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  • The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia
  • Waitman Beorn
The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia, Wendy Lower (Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context) (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2011), xxv + 177 pp., hardcover $44.95, e-book available.

“Every village and town, every forest abounds with graves looming from a distance as a historical lesson and a warning. Once the living witnesses are gone, then those graves will speak volumes. They will accuse the whole world … with an eloquence a hundredfold mightier, of having committed or having failed to act against the cruelest of crimes” (p. 92).

With these words, the Jewish diarist Samuel Golfard ended his entry of April 11, 1943. Sometime shortly after, he died in a hail of bullets after trying to shoot a German SS officer. Despite his own statement, Golfard’s diary speaks with far more eloquence than he perhaps gives himself credit for. Only rarely are we historians the [End Page 480] beneficiaries of valuable source materials that serendipitously find their way to us, rather than the reverse. The incredible diary of Samuel Golfard, which after a long and convoluted journey from the Ukraine was fortunate to reach historian Wendy Lower, is one such source.

While our knowledge of the experience of Jews in Western Europe and in the concentration camps is based on a wealth of testimony, documentation by Jews in Eastern Europe, particularly in smaller towns and ghettos, is less plentiful. Many of the ghettos lasted only a short time, and Einsatzgruppen killings often left no survivors. The fall of the Iron Curtain kept much of the testimony of the few survivors from reaching the West. For all these reasons, the glimpse Samuel Golfard gives us into the Holocaust in Galicia is all the more valuable and Lower’s thoughtful editing makes this source incredibly powerful and accessible.

The centerpiece of this latest addition to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s series of published Holocaust sources is, naturally, Golfard’s diary. The young man’s narrative describes the experience of the German occupation, including deportations and murders, in the small town of Przemyślany in southeast Poland (now Ukraine). The diary covers the period from January through mid-April 1943—a time when German authorities were focusing on completing the murder of the Jews in Galicia. We know little of Golfard except that he was from Radom and had fled to Przemyślany. He was imprisoned in a series of ghettos and work camps where he was a slave laborer for the Germans. The deportation of his sister to Bełżec death camp drove Golfard to chronicle his experiences, and he continued to do so until his death several months later. Sometime in April 1943, he drew a smuggled pistol and attempted to shoot an SS officer. It is possible that the gun misfired or that Golfard simply missed, but in any case he was killed by return fire from the startled SS men surrounding him. Tadeusz Janiewicz, a Polish man who had helped Golfard and other Jews, and who was later honored as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, mailed Golfard’s diary to a Jewish acquaintance in 1947.

Though it covers only four months, Golfard’s diary is an incredibly valuable historical source. In a short review, one cannot begin to address all the important topics Golfard raises. Some key elements stand out, however, as particularly instructive for scholars and students alike. First, Golfard writes in a self-aware, unapologetic manner that demands attention. In this tone, he begins by describing his reaction to the deportation and death of his sister, Manya. “What did she think of me?” he wrote in January 1943; “Did she know that I ran to save her? In vain. I distinguished her screams among the cries of the others, swollen with despair, and coming from the truck as I, dazed and unaware of what was really going on, desperately begged for help” (p. 50). Golfard does not shy away from describing his personal feelings and observations in a way that makes this work...

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