Filip Friedman i początki badań nad Zagładą
Philip Friedman and the Beginning of Holocaust Studies

Summary/Abstract: The article presents the scholarly achievements of Philip Friedman, an eminent historian from Lviv and survivor, whose wife and daughter died in the Holocaust. Friedman was a pioneer of Holocaust research. His contribution consisted in setting out research directions, developing the methodology and research tools, and documenting the Holocaust. Immediately after the war Friedman developed one of the 􀏐irst Holocaust research programmes, which included topics such as: the place of Jews in Nazi ideology, the subsequent stages of persecutions of Jews, the description of Jewish life and resistance to the Nazi extermination policy, the Nazi genocide, the attitude of the non-Jewish population toward persecutions of Jews, and the response of the free world, including the Yishuv, to the Holocaust. Friedman was convinced that reactions of the victims and their life in the shadow of looming annihilation should constitute the foundation of research on the ‘􀏐inal solution’. The severely criticised the historians who based their Holocaust research solely on Nazi documentation, disregarding the Jewish perspective. Friedman himself was most interested in two issues: Judenrats and Jewish resistance. He examined the Jewish councils’ activity in the context of the inner life of ghettoes, the council’s in􀏐luence on the life of ghetto inhabitants. Carrying out research on Jewish resistance, Friedman created a broad concept of that stance – one that included not only military activity but also acts in the spiritual and cultural sphere. Philip Friedman was also one of the 􀏐irst historians who paid attention to the universal signi􀏐icance of the Holocaust. He claimed that the human and moral implications of the ‘􀏐inal solution’ pertained not only to the Jews but also to all mankind. He also assumed that Jews were the 􀏐irst but not the only victims of the Nazi extermination policy, as he discussed the extermination of the Roma as early as in 1950.

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