Remembering a Forgotten Hero of Holocaust Historiography

REMEMBERING A FORGOTTEN HERO OF HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY Laying the Foundations for Holocaust Research: Ihe Impact of the Historian Philip Friedman, Search and Research-Lectures and Papers 15, by Roni Stauber, Yad Vashem, 2009, 60 pp.I was a child, not quite ten, rummaging through a bookcase in my grandparents' house when I came across Martyrs and Fighters. It was on the cover of that 1962 paperback, its faded pages brittle to the touch, that I first came across the name of Philip Friedman-and that I received my first introduction to the heartrending story of the Warsaw Ghetto. In particular, one chilling vignette from that book remained etched in my consciousness. It was an eyewitness description of a Jewish boy caught smuggling food from the Aryan side and trying to wiggle his way back into the ghetto. The child's hips got caught in the hole under the wall and a German began beating him mercilessly. By the time he was finally pulled through to the Jewish side by a horrified passerby, it was too late. The boy was dying, his spine crushed.Many years later, while sittingin a Jerusalem cinema watching Ihe Pianist, I was startled to see that terrifying episode depicted on the screen. I immediately recalled book, one of the first anthologies of ghetto testimonies, and eventually was able to acquire a durable hardcover edition. In its pages I quickly found the account of that incident dutifully reproduced by Friedman and attributed to the (Polish-language) memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman-the Warsaw Radio pianist immortalized as the protagonist of Roman Polanski's masterful film.1In the slim volume under review here, we are introduced to the story of Friedman-a great and often forgotten hero of Holocaust historiography. Friedman was an outstanding representative of the Galician Jewish intellectual tradition. That heritage was exemplified by such men as Emanuel Ringelblum, Ruben Feldshuh (Ben Shem), Joseph Tenenbaum, and Artur Eisenbach, all of whom played a disproportionate role in recording the story of the catastrophe that had befallen the Jewish people and their own families. The author, Dr. Roni Stauber, is a senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University's Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry. He is also lecturer in the university's Department of Jewish History and the academic advisor of the Wiener Library, and has written a number of important works on Israeli society and the Holocaust. Most recently, he was the editor of Collaboration with the Nazis: Public Discourse afier the Holocaust (2010), a book on Europe's confrontation with the legacy of the Shoah. At the beginning of this book Stauber notes that Friedman's work on Holocaust documentation, his contribution to the historical commissions staffed by survivors in Europe immediately after the war, his historiographical approach to various areas of research, and his methodological concepts have not yet been treated appropriately. Here I shall attempt to fill in this lacuna. To achieve that end, the author made use of a wide variety of sources, including archival documents in YIVO, Yad Vashem, and elsewhere-but above all, own copious writings.Staubers book is divided into two parts. The first deals with career as a historian of Polish Jewry, the largest prewar Jewish community in Europe. The second deals with his later work as a chronicler of its destruction. It is poignantly entitled From the Study of a Vibrant Society to the Chronicle of Destruction.Stauber presents us with the salient details of his subject's early life and work. Friedman was born in Lwow (Lemberg) in 1901. Like many of Galicia's best and brightest, he completed his education in Vienna. After receiving his doctorate, he settled in Lodz to take up a teaching position at the city's Jewish gymnasium. But in addition to his pedagogic activity, Friedman quickly made his mark as one of the pioneering historians of Polish Jewry. …