Der Beginn des Untergangs. Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees by Miriam Schulz (review)

Miriam Schulz, currently a PhD student at Columbia University, was in the right place at the right time—the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide in London—while working on her MA degree at the Freie Universität in Berlin. It just so happened that Howard Falksohn, the archive director, pointed Schulz in the direction of what she calls "a sensational find" (15) in the archive that immensely enriches "Khurbn scholarship" (10) in a time when we are rapidly losing our last survivors (and liberators). During several months as an intern at the institute, Schulz explored "an until then completely untouched archival collection"—Wiener Library Document Section 532—whose study led to this publication and to whose further exploration she has dedicated herself since then (283). Schulz's MA thesis, completed in 2015, received major recognition from the Zentrum für Historische Forschung Berlin of the Polnische Akademie der Wissenschaft, and was awarded the Wissenschaftlichen Förderpreis des Botschafters der Republik Polen. Publication of the revised thesis by the Metropol Verlag in Berlin followed swiftly in 2016. A second honor was bestowed on Schulz in 2017, the Hosenfeld-Szpilman-Preis, by Leuphana Universität in Lüneburg. The award was shared with another honoree and bestowed on January 27, 2017, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

So what is this remarkable study about? In October 1939, two months after the beginning of World War II, Polish Jewish writers and journalists, who had fled Poland in what became known as the "Journalistenzug," connected in their new domicile of Vilna—not yet part of Lithuania—and quickly decided that the stories of 30,000 refugees streaming out of Poland had to be collected and at least archived for the future, but better yet, written up and disseminated as widely as possible. Most of the individuals—and Schulz names many—had belonged to literary or journalistic groups in the interwar years, so the connections were easily reestablished and the work familiar. The group of sixty called itself the Komitet tsu samlen material vegn yidishn khurbn in Polyn 1939, and had one goal—no matter their political or religious views—to join together in documenting the destruction of Polish Jewry at the hands of the Nazis. The horrendous German activities during "the incubation phase" (12) of this war of destruction are detailed in six bulletins in Yiddish, authored by the Komitet during a six-month period between October 1939 and April 1940. Schulz translated the bulletins into German and they make up the second part of the book. The information contained in the bulletins is chilling, providing detailed eyewitness accounts of the displacement, abuse, torture, and outright murder of numerous Jews and Poles, the destruction and plunder of Jewish and Polish property, and the total erasure of Jewish shtetls such as Brok on the Bug (and Brok) river in the district of Warsaw. Both the historical/theoretical first part and the narrative second part are accompanied by copious explanatory notes, glossaries of Yiddish and Hebrew terms and passages, and references to secondary sources as well as to the Hebrew Bible. A map of some of the cities and especially the shtetls, including those no longer in existence, would have been helpful. The hitherto unknown Komitet was not as large as the Oneg Shabbat project in Warsaw, but it preceded the Oneg Shabbat work by about a year. Eventually, all the different communal underground documentation efforts had the same goal—a historical Jewish goal going back to the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE—to provide factual evidence of events in Jewish history.

Miriam Schultz provides a new source for the study of Nazi atrocities against Jews and Poles in Poland that were every bit as gruesome and deadly as the Final Solution hatched at the Wannsee Conference...