From Persecution to Documentation
Dr David Silberklang
It was a dramatic moment. The Soviet army broke through German defenses and advanced on Buczacz and its environs, liberating the area on 23 March 1944. Some 800 Jews, a tiny fraction of the original Jewish community, emerged from hiding. Among them was historian Dr. Josef Kermisz, who had fled Warsaw to his native Eastern Galicia early in the war and had survived the last five months in hiding nearby with a Polish Christian friend. The Soviet commanders quickly identified the 36-year-old Kermisz, drafted him, and sent him to teach at the officers’ training school in Zhitomir, further east. However, the Soviets held Buczacz for only eleven days. In a counter-offensive, the Germans retook Buczacz on 3 April and immediately shot the “liberated” Jews. The Soviets finally liberated the town on 21 July. Kermisz had survived by coincidence.
The Soviet army then advanced rapidly westward, liberating Lublin on 23 July 1944. Kermisz got himself transferred there in September, was discharged, and immediately joined Dr. Philip Friedman and Nachman Blumenthal in a new project – recording Jewish survivor accounts in Lublin. Like Kermisz, Friedman and Blumenthal had survived the war in hiding. Their work in recording survivor accounts succeeded beyond their expectations, and by the end of 1945, the Jewish Historical Commission in Lublin had recorded some 1,500 testimonies.
All three historians went on to make a seminal contribution to laying the foundations for Holocaust research – Friedman eventually became a professor at Columbia University; Blumenthal directed the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and then worked in research and publications at Yad Vashem; and Kermisz became Director of the Archive at the Jewish Historical Institute
How Survivors Laid the Foundation for Holocaust Research