Pathfinders? Polish-born Survivor-Researchers and their Place in the Production of Holocaust Historiography in Poland and Beyond

• Applicant: Dr. Katrin Stoll
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; History of Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 540504045

The Nazi anti-Jewish campaign (1933 to 1945) spread over continental Europe as a whole. German-occupied Poland was the geographical center of the murder of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its helpers. Crucial to the research project is the analytical distinction between knowledge and experience. We know from source material how the persecution and murder of European Jewry was carried out including participants and the social practices employed. Conscious of the fact that they were the absolute exception to the rule, those few Jews who were able to testify about what happened and how also testified on behalf of those murdered. The dominant Jewish experience of the Holocaust was characterized by constant attacks on the body (living and dead) and violent death. Survivors confronting the dimensions of the almost total destruction of European Jewry responded in various ways. This research project focuses on a group of Polish-born Jewish survivor-historians who would spend the rest of their lives documenting and researching the fate of destroyed Jewish communities including that of their own families. They are: Tatiana Berenstein, Nachman Blumental, Szymon Datner and Józef Kermisz. It will engage with practices of knowledge production such as site-specific Holocaust research, fearless truth-telling, the role of victim-witnesses or expert-witnesses in postwar trials. It seeks to examine how the status of survivors as both a dominated and marginalized minority influenced and impeded the public expression of their experiences. The socio-historical context in which they operated was characterized by ongoing antisemitic violence and by Cold War-influenced political struggles for discourse control. Given this, the survivor-researchers who exposed the true extent of Polish participation in the annihilation (Zagłada), thereby undermining the dominant narrative of Polish innocence and martyrdom, faced the threat of social exclusion, out-of-placeness, physical violence, and death.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants