Lucy Dawidowicz ( Schildkret; June 16, 1915 – December 5, 1990) was an American historian and writer. She wrote books about modern Jewish history, in particular, about the Holocaust.
Life
Dawidowicz was born in New York City as Lucy Schildkret. Her parents, Max and Dora (née Ofnaem) Schildkret, Jewish immigrants from Poland, were secular-minded with little interest in religion. Dawidowicz did not attend a service at a synagogue until 1938.
Dawidowicz's first interests were poetry and literature. She attended Hunter College from 1932 to 1936 and obtained a B.A. in English. She went on to study for a M.A. at Columbia University, but abandoned her studies because of concerns over events in Europe. At the encouragement of her mentor, the historian Jacob Shatzky, Dawidowicz decided to focus on history, especially Jewish history. Dawidowicz made the decision to learn Yiddish, and at Shatzky's urging, she relocated to Wilno, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1938 to work at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (known by its Yiddish acronym as the YIVO). With the help of Shatzky she became a research fellow there.
Dawidowicz lived in Wilno until August 1939 when she returned to the United States just weeks before the war broke out. During her time at the YIVO, she became close to three of the leading scholars there, namely Zelig Kalmanovich, Max Weinreich and Zalmen Reisen. Weinreich escaped the Holocaust because he went to New York to establish a branch of the YIVO there before World War II, but Kalmanovich and Reisen perished. Dawidowicz had been close to Kalmanovich and his family, whom she reportedly described as being her real parents. From 1940 until 1946, Dawidowicz worked as an assistant to a research director at the New York City office of the YIVO. During the war, like most Americans, she was aware of the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people in Europe, although it was not until after the war that she became aware of the full extent of the Holocaust.
Following World War II
In 1946, Dawidowicz traveled back to Europe, where she worked for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee as an aid worker among the Jewish survivors in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps. She helped the survivors to re-create schools and libraries. Over a period of months in Frankfurt, she examined books that had been looted from Jewish institutions by the Nazis and identified those to be returned to the YIVO headquarters in New York, recovering in this way vast collections of books.
In 1947, she returned to the U.S. and on January 3, 1948, she married a Polish Jew, Szymon Dawidowicz. Upon her return to the U.S. she worked as a researcher for the novelist John Hersey's book The Wall, a dramatization of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. From 1948 until 1960, Dawidowicz worked as a historical researcher for the American Jewish Committee. During the same period, Dawidowicz wrote frequently for Commentary, the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review.
An enthusiastic fan of the New York Mets, Dawidowicz lived the rest of her life in New York. In 1985, she founded the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature from Yiddish and Hebrew into English. A fierce anti-Communist, Dawidowicz campaigned for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. She died in New York City in 1990, aged 75, from undisclosed causes.
Holocaust study and historiography
Dawidowicz’s major interests were the Holocaust and Jewish history. A passionate Zionist, Dawidowicz believed that had the Mandate for Palestine been implemented as intended, establishing the Jewish State of Israel before the Holocaust, "the terrible story of six million dead might have had another outcome". Dawidowicz took an Intentionalist line on the origins of the Holocaust, contending that, beginning with the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, Hitler conceived his master plans, and everything he did from then on was directed toward the achievement of his goal, and that he had "openly espoused his program of annihilation" when he wrote Mein Kampf in 1924.
Dawidowicz's conclusion was: "Through a maze of time, Hitler's decision of November 1918 led to Operation Barbarossa. There never had been any ideological deviation or wavering determination. In the end only the question of opportunity mattered."