Nachman flower valley

Nachman Blumental , also Nahman Blumenthal (born May 12, 1902 in Borszczów , Austria-Hungary ; died November 8, 1983 in Tel Aviv ) was a Polish-Israeli historian.

Life

Blumental studied literature at the University of Warsaw and worked as a teacher in Lublin . His essays and literary reviews appeared in Warsaw before the Second World War in Yiddish newspapers and magazines such as Literarishe bleter , Vokhnblat , Arbeter-tsaytung , Foroys , in the Lubliner Tugblat and in the Lodzscher Dos naye lebn . He translated the novel The Peasants (Chłopi) by Nobel Prize winner Władysław Stanisław Reymont in an abridged version into Yiddish. During the German occupation of Poland he was able to hide his identity and survived the Holocaust.

After the end of the war, when the mass of Yiddish readers had been murdered, he wrote for the Bleter far geshikhte in Warsaw. In 1946 he wrote the preface to the poems of the Holocaust victim Simkha-Bunim Shayevitsh . He translated the book Słowa niewinne (Dictionary of the Nazi Language ) from Polish into Yiddish. He compiled the Ruch Podziemny document volume for the Jewish Historical Commission, which was published in Lodz in 1946.

Even before the end of the war, Blumental worked for the Jewish Historical Commission (CŻKH), which wanted to document the murder of the Jews. Its initiator Philip Friedman had to leave Poland in 1946. Blumental therefore became director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw in 1947 . He worked as an expert in various Nazi trials in Poland. In the trial of Amon Göth in Kraków in 1946 he and Michał Borwicz were the witnesses' reporters. In the trial against Rudolf Höss he was the main expert witness for the prosecution. His colleagues on the commission asked him to focus his four-hour testimony on Jewish suffering, while Blumental stuck to his analysis that the Germans' habitat plan made no distinction between the peoples of Eastern Europe.

In 1949 the communists in Poland also took over the management of the institute, and Blumental had to emigrate from Poland to Israel in 1950. He moved to the kibbutz Lochamej haGeta'ot ("ghetto fighter"). There he worked at the House of Ghetto Fighters and also as a researcher and editor for Yad Vashem . From 1953 he published Dapim leḥeker hashoah vehamered ("Pages of Research into the Shoah and Resistance") at Kibbutz Hameuḥad in Israel .

Fonts (selection)

• Darko shel Judenrat: Te'udot mi-Ghetto Bialystok [Behavior of a Judenrat. Documents from the Bialystok Ghetto]. From the Yad Vashem Archives, Vol. IV, Jerusalem 1962 (Hebrew with English introduction).
• Shmuesn vegn the yidisher literature under the daytsher okupatsye . Buenos Aires: Association of Polish Jews, 1966
• Tsurikblikn [looking back]. Tel Aviv: Hamenorah, 1973
• Verter un vertlekh fun der khurbn-tkufe [words and sayings from the Holocaust]. Tel Aviv: Peretz Publ., 1981

literature

• Laura Jockusch: Collect and record! : Jewish Holocaust documentation in early postwar Europe . New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, passim, short vita on p. 209, also photos with Blumental from the archive of Yad Vashem page , at google books
• Berl Kagan (Ed.): Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers . New York, 1986, col. 90 Link (yiddish)

Web links

• Literature by and about Nachman Blumental in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ↑ [1]
2. ↑ [2]
3. ↑ Simkha-Bunim Shayevitsh , at jewishvirtuallibrary
4. ^ Stephan Stach: Jewish Historical Institute. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 3: He-Lu. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02503-6 , p. 274.
5. ↑ Laura Jockusch: Collect and record! , 2012, p. 114ff.