Collect and Record!

This volume tells the largely unknown story of Holocaust survivors who founded Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers in Europe immediately after World War II. Amidst political turmoil and extreme privation, physically exhausted and traumatized women and men who had survived ghettos, camps, hiding, or life under false identities sought to chronicle the catastrophe. They collected thousands of Nazi documents along with more than 18,000 testimonies, some 8,000 questionnaires, and large numbers of memoirs, diaries, songs, poems, and artifacts of Jewish victims. The activists found documenting the Holocaust to be a moral imperative after the war, the obligation of the dead to the living, and a means to understand and process their recent trauma and loss. They deemed historical documentation vital in the pursuit of postwar justice and essential in counteracting the Nazis' wartime efforts to erase the evidence of their crimes. These Jewish documentation initiatives pioneered the development of a Holocaust historiography that used both victim and perpetrator sources to describe the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the everyday life and death of European Jews under the Nazi regime, while placing the experiences of Jews at the center of the story. These groundbreaking efforts of survivors to study the Nazi regime's genocide of European Jews was ignored by subsequent generations of Holocaust scholars. With a comparative analysis, Jockusch focuses on France, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy to illuminate the transnational nature of Jewish efforts to write the history of the Holocaust in its immediate aftermath. The book explores the motivations and rationales that guided survivors in chronicling the destruction they had witnessed, their research techniques, archival collections, and historical publications. As the first comprehensive study on the subject, this book serves as an important complement to the literature on survivor testimony, Holocaust memory, and the rebuilding of Jewish life in postwar Europe.
"Collect and Record! is one of the most original and important studies of Jewish life in the aftermath of the Nazi catastrophe to appear in recent years. This vital chapter of historiography will change the way historians understand the development and uneven reception of the early scholarship on the Holocaust. It challenges the myth that Jewish survivors of the wartime apocalypse were traumatized, paralyzed, and silent." --David Cesarani, Research Professor in History, Royal Holloway, University of London

"This is the first rigorous study of the efforts by Holocaust survivors to document their fate in the immediate aftermath of the war. Based on extensive research, this book demonstrates that contrary to the conventional view, there was no silence after the Holocaust, but rather a refusal by the rest of the world to listen. Laura Jockusch saves these voices from oblivion and immeasurably enriches our knowledge of the Holocaust and its aftermath." --Omer Bartov, author of Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine

NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND TRANSLITERATIONS ; LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ; INTRODUCTION: EARLY CHRONICLERS OF THE HOLOCAUST: JEWISH HISTORICAL COMMISSIONS AND DOCUMENTATION CENTERS IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR ; 1. KHURBN-FORSHUNG: HISTORY WRITING AS A JEWISH RESPONSE TO CATASTROPHE ; 2. WRITING FRENCH JUDAISM'S "BOOK OF MARTYRDOM": HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTATION IN LIBERATED FRANCE ; 3. WRITING POLISH JEWRY'S "GREATEST NATIONAL CATASTROPHE": HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTATION IN COMMUNIST POLAND ; 4. WRITING HISTORY ON PACKED SUITCASES: HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTATION IN THE JEWISH DISPLACED PERSONS CAMPS OF GERMANY, AUSTRIA, AND ITALY ; CONCLUSION: HISTORY WRITING AS RECONSTRUCTION: THE BEGINNINGS OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF ITS VICTIMS ; APPENDIX: MAJOR PARTICIPANTS IN THE JEWISH HISTORICAL COMMISSIONS AND DOCUMENTATION CENTERS ; NOTES ; BIBLIOGRAPHY ; INDEX