After the liberation of the last Dachau concentration camp with its many branch offices, after the end of the death marches and the desperate efforts to keep the “rest of the rescued”, the “Scherit Hapleita”, physically alive, developed within a very short time and at the same time as a transit commemorated diverse Jewish life in Bavaria.
Thousands and thousands of Jewish survivors passed through Munich, each of whom was “a living treasure,” carrying memories of the Shoah that needed to be preserved.
magazine The historian Markus Roth, who works at the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt, presented the book he co-edited at the Einstein Education Center of the Munich Adult Education Center From the last destruction. It is the German language title of a magazine published in Munich between 1946 and 1948 entitled »Fun letstn churbn«.
Roth, who previously worked at the Holocaust Literature Office at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, researched the activities of the “Jewish Historical Commission” and its two driving forces, Israel Kaplan and Moshe Yosef Faygenboym. As the speaker vividly conveyed, the two saw each other “in a race against time”.
The aim was to collect as much authentic material as possible, especially testimonies from survivors.
The aim was to collect as much authentic material as possible, primarily testimonies from survivors; for most understood their stay as temporary. With their emigration, their knowledge of the atrocities of the Nazi era would be scattered around the world and could hardly be found again.
collect Kaplan, born in 1902, a historian from Riga, went to Munich after the liberation on the death march and his convalescence in the St. Ottilien Hospital. Moshe Faygenboym, born in 1908, a trained accountant who had escaped from a deportation train, which he carefully recorded, devoted himself to collecting from then on.
For both of them, everything they collected was supposed to be “a symbolic tombstone” for the murdered. They mistrusted the criminal files and wanted to document what happened from a Jewish point of view.
In the first issue of the journal “Fun letstn churbn” the “Central Historical Commission, Munich” drew up a programmatic article with which they addressed “all survivors”, “our intellectuals”, “our brothers and sisters who have gone far away from the places where the terrible catastrophe took place«.
Yiddish Their language was Yiddish, both an advantage and a disadvantage. It was good to report the appeal, to proclaim in the language with which most were familiar. The obstacle was that the approximately 2,000 testimonies were taken to Israel in the late 1940s and lay dormant in the Yad Vashem archive for decades.
It was forgotten that ten editions appeared between 1946 and 1948 – in Hebrew letters, produced in the printers where the “Völkischer Beobachter” had previously been printed.
Frank Beer, Markus Roth (eds.): »Of the Last Destruction. The journal ›Fun letstn churbn‹ of the Jewish Historical Commission in Munich 1946–1948«. Translated from the Yiddish by Susan Hiep, Sophie Lichtenstein and Daniel Wartenberg. Metropol, Berlin 2020, 1032 p., with illustrations and index, €49
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