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Yehuda Bauer, preeminent historian of the Holocaust, dies at 98

By Emily Langer Washington Post

Yehuda Bauer, who fled Nazi Europe shortly before the outbreak of World War II and became one of the foremost historians of the Holocaust, combining academic rigor with humanity as he confronted an unfathomable event and sought to discern its meaning for the future, died Oct. 18 at his home in Jerusalem. He was 98.

His family confirmed his death but did not cite an exact cause.

Dr. Bauer, a Czech-born Jew, was a teenager when he escaped Prague with his parents the night in March 1939 when Hitler’s Germany invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. Traveling by train, they crossed into Poland and made their way to Romania, where they boarded a ship for what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and is today the state of Israel.

As a young Israeli historian, Dr. Bauer did not set out to become an authority on the Holocaust, or the Shoah, another term used to describe the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. In a 2004 interview with Dimensions, a journal of Holocaust studies, he traced the origins of his scholarship to a conversation with Abba Kovner, a leader of Jewish partisans during the war who later became a poet and a friend of Dr. Bauer’s in Israel.

“What was the most important event in Jewish history?” Dr. Bauer recalled Kovner asking him.

“The Shoah,” he replied.

“Well then,” Kovner inquired, “why don’t you deal with it?”

“Because I’m scared,” Dr. Bauer said.

“That,” Kovner told him, “is a very good starting point.”

Over the next half-century, Dr. Bauer wrote dozens of books that helped form the foundation of modern understanding of the Holocaust. He had lost his extended family in the slaughter, and his work served, in part, to document what had befallen them and so many other victims of Nazi persecution. But he did not regard it as his role simply to “memorialize” the dead, he wrote in his book “Rethinking the Holocaust” (2001). Instead, he wrote, “I ask questions about what happened and why.”

In the early years of his career, that line of inquiry led him to move beyond existing Holocaust scholarship, which relied in large part on the Nazi bureaucracy’s paper trail and centered on the perpetrators. No true understanding of the Holocaust would ever be reached, Dr. Bauer maintained, without studying the victims.

In books including “They Chose Life: Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust” (1973), Dr. Bauer challenged a pernicious notion circulating at the time that Jews went “like sheep to the slaughter.” Immersing himself in diaries, correspondence and oral histories, he showed that the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 - in which hundreds of Jewish fighters mounted the best known revolt against the Nazis - was far from the only act of insurrection by Jews in ghettos or elsewhere.

Jewish partisans in Europe, Dr. Bauer found, numbered in the tens of thousands and included women and children as well as men. He recounted the story of a 12-year-old Ukrainian boy called Motele, whose parents and sisters had died in a concentration camp. Posing as violinist, he smuggled explosives into the cellar of a restaurant where he performed for German soldiers and blew up the building. The boy later died fighting alongside the partisans.

While such accounts provided perhaps the most dramatic examples of resistance, Dr. Bauer also shined a scholarly light on the everyday efforts by Jews to retain the dignity that the Nazis tried to strip away.

When Jews in ghettos established underground schools or organized plays, concerts and lectures, they were committing acts of resistance, Dr. Bauer said. In a concentration camp, when a mother addressed her little daughters by name instead of by number so that they would not forget who they were, that was an act of resistance.

Dr. Bauer “added a critically important dimension to the study of the Holocaust,” said Debórah Dwork, a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “No one could ignore the humanity of the victims. They were not ciphers in the conversation anymore.”

Dr. Bauer was admired among his colleagues for following historical evidence wherever it led him, for his willingness to evolve in his views and for his comfort challenging widely held opinions.

He wrote extensively about the American response to the Holocaust, including in the book “American Jewry and the Holocaust” (1981), and was among the scholars who argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unfairly condemned for what critics regarded as his insufficient efforts to stop the Holocaust as it was in progress.

In the decades after the Holocaust, an often-bitter debate emerged around the question of whether the Allies should have bombed the train tracks leading to Auschwitz or the gas chambers at the camp, the largest of the Nazi killing centers, where more than 1.1 million people - including nearly 1 million Jews - were murdered.

Dr. Bauer contended that bombing the rail lines would have been ineffective because Germans were capable of quickly repairing them, that accurately targeting the gas chambers would have been exceedingly difficult and that prisoners certainly would have been killed in any such attack, said Richard Breitman, the co-author, with Allan J. Lichtman, of the 2013 book “FDR and the Jews.”

As his career progressed, Dr. Bauer had the painful experience of observing the emergence of pseudo-historians who sought to deny that the Holocaust had occurred or to suggest that the killing had been more limited in scope than was generally understood.

Deborah E. Lipstadt, now serving with the rank of U.S. ambassador as a special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, documented the trend in her book “Denying the Holocaust” (1993) and later prevailed in a libel suit brought in England by David Irving, whom she had described as “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial.” Her story was dramatized in the 2016 film “Denial.”

It was Dr. Bauer who first encouraged her to pursue the topic of deniers in her research, Lipstadt said in an interview for this obituary.

In later years, Dr. Bauer found himself forced to confront not only the denial of the Holocaust, but also the distortion of its history, such as when Poland in 2018 passed a law, later loosened, making it punishable by prison time to suggest that the Polish nation had been complicit in the Holocaust.

“He was my greatest ally … in the struggle against Holocaust distortion,” said Jan Grabowski, a Polish Canadian professor at the University of Ottawa who ultimately prevailed in a libel case in Poland over his writings on the role of Poles during the Holocaust. Grabowski described Dr. Bauer as a “master” of history, one for whom that history was very fresh.

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Escape From Nazi Europe

Martin Yehuda Bauer, an only child, was born in Prague on April 6, 1926. His mother was an artist who also made women’s belts. His father, an engineer, found work in a factory when the family reached Mandatory Palestine.

Dr. Bauer attended high school in Haifa and began his university studies at Cardiff University in Wales, where he had received a British scholarship, and where he added Welsh to the long list of languages that he would learn to speak - among them Czech, Slovak, German, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, French and English.

A member of the Palmach, a branch of the pre-state Zionist military organization the Haganah, he paused his studies to fight in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. He later moved to a kibbutz and pursued his doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he graduated in 1960.

Dr. Bauer taught for years at Hebrew University; served as an academic adviser to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem; and helped found the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

In addition to his writings on the Holocaust, he explored topics including the founding of the state of Israel and the nature of modern antisemitism. His final books included “The Jews: A Contrary People” (2014).

Dr. Bauer’s honors included the Israel Prize, one of the country’s highest honors, bestowed on him in 1998. He spoke critically of Israeli leaders, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he accused of using the Holocaust for nationalistic purposes and as a “tool for politics.”

In 2011, Dr. Bauer joined a declaration calling for the creation of a Palestinian state, which he regarded as centrally important for the preservation of the Jewish one.

“We are occupying people who hate us, and that’s not a good thing,” an obituary in the Times of Israel quoted Dr. Bauer as saying. “As long as the kind of nationalist government that we have is in power, there’s no possibility of a solution.”

He did not comment publicly on the attack on Israeli by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, or on the Israeli military response to the assault, according to his family, because he did not consider himself a “a military or a political person.”

Dr. Bauer’s first marriage, to Shula Sugarwhite, ended in divorce. His second wife, Ilana Meroz, predeceased him. Survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Danit Cohen and Anat Tsach; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

In the debates surrounding the Holocaust’s place in history, Dr. Bauer took the position that it was “unprecedented” but not “unique.”

“If it were unique, we could forget about it, because it could happen only once,” he said. “But it could happen again.” Referring to the top Nazi officials Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler, he said that “we all have within ourselves a tiny little element which, if developed, could turn us into an Eichmann or a Himmler.”

Decades into his scholarship, Dr. Bauer reflected on the conversation that had started him on his path - when he told his friend Kovner that he was scared to study the Holocaust, and Kovner replied that fear was the truest place to start. After everything he had learned in his long search for understanding, Dr. Bauer said, “I still am scared.”