Szymon Datner


Szymon Datner was a Polish historian, Holocaust survivor and underground operative from Białystok, best known for his studies of the Nazi war crimes and events of The Holocaust in the Białystok region. His 1946 Walka i zag/ada bialostockiego ghetta was one of the first studies of the Białystok Ghetto.

Life to 1945

In 1928 Datner settled in Białystok. Before the outbreak of World War II, he worked as a physical-education teacher at a Jewish secondary school in Białystok. He lived in that city with his wife and two daughters through the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. After the German attack on the Soviet Union, he was forced with his family into the Białystok Ghetto. On 24 May 1943 he helped smuggle several persons out of the Ghetto. However, his wife and daughters did not survive its liquidation.

Postwar career

After the war, Datner served for two years as head of the Białystok branch of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland. "A survivor himself, he deposited his own testimony at the Jewish Historical Commission in Białystok on 28 September 1946."
The same year, the CŻKH published his Walka i zagłada Białostockiego Ghetta. In the late 1940s Datner moved to Warsaw. He became a prominent specialist on World War II crimes and the Holocaust. Of Jewish extraction, he was dismissed from his post during the 1968 Polish political crisis but was rehabilitated soon after.
In 1969–70 he presided over Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute, and he was one of the historians at the. According to Bernd Wegner, Datner drew up the most comprehensive documentation of Nazi Germany's war crimes and atrocities in eastern Poland. In 1966 he published an article on "The Extermination of the Jewish Population in the District of Bialystok" ; however, due to censorship in the Polish People's Republic he could not openly write on killing of Jews by Poles.
According to Datner, German units operating in the Bialystok District incited local Poles to act against Jews, while not necessarily participating in the events themselves. He estimates the number of Jews who "fell prey to the Germans or their local helpers, or were murdered in various unexplained circumstances" outside ghettos and camps at 100,000.

Death

Datner died in 1989 in Warsaw and was interred at the Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery.

Publications