A Memoir of Victims of the Holocaust

From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947 by Lucy S. Dawidowicz (W. W. Norton: $19.95, 330 pages)

When we contemplate the Holocaust, we are horrified by the monstrous instruments of death, and we are dazed by the sheer numbers of the dead--we are tempted to see only the long lines of nameless victims in the ghetto, the concentration camp, the killing pit. But the horror and the sadness are all the greater when we remember that every man, woman or child who died at Auschwitz or Babi Yar came from a home, a family, a neighborhood, a school, a job. Before they were victims, they were human beings like you and me.

Lucy Dawidowicz, a distinguished historian whom we know best as the author of “A Holocaust Reader” and “The War Against the Jews,” was an eyewitness to this neglected aspect of the Holocaust. On the very eve of World War II, she spent a year in the Jewish community of Vilna, and she witnessed the last days of Yiddish civilization in Poland--a passionate and lively community with a 1,000-year-old civilization of superb intellectual and cultural accomplishment.

As a Holocaust memoir, “From That Place and Time” is unique--Dawidowicz saw not a single death, but her testimony is all the more poignant, all the more telling, because she was one of the last witnesses to see Vilna and its people alive.

‘A Posthumous Life’

“Vilna exists now only in memory and history,” she explains of her compulsion to write about her sojourn in Vilna. “I wanted to reconstruct, as best I could, the Vilna I knew, the world capital of the realm of Yiddish, as I had seen it in that last year of its authentic life. I wanted to bestow upon it and its Jews a posthumous life.”

Dawidowicz, an American Jew growing up in New York in the ‘30s, was given the opportunity to pursue her studies in Yiddish language and culture at YIVO, the Yiddish Research Institute of Vilna. In a real sense, “From That Place and Time” is YIVO’s memoir, a eulogy for a unique academic institution that embodied the brave hope of Yiddish scholars who sought to preserve and study their culture, even as Hitler (and his momentary ally, Stalin) were plotting to obliterate it. Hitler and Stalin were successful, of course, and both YIVO and Yiddish survive only in exile. But Dawidowicz’s memoir pays homage to the glories of Yiddish culture in its native soil: “It was a feverish flowering in the shadow of death,” she writes.

I hasten to point out that Dawidowicz’s memoir is not a lament. She allows us to see the world of the ‘30s and ‘40s, both in Europe and New York, through the eyes of an appealing young woman with a passion for history and language, politics and poetry, as well as the more customary passions of youth. What’s most important, I feel, is that Dawidowicz gives us such vivid portraits of the poets who courted her, the teachers who became her mentors and surrogate parents, the young men and women who became her intimate friends. Dawidowicz gives names and faces to these otherwise anonymous victims of Nazi brutality, and by doing so, she ultimately rescues them from the awful maw of the Holocaust.

11th-Hour Escape

Dawidowicz’s book is also a kind of adventure story--she was nearly caught in the Nazi invasion of Poland, and her 11th-hour escape through Germany is a frightening and ominous episode: an American passport allowed one Jew to survive, but she was forced to leave behind millions of other Jews for whom there was no refuge. On her return to New York, she worked in YIVO’s headquarters-in-exile; the war years were a kind of death watch, as she learned of the atrocities carried out in the places where she had lived and against the people she had known and loved.

“I felt so assaulted and battered by history that my personal life had all but collapsed,” she recalls. “I had not yet entirely exorcised my guilt feelings for having fled to safety.” Even among her colleagues at YIVO, including a few fortunate souls who managed to escape Vilna, the fate of those trapped in Europe was too painful to talk about.

“We had learned to control our physical revulsion and to stifle our grief. We endured our despair in silence. It was as if these events were off-limits for human intercourse, as if the world we had once known and now read about had been sucked into a terrible pit of nothingness.”

“From That Place and Time” closes on a note of redemption. Dawidowicz returned to Europe after the war to work with Holocaust survivors--”the remnant that was saved,” in the biblical phrase--and she managed to rescue at least a symbolic remnant of the Vilna community itself.

Sense of Holiness

The Nazis, it turned out, had systematically looted the libraries and museums of the very Jewish communities that they sought to destroy; Dawidowicz was given the task of examining tens of thousands of stolen books and artifacts in a noble effort to restore these treasures to their owners. All too many of “the orphaned books,” of course, were marked “Hebraisch ohne Besitz”-- “Hebrew ownerless”--but, remarkably enough, Dawidowicz discovered the remnants of the YIVO library of Vilna.

“I was in a state of exaltation,” she writes. “I wrote home that when I came across these YIVO books, I had ‘a feeling akin to holiness, that I was touching something sacred.’ ”

I felt something of that exaltation, something of that sense of holiness, as I read “From That Place and Time.” Dawidowicz honors the martyrs of the Holocaust--and enriches the literature of the Holocaust--simply by showing us what kind of people they were before they suffered their martyrdom.