The Historiography of the Holocaust

70 Tim Cole
post-war period. The work of Philip Friedman was an important exception to
amore general trend.
Very broadly speaking, however, with the emergence of the Holocaust as
a distinct event from the 1960s onwards, the divorcing of ‘ghetto’ and ‘Holocaust’
became more or less inconceivable. Increasingly, ghettos became studied in what
Gringauz phrased ‘historical-morphological’ terms as Holocaust places. However,
that is not to say that this other strand of methodology – the sociological –
ceased to be of importance. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the 1961
Eichmann trial, studying the ghettos with an eye to the victims rather than
primarily the perpetrators assumed an increased importance.
The stimulus to studying ghettos in such terms came less as a result of the trial
itself, than the reporting of the trial. In particular, Hannah Arendt’s controversial
reporting of the trial for the New Yorker placed the ghettos, and specifically
Jewish reactions in the ghettos, to the fore. In a series of magazine essays subsequently
republished under the title Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil, Arendt argued that the collaboration of the Jewish Councils in
the ghettos was essential in determining the scale and success of the Nazi exterminations.
27 Such accusations of collaboration on the part of the leadership
were joined with charges of passivity by ordinary ‘Jews’, which were echoed in
Raul Hilberg’s compliance thesis. At the start of his highly influential study
first published in 1961, Hilberg painted a picture of passivity being the normal
response of ‘Jews’ living outside of Israel – and this included ‘Jews’ living in the
ghettos. 28 Those twin claims – that ordinary ‘Jews’ were passive and their leaders
complicit – raised an immediate furore.
Arendt’s broad-brush attack on the wartime Jewish Councils was challenged
most fully in Isaiah Trunk’s massive study of the Judenräte in Poland and
Lithuania. 29 Rather than writing of the role of the Jewish Councils in the
monolithic terms adopted by Arendt, Trunk’s nuanced study pointed out the
need to recognize local differences and the context within which the Jewish
Councils operated. However, in doing so, he did not attempt to sanitize the
ghettos. Trunk did not shy away from such controversial areas as the payment
of bribes within the ghetto or the social stratification of ghetto society.
The role of the Jewish Councils in the ghettos has developed its own historiography,
which is somewhat tangential to the historiography of the ghettos
per se. As a number of writers have pointed out, the Jewish Councils were
engaged in a wide range of relief activities within the ghettos. Although facing
the problems of famine, disease and overcrowding that were endemic to
ghetto life, Charles Roland – in a ‘medical history’ of the Warsaw Ghetto –
points to the remarkable social and medical provision organized by the Jewish
Council. 30 The result of the network of arrangements was, Roland suggests,
that ‘although almost 100,000 Jews died of all causes in Warsaw from September
1939 to July 1942, it is estimated that another 100,000 or more survived that