Israel Gutman
Israel Gutman (Hebrew ישראל גוטמן; born May 20, 1923 in Warsaw, † October 1, 2013 in Jerusalem) was an Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor.
Life
Gutman grew up in Warsaw. His parents and his older sister died in the Warsaw ghetto. Gutman participated as a member of the ŻOB in April 1943 at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in part and was wounded there. After the suppression of the rebellion Gutman was deported on May 5, 1943 to the Majdanek concentration camp and from there to Auschwitz. During the evacuation of the camp in January 1945, shortly before the liberation by the Red Army, Gutman had to participate in a death march to Mauthausen concentration camp.
After his liberation in May 1945, Gutman was transferred to Austria in a hospital, fled from there to Italy and joined the Jewish Brigade. He was active in the underground movement Brichah, which organized the emigration of Holocaust survivors to Palestine and emigrated himself in 1946 in the mandated territory.
Lived in the State of Israel was founded in 1948 and worked for 25 years in the kibbutz Gutman Lehavot Habashan. There he met Irit Adelstein know; the two married and have two children.
Until 1971 Gutman began at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to study history. In 1975, he was there his doctorate with a dissertation on the Jewish resistance movement in the Warsaw ghetto. He became a professor at the Hebrew University, 1980/81 was a visiting professor at UCLA and led from 1983 to 1985 the Department of Contemporary Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University. In the 1980s, his major work, edited by him on behalf of Yad Vashem and published in 1990 in Hebrew and English Encyclopedia of the Holocaust emerged.
From 1993 to 1996 Gutman was head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. From 1996 to 2000 he worked for Yad Vashem as a senior historian, since 2000, he held the position of academic advisor there.
Gutman was in 1994 awarded the Carl-von- Ossietzky Prize by the city of Oldenburg.
In May 2008, Gutman was briefly in the headlines after he criticized the choice of location for the Berlin memorial for homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis in the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita.
Role of the Jewish resistance
In contrast to Hannah Arendt ( and, following her in it, Raul Hilberg ) Gutman stressed that it is very probably was resistance among Polish Jews against the German murderers. They did not like sheep to the slaughter, lead ( Arendt ). It comes for him on how you defined at all resistance; and one must consider the limited scope that was present under the extreme terror of the German occupation. Arendt's opinion reflects an early, but misconception. The mostly done in secret resistance could hardly public opinion, especially in the distant USA impress in the first years after 1945, of course. The few survivors naturally had other concerns, especially they had certificates and documents in sight land and preserved.
A very early representation of armed resistance against the Germans in the eastern and northern forests of Poland, albeit in novel form, offered Romain Gary 1945 in Éducation européenne, a book that Gary already during his time as a fighter pilot of the Royal Air Force, the French troops part, had written. Due to its origin from Vilna, and through contacts with the Polish government in exile in London Gary had a good knowledge of the partisan struggle in the Polish-Lithuanian forests that he einarbeitete here.
Works
- Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1990. ISBN 0-02-896090-4 (4 volumes) German edition: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Piper, Munich and Zurich in 1995. ISBN 3-492-12120-9 ( 4 volumes, German edition published and edited by Eberhard Jäckel and Peter Longerich )
- German edition: The Auschwitz Album. The story of a transport. Wallenstein -Verlag, Göttingen, 2005. ISBN 3-89244-911-2
- German edition: Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations. Wallenstein -Verlag, Göttingen 2005 ff (previously 1 Volume )