Agnieszka Żółkiewska spoke about the tasks and challenges faced by the Jewish Historical Commission established on 29 August 1944. The work of the Commission included gathering, organising and developing materials documenting the Holocaust. The area in which the Commission intensively developed its activity and achieved the greatest success was the recording of the accounts of Holocaust survivors. The primary purpose of collecting these materials was the “disclosure and trial of German crimes committed against the Jewish populations in Poland,” as well as the promotion of the collected materials.
Files were gathered documenting the activities of German offices, the Gestapo, Jewish organisations and institutions, underground, ghetto and guerilla organisations, as well as plans of ghettos and camps. Crime tools and human remains were gathered, referred to as “exhibits of terror” by employees of the Commission. The Committee also took an interest in the fate of pre-war Jewish collections, archives, museums and libraries. It gathered surviving paintings, synagogue art, museum objects and books. The outcome of the Commission’s activity is impressive. It collected about 3,000 accounts of survivors, 100 diaries, several hundred literary works, an impressive collection of camp and ghetto correspondence, more than 5,000 files and 4,000 photographs. All of the resources collected by the Commission are to date the most important source of knowledge about the Holocaust.
The guests from Mémorial de la Shoah spoke about the beginnings of research on the Holocaust in France. Jacques Fredj recalled that as was the case in Poland, research on the Holocaust organised by the Jewish community began during the war. As early as April 1943, Rabbi Isaac Schneersohn started to collect documents related to crimes against the Jews by the Germans and the Vichy government. Owing to these documents, the first French organisation was founded, conducting research on the Holocaust, collecting documents and publishing early studies on this subject: Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (currently, Centre de documentation du Mémorial de la Shoah). These archives are essential for historians examining the policy of the perpetrators, behaviour of the victims and the contemporary history of the Jews in France.
Audrey Kichelewski spoke about publications: the magazine Le Bulletin du Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, books published until 1950, and the communist institution founded by Jewish activists called Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l'Entraide (UJRE), which organised a public exhibition about life in the Polish ghettos in 1946 (it was seen by approx. 100,000 people; another exhibition concerned the Jewish resistance movement). Audrey Kichelewski also recalled the yizker bikers (memoirs), including an extremely valuable and interesting example of cooperation between Jews from Poland and France - the 1951 publication about Lublin containing excerpts from a journal by Emanuel Ringelblum. In her summary, she drew attention to the hybridity of post-war publications common to France and Poland, in which one can discern both documentary, historical, sociological, literary, poetic elements, as well as many others.
The last speaker was Piotr M. A. Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. His speech concerned reports preserved in the Museum archives: dramatic accounts of Sonderkommando members closely related to what happened during the war, obtained immediately after the war - in connection with the ongoing trials of Nazi criminals – Letters, in which former prisoners described their fates (more than 100 volumes of “Statements"), and broader studies and memoirs (approx. 300 volumes) created in subsequent years.