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Larissa Allwork, Lisa Moses Leff. The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 326–327, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.326
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Lisa Moses Leff’s The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust is the story of Jewish scholar Zosa Szajkowski (1911–1978) and his impact on the recovery, collection, and archiving of European Jewish documentary heritage in the wake of the Holocaust. Szajkowski is particularly well known for his research on the history of the Jews in France since the seventeenth century. He has also gained a reputation as a notorious archive thief. Szajkowski’s motivations for his post-1945 thefts and the historical and institutional context in which they occurred form the thematic, intellectual, and ethical focus of Leff’s book. As much as a study of Szajkowski, this book is an analysis of the impact of what Raphael Lemkin would call Nazism’s “cultural genocide” on the politics, activism, and institutions of Jewish reconstruction in America and Europe after the Second World War.
In many respects, Szajkowski’s own life was as eventful as the French Revolutionary period so often addressed in his research. Szajkowski was born in Zaromb, Poland, and joined his two older brothers and sisters in Paris at the age of sixteen. There he worked for the Yiddish-language Communist press and met the Ukrainian émigré Jewish intellectuals Elias (Ilya) and Rebecca (Riva) Tcherikower. The Tcherikowers were synonymous with YIVO (Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut, an institution dedicated to the academic study of the Jewish people) and ignited Szajkowski’s passion for archiving and writing European Jewish history. During World War II, Szajkowski fought for the French Foreign Legion, was a paratrooper with the U.S. Army, and from July 1945 participated in the Allied occupation of Berlin. Leff’s chapter on this period evocatively chronicles the chaos of Berlin’s ravaged postwar cityscape and Szajkowski’s determined efforts to salvage and ship back to YIVO’s offices in New York any recovered Jewish communal documents or archival evidence of Nazi antisemitism. The cast of characters in this section of Leff’s book also suggests the extent to which various forms of Jewish cultural activism in the immediate postwar years would influence the future field of Holocaust studies. For example, Leff shows how Libe or Lucy Schildkret (also known by her married name, Lucy Dawidowicz) worked in a displaced persons camp and carried out cultural reconstruction on behalf of YIVO. Equally, in Paris, Léon Poliakov collected the documentary evidence of German occupation, while by 1950, Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR) representative Hannah Arendt was in conflict with the president of the Hamburg Jewish Community over where its archives ought to be preserved. The seeds of Holocaust scholarship were thus far removed from the ivory tower of Leopold von Ranke’s historical “objectivity.” Instead, resembling Leff’s reproduction photograph of Szajkowski rummaging through the documentary remains of Berlin’s Nazi Propaganda Ministry (131–132), the founding figures of Holocaust studies such as Dawidowicz, Poliakov, and Arendt were intellectually shaped by the physical, emotional, and existential experience of the rubble, debris, and barbed wire of Europe’s ruins.
