Szymon Datner

Szymon Datner (Kraków, 2 February 1902 – 8 December 1989, Warsaw) was a Polish historian, Holocaust survivor and underground operative from Białystok, best known for his studies of the Nazi war crimes and events of The Holocaust in the Białystok region. His 1946 Walka i zagłada białostockiego ghetta was one of the first studies of the Białystok Ghetto. Life to 1945 In 1928 Datner settled in Białystok. Before the outbreak of World War II, he worked as a physical-education teacher at a Jewish secondary school in Białystok. He lived in that city with his wife and two daughters through the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. After the German attack on the Soviet Union, he was forced with his family into the Białystok Ghetto. On 24 May 1943 he helped smuggle several persons out of the Ghetto. However, his wife and daughters did not survive its liquidation. Postwar career After the war, Datner served for two years as head of the Białystok branch of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (CŻKH). "A survivor himself, he deposited his own testimony at the Jewish Historical Commission in Białystok on 28 September 1946." The same year, the CŻKH published his Walka i zagłada Białostockiego Ghetta (The Struggle and Destruction of the Białystok Ghetto). In the late 1940s Datner moved to Warsaw. He became a prominent specialist on World War II crimes and the Holocaust. Of Jewish extraction, he was dismissed from his post during the 1968 Polish political crisis but was rehabilitated soon after.