Nitzotz: The Spark of Resistance in Kovno Ghetto and Dachau-Kaufering Concentration Camp

Notes

161 Notes Preface 1. The publication of Nitzotz continued after liberation, and Nitzotz was the only Hebrew journal to be circulated in Germany in the postwar years. Frenkel edited the journal until he emigrated to Palestine in early 1948. In 1946, Shmuel Epelboim joined Shafir as coeditor, and Shmuel D. Bunin became literary editor. 2. David Geffen, “Under Hammer/Sickle and Swastika,” Jerusalem Post, March 12, 1991, 8. 3. Ze’ev Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany. The term, which literally translates to “Surviving Remnant” and gained postwar currency as a label for the survivors, is of biblical origin. See Dalia Ofer, “From Survivors to New Immigrants: She’erit Hapletah and Aliyah,” 304–5. Although Mankowitz has argued that the term first appeared in the pages of Nitzotz, it appears to have been used independently in Palestine; Dina Porat has documented its use as early as 1942 in the Yishuv. See Porat, “The Role of European Jewry in the Plans of the Zionist Movement During World War II and Its Aftermath,” 289, and The Blue and Yellow Stars of David: The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939–1945, 259. 1. Introduction to Nitzotz 1. See, for example, Elie Wiesel, “Some Questions That Remain Open,” 18 (“If communication is impossible how can we fulfill our task to bear witness? If knowledge is restricted—if not totally forbidden—how can we make use of it and transform it into lessons? Lessons for whom?”). 2. In their acclaimed 1992 book on the subject, Testimony, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub had the following to say about the chronicles and diaries penned during the Holocaust: “These attempts to inform oneself and to inform others were doomed to fail. The historical imperative to bear witness could essentially not be met during the actual occurrence. . . . [I]t was beyond the limits of human ability (and willingness) to grasp, to transmit, or to imagine” (Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, 84). 162 . Notes to Page 4 3. Relatedly, some Holocaust scholars have assumed that those prisoners who found the strength to speak within the camps or after liberation must have been spared the worst of the Nazi abuses. The real victims, they have argued, were the ones who were silenced. As Primo Levi once reflected, “We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. . . . Those who . . . have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute [are] the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance” (The Drowned and the Saved, 83–84). 4. See Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944; Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary; David Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary; Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–1944; Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary; Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emanuel Ringelblum; and Martin Doerry, My Wounded Heart: The Life of Lilli Jahn, 1900–1944. 5. In Kovno ghetto, Avraham Tory, of the Jewish council, regarded it as his mission to survive in order to bring the ghetto diaries to the attention of the world. Similar stories emerge from many ghettos. 6. The literary output of the Warsaw ghetto was preserved by Emanuel Ringelblum, who created a ghetto archive (known as “Oneg Shabbat”) in November 1939. The archivists collected documentation of the Warsaw and other ghettos, recorded the testimony of refugees to Warsaw from other communities, and encouraged ghetto residents to write diaries and other records. See Ruta Sakowska, “Two Forms of Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto—Two Functions of the Ringelblum Archives.” The newspapers of the Warsaw ghetto debated political differences among various factions, criticized the ghetto leadership, and discussed the fate of Jewry and the future of Zionism, among other issues. A catalog of the forty-seven archived newspapers appears in Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, 149–51. It is noteworthy that twenty-six of the newspapers were published by Zionist organizations, and two-thirds were produced by youth movements and youth divisions of the political parties. Most of the newspapers were written in Yiddish or Polish; only three contained Hebrew articles, and only one was exclusively Hebrew (ibid.). Yad Vashem has reproduced much of the contents of the Ringelblum Archive in a Hebrew-language series, Jewish Underground Press in Warsaw. For a published...