This thesis explores letters and postcards that Holocaust victims wrote on trains to concentration and death camps. Looking at transport through both a historical and a literary lens, it examines deportee texts alongside Dan Pagis’ iconic Hebrew poem, “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car.” What is the relationship between a letter that someone threw from a train car and this poem by Dan Pagis? If, for instance, Pagis disrupts the flow of time in “Written in Pencil,” do archival testimonies of transport convey similar disruption? My primary intention is to probe how a fusion of historical and literary lenses can enrich present understanding of Holocaust victims’ deportation experiences.

In Holocaust historiography, the subject of deportation has mostly centered on the logistics involved in coordinating train departures and arrivals. As such, it has largely sidelined victims’ perspectives. While Simone Gigliotti’s groundbreaking study, The Train Journey, sheds much light on physical and psychological trauma inside the train car, her scholarship draws heavily on postwar survivor testimony. By contrast, this thesis investigates victims’ changing sensibilities in transport by foregrounding real-time testimonies of witnessing: postcards, notes, and letters victims wrote on (and later threw from) deportation trains.

The tightly compressed, disorienting language Dan Pagis employs in “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car” engenders strong emotional responses. Despite (or perhaps as a result of) its creative license, the poem has come to dominate popular representation of transport during the Holocaust to a degree overshadowing its historical context. Yet this study does not aim to reverse the trend by simply dismissing “Written in Pencil.” The fact that the poem has attained iconic status internationally reflects its capacity to provoke the reader into contemplating victim train journeys. As a point of departure, I contend that “Written in Pencil” offers a deeper vocabulary with which to approach letters written in transport. I therefore juxtapose my readings of the poem with an analysis of deportee texts. The letters examined in this thesis evoke themes in a rich dialogue with those in Pagis’ poem.

My analysis resulted in several findings. While Pagis suggests that Eve’s train exists in collapsed time, actual letters negate such a reading by attesting to victims’ tenacious grasp of time on the train. Concurrently, the letters propose an alternate collapse that expresses itself in emotional disorientation rather than in a loss of physical cognition. However, deportee texts also suggest that human agency could be accessed through language, recovering elements of powerlessness in the face of mounting despair. Deportee letters studied demonstrate that, to a noteworthy degree of consistency, victims’ expressions of tumult mostly reflected their knowledge (or their lack of knowledge) of the transport’s true destination. Yet, regardless of deportees’ awareness, processes of mourning, already commenced on the transport, exacerbating the earlier trauma of separation. Mothers, fathers, children, and siblings mirrored Pagis’ Eve in mourning what was already lost as a result of deportation, before they knew with any certainty what awaited them.

Supervisors:
Dr. Alan Rosen
Prof. Dan Michman

Although an extensive historiography of the Holocaust in Lithuania exists, very little has been written about the history of the Jewish communities in provincial Lithuania. Most research addresses the history and fate of Lithuania’s largest communities, Vilnius and Kaunas. However, the provincial towns in Lithuania are crucial to understanding the Holocaust as well as the development and implementation of the Final Solution in the area. Within the last decade, studies have raised new issues and questions regarding the Holocaust and have placed greater emphasis on developments that took place in the rural areas and provinces of Lithuania, but the subject still remains insufficiently studied.

According to the Jäger Report, Raseiniai County was one of the first places where the murder of women and children took place as early as mid-July 1941. Therefore, a thorough examination of Raseiniai County and its Jewish communities raises important issues and questions and can contribute to scholarship about the rapid and brutal elimination of Jewish towns and villages in provincial Lithuania, and the transition to total annihilation.

This study examines the fate of small Jewish towns (Shtetlekh) in Raseiniai County through an integration of a variety of sources. Creating a synthesis of documents and literature identifies the stages of persecution and extermination, the relationship between the Germans and the Lithuanians, the connection between bureaucracy and ideology, and the various groups of perpetrators involved in the extermination of the Jews in Raseiniai County. In addition, this study can also shed light on the Holocaust in Lithuania in general in light of the fact that more than 50% of Lithuanian Jewry lived in rural areas and provinces. Furthermore, it raises questions that can be relevant to the destruction of Jewish communities in other rural Eastern European areas when considering factors such as the participation of the local population in the murders, their motivations, and how regional dynamics influenced the development of the Final Solution in those areas.

Supervisors:
Dr. David Silberklang
Prof. Hagit Lavsky

This thesis delves into rabbinic literature that deals with issues arising during the Holocaust in an effort to demonstrate that it is a critical primary source to understanding the daily lives of religious Jews, and specifically religious women. As women’s and gender studies have received growing attention in Holocaust scholarship since the 1980s, the experiences of religious women are noticeably lacking. Rabbinic literature is largely understudied within the canon of Holocaust sources, as well. Thus, in discovering that rabbinic literature may, in fact, be used to deepen how we view the ritual practices and more private aspects of religious women’s lives under Nazi rule, I sought to utilize this lesser reviewed corpus of literature to explore the under-represented experiences of religious women during the Holocaust.

While personal diaries and memoirs written by women are valuable firsthand accounts of the trauma, they do not necessarily reveal the entirety of the picture of women’s more intimate experiences. Through researching secondary scholarship on Holocaust diaries, I discovered that there are gaps in these personal accounts. Victims often focused on documenting external occurrences rather than recording their personal emotions in their writing. Furthermore, as Jewish diarists internalized the scope of the Final Solution, they understood that their writing would serve as a historical text and thus read by a future audience. This realization may have deterred an individual, especially a religious woman, from writing more intimate details.

Rabbinic literature, while an imperfect autobiographical and historical source on its own, is quite effective when synthesized with diaries, memoirs, and personal testimonies. Although they are texts written by men, the issues the sources cover reflect some of the more difficult challenges faced by religious women. With a strong tradition of rabbinic responsa dating back to the 3rd century CE, women could not only rely on the age-old practice of “asking the rabbi,” but were also afforded the comfort of anonymity in doing so.

I have demonstrated in this thesis the benefits of incorporating rabbinic literature into the greater corpus of Holocaust scholarship. I explored the intimate topics of the mikveh (ritual bath), sexual relations, both voluntary and coerced, birth control, and abortion in rabbinic sources as well as diaries, memoirs, postwar testimonies, and secondary literature. I analyzed which of these sources delve into these topics, discovering that the mikveh rarely appears in autobiographical accounts. Yet, there are rabbinic texts that discuss quandaries surrounding its usage and laws related to the mikveh. The topic of sexual relations has gained traction in Holocaust scholarship more recently; the rabbinic sources that address questions on this topic enrich our perspective of the challenging decisions women in hiding and in ghettos faced in this realm. I discovered that birth control appears in rabbinic literature spanning various countries during the war. I thus presented this topic with geographic sensitivity, as the Jewish communities in which birth control-related questions appeared confronted diverse realities. Finally, the topic of abortion likewise appears in various countries, most prominently in the ghettos in which the Nazis enforced compulsory abortion (such as Theresienstadt and the Lithuanian ghettos) as well as among women in hiding. Rabbinic literature on this topic is less preponderant, yet it remains an essential source in that it reveals how religious Jews approached these painful realities.

Rabbinic texts offer substantial insight to the challenges that women faced because, based on the content, religious women did discuss personal aspects of Jewish observance with a trusted rabbi, rather than record such a quandary in a personal diary. Studying the documents written by the rabbinic leadership alongside diaries, memoirs, and postwar testimonies deepens our insight into the lives of religious women during the Holocaust and reveals a bit more of the struggles with which they grappled.

Supervisor:
Prof. Eliyana Adler

Even after the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto on May 16, 1943, some 20,000 Jews remained in the city. Some of them were living under an assumed identity (“above the surface”) while the majority lived in hideouts, in complete isolation from the outside world (“underground”). The purpose of this study is to examine the problems faced by Jews from these two categories in their struggle to survive in Warsaw and the measures they took to confront them. This study focuses on the period between the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Polish Uprising, that is, May 1943 to July 1944.

The main source is a collection of requests for help sent by many of those Jews to the Jewish National Committee (Żydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ŻKN) and the Council for Aid to Jews (Żegota), a Jewish underground and a Polish one, respectively, both working alongside the Bund in helping Jews on the Aryan side. These letters reveal the hardships faced by the senders. These letters were kept during the war in the ŻKN archive and were later brought to the Ghetto Fighters’ House Archives by Adolf Berman. By analyzing and contextualizing hundreds of letters and other documents from this collection, I have examined the existential challenges faced by the Jews on the Aryan side and the responses they were given.

The study shows that the Jews initially tried to get by on their own; they utilized the means at their disposal (money, clothing, valuables, etc.), which they had entrusted to Polish acquaintances; they obtained forged papers and tried to make a living from jobs, homemade products, the black market, and other initiatives. However, the reality on the Aryan side was harsh, and their situation soon deteriorated: entrusted property was not returned; landlords maltreated them; poor clothing, hunger, and health problems aggravated their physical condition, especially in hiding; Jews were arrested, blackmailed, and robbed, often not only losing their clothes, money, papers, and possessions, but thrown out of their homes as well. Many were in physical and mental distress, and many were destitute.

Only once they had exhausted their resources and had nowhere else to turn to did they ask the underground aid organizations for help. Some ten to twelve thousand Jews received regular financial support, in addition to help in coping with concrete stringencies, and had a safety net of sorts. The biggest help was in the finance of the rent (even partially), which allowed them to stay hidden; the aid helped its recipients in other areas, such as hiding, obtaining papers, food, health, clothing, and sustenance, and provided a morale boost.

The research leads to several other conclusions: First, the Jews who lived in hiding and the ones who lived with an assumed identity had a different hierarchy of needs because their predicaments called for different solutions. Second, it appears that the sheltering of Jews for money was much more commonplace than doing so from conscientious reasons. Third, receiving aid made it easier for Jews to move from one pattern of existence to the other – from hiding to an assumed identity and vice versa. Fourth, the crisis points that impelled the hiders to seek help had similar biographical characteristics. Finally, the perspective of the Jews fighting to survive on the Aryan side shrank to the immediate future. The study of the Berman collection, which documents the underground relief actions for Jews in post-ghetto Warsaw, can thus contribute to our understanding of various aspects of the Jewish existence there.

Supervisors:
Prof. Havi Dreifuss
Prof. Arieh Kochavi

On August 4, 1941, eleven days before the sealing of the Kovno ghetto on August 15, Moisei Kopelman/Moze Kopelmanas (1895-1945), the director of the largest Lithuanian insurance company, was persuaded to accept the position of chief of the Jüdische Ghetto Polizei/Žydų Ghetto Policija (Jewish Ghetto Police). Tanchum Aronstam/Tanchumas Aronstamas (1907-?), a manager in a textile factory, submitted an application to join the ghetto police with his interest noted on August 14, 1941. On August 17, 1941, Yehuda Zupovitz/Julius Zupavicius (1914-1944), a construction engineer who had worked for “Pieno Centras,” the largest Lithuanian dairy association, was mobilized to join the force because of his military knowledge as a reserve officer in the Lithuanian army. Thirteen days later, on August 30, 1941, Misha Hofmekler/Michelis Hofmekleris (1898-1965), a violinist and conductor, was placed in the police force by the Ältestenrat (Elder Council) to protect his life. Each of the four men became ghetto policemen for different reasons, yet in the literature Jewish ghetto policemen are most often described in monolithic terms resulting in a common perception that those who were members abused their power and profited as privileged ghetto functionaries. This impression exposes the understudied area in the historiography as to how and why individual men became ghetto policemen. Utilizing the framework of Krista Cowman’s interpretation of the methodology of collective biography, this study examines the individual lives that Kopelman, Aronstam, Zupovitz, and Hofmekler built and rebuilt. To do so, it will include relevant governmental policies related to Jewish life during Tsarist Russia (1804-1917), independent Lithuania (1918-1940), Soviet annexation (1940-1941), and German occupation (1941-1944). Moreover, it will address the following questions: What lives did Kopelman, Aronstam, Zupovitz, and Hofmekler build from 1918 to 1940, in an independent Lithuania, in relationship to family, education, religion, language proficiency, career, political affiliation, and military service? Which aspects did they or did they not adjust during Soviet annexation and then German occupation? Which prior knowledge and skills appeared or did not appear in their work as ghetto policemen? The purpose of the above questions is to dissolve the collective label of “Jewish ghetto policemen” to understand the individual lives that the men built and rebuilt, as linked by their shared status as Jewish ghetto policemen, to understand what they faced and how they reacted imprisoned in the Kovno ghetto.

Supervisor:
Prof. Eliyana Adler

By focusing on several egodocuments from Greek Jewish Holocaust survivors from Thessaloniki, this thesis argues that hitherto titular and autobiographical conventions do not apply to Holocaust egodocuments. The unprecedented experience of the genocidal persecution of Jews has inevitably established new norms of life writing that have not yet been the subject of a thorough study. Paratext and titular choices in relation to the circulation of the egodocuments in question are inextricably intertwined with the emergence and institutionalization of Holocaust memory in each micro-society and it calls upon theoretical re-evaluation. It’s a new approach to the “autobiographical pact” given the spatiotemporal conditions that favored or hindered the circulation of these narratives for a while, and how the paratext and the critical threshold of the title in particular, are shaping authorial and reading expectations in an ever-evolving dialogical relationship over time. Drawing my remarks from literary theory and autobiographical discourse conventions, it becomes evident that Holocaust egodocuments challenge and exceed handed-down literary standards whilst constituting a substantial corpus of autobiographical narratives of distinctive significance that calls upon a theoretical reassessment. The latter will not only provide new insights into Holocaust-related autobiographical discourse writing in conjunction with its spatiotemporal context, but will also pave a new way for the interpretation and the didactic utilization of this corpus.

Supervisor:
Prof. Shmuel Refael