Israel Gutman - Biography

Israel Gutman (born 1923, Warsaw) is a Polish-born Israeli historian of the Holocaust.

Israel Gutman was born in Warsaw, Poland. After playing an important role in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, he was deported to the Majdanek, Auschwitz and Mauthausen concentration camps. His older sister died in the ghetto. After two years in the camps, he was hospitalized in Austria. He managed to escape and join the Jewish Brigade in Italy. In 1946, he immigrated to Mandate Palestine and joined Kibbutz Lehavot HaBashan, where he raised a family. He was a member of the kibbutz for 25 years. In 1961, he testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Academic career

Gutman was a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as the chairman of the Scientific Council of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and deputy chairman of the International Auschwitz Council. He was the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Israel Gutman is an advisor to the Polish government on Jewish affairs, Judaism and Holocaust commemoration.

Awards

Gutman won the Salonika Prize for Literature, the Yitzhak Sadeh Prize for Military Studies, and the Polish Unification Prize.

Controversies

Speaking about the 2008 German Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism, Gutman questioned its location near the Jewish Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. "The location was particularly poorly chosen for this monument," Gutman told Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita. "If visitors have the impression that there was not a great difference between the suffering of Jews and those of homosexuals – exclusively German – it's a scandal." He explained that the German people "understood the immense scope of the crime of the Holocaust which they had committed, but this time, they made an error," because "a sense of proportion must be maintained." – Designed by artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, the Pillbox monument to homosexuals contains a loophole that invites the visitor to look inside and see a film of a gay couple kissing.

Published work

• Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
• Anatomy of Auschwitz Death Camp
• The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars
• Emanuel Ringelblum – The Man and the Historian
• Unequal Victims-Poles and Jews in World War Two

External links

• Israel Gutman - in the online exhibition "To Build and To Be Built" - The Contribution of Holocaust Survivors to the State of Israel - Yad Vashem