19 Facts About Lucy Dawidowicz

Lucy Dawidowicz was an American historian and writer.

Lucy Dawidowicz wrote books about modern Jewish history, in particular, about the Holocaust.

At the encouragement of her mentor, the historian Jacob Shatzky, Lucy Dawidowicz decided to focus on history, especially Jewish history.

Lucy Dawidowicz made the decision to learn Yiddish, and at Shatzky's urging, she relocated to Wilno, Poland in 1938 to work at the Yiddish Scientific Institute.

Lucy Dawidowicz lived in Wilno until August 1939 when she returned to the United States just weeks before the war broke out.

Lucy Dawidowicz had been close to Kalmanovich and his family, whom she reportedly described as being her real parents.

From 1940 until 1946, Lucy Dawidowicz worked as an assistant to a research director at the New York City office of the YIVO.

In 1946, Lucy 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 camps.

Lucy Dawidowicz helped the survivors to re-create schools and libraries.

From 1948 until 1960, Lucy Dawidowicz worked as a historical researcher for the American Jewish Committee.

An enthusiastic fan of the New York Mets, Lucy Dawidowicz lived the rest of her life in New York.

Lucy Dawidowicz died in New York City in 1990, aged 75, from undisclosed causes.

Lucy 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.

Lucy Dawidowicz maintained that from the Middle Ages onward, German Christian society and culture were suffused with antisemitism and there was a direct link from medieval pogroms to the Nazi death camps of the 1940s.

Lucy Dawidowicz argued against Mayer that the historical evidence undoubtedly shows that Hitler never believed that the war was lost as early as December 1941 and that Mayer's theory is anachronistic.

Lucy Dawidowicz commented that the Einsatzgruppen had been massacring Jews since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and that Mayer's claim that the Jews were only surrogate victims due to Germany's inability to defeat the Soviet Union was, in her opinion, rubbish.

Lucy Dawidowicz wrote that Hitler and Luther were both obsessed by the "demonologized universe" inhabited by Jews and that the similarities between Luther's anti-Jewish writings and modern antisemitism are no coincidence because they derived from a common history of Judenhass.

Hilberg ends on the subject of Lucy Dawidowicz stating "To be sure, Lucy Dawidowicz has not been taken all that seriously by historians".

Lucy Dawidowicz wrote The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe to document Jewish civilization in Eastern Europe before its destruction during the Holocaust.