The Benjamin Tenenbaum (Tene) collection: testimonies of child survivors of the Holocaust

The GFH Tenenbaum collection includes hundreds of unedited testimonies of Holocaust survivor children, collected in 1946 and 1947 in Poland and Germany. Some eighty of the testimonies were published in his book "One of a City and Two of a Family". However, as Tenenbaum himself admitted, they were edited, and carried some bias in favor of Zionism and the USSR. The GFH collection holds about 650 unedited testimonies in Russian, Polish and Yiddish. The material has been fully catalogued, indexed and scanned. For further information, see Cohen, Boaz. “The Children’s Voice: Postwar Collection of Testimonies from Child Survivors of the Holocaust.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 73–95 Benjamin Tenenbaum (Tene) was born in 1914 in Warsaw, Poland. He joined the HaShomer HaTzair Zionist movement as a teenager, and began writing poetry for the movement's publications. He immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1937, and was a founding member of Kibbutz Eilon, where he lived for a decade. After the war, Tenenbaum travelled to Poland, where he spent over a year collecting testimonies from Holocaust survivor children. He included some of those testimonies in a book titled "One of a City and Two of a Family", published (in Hebrew) in 1947. This trip to Poland was also the inspiration for his poem "Temolim al ha-Saf" (1947). He was the editor of a children's magazine and wrote stories for children and adolescents, often inspired by his own childhood in prewar Poland. He was a prolific translator, mostly from Polish and Yiddish, as well as a poet whose poems have been translated into several languages. He died in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1999.