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Title

Noe Grüss (Noah Gris), ed. Kinder-martirologye: zamlung fun dokumentn [Children’s Martyrdom: A Document Collection] (Buenos Aires [Argentina]: Tsentral-farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1947) <Yiddish>

Abstract

"The future of surviving children was a major issue in post-Holocaust Jewish society ... Less known is the fact that correspondingly, much effort was put into listening to the child survivors, recording their stories, and publishing them. By 1947 three anthologies of children’s testimonies were published [in Israel, Poland, and Argentina] bringing to the public the stories of child survivors as they told them." Some children's testimonies were also collected and published in the Yiddish journal Fun Lezten Hurban, the first-ever Holocaust research journal, published in Munich during 1946– 48. The journal was published by the Central Historical Commission in Munich, which was established in December 1945 by the Central Committee for the Liberated Jews in Germany. The commission collected thousands of testimonies from Holocaust survivors in the DP camps, among them hundreds from child survivors of the Holocaust. The drive to collect testimonies from children was initiated by Israel Kaplan (1902–2003), a teacher from Kovno who together with Moshe Feigenboim led the commission. The child survivors and their stories held a strong fascination with Kaplan, whose own child survived the Holocaust in hiding and on the run. Out of hundreds of testimonies collected from child survivors by the staff of the Central Historical Commission during its more than three years of existence, eight were selected for publication in the journal issues."--See Boaz Cohen, Representing Children's Holocaust

About the Author

Noe Gruss, who before the war was a teacher in Rovno’s Hebrew gymnasium, was one of the founding members of the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland and an expert on children’s testimonies. As early as 1945, he was lecturing to the Commission’s staff on “The Psychology of Jewish Youth in Light of Existing Archival Materials.”