Dov Levin — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Litvak Holocaust Historian Dov Levin is Dead /2016-12-18

Dov Levin, scholar and Jewish historian, passed away December 3. The Lithuanian Jewish Community mourns the loss of the great Litvak scholar and extends our condolences to his loved ones. May his memory shine on.

Professor Levin was one of the most accomplished researchers working in Eastern European Jewish community history. Born in Kaunas in 1925, he attended a Zionist school with instruction in Hebrew and was a member of the Youth Zionist movement. He and his family were imprisoned in the Kaunas ghetto. His father Tzvi Hirsh, his mother Bluma Wigoder and his nine sisters all perished and Dov was the only survivor. In 1943 he fled the ghetto and joined the partisans. After Soviet liberation his partisan group, Death to the Occupiers, was moved to Vilnius, and Levin resolved to go to Palestine. He left Vilnius on foot for Israel in 1945. He was part of the founding of the State of Israel and fought in battles for independence. He completed his education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and received a doctorate in history. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Chicago and became director of the Oral History Division of the Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University. Over 50 years he recorded more than 610 interviews with Holocaust survivors from the Baltic states. In 1960 he spearheaded efforts to record the testimonies of survivors in Israel and elsewhere. He is the author of over 520 academic articles and 16 books in Hebrew and English, including Lithuanian Jewry’s Armed Resistance to the Nazis 1941-1945 (1985); Baltic Jews under the Soviets (1994); Lesser of Two Evils: 1939-1941 (1995) and Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews in Lithuania (2000). Most of his work is dedicated to preserving the memory of the murdered communities, the history of the Holocaust and Holocaust denial in the Baltic states.

From: Jewish Community of Lithuania

From the Forest to the Bookshelves: The Life of a Partisan and a Historian  Translated from: Haartz: Ofer Aderet 2017

After the Holocaust, Dov Levin was given the task of searching through the archives for Lithuanians who had collaborated with the Nazis. When he came on Aliyah he started out on his life’s work: documenting the life histories of his comrades-in-arms. During the last few years of his life he condemned the “hypocrisy” of his birth place Lithuania regarding the past. He died last month (in 2016) aged 92.

Seven years ago, Professor Dov Levin - partisan, historian and former board member of Yad Vashem - faced a serious predicament. The matter in question was whether he should take part in a discussion forum with historians, authors and composers from Lithuania, that was taking place under the auspices of the National Book Fair in Jerusalem in 2009, or to boycott the event because of a sense of disgust. He eventually absented himself from the event and, in an article he published in the newspaper “Ha’aretz”, he explained why: “The very idea was so revolting to me that I decided to stay away”.

According to him, the reason for his decision was based on how he perceived Lithuania’s hypocrisy towards Israel. “On the one hand, they smile and display apparent friendship towards Israel. On the other hand, they do everything they can to deny the horrors of the Holocaust”. Apart from this, he claimed, Lithuania continues to harass Lithuanian partisans and Holocaust survivors in Israel.

The background for this was the policy of “rehabilitation” towards Lithuanians who collaborated with the Nazis, which was adopted by Lithuania in the early 1990s, shortly after independence was declared. These Lithuanians had been persecuted by the Soviet Union after World War Two owing to their involvement in war crimes. However, modern Lithuania considered the Soviet Union no less an enemy than the Nazis, and, according to Levin, “sought to draw a parallel between the crimes of the Nazis and the so-called ‘crimes’ of the Red Army who fought the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators”.

Levin engaged in a bitter dispute about the subject with Lithuanian President Algirdas Brazauskas, when he visited Jerusalem in 1993, because of the principle he had of issuing pardons to vast numbers of Lithuanians who had murdered Jews. The president responded in a speech in which he said that he bows his head in memory of the 200,000 Lithuanian Jews who perished in the Holocaust and begs their forgiveness “for the deeds of those Lithuanians who cruelly murdered, shot, deported and pillaged”. But in retrospect Levin realized that these were empty words, the true intent of which was to clear the Lithuanians of their responsibility for the murder of Lithuanian Jews, thereby minimizing the Holocaust and its significance.

Levin was also critical of the different Israeli governments, claiming that they overlook this policy because they want to preserve their relationship with Lithuania where politics, commerce and security are concerned. Instead of protesting and condemning, even reducing the level of diplomatic relationships, they ingratiate themselves to them.

In 2009, when he decided to absent himself from the cultural event, he wrote in “Ha’aretz” that the Lithuanian government, through its embassy in Israel, tries to cover up and hide the disgrace by means of a new sort of collaborator: intellectual yes-men who came to the Israeli capital for talks are totally disconnected from intellectual integrity and cultural discourse.

Levin was born in 1925 in Kovno, Lithuania. As a young man he was active in “Hashomer Hatza’ir” and in 1941, when the Nazis invaded, he joined the Zionist underground in the Kovno ghetto and the partisans in the forests.

His desire to write a historic record came to fruition straight after the war. “Dov Levin emerged from the forests with a clear motivation to memorialize the events”. In 2015, Dr. Boaz Cohen, Head of the Holocaust Studies program of the Western Galilee College, wrote an article entitled “Micro-History of Research of the Israeli Holocaust: Dov Levin and the Partisans from Kovno Write their Stories.”

In his article, Cohen describes the important event at the background of this: Towards the end of the war, when the Russian army was on its way to liberate Lithuania, a group of partisans, amongst them many Jewish fighters from the partisan military unit known as “Death to the Occupiers”, including comrade Levin, launched an attack on the German militia. This was a success but 16 Jewish fighters were abandoned by their commander and were killed. “It felt awful, liberation was just a step away, and here comrades who were part of the group were killed unnecessarily”, wrote Cohen.

Levin, who was a 19-year old partisan at the time, said that it was then that he understood how important it was to remember and commemorate. Immediately afterwards, in July 1944, he was drafted by the Soviets for an undercover mission: hunting for locals who collaborated with the Nazi regime.

“It was sisyphic work – interrogating so many suspicious characters, examining thousands of their documents and photographs… but as someone who was the only remaining member of a family that had been murdered by local citizens, I was highly motivated to succeed in this mission, something that I considered like a continuation of my mission as a partisan”, wrote Levin.

Apart from this, he continued working on the German archives that were captured in Vilna. One day a famous guest happened to turn up: this was the Yiddish poet Avraham Sutzkever, who was combing through the archives to find documents about Jews. Levin described the fascinating meeting: “Just like wolves who can sniff out their own kind, all we had to do was look at one another to realize we were both former partisans, and after we both uttered the password “Amcha”, we started talking in Yiddish”. Sutzkever hid the pile of papers Levin helped him to find in the archive, inside his rubashka (Russian tunic shirt).

During the following months he was busy helping Jews escape over the borders and emigrate illegally to Eretz Yisrael. In 1945 he made Aliyah himself. Initially he settled in Kibbutz Bet Zera, but he was keen to pursue academic studies. “I missed out on cultural life in the ghetto and the forests, I felt like a semi-savage”, he said.

He completed his BA in Sociology, Jewish History and Economics at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. His studies came to a halt with the outbreak of the War of Independence, when he was sent to serve on Mount Scopus that was under siege. In an enthusiastic note to one of his friends he wrote: “Ten of us “Death to the Occupiers” partisans are here right now. Could we ever have imagined this when we were sitting at our base back there? Shouldn’t we be happy?” He completed his studies at the end of the war, and after having been granted a degree in Social Work, continued with an MA in Jewish History.

He considered his work in documenting his history and that of his partisan comrades as a noble cause, not only in telling stories about the war, but also commemorating his fallen friends.  This cause had another angle to it, as described by Dr. Boaz Cohen: “The issue of self-respect was also relevant here: people had already heard stories about Zivia Lobatkin and Yitzhak Zuckerman from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and Rozka Korczak and Abba Kovner from Vilna, but not nearly enough was known about the Kovno fighters”, he wrote.

In 1954 an event took place at Kibbutz Yagur in honor of a memorial set up to commemorate the Kovno fighters. The event was published in the newspapers. “The remnants of the partisans from the Kovno ghetto living in Israel gathered for a reunion last Shabbat on the 10^th anniversary of the formation of the underground movement. The participants memorialized their fallen comrades in arms and discussed how to commemorate the Kovno ghetto resistance movement. The decision was made to formulate a comprehensive list of the members of the resistance movement, collect all the records about the movement’s activities and publish memoirs of the war of resistance waged by the Jews of Kovno”. Levin was voted to be a member of the commemoration committee.

“Yad Vashem” which was only just starting out at the time, provided them with assistance, financial support and advice in how to carry out their undertaking, and provided Levin with a heavy tape recorder, which he took with him on his travels round the country on public transport for the purpose of gathering witness testimonies. The expertise he developed helped him not only to document data about the number of Jews in the different partisan platoons and companies, but also to hear fascinating personal stories. One man from Haifa told him in his testimony that he was a Lithuanian garmoshka (harmonica) player. “Whenever he went places, people would tell him ‘Listen, leave everything, just play the mouth organ for us. It’s like having the power of 100 firearms”, Levin wrote.

As the official collector of testimonies, he travelled around Israel and all over the world “to meet with people in strange and different places, in hotels, airports, even in a granary”, so he wrote. He described a rare encounter that took place at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem with one of the UN observers, who had been a doctor at the time with the Lithuanian division. He was not Jewish, but he did remember his Jewish friends who fought there. Levin put every word he uttered into writing. All in all, he interviewed some 200 witnesses.

He went on to write his doctoral thesis at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry‎, Hebrew University Jerusalem. Professor Yehuda Bauer - one of the world’s greatest Holocaust researchers - was his mentor, (Levin was his first doctoral student). Levin, who received his doctorate in 1971, was the first person to write a doctoral thesis on the subject of the Holocaust at the Hebrew University. “Accepting Levin to carry out research and write a doctorate represented the initial step for a whole group of former fighters to enter the world of academe”, wrote Dr. Cohen. Levin’s book that is based on his doctorate was the first in a series written by former fighters who joined academia.

During the following decades Levin was a prominent researcher on the subject of Jews from the Baltic States before and during the Holocaust. Thus the partisan who arrived in the Jewish homeland aged 19 years, with a burning desire to memorialize his partisan comrades, became a major researcher on the entire range of Jewish warfare in the area in which he originated. Because he made his name as a pioneer in the use of tools from the field of the social sciences in historical research and used testimonies as the main tool in his research, he was appointed to be Head of the Department of Oral History at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and later as Head of the Israeli Oral History Association and Head of the Israeli Genealogy Research Association. “This closed the circle for a person who made concerted efforts to find and record the names of Jewish fighters who perished in the Holocaust”, wrote Cohen.

Levin also pioneered the effort to have the younger generation of survivors of the Holocaust who were fighters accepted as academic staff members : Yisrael Gutman, a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto and Yitzhak “Tulka” Arad, a partisan in the Rudniki forest.

Levin, who published hundreds of articles and some 20 books, passed away in December 2016, leaving his wife, sculptress Bilha Levin, three children, seven grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.