Transcending the divide between history and memory: Szymon Datner's practical Holocaust historiography in the early post-war period

This article deals with Szymon Datner's narratives of the Holocaust in Białystok and its surroundings, which he produced in the aftermath of liberation from German occupation (from 1944 onwards). Datner (1902–89) survived the Białystok ghetto from where he escaped in June 1943 to become a partisan fighter. His family was murdered by the Germans. In his capacity as chairman of the Białystok Jewish Committee and as a member of the Jewish Historical Commission at the Committee, he played a vital role in recording, documenting, interpreting, and commemorating the murder of the Jews in Białystok and its surroundings. This article analyzes the characteristic features of some of his early historical as well as artistic writings in Polish and Yiddish. It argues for a new way of appreciating the effort to write the history of an event in its immediate aftermath (or even while it is still taking place), a way of reading these kinds of sources as a kind of hybrid, involving both memory and the ethical imperative of representing the fate of the community at large, and thus the need to record its history.