[Cz-L] Adolph Herschmann, the chief of the ghetto

A very interesting research paper by Vadim Altskan, a senior scientist
at the US Holocaust Museum, was published in the last issue of the
journal "Holocaust Genocide Studies". The paper focuses on the fate of
Adolph Herschmann, a Czernowitz lawyer, who was deported to Zhmerinka
ghetto in Transnistria in October 1941 and who became a member and
later the Chair of the Jewish Council in the ghetto. When the ghetto
was liberated by the Red Army in 1944, Herschmann was arrested by the
Soviet authorities on the charges of collaboration with the enemy. He
pleaded innocent, claiming that all his actions were aimed at saving
as many Jews as possible, however he was tried by a military tribunal
and sentenced to death.

The paper describes in detail Herschmann's activities in Zhmerinka and
analyzes moral and other ambiguities faced by the members of Jewish
self-administration, who in many cases did try to save their fellow
Jews, at the same time doing the bidding of their Romanian or German
masters.

Herschmann was born in 1895 in Ostritz, graduated from a gymnasium in
Czernowitz in 1914 and enrolled into a medical school in Vienna. In
1915 was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and by the end of the
war became a first lieutenant. In 1922 graduated from the law school in
Czernowitz and started a successful private practice. In July 1941 he
was arrested by the Romanians for bribing the officials, when he tried
to save his cousin, Gotlieb Markus, from imprisonment, but instead
went to prison himself. His wife, Dora Rosenbaum, and daughter Donia
survived the ghetto and managed to leave for Romania and then Israel
after the war.

Reference: Vadim Altskan, On the Other Side of the River: Dr. Adolph
Herschmann and the Zhmerinka Ghetto, 1941–1944 / Holocaust Genocide
Studies (Spring 2012) 26(1): 2-28 doi:10.1093/hgs/dcs010.
http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/1/2.abstract

Iosif

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Received on 2012-05-29 00:08:20