File:1947 Tenenbaum.jpg

Title

Benjamin Tenenbaum, ed. Ehad me-ir u shenayim mi-mishpahah: Mivhar m’elef autobigrafiot shel yaldei Yisrael b’Polin [One of a City and Two of a Family: A Selection from a Thousand Autobiographies of Jewish Children in Poland]. Merhavyah, Israel: Sifriat Poalim, 1947 <Hebrew>.

Abstract

"Benjamin Tenenbaum (1914-1999), a Polish-born Jewish prewar emigrant to Palestine, traveled to Poland in 1946. With the aid of a few friends, he collected 1,000 “autobiographies” written by surviving Jewish children ... His work with children began after a chance meeting at the headquarters of the Hashomer Hatsair in Poland at 18 Narutowicz Street in Ło´dz´, one of the first addresses he visited ... Tenenbaum was captivated by the children, who had “aged prematurely,” but had, despite the horrors they had experienced, come back to life “with no less force then a tree whose roots split rocks” ... He spent his nights traveling by train to children’s homes all over Poland ... On his hbehalf, Marian Klinowski collected hundreds of additional testimonies in the DP camps in Austria and Germany ... In 1947, after his return to Palestine, Tenenbaum published a compilation of the testimonies he had collected ... Tenenbaum's book contained eighty testimonies. Some were given in full, some were broken down into two parts, and some were excerpted. The testimonies were organized geographically and thematically. One chapter each was devoted to Warsaw and Wilno, and the remaining chapters were “Ghettos,” “In Villages and Woods,” “Camps,” and “Partisans” ... The testimonies, which he had translated into Hebrew, had undergone a process of editing ... Although the book is about children’s experiences in the Holocaust, it has a clear Zionist slant ... Tenenbaum collected many testimonies from children who had survived the war in relative safety in Siberia or Soviet Central Asia. These testimonies feature harrowing stories of hunger, disease, deaths of parents and siblings, and antisemitism. Not one of these testimonies however were included in the book."--Boaz Cohen, Bar-Ilan University.

[Picture: Barukh and Izik Zviklik were found in a Polish orphanage and entrusted to the Zionist Coordination Committee. Their father Yaakov Zviklik was killed in the German conquest of Poland. His wife, Feige, fled with their two sons to Russia and died there. (PHAL\1618339)]