„Facing a crisis unparalleled in history“. Jüdische Reaktionen auf den Holocaust aus New York, 1940 bis 1945

S:I.M.O.N. Issues

S:I.M.O.N. Sections

Editorial

S:I.M.O.N. is an e-journal of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI). It appears twice a year in English and German language. S:I.M.O.N. aims at both a transnational and comparative history of the Holocaust and Jewish Studies in Central and Eastern Europe within the broader contexts of the European history of the 20th and 21st century, including its prehistory, consequences and legacies as well as the history of memory.

S:I.M.O.N. serves as a forum for discussion of various methodological approaches. The journal especially wishes to strengthen the exchange between researchers from different scientific communities and to integrate both the Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust into the different “national” narratives. It also lays a special emphasis on memory studies and the analysis of politics of memory. S:I.M.O.N. uses a double-blind review system, which means that both the reviewer’s and the author’s identities are concealed from each other hroughout the review process.

Shoah: The journal deals with the history of the Shoah from multidisciplinary, transnational and comparative perspectives. It seeks to integrate studies on Jews as well as on other groups of victims of the Holocaust, especially on Roma, and of so far less researched regions of (East) Central and (South) Eastern Europe.

Intervention. The journal reports on research projects and their transmission into public events. It also informs about current educational and remembrance programs.

Methods. The journal serves as a forum for the discussion of methodological approaches as, for instance, the everyday history, oral history, gender history, the history of violence, anti-Semitism and racism and the theory of memory and memory politics.

DocumentatiON. The journal contributes to critical approaches on using and interpreting archival materials in the 21st century.

Download the current issue S:I.M.O.N. 2017/2.

Articles

Eva Reder

Pogrome in Polen 1918-1920 und 1945/46. Auslöser, Motive, Praktiken der Gewalt

The paper focuses on the fundamental aspects of my dissertation project: triggers of pogroms, dynamics of violence and the role of the respective emerging statehood as well as the perpetrators’ self-perception. In both reference periods, pogrom violence referred closely to the establishment of Polish statehood, even though this happened under divergent circumstances. Both phases involved exceptionally large numbers of pogroms. In both cases profound socio-political ruptures and paradigm shifts took place, where the need to create enemies was tremendous. An examination of the perpetrators’ verbal utterances and actions during and after the pogrom allows to identify their symbolic reference points, which express antisemitic stereotypes and show how the pogromists defined their relations towards state authorities. The project will offer insights about prejudices during transitional phases, the dynamics of pogroms and how narratives of violence are preserved. The pogroms are reconstructed by means of eyewitness accounts, military records and court files.

SWL-Reader

Marc Buggeln

Sklavenarbeit und Gewalt. Die KZ-Außenlager

The detainees at the subcamps of Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg lived and worked under a broad range of conditions. Although the first two subcamps were established as early on as in 1941/1942, it was not until 1944 that all of northern Germany was covered. The Neuengamme concentration camp had more than 85 subcamps, to which the SS had brought about 40,000 detainees as slave workers for the German war effort by the end of 1944. Marc Buggeln has compared the subcamps and evaluated the significance of a range of factors such as labour conditions, racism and gender differences with regard to the concentration camp inmates' likelihood of survival. In this way, he was able to disprove some central assumptions made by concentration camp research to date, or at least to seriously curtail the general validity that had been ascribed to them. Finally, he describes the conditions for the perpetrators as well as the victims at hand of a selection of biographies.

Events

Zoltán Halasi

Duschehubka

This text is the penultimate chapter of Zoltán Halasi's book Út az üres éghez (Road to an Empty Sky). With this work, which was first published in Hungarian, the author created a singular memorial to Polish-Jewish culture and its destruction. Setting out from the Yiddish Holocaust poem Dos lid funm ojsgehargetn jidischen folk by Itzhak Katzenelson, Halasi records what was lost in the Shoah in the course of nineteen compelling chapters. He takes on the grab of an art historian, a literary critic and a travel guide when he reports about a wooden synagogue and the Jewish quarter in Warsaw. In the role of a German banker, he illuminates the aims of the Nazi monetary policies, as a writer of SS brochures he highlights the absurdity of racism. Depicting a Selektion in the Warsaw ghetto, he shows the grim logic of compulsive acts in catastrophic situations, draws an image of the running of the extermination camp Treblinka. The cynical words of two German policemen provide an insight into the rituals of mass executions and introduce us to the craft of murder. The final chapter is an interplay of slithers of narrative by Jewish children on the run and by those who helped and hid them that borders on the unbearable.
The chapter reproduced on the following pages has three parts: Part one is a Treblinka railway station master's report to the Polish Home Army. In the second part, a former Jewish detainee who managed to escape from the extermination camp Treblinka gives a literary treatment of his arrival at the camp. The final part consists of an inner monologue by the Treblinka extermination camp's director of administration.

The book will shortly be published in Polish at the Nisza publishing company in Warsaw. The German-speaking public was first presented with the work on December 1, 2015 at the Simon Wiesenthal Conference 2015. The German translation by Éva Zádor and Heinrich Eisterer is in progress.

This contribution describes and analyses the activities of two expert committees on Jewish politics and analysis of the present age, which were established in New York in 1940 and 1941. The Research Institute on Peace and Post-War Problems and the Institute of Jewish Affairs were meeting places for Jewish people who worked on political strategy papers on how to address the apocalyptic presence of the extermination of the European Jews, based on their range of experiences during the interwar period. They were modelled on the tradition of East European minority protection policies and the Jewish defence against antisemitism in the Weimar Republic; it was their aim to debate the possibilities for saving the Jews as well as the future of Jewish existence. Their activities resulted in the collection of wide-ranging documentation and many reports on the reality of Nazism. These documents are significant sources of information on the immediate effect of the events on contemporaries and bear witness to the attempts to act, understand, report, remember the victims and at the same time design a new Jewish life after the catastrophe in America while war and extermination were still going on.