From survivor to witness: voices from the Shoah

Abstract

‘Good people, do not forget, good people, tell the story, good people, write!’ declared the renowned historian Simon Dubnov to his companions before his death on 8 December 1941 in Riga, killed by a Lithuanian policeman during the liquidation of the ghetto. It was the last appeal of an old man. This story may be apocryphal. But Dubnov was not alone among those who, during the Holocaust, as well as throughout the fifty years following the destruction of the Jews of Europe, tried to tell the story because to do so was an act of duty, the duty to remember.