Zosa Szajkowski, Historian and Thief of French Jewish Archives

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Between 1940 and 1961, the historian Zosa Szajkowski (1911-1978) illicitly moved tens of thousands of Jewish historical documents that he had found in Europe to the United States. In New York, he used these papers as the basis for dozens of scholarly articles, and later, when he had finished his work, he sold them to American and Israeli research libraries. The story of this historian is, at its core, morally ambiguous. Szajkowski began to transfer these papers when Europe was at war and Jewish life was deeply threatened, but he continued his activities well after European life returned to normal. Szajkowski’s path, from archive rescuer to archive thief, can only be understood when placed in the ambiguous context of the tremendous changes in the global balance of power in the Jewish world that followed the Shoah.