My talk is going to be a little bit different
it’s also very personal because I also knew David well for many years—we were friends for some 20 years or more—and I have some things to say of course about that
Some of those comments may sound familiar because he’s the same friend to many of us
But I’m also going to talk a little bit about some research that I discussed quite a bit with David in the last couple of years of his life
and whereas we didn’t always agree on everything
I think in a sense what I’ll talk about relates to things that influenced him
influenced me and influenced research on the Holocaust in general
I want to first say that it is an honor to be here taking part in a panel talking about David Cesarani
When Wolf Gruner wrote to me and invited me
because I have so much to say about David and I so admire him
But I really wish I could be saying things about David under a different context—when he’s getting an award
or praising him for his great achievements
and his profound insights into history and so on
an outstanding scholar and he also was a very good friend
I was also honored very much and moved that he mentioned me and my family as well in his introduction to Final Solution
about our discussions of history and about the Holocaust and about sharing family things that we discussed
There have been many times since his most untimely passing when I have genuinely felt the need for his sense and for his voice
that I agree that he would have much to say about Holocaust research and remembrance issues today
revising our understanding of the Holocaust in ways that are less than healthy
And he’d have much to say about current antisemitism
he would have much to say about various current subjects that are being debated among scholars of the Holocaust
If you ever wanted a keen insight that penetrated to the heart of the subject
His contribution to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
about which we heard a little bit about earlier from Steven
I’m a member of Israel’s delegation to that organization
and there was a major crisis regarding the country that was going to be the chair the following year
it was David’s in depth analysis of the issues
various extensive documents that were involved
that helped guide that organization through the crisis and help navigate it to more peaceful waters
Over the more than 20 years that we knew each other and we became good friends and our families
we shared many meals together in restaurants
The conversation always flowed about everything and anything
When the kids were around we talked about the kids
When they were around we had to ask them things directly
but we talked about everything personal and professional
And I consulted him about a great deal about many things
universities where I would teach as an adjunct
I remember a little less than two years ago
when David came over to our house one evening
and my wife Bobbie and I mentioned in passing in a conversation that our son and daughter-in-law were planning a brief trip to London that was both part professional and part vacation; the professional – our daughter-in-law is a fashion designer and there was an exhibit that she wanted to see or an event she wanted to visit
Before we completed the sentence that they are going to the UK
David had already invited them to stay with the family ..
they can come and go as they want…and of course we’ll feed them whenever they want
we’ll do that.” Of course the report that we got from Hillel and Liron after their return back to Israel was only superlative
David was also a constant great tour guide
I had the great fortune to be guided by him twice
once of course in his own backyard of East End in London
He could point to a grocery on some street that I think was run at the time that we were there by someone from Pakistan
before that it was so-and-so’s butcher shop.” He gave us all the details about who lived there and who did what
But he knew not only the East End; of course he knew much more
That’s the capital city of the country where I grew up
“let me take you on a tour of certain things in DC.” And he took Bobbie and me
although I was breathing more heavily than he was
if you walk through that alley over there to the Kennedy Center
not only did he know how to get there but he made the sites come alive
because he knew not only about the site but about what went on behind the scenes in creating the site or developing the site
Well I’d like to not only comment on David personally
but also on his scholarship and his approach to history
I won’t repeat anything that Rob and Todd have said
but all who knew him are aware of course that David read very widely and voraciously
but he also remembered everything that he read
It was a humbling experience to discuss some aspect of history that I researched
but so-and-so had something else to say about Poland
But he had that rare and remarkable ability not only to read everything and remember it all
but also to analyze and synthesize all of that vast information into a coherent whole
And he was very much conscious of both the text he was looking at and discussing and the context of the historical events and developments
he emphasized the importance of various contexts
Not that no historian has ever said it’s important to look at World War II and study the Holocaust – of course other historians have said that – but he drove home so clearly how essential that context is for discussing the developments of the Holocaust
the voices of the Jews were central to his discussion
and he would make that point to anybody and everybody in any discussion about the Holocaust
That approach came out very much in all of his reading and all of his writing
but especially in Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-49
Now David and I discussed the Holocaust and Modern Jewish history in all ways
And whenever he would visit Jerusalem he would ask me about recent publications
He would finish reading an item and then would say “what’s next?” And whenever he would write something for Yad Vashem Studies
he would bring to bear all of his vast reading and knowledge
and multiple types of sources in his keen analysis and deep sensitivity to the victims’ voices and perspectives
Whenever I would send his peer review – anonymously
of course – to authors as part of the recommendations for revisions of an article
the authors might disagree with some comment
but they found it very difficult to disagree with David’s comment
They didn’t know with whom they were agreeing or disagreeing
but over the years I have seen that while they might disagree with a certain revision request
when it came to David’s comments they would just go to work and do the revisions
it was an exhilarating experience for me very often
It was in light of that multi-level and multi-faceted approach of David’s that I’d like to discuss a particular piece of research that I discussed with him quite a bit
including at that dinner in our home a little less than two years ago
I would like to look at the last year or so of the war and the Holocaust
reflecting research on the Holocaust through comments on a particular person
and to me and to other scholars pretty directly
The person I want to mention is a man named Joseph Kermisz
Joseph Kermisz was a Jewish historian who was born and raised in Poland
He was born in 1907 in a small town in what was Eastern Galicia in inter-war Poland and now is part of Southwestern Ukraine
a village in Podhajce County in the Tarnopol District
He got his PhD from the University of Warsaw in 1937 in Jewish history
but he wrote about the history of the Jewish community in Warsaw
his PhD was the first scholarly publication in Poland after the end of World War II
It had already been typeset and was about to be printed when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939
And the publisher managed to throw the type-set manuscript away
and that’s the first scholarly publication in Poland after World War II
Kermisz fled Warsaw and went back to Złotniki
ostensibly to join Polish forces that were regrouping there
when that area was conquered by the Soviet Union in 1939
Kermisz became first a history teacher and then the principle of a high school in a small town in the same area called Husiatyn
and Kermisz got a job working for the Jewish Council
and he hid with a colleague from the school
who lived in a tiny village called Czabarówka
not far from the town that I now want to mention
Buczacz was a medium sized town in Eastern Galicia
There were about 7,500-8,000 Jews there before World War II / on the eve of the war they constituted a little more than half of the town’s population
is a place from which many well-known people have emerged
maybe it’s something in the water in Buczacz
the famous historian in the Warsaw ghetto who created the Oneg Shabbat archive was from Buczacz
Sigmund Freud’s great grandparents apparently were from Buczacz
why are all these well-known people from Buczacz
where Keremish was from and where he worked during the war
was under Soviet occupation from 1939-1941
the Germans and their local collaborators murdered more than 10,000 Jews on the hill outside of Buczacz and in the Jewish cemetery
These murder operations included the Jews of Buczacz and other Jews from little villages and towns in the area
the German authorities in Buczacz declared the town
The Soviet army advanced on the town in 1944
the Soviet army liberated Buczacz and the area around Buczacz
because between 700-800 Jews emerged from hiding
Some had been hiding out in fields and nearby woods and others had been hiding with people who had been protecting them
local Christians who had been protecting them
And among those people who emerged was Joseph Kermisz
who was hiding in that little village in that same general area
having been a teacher and principal of a high school under Soviet authorities
immediately went to the Soviet authorities
They immediately sent him to the officers’ training school further east of there in Ukraine in Zhitomir
and there he became he a history professor
but rather as an academic teaching history to Polish officers being trained by the Red Army
the Germans re-conquered the town and the area
They seized every Jew they could find and they shot between 600-700 Jews
When the Soviets returned to the town on July 21
1944 to finally liberate Buczacz and the area
it turned out that the Germans hadn’t quite gotten everybody
I want to move to another area and then to tie again back to Buczacz and back to Kermisz
then re-taken by the Soviets; that same period of time
the same district that I researched in greater depth and on which I published a book and discussed in great length all the different things that came up in the research with David
in that area in that period of Spring/Summer 1944
The Germans were so afraid of the partisans that every German official had orders never to travel alone
never to travel unarmed and never to enter the forests of the Lublin district
the Home Army that was the mainstream/right-wing
representing the Polish Government-in-Exile
the far right Fascist underground that was sometimes more pro-Nazi than anything else
while also fighting each other and killing each other
The NSZ in particular and also units from the other two were also busy hunting Jews and killing Jews that were hiding
as were of course the German SS and the German police and German civilians
There were hundreds of Jews hiding in the forests of the Lublin District
Only hundreds remained from several hundred thousand that had been there in the early part of the war
And some of them were hiding in family camps in the forest and were being protected by Jewish partisans
there were nearly 10,000 Jewish forced laborers still working in various forced labor installations run by various German authorities
the SS or the armed forces or the police or others
as Soviet shells began to rain down on this district during the end of spring/beginning of summer of 1944
I want to mention a few of those camps where there were Jewish forced laborers from which they were moving out
Budyzn was a place where there had been a Polish aircraft factory before the war that produced Polish military aircraft
a camp that produced mostly for the Heinkel aircraft company in Germany that produced engines for German fighter planes
There were about 3,000 Jews who were working there
Their work masters were mostly people from the factory but their security guards were SS guards who killed many of the Jews there along the way
The camp was gradually liquidated and the prisoners were transferred between March and May 1944 to camps further west within Poland
and some of those people survived in those camps or in subsequent death marches and moving further into Germany
in the northern part of the Lublin district
where there was a camp run by the German air force
where there were kindergartens being operated by the women who were teaching children from kindergarten to other early childhood care
The Luftwaffe commander of the camp allowed these children to be there and these women whose job was to take care of the children apparently to maybe keep things calm
who were the majority of the forced labor would be calm
The camp functioned almost to the day that the Red Army arrived in July 1944 and then all of the Jews were transferred further west into Poland to other military related camps in the area of Częstochowa and in that process nearly all the children were killed
The Jewish leaders of the camp were so upset that the children were killed that they actually dressed down the Luftwaffe commandant for not keeping his part of the bargain
They had agreed that the children would be transferred as well
And none of the Jews who dressed down the commandant were ever disciplined
But the most bizarre of all these camps is a camp that was in a small town called Kraśnik
one of the greatest mass murderers of the Holocaust
and in the fall of 1942 he created a camp that Germans who had served there
later on in post-war trials called “Schwartz geführt.” It was a black market kind of a camp
not really revealed in in its true nature to Himmler
The camp was run officially as a camp that was going to make furniture for German schools and German authorities in the district
but in reality what the camp mostly engaged in was making private gifts for German officials in the district and making money for the SS officials running the camp
There were between 250-300 Jews in the camp
Jewish men in the camp who were permitted to bring their wives out of hiding to the camp
bring their children out of hiding into the camp
There weren’t that many women and children there but there were some
had a 6 or 7-year-old boy who had no one to play with
so the Jewish children of the camp were permitted to play with the boy
He was allowed to play with the Jewish children
But his son could play with Jewish children
this camp received orders for 692 personal gifts that were made by the Jewish forced laborers for SS and other officials in the Lublin District
Things like children’s toys made out of wood
that various German officials going home to Germany for Christmas could bring home to their children as Christmas gifts
the work in this camp shifted to work that related to the German retreat – the Germans were moving out
What we find is that the camp was now making things that the Germans needed in order to pack up and leave
they made dozens of huge trunks for packing office material and other things into for moving out
They made field kitchens for the SS Wiking Division that had many northern Europeans and Scandinavians
they made 13 closets to be put on the back of trucks for a unit of Panzer Regiment 5
they were also busy making private gifts that all these people who were retreating would take with them back to their families as souvenirs
One of the things they were also making was sausages
cured meat that can last long while you’re traveling – you don’t have to cook them
The reason they were making sausages was that they received orders from the Lublin officer overseeing the camp
The Germans in the camp were told to buy a sausage-making machine and to buy animals
in order to slaughter them and make sausage
They were to not pay for these things in money
but rather to barter for these things so there’d be no written record
Then they produced massive amounts of sausage for all these retreating Germans
During the last month of the existence of this camp
the commandant of the camp at the time was an SS sergeant named Franz Bartetzko
who had previously cut his teeth at the death camp of Bełżec; after experiencing Bełżec and becoming a mass murderer
The last 4 reports we have until the camp was liquidated and everyone moved Westward across Poland
During that period the Jewish personnel in that camp increased by about 15 or so Jews who apparently entered the camp from hiding because it was a relatively safe place to be
During those 4 weeks Jews were working in 18 different crafts and produced 1,896 items for the German retreat that they took with them
most of them to the Plaszów concentration camp in July of 1944
I won’t go on with the details of the Majdanek camp as time was running out at other camps that were liquidated
other than to say that Jews were taken out of the Majdanek camp
there were somewhere between 1,000 and 1,600 forced laborers who worked in the Zamek for the German police and for the SS various odd jobs
So that when the Soviets entered the city of Lublin on July 22 and 23 and the rest of the district in subsequent days and liberated Majdanek as well
what they found in the entire district was that there were between 300 and 500 Jews who emerged from hiding – hiding in the forest or hiding with other people
the Polish provisional government that arose after the liberation and was under Soviet influence but was not yet a Soviet government
alongside ongoing violence all over Poland
the different Polish underground units were fighting each other and trying to fight the Soviets for domination of the country
The Provisional Government on August 31st issued a decree that has gone down in history as the August decree that discussed how to prosecute Polish people
or begin criminal investigations to prosecute them for treason in collaboration with the enemy
helping to murder Jews was one of the things for which they could be prosecuted
But alongside that there was also a great deal of antisemitic violence
very shortly after the liberation of the district
6 Jews who were trying to return home were killed
They were trying to see who else had come home and were killed
who was one of the organizers of the uprising and escape from Sobibór
when he went back to see if anyone had survived in his family
one of the only two known survivors of the Bełżec death camp
The day that he was meant to go to the Jewish Historical Committee in Lublin and tell his story about the Bełżec camp
what we know of his experience is what his wife told us
at least 118 Jews in the Lublin district were murdered between 1944 and Spring of 1946
I’d like to come back to Joseph Kermisz and what all this means for David and for me and for research
Joseph Kermisz managed to get himself transferred from the officers training camp in Zhitomir in September 1944
His ostensible reason was to help train and teach history over there
but what he really wanted to do was meet Holocaust survivors
He immediately joined two other historians who were already on the scene and had begun to report Jewish survivor accounts by the end of August 1944 – Philip Friedman and Nachman Blumental
and Blumental – had organized recording survivor accounts
They set up a committee to continue in Lublin and they moved further West and set up committees in other places
What you find in the course of the latter part of 1944 and the first months of 1945 is that similar historical committees whose job was to record survivor accounts were created all across Poland
working on this and collecting documentation
they had already collected about 1,500 survivor accounts; ultimately they were to collect more than 3,000 in Poland
All of these regional and local committees were merged in early 1946 into an institution that still exists today as a very important institution for research
and that is the Jewish Historical Institute known by its Polish acronym ŻIH in Warsaw
They have a very important archive for very important research that is done there
and Joseph Kermisz moved to Warsaw to take up a role in this new institution
He became the first chief archivist of ŻIH in 1946
and he proceeded prior to getting that job and following getting that job in running around all over Poland looking for documentation
but he went looking for written documentation and he was perhaps the most significant figure in gathering German documentation
such as the Lublin District civilian Governor’s archive which has 914 files
or the Lublin Juderat archive with its 181 files
as well as various other archives in the Lodz district
The Jewish Social Self-Help archive he helped find part of in Poland
He was also one of the people who led the way in discovering the first part of the Oneg Shabbat archive that had been buried by Ringelblum and his cohorts before the Warsaw ghetto uprising
He was able with others to identify that site
in some of the famous photographs we see of people who clearly weren’t doing the digging because they were wearing suits and ties
but they’re in the pit pulling out the milk cans we can see Joseph Kermisz there in the center of the photograph
Joseph Kermisz was essential in creating one of the most important archives in the world on the Holocaust and beginning to do research
But he was also essential in pushing and bringing to trial German criminals
he made sure that he went back to Warsaw after putting together a hefty affidavit so that he could testify as an expert witness in the trial of Jürgen Stroop
who was the commander of the German forces that put down the Warsaw ghetto uprising
he became the first chief archivist of the first memorial institution to have an archive in Israel created about the Holocaust
Yad Vashem hired him as the first chief archivist of Yad Vashem
he continued producing for the next 20 years or so in research and publications until he became ill and died in 2005
Kermisz was a major figure in laying foundations in major research and for bringing criminals to justice
He collected a wide variety of documentation because he had a vision that only through integrating sources
a variety of sources for each body of material--only in that way
having actually begun to do the research can we perhaps begin to understand what had happened
That idea of integrating sources in a sense began with Joseph Kermisz and some of his colleagues
He was the one who began to develop the archive at Yad Vashem that is the largest archive in the world and certainly one of the most important in the world
and in his influence on the integration of sources
we might say that but for a stroke of luck in history
where Kermisz happened to have survived and where Kermisz happened to have decided to go report to the Soviet commander during the 10 days that this place had been temporarily liberated
and the Soviet commander just happened to decide
where the Germans are not going to reconquer the place
that piece of luck resulted in gathering all this material
developing the foundations for research--one of the people developing that--and in developing a concept for research that is of course at the heart of what David did
David writes about Kermisz in Final Solution
He was at the heart of what David did: integrating sources and putting Jewish voices at the heart
and hopefully it’s also the heart of what very many of us do
Sign Up Today!
Be the first to learn about new articles and personal stories like the one you've just read
Digital Accessibility | Accessibility Guidelines
Sign In
Register
Stella Tracz (nee Woloschuk) of Thunder Bay passed away peacefully of natural causes on March 11