On Friday, October 18, Professor Yehuda Bauer passed away at the age of 98. One of the most prominent historians of the 20th century, his thoughts and words have shaped and inspired the debate on the Holocaust, its denial, and the challenge of preserving Memory. The Gariwo Foundation has helped disseminate Bauer’s ideas in Italy through the translation of the book "The Jews: A Contrary People" (Gariwo/Cafoscarina, 2023). We offer our readers a brief article in which the author, in an autobiographical reflection, explains why he chose to study the horror of the Shoah.
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t deep down, why? After all, I’ve written fourteen books on the Holocaust and nearly a hundred articles and essays. Is there really anything new that I can add?
I didn’t experience that hell myself. I was born in 1926. My parents and I emigrated to Palestine from what was then Czechoslovakia, from Prague to be precise. We left the city on the night between March 14 and 15, 1939, the night the Germans occupied Bohemia and Moravia (today the Czech Republic), three weeks before my thirteenth birthday. My father (1895-1975) was a committed Zionist since his teenage years, and he had prepared our journey to Palestine as early as 1934, the year he visited the country to assess how he could make a living there. By then, he was in his forties and couldn’t adapt to the physical demands of agricultural work. He sought opportunities in various cities. While studying at Charles University in Prague, despite not being a pacifist, he was part of a group of Jewish students, “Barissia,” who defended Jewish “honor” by dueling with anti-Semitic German students. During the Great War, he served as a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian infantry. He was captured by the Italians but, after falling seriously ill, he was exchanged in 1918 for an officer on the other side. After the war, he joined the Socialist Zionist Party ("Poale Zion") and the Czech Social Democratic Party. By the 1930s, he was leading the committee supporting Zionist pioneers from Czechoslovakia preparing to move to Palestine. He married Uly (Gusta) Fried (1899-1993) in 1923. My paternal grandparents came from a Czech-speaking area of Moravia but also knew German. My father was relatively poor, but he worked hard to become an engineer. He didn’t love his profession, eventually becoming the chief accountant in a coal company in Prague. In his spare time, he was a pianist, composer, poet, writer (mostly of feuilletons), and Freemason. He even wrote a book, Zionist and anti-Nazi, which naturally landed him on the regime’s blacklist. My mother came from a well-off family in Prague. Her father had been a bank director and died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919. His wife, my grandmother, lost everything during the great inflation after the war and had to move in with us in a small but comfortable apartment. She remained there after we left, married her brother-in-law, was deported to Terezín (Theresienstadt), and was murdered by the Germans in 1942 near Baranavičy, in what is now western Belarus.
My father didn’t have enough money to get a visa to Palestine as a “capitalist”—he needed a thousand British pounds, a fortune in the 1930s. He sold what he had, borrowed money, and got help from friends. Finally, in 1938, he gathered the required amount, overcoming various bureaucratic obstacles along the way. Our visas arrived in early 1939. We left Prague on the same train as Max Brod, the executor of Franz Kafka’s estate, and a writer and poet in his own right. There were other Zionists on board, but also German Social Democrats fleeing the imminent German occupation of Czech territories. When we reached the Polish border at Moravská Ostrava after midnight on March 15, the Germans were already in control. Men with swastika armbands surrounded the train, but a Czech station master, understanding the situation, raised his green paddle, signaling the engineer to proceed. The train crossed the border into Poland, just a few hundred meters away, and we were finally safe. We traveled through Poland to Romania and boarded the first passenger ship of Palestinian Jews, the Har Zion, arriving at the port of Haifa on March 23. So yes, it’s true, I didn’t live through the Holocaust myself.
My paternal grandfather died in 1937; my grandmother, a descendant of a Jewish family from Turkey that had arrived in Bohemia via Hungary a couple of generations earlier, managed to emigrate to the United States, where her brother lived in New York. He had converted to Christianity and married an American woman. They treated my grandmother poorly, and my father did everything he could to bring her to Palestine, but the British administration vetoed her visa repeatedly. Finally, in 1944, he obtained permission and sent it to New York, only to learn that my grandmother had passed away. My grandfather had a brother in Brno (Moravia), who was deported to Terezín and died in Auschwitz; his two sons were shot by the Germans for being part of the Czech resistance. At that time, I was playing football for my school team in Haifa (right back), and I saw my father’s grief over his mother’s death, followed by both my parents' mourning when it became clear that my maternal grandmother and her husband had not survived. My father is and will always be my hero. As I’ve written before, his portrait, painted by my mother (who, among other things, was a painter), hangs in my study. I resemble him; his voice is my voice, and my body language is identical to his. But I can only aspire, in vain, to his moral integrity and charismatic personality. And yes, once again, I did not live through the Holocaust myself.
From the end of 1942 onwards, I had a rough idea of what was happening in Europe. In 1944, as a member of the Palmach, the Haganah's paramilitary combat force, I received more detailed information. In February 1945, my unit participated in an illegal march and military training along the shores of the Dead Sea. At that time, there were no inhabitants in the area, except for a few people involved in potassium extraction from the sea. On the northern shore, before we embarked on our desert expedition, one cold night, we were visited by Palmach commander Yitzhak Sadeh (who would later become one of the founders of the Israeli Defense Forces) and Ruzhka Korczak, the first Jewish partisan to arrive in Palestine from the Vilna (Vilnius) region, where she had fought and been liberated by the Red Army. She didn’t speak Hebrew, so Sadeh had to translate her Yiddish, which we didn’t understand, as she told us about the Holocaust, from what she knew at the time. She and her story left a deep impression on me.
In 1946, I received a scholarship from the British government and was admitted to Cardiff University College in Wales. I didn’t study the Second World War—it was too recent—nor, obviously, the Holocaust. I wanted to become a historian of the Jewish people, focusing on the Jewish Palestinian community, but in Wales, I decided to broaden my horizons and study history more generally. I delved into English socio-economic history of the 16th and 17th centuries, Welsh history, medieval history, the history of 16th- and 17th-century Japan, Chinese history, and the New Deal. I wanted to learn about Christianity, so I spent a year in an Anglo-Catholic monastery (St. Teilo’s), which also housed a residence for students. In 1948, I returned home to fight in the Israeli War of Independence, and then back to Cardiff, without the scholarship (but not having to pay tuition), to complete my academic studies. I earned First Class Honors and the equivalent of a degree. I also participated in Zionist youth work in Leeds and then returned home in 1952, joining Kibbutz Shoval in the Negev desert, where I became a member and remained until 1993. The kibbutz approved my doctoral studies, and I received a PhD in 1960, writing a dissertation on the Jewish Palestinian community (Yishuv) during World War II. In 1961, I joined the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in 1977, I was appointed full professor (which Nobel laureate in literature Shmuel Yosef Agnon sarcastically referred to as a “complete professor”). I headed the Institute, wrote books, and so on. At first, I was terrified even to think of addressing the Holocaust, but in 1962, I met Abba Kovner, the first to raise the banner of Jewish rebellion in Nazi-occupied Europe. He had been a partisan commander and, after the war, emigrated to Palestine, where he became known as a poet, writer, and public figure. He told me that my first book, based on my doctoral dissertation, wasn’t bad, but then asked why I was wasting my time. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Well,” he replied, “in your opinion, what is the most important event in recent Jewish history, if not in the entire history of the Jewish people?” “The Holocaust,” I answered. “So why aren’t you dealing with it?” “Because it scares me,” I told him. “That,” he said, “is an excellent starting point to confront it.” I was convinced, and I’ve studied that series of events over the past fifty years.