In the U.S., much scholarship of the Shoah has its roots in the first English-language books on the subject, published in the 1960s. Israeli historical research, by contrast, flows from the works of a different set of scholars, much less known on this side of the Atlantic, with a different set of assumptions and priorities. The deans of this group were Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, and Yehuda Bauer—the last of whom died on October 18. Andrew Silow-Carroll describes how Bauer, as a graduate student, came to the subject:
In a conversation with Abba Kovner, the poet who had led the resistance to Nazi rule in the Vilna ghetto, the young historian said he knew there was a larger story to tell but admitted that he was fearful of taking on a subject as monumental as the Holocaust. Kovner convinced him that there was no more important event in Jewish history and that his fear of the subject was “a very good starting point.”
Bauer was born in Prague in 1926, and with his family left Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, the same day the country was annexed by the Nazis. The family fled to Poland and Romania before settling in British Mandate Palestine later that year.
Bauer attended high school in Haifa and served in the pre-state Jewish paramilitary known as the Palmach. He studied at Cardiff University in Wales on a scholarship, returning home to Israel to fight in the 1948-49 War of Independence. (Welsh was one of the nine languages he was able to speak.)
In 1998, Bauer gave a speech to the German Bundestag in which he proposed three additional commandments to the Ten Commandments. “I come from a people that gave the Ten Commandments to the world,” he said. “Let us agree that we need three more, and they are these: thou shalt not be a perpetrator; thou shalt not be a victim; and thou shalt never, but never, be a bystander.”
Read more at Jewish Telegraphic Agency
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