Collect and record!

This volume tells the largely unknown story of Holocaust survivors who founded Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers in Europe immediately after World War II. Their initiatives collected thousands of Nazi documents along with 20,000 testimonies, 10,000 questionnaires, and large numbers of memoirs, diaries, songs, poems, and artifacts of Jewish victims. They pioneered the development of a Holocaust historiography that used both victim and perpetrator sources to describe the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the everyday life and death of European Jews under the Nazi regime, while placing the experiences of Jews at the center of the story.