Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe by Laura Jockusch (review)

In this important new book, Laura Jockusch effectively puts to rest the “myth of silence”—the idea that Jews did not discuss the Holocaust in the war’s immediate aftermath—and sheds light on the fascinating origins of Holocaust scholarship. She does so through the story of survivors across Europe, including both professionally trained historians and many more with no academic credentials. They were all imbued with a powerful sense of duty, seeking to document the experiences of as many survivors as possible. Far from silence, their response to the Holocaust was to engage and study it; to seek justice and to warn; and to make aware those who truly were silent—namely the wider, non-Jewish public. The book fits within a growing body of work on the post-Holocaust, post-WWII period: from focused studies like that of Atina Grossman’s Jews, Germans, and Allies (2007) to continental or global perspectives offered by Tony Judt’s Postwar (2005) and Ian Buruma’s Year Zero (2013). Jockusch uses a comparative approach to explain how some Jews sought to make sense of their recent experiences and move forward in the wake of such devastation. She also gives credit to the people—both men and women—whose approach to studying the Holocaust was well ahead of their time.

Jockusch begins by showing how 1945 was no Stunde Null for these Holocaust survivors. Instead, she places their work within a longer tradition of khurbn-forshung (destruction research) that originated in efforts to document the pogroms in early twentieth-century Russia. Pioneered by the likes of Simon Dubnow and Chaim Bialik, khurbn-forshung departed from traditional Jewish accounts of historical traumas in its factual and documentary approach, its secular nature, and its purpose in seeking justice. Within this framework, Jockusch examines five national cases: France, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy. Her approach highlights the importance of context for understanding the particularities of each project.

Austrian scholars focused on collecting evidence against war criminals. With Simon Wiesenthal among the key figures, they presented a badge to all who testified, which read, “I exposed a murderer.” In France and Poland, the emphasis was on gathering materials for use in published accounts of the Jewish experience. In these studies, participants sought to depict the Holocaust as more than simply a Jewish event. While those at the French Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC) understood the Holocaust to be unique, they also sought to universalize its significance. They depicted the Nazi program to murder all Jews as an attack on the values of liberalism and democracy, and thus an attack on all. In Poland, the survivors at the Central Jewish Historical Commission (CZKH) faced a more hostile environment; but they also sought to link the Jewish experience to that of the country as a whole. They noted that Jews may have been the first targets for annihilation but Poles were the next. Those in France, Poland, and Italy also worked to place the Holocaust within the war’s larger national context. This strategy meant a stress on Jewish resistance: both within the ghettos and camps, and in the broader fight against the Nazis. One is struck by the extent to which these early scholars focused on resistance. In Italy, for example, they sought to produce a “partisan almanac” which they expected would “silence all our enemies who are trying to say that the Jews did not defend themselves against the German occupier and were not represented among the resistance” (157). More than a decade before Hannah Arendt wrote of Jews having gone “like sheep to the slaughter,” the survivors in Jockusch’s study had already demonstrated the absurdity of such a notion.

In many other respects, too, the survivors’ work was pioneering. Much of it involved the collection of materials, including documents from the perpetrators. Still, they focused primarily on the victims. In particular, they sought the memories...