Holocaust representations, see e.g. James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Zoë Vania Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006).
20. For the first and only analysis of Tsam's manuscript, see Boaz Cohen and Beate Müller, “The 1945 Bytom Notebook: Searching for the Lost Voices of Child Holocaust Survivors,” in Freilegungen: Überlebende, Erinnerungen, Transformationen. Jahrbuch des International Tracing Service, ed. Rebecca Boehling, Susanne Urban, and René Bienert, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 122–37.
21. Translated by Judy Grossman and Sidney Lightman. We are grateful for the translators’ work on the manuscript and for the funding for this undertaking obtained from Western Galilee College and Newcastle University.
22. Emphases in the original. The Styr River begins near Brody, in the Ukrainian oblast of Lviv, then flows into the Rivne Oblast, Volyn Oblast, then into the Belarusian oblast of Brest where it finally flows into the Pripyat.
23. A derogatory East European word for “Jew;” feminine form, zhidovka; plural, zhidi.
24. In the context of the Final Solution, Aktion (or “actions”) by German forces denotes operations during which hundreds of thousands were murdered by bullet or gas. Sometimes Aktionen targeted a particular segment of the Jewish population, such as the intellectuals, women, children, the elderly, the sick, or simply Jews living in a designated area. At other times, entire communities were wiped out. See Nachman Blumental, “Action,” Yad Vashem Studies 4 (1960): 57–96.
25. Banderists, or “Banderovtsi,” were members of the Organization of Ukranian Nationalists (OUN), followers of Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist (1909–59). The term was also used as a general name for Ukrainian nationalist groups hostile to Jews.
26. “Bul'bivtsi” in the narrower sense refers to the followers of Taras Bulba-Borovets, who established the Ukrainian Insurgent Army before the Banderovtsi took it over. In Jewish testimonies, however, the term is often used in reference to Ukrainian nationalist partisans in general. John-Paul Himka, “The Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Holocaust,” paper presented at the 41st National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Boston, November 12–15, 2009, https://www.academia.edu/1071581/The_Ukrainian_Insurgent_Army_UPA_and_the_Holocaust (accessed August 30, 2015).
27. “For Our Sins”: a prayer of confession recited in synagogue on the Day of Atonement (the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar), during which one beats one's breast.
28. Russian for “comrades.” Singular: tovarishch.
29. We could not find a translation for this word.
30. Their father's name.
31. The Ukrainian.
32. Wedel is the oldest chocolate brand in Poland, the business having been established in 1851.
33. The first two lines of “Die Lorelei,” by the German poet Heinrich Heine (1799–1856), a nominal convert from Judaism. The English translation (by A.Z. Foreman), reads, “I know not if there is a reason / Why I am so sad at heart … ” The best-known and most popular musical setting of the poem was composed in 1837 by Friedrich Silcher.
34. The meaning of the Yiddish word dardareno is unclear.
35. The date here is incorrect: July 6 or 8, 1941 (and not June) is the date when the town was occupied by the Germans. The Jewish men were massacred on August 10, 1941. Error can be attributed to the witness's own mix-up or to a transcribing mistake by Tsam.
36. What may have been meant here is “proposals.”
37. The fifth and sixth lines of “Die Lorelei.” A.Z. Foreman's translation reads, “The air is cool under nightfall. / The calm Rhine courses its way.” See http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/heinrich-heine-lorelei-from-german.html (accessed November 19, 2014).
38. SS-Oberscharfuehrer Heinrich Feiertag served in 1942 at the Lutsk Ghetto, and also in Krasne camp.
39. We think that P—tch regretted having said she was her cousin and (“murderously”) claimed that the girl was not her cousin – laying her open to the murderous allegation that she was a Jew.
40. Also known as Kostopil.
41. Also known as Korzec.
42. Some letters are missing from the text here.
43. Literally, “insult” or “affront.”
44. Lamentations 4:2.
45. Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), a German-Jewish historian considered to be the founder of modern Jewish historiography.
46. Tsam presumably meant “endless”, “continuous.”
47. It is now known that while the Germans did experiment with making soap out of human bodies this did not go past the trial stage. One such site was found but certainly not “hundreds.” One has to remember that Tsam was writing according to the historical knowledge or truisms of the time.
48. “Work makes life sweet.” Tsam is probably referring to the infamous slogan “Arbeit macht frei” here. “Work makes life sweet” is the first half of a German folk saying, the second half of which reads, “and laziness strengthens the limbs” (“Faulheit stärkt die Glieder”).
49. Tsam refers here to Julius Streicher, who was the editor of the virulent antisemitic Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer and one of the defendants in the Nuremberg trials. It is probably because of this that Tsam singles out him and his “statement.”
50. Tsam is presumably referring to villagers or partisans here.
51. This is a literal translation. Something is clearly missing here, but unfortunately we were not able to trace the original.