in 1960, directing a joint documentary project between Yad Vashem and YIVO in New York and contributing seminal methodological articles to the early issues of Yad Vashem Studies. Kaplan’s Historical Commission archive became one of the important early collections deposited in Yad Vashem’s Archive, recruited by Kermisz, and Koniuchowsky donated his collection to Yad Vashem in 1989.
Other survivors also played central roles in promoting the recording of survivor testimony and developing the archive at Yad Vashem and research methods. Among these were Dr. Shaul Esh, who escaped Germany on the eve of WWII and became Yad Vashem's first Publications Editor and Editor of Yad Vashem Studies; Dr. Nathan Eck, a survivor from Warsaw who was involved in research and edited the Yad Vashem Bulletin and later briefly edited Yad Vashem Studies; and Dr. Meir (Mark) Dworżecki, a survivor from Vilna, who was a member of the Yad Vashem Directorate and established the first Israeli chair in Holocaust studies at Bar-Ilan University.
Initiative, luck, and sometimes the assistance of others had helped these people survive the Holocaust, and remarkable vision had led them to jump into recording survivor accounts immediately after liberation and to lay the foundations for Holocaust research. Their seminal role in laying these foundations cannot be overestimated, and their legacy lives on in the work performed in Yad Vashem and many academic institutions around the world to this day.
Autor jest starszym historykiem Międzynarodowego Instytutu Badań nad Holokaustem oraz redaktorem naczelnym „Yad Vashem Studies”.
The article was originally published at the "Yad Vashem Magazine".
Rachel Auerbach with Hersh Wasser when the first part of the Ringelblume Archive was discovered in September 1945. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Archives.
Nachum Blumental speaking to a group at the Jewish Historical Commission in Lodz in April 1945. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Archives.