Israel Gutman

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Israel Gutman at the Eichmann trial in 1961

Israel Gutman ( Hebrew ישראל גוטמן; * May 20, 1923 in Warsaw ; † October 1, 2013 in Jerusalem ) was an Israeli historian and survivor of the Holocaust .

Life

Gutman grew up in Warsaw. His parents and older sister died in the Warsaw ghetto . Gutman took part in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April 1943 as a member of the OOB and was wounded in the process. After the suppression of the uprising Gutman was on May 5, 1943 to the Majdanek concentration camp and from there to Auschwitz deported . In the course of the evacuation of the camp in January 1945, shortly before the liberation by the Red Army , Gutman had to take part in a death march to the Mauthausen concentration camp .

After his liberation in May 1945 Gutman was transferred to a hospital in Austria , from there fled to Italy and joined the Jewish Brigade . He was active in the illegal Bricha movement , which organized the emigration of Holocaust survivors to Palestine , and himself emigrated to the mandate area in 1946 .

In the State of Israel , which was founded in 1948 , Gutman lived and worked in Kibbutz Lehavot Habashan for 25 years . There he met Irit Adelstein know; the two married and have two children.

It wasn't until 1971 that Gutman began studying history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . In 1975, he was there with a thesis on the Jewish resistance movement in the Warsaw ghetto doctorate . He became a professor at the Hebrew University, was a visiting professor at UCLA in 1980/81 and headed the Department of Contemporary Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University from 1983 to 1985. His main work, the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, edited by him on behalf of Yad Vashem and published in Hebrew and English in 1990, was written in the 1980s .

From 1993 to 1996 Gutman was director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research in Yad Vashem. From 1996 to 2000 he worked for Yad Vashem as senior historian, from 2000 he held the position of academic advisor.

Gutman was awarded the Yitzhak Sadeh Prize in 1979 and the Carl von Ossietzky Prize of the City of Oldenburg in 1994.

In May 2008 Gutman briefly hit the headlines after criticizing the choice of the location for the Berlin memorial for homosexuals persecuted under National Socialism in the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita .

Role of the Jewish resistance

In contrast to Hannah Arendt (and, following her, Raul Hilberg ) Gutman emphasized that there was indeed resistance among Polish Jews against the German murderers. They would not be led to the slaughter like sheep (according to Arendt). For him it depends on how one defines resistance in the first place; and one has to see the small margin that existed under the extreme terror of the German occupation. Arendt's opinion reflects an early but incorrect view. In the first few years after 1945, the resistance, which was mainly carried out in secret, could of course hardly impress public opinion, especially in the distant USA. The few survivors naturally had other worries, in particular they had to sift through and receive certificates and documents in the country.

A very early account of the armed resistance against the Germans in the eastern and northern forests of Poland, albeit in the form of a novel, was given by Romain Gary in Éducation européenne in 1945 , a book that Gary wrote in the French unit during his time as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force , had written. Due to his origins in Vilnius and through contacts with the Polish government-in-exile in London, Gary possessed authentic knowledge of the partisan struggle in the Polish-Lithuanian forests, which he incorporated here.

Works

Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
  • Encyclopedia of the Holocaust . Editor-in-chief with a 24-person editorial team. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1990, ISBN 0-02-896090-4 . (4 volumes)
  • Resistance. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising . Houghton Mifflin, Boston / New York 1994, ISBN 0-395-60199-1 .
  • with Michael Berenbaum : Anatomy of the Auschwitz death camp . Indiana University Press, Bloomington / Indianapolis 1994, ISBN 0-253-32684-2 .
  • with Bella Gutterman: The Auschwitz Album. The story of a transport . Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2002, ISBN 965-308-149-7 .
    • German edition: The Auschwitz album. The story of a transport . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-911-2 .
  • The Encyclopedia of the Righteous among the Nations. Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust . Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2004 ff. (5 volumes so far). Edited with Ben Mikhman; Sarah Bender.

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Prof. Israel Gutman , yadvashem.org, accessed October 1, 2013.
  2. ↑ Holocaust Academic Pans Monument to Nazis' Gay Victims , dw-world.de , May 29, 2008, accessed on June 1, 2008.
  3. ↑ Germany: Monument to Nazis' gay victims criticized ( Memento from February 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), canada.com, May 29, 2008, accessed on June 1, 2008.
  4. ^ Israel Gutman: Resistance (Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity). ( Memento of November 11, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), enotes.com, accessed on November 11, 2013.
  5. ↑ in German: General Nachtigall. Diana Verlag 1960; also published in English and in Persian
personal data
SURNAME Gutman, Israel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH May 20, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw
DATE OF DEATH October 1, 2013
Place of death Jerusalem