YIVO Receives the Archive of Nachman Blumental

(New York, NY) – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has just received the archive of noted historian, scholar, and Holocaust survivor Nachman Blumental.

The archive, which has not been seen for over 70 years, “is a very significant addition to the YIVO Holocaust collection,” said Dr. Stefanie Halpern, Acting Director of the YIVO Archives. “Our Archive is the largest North American repository of original documents on the Holocaust and is one of the most important of its kind in the world,” said Dr. Halpern.

Born in 1905 in Borszczów, Austria-Hungary, Nachman Blumental collected ethnographic and historical documents for YIVO prior to World War II and was a member of the association Friends of YIVO. “Given Nachman’s early associations with YIVO, it is fitting that his archive is now with YIVO to be processed and preserved and shared with the world,” said Mr. Jonathan Brent, CEO of YIVO.

Blumental, who survived the Holocaust in the non-German occupied part of the Soviet Union, lost his first wife, Maria, and his three-year-old son, Ariel, and six of his seven siblings.

After the war, Blumental traveled across Poland to collect survivor testimony and original German documents concerning ghettos, camps, and sites of mass murder. Blumental served as an expert witness in the trial of Rudolf Höss and Artur Liebehenschel, both of whom served as Commandant of Auschwitz, Amon Göth, the SS Officer who commanded the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, and other post-war trials against Nazi perpetrators.

His archive includes materials he collected while in Poland, and documents about his work in the war trials. Some of the materials he collected were used as evidence during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1945-1946.

Blumental’s archive also contains a number of unique and original documents, including original Nazi documents, materials he gathered while investigating the murders of his wife and son by the Blue Police (Polish officers who collaborated with the Nazis), and songs and poetry from the ghettos, including many original documents from the Łódź Ghetto.

In the collection are his handwritten dictionary cards, which are in multiple languages including German, Yiddish, and Polish, that formed part of Słowa niewinne (Innocent Words), the dictionary on German words that Blumental published after the war.

Blumental considered language the Nazi’s greatest weapon and his dictionary documented how the Nazi’s used language as part of their campaign to exterminate the Jews. The dictionary is made up of words whose meaning shifted with Nazi usage, such as in the case of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp’s Entry and Exit Book, where “exit” was used as a euphemism for “murder.”

Blumental passed away in 1983. “The legacy of Nachman is in his understanding of the power and importance of memory and direct testimony in comprehending the horrors of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust,” said Mr. Brent.

The collection was donated to YIVO by Blumental’s son, Miron Blumental. “I did not wish my father’s personal archive, a product of decades of intensive and emotional work, to be shut in a dark room. I wanted it to be preserved and used by researchers everywhere…” said Miron.

YIVO will process and digitize this important collection to make it available to the world. To do this, it is embarking on a fundraising campaign to raise $300,000 USD. For more information about this campaign, please contact Elina Bloch, Director of Foundations and Grants, at ebloch@yivo.cjh.org.

For more information contact:

Shelly Freeman
Chief of Staff
(917) 606-8292