Introduction

This volume focuses on a unique historical phenomenon – the survivor historians: Holocaust survivors who devoted themselves in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah to the documentation, research, and writing of the tragedy that had engulfed them and their communities. They, as victims of Nazi persecution or refugees from it, felt best equipped, from personal experience, to do this work – to write as it were their own history. They also had a strong sense of mission, an obligation to the murdered Jews and their now extinct communities to tell their story. This was not just a story of extermination, but also of the world that was destroyed but from which some survived. The articles in this volume analyze the contribution that some of these men and women made to writing the Holocaust. There were others, such as Philip Friedman or Joseph Kermish, who at times were more prominent then those that you will read about here. As such we make no claims to comprehensiveness. But in all, there were relatively few survivor historians spread out all over Europe who undertook this burden, with many migrating in time to Israel or the US, and as such the group gathered here is certainly representative.