Introduction

The Holocaust was a time that saw an immense amount of history taking place throughout Europe. In 1966, the Israeli historian Jacob Robinson observed that the challenge for the Holocaust scholar was one of “rescuing from oblivion a history as eventful and rich as that of a thousand years.” By way of illustration, the nature of survivor testimony can have both positive and negative dimensions. A court of law would look at a piece of testimony from the point of view of whether that evidence would convict or acquit an accused, and for this reason might reject much of what a survivor could relate about what happened to them. In 2001, one of the great pioneers of Holocaust Studies, Raul Hilberg, produced Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis, which demonstrated his commitment to the use of documents in historical writing.