Établir la vérité sur le meurtre des Juifs en Pologne

Abstract

The foundations for research on the Shoah were laid by Jewish survivor scholars in the immediate aftermath of liberation from German occupation. In his book, The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for Jewish History, Mark Smith identifies Nachman Blumental (1902–1983), who survived the Shoah in the Soviet Union, as one of these Yiddish historians. While Blumental was indeed a Yiddish historian and a Yiddishist, he was much more. Blumental was also a survivor scholar in a more general sense who sought to reach out to the Polish majority and enlighten the public at large, as indicated by the numerous articles he published in the 1940s in the journal Nasze Słowo.Drawing on previously unexamined and unpublished source material from the Nachman Blumental Collection, my article seeks to analyze Nachman Blumental’s perspective on the Nazi’s persecution and extermination policy in German-occupied Poland. Blumental’s “historiographical operation” (Michel de Certeau) that he developed in the 1940s took shape within a specific constellation: first, the institutional framework of the Central Jewish Historical Commission and its successor organization, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, which he headed from 1947 and 1950 and for which he collected and edited documents; second, his function as an expert witness in the trials of Deputy Governor-General Josef Bühler and Commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höß as well as his attempt to bring two Polish policemen involved in the murder of his family to justice; third, his inspection of Shoah sites, which constituted part of a journey he made through the landscape of the Shoah between 1944 and 1950; fourth, his linguistic approach to the reality of the Shoah as manifested in his dictionary project decoding German Nazi words, Słowa niewinne (Innocent Words), and in his analysis of new Polish words that emerged during the German occupation. Blumental’s still unpublished Gwara polska pod okupacją niemiecką (Polish Jargon under German Occupation), which is divided into 15 thematic sections, includes a collection of words on the subjects of “Camps,” Ghetto,” and the “Aryan side.”The aim of my paper is to shed new light on Nachman Blumental’s contribution to early research on the Shoah by situating his work in the broader Polish societal context of the 1940s, a part of which was the continuity and omnipresence of anti-Semitic violence after liberation from German occupation. In Poland, documentation of the Shoah by Jews was carried out under life-threatening conditions. This had an impact on how explicit survivor scholars could or could not be when writing in Polish about Polish participation in the Shoah. One can discern the difference between Blumental’s published works, such as his expert witness testimonies, and his private hand-written notes on his journey through Poland, which demonstrate the prevalence of Polish anti-Semitism.