Yad Vashem Publications

Editor: Sharon Kangisser Cohen

Paul Sanders

 Jovana Cvetićanin

  Olga Ungar

László Bernát Veszprémy 

בעריכת : Sharon Kangisser Cohen

Lazar Engles (Engelstern)

The moment we first set foot on the soil of the Naliboki Pushcha, the atmosphere was completely different. We felt a new kind of security, as if we were in our own partisan kingdom…. We had survived so many dangers, but we were now among Jews in the forest.

Prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Lazar Engles (Engelstern) lived a peaceful and fulfilled life in his beloved city of Vilna with his wife and two daughters. The Nazi occupation of the city in June 1941 and its subsequent ghettoization marked a rapid escalation of horrors for Lazar and his family.

Editor: Dr. Sharon Kangisser Cohen

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Dan Stone - Lawrence L. Langer (1929–2024): In Memoriam

Barbara Engelking - “I Can’t Write”: Requests for Assistance Addressed to the Jewish National Committee in Warsaw, 1943–1944

Fábio Koifman and Rui Afonso - The Legality of the Visas Issued by the Brazilian Consulate in Hamburg, 1938–1939

Kenneth H. Marcus, Marlou Schrover, and Simon Erlanger - Remembering World War II Concentration Camps: Dutch Memorials and Transitional Justice

Efrat Buchris Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem in Theresienstadt: Music of Succor

In the historiography of World War II and the Holocaust, letters and diaries are often used to provide insight into the perspectives of the time. In this volume, Jürgen Matthäus uses the often-neglected source of photo albums created by German soldiers during and immediately after the war. These albums provide a rare insight into the mindset of ordinary Germans, their knowledge of the crimes committed, and how their perspectives changed during the war.

Hans Oppenheimer and Others

Forgotten Stories of individual Jewish Resistance in Nazi Germany

Wolf Gruner

Through the stories of Hans Oppenheimer and others, this research reassesses Jewish resistance in Nazi Germany and emphasizes that courage existed in all elements of the Jewish population. Jewish men and women acted against the Nazis and their policies, regardless of age, social status, education, profession, religious belief, and political conviction. Wolf Gruner asserts that by applying a broader lens regarding resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, we will be able to tell a richer story of Jewish agency and responses during the Holocaust and bury the wrong assumption of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust once and for all.

On Duty - The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust

By Jan Grabowski

The Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland. The uniformed police has been an enthusiastic executor of all German directives regarding the Jews.

Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, 1943

Shortly after the occupation of Poland in the fall of 1939, the Germans created the Blue Police, consisting mainly of prewar Polish police officers. Within a short time, this police force was responsible for enforcing many anti-Jewish regulations issued by the Nazis. Who were these policemen, and how did they transform from ordinary policemen to murderous executioners? And what was the role of the Germans in this horrifying picture?

Author: Yehuda Bacon
Editors: Sharon Kangisser Cohen and Dorota Julia Nowak

What a life it will be, Jerusalem! I know very well what the wordmeans. Like every association, it spans my entire life. Notebook 8, August 12, 1946; World-renowned Israeli artist and Holocaust survivor Yehuda Bacon began to keep a diary in July 1945, while living in a youth home in Štiřín, Czechoslovakia, shortly after his liberation. During the past seven decades, Bacon has filled over 240 notebooks. His diary is a mosaic of words and drawings through which he attempts to express his past, contemplate his present, and imagine his future.

Editor: Dr. Sharon Kangisser Cohen

Table of Contents:

Introduction • Susanne Heim and Ulrich Herbert - A Comprehensive Documentation of the Holocaust: The Completion of the VEJ Project • Eliyahu Klein - Between Rescue and Persecution: Defining and Mapping the Range of Behaviors Toward Oppressed Jews During the Holocaust in the Countryside of Occupied Poland • Attila Gidó - Survivors of the Northern Transylvanian Deportations: Liberation, Repatriation, Reckoning • Gali Drucker Bar-Am - “Record and Lament”: Yizkor Books as History and Literature Conflated • Merav Yisrael and Gila Prebor - The Yizkor Book Collection in the Yad Vashem Library in Jerusalem: A Bibliographical Analysis

Hanna Temkin

In My Involuntary Journeys, Hanna Temkin shares her story for the first time, shedding light on lesser-known aspects of Jewish life and survival in Eastern Europe before, during, and after the Holocaust. Moreover, Hanna’s story is an inspiring tale of female empowerment and serves as a testament to her ability to overcome the worst odds.

Moral Dilemmas among Jews in the Reality of the Holocaust

By Yitzhak Arad

It Happened on Our Planet offers a brutally honest insight into the horrifying decisions that the Jews had to make and the unbearable situations in which the Jews found themselves during this time. The publication of this important work presents generations to come with a better understanding of the complex reality of the Holocaust.

Zoltán Roth

There were many times when I felt an irresistible desire to stop, and those were moments that I had to really choose between fighting for life or not. My other option was to continue walking. It seems that struggling for the yet unlived part of my life was stronger. I didn’t stop.

Ruth Leimenzon Engles| Edited by Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky

At last, I have gotten a notebook in which to write. I have a pencil. I will try. Maybe it will make it easier to push through the days. It’s hard for me. As soon as dawn breaks, my first thought is: how does one endure until the end of the day.
Ruth Leimenzon Engles, May 15, 1944

A few days after the Germans occupied Vilna at the end of June 1941, Ruth Leimenzon’s husband was seized by local collaborators and was never seen again. Ruth, the sole survivor of her murdered family, managed to survive two years in the ghetto using her intelligence and common sense, helped by luck and perhaps miracles. Just two days before the ghetto’s liquidation in September 1943, Ruth escaped with the help of a Christian woman, her former boss’ wife, and found a hiding place in a barn on a farm 20 kilometers from Vilna, where she hid for nearly a year. During the last two months in the barn, Ruth wrote a diary in Yiddish describing her three-year ordeal.

Christoph Schminck-Gustavus

Holocaust Survivors’ Emotional, Psychological, and Social Journeys in the Early Postwar Period

Editors: Constance Pâris de Bollardière and Sharon Kangisser Cohen

His reaction to my cautious questions about his parents, his brothers and sisters, his experiences in the concentration camp was characteristic. His only response was to let his head drop onto his chest. He remained sitting in this posture in silence for some time. It must be said here without pathos or literary embellishment that it is only now that he has been returned to normal life that this child feels the pain and torment of everything he has seen and experienced.

Hans Keilson

Edited by Sharon Kangisser Cohen

Table of Contents: • Introduction • Michael Robert Marrus (1941-2022)—In Memoriam (Doris Bergen) • The Polish Underground State and the Financing of Help for the Jews: An Attempt at a New Approach (Dariusz Libionka) • News from Auschwitz: The International Underground’s Secret Reports and the Jewish Holocaust (Tom Navon) • Bandera, Genocide, and Justice: Was Stepan Bandera Responsible for Crimes Committed by the OUN and the UPA? (Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe) • Politics of Holocaust Memory in Communist and Post-Communist Romania: On Survivor Matei Gall’s Multiple Life Stories (Ștefan Cristian Ionescu and Dana Mihăilescu)

Edited by: Eliyana R. Adler and Natalia Aleksiun

The Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews of Europe led to the atomization of the social relationships of the victims. Families were ripped apart. Entire communities were ghettoized and isolated from the outside world. The forced removal of the Jews from the midst of the non-Jewish population facilitated the crimes committed against them, significantly limited the assistance they could rely on, and restricted the number of witnesses to their persecution and murder. However, despite the devastation, disruption, and loss brought by the Holocaust, prewar patterns and lationships continued to shape decisions and actions by Jews and non-Jews both during and after the war. Even in extremis, they often relied on established networks of support that had been forged in very different circumstances. Jewish victims as well as bystanders and perpetrators relied on the already familiar cohort of relatives, neighbors, peers, and colleagues to support and assist them during this time. Just as these networks brought people with various backgrounds together, Entanglements of War compiles a broad range of interdisciplinary perspectives to reveal invaluable findings about the relationships, choices, and actions that shaped these complex connections, and their impact on Jewish lives during the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath.

Vera Komissar

A child’s cry pierces the stillness. The wail breaks the dismal silence that fell when the doors were locked. It’s as if the child’s tears give us all permission to let out our despair. Julius Paltiel grew up in Trondheim, Norway, where he lived with his mother and his brother. Like all the Jews of Norway, their lives changed forever when the Nazis came to power in April 1940. His arrest at the age of eighteen in 1942 marked the beginning of a journey of inconceivable horror and brutality in the Nazi concentration camps. Initially incarcerated in Falstad, a Nazi concentration camp in his native Norway, Julius Paltiel was then deported to Germany by sea in February 1943 before boarding a train to Auschwitz. He was selected for forced labor to work for IG Farben in Auschwitz III–Monowitz. In January 1945, he was sent on a death march to Buchenwald where he was liberated by U.S. forces on April 11, 1945. Julius Paltiel is one of the few Norwegian Jews who survived and returned from Auschwitz and one of the Jewish survivors who testified in the war crime trials against the Nazi perpetrators in Norway. He dedicated his life to the fight against antisemitism to ensure that such horrors would never happen again. As one of only a handful of Holocaust testimonies from Norway, In Spite of It All sheds light on Julius Paltiel’s personal ordeal to survive the Holocaust as well as on the Jewish persecution and murder of Norway’s Jewish community. This tale of survival also serves as a warning of the atrocities that are possible at the hands of ordinary human beings.

Lipman Kunstadt | Edited by Sarah Rosen and Dalia Ofer

I decided to stop writing the diary and to destroy the pages… I eventually overcame the despair and listened to the counterargument…a miracle may occur and your fragmentary writings will be the only remaining memory of Transnistria. (Lipman Kunstadt, August 26, 1942)

Diary from Hell in Transnistria is a painfully vivid and intricate account of life in the Dzhurin ghetto in Transnistria, written by Lipman Kunstadt, who was deported there from Radauţi, Romania, with his wife, his children, his mother, and his sister on October 14, 1941. Kunstadt, who was well-educated and a journalist, was appointed secretary of the Jewish council in the Dzhurin ghetto, where he had access to a great deal of information about its inner workings. He began writing his diary in Yiddish on April 11, 1942, at great risk, sparing no criticism against the ghetto leadership. 

Anikó Boros

Translated from the German by Christopher Reid