Filip Friedman

Who was Filip Friedman?

Filip Friedman was a Polish–Jewish historian and the author of several books on history and economics.

Philip Friedman was born in Lwów in 1901. After graduation from Gymnasia in Lwów, Friedman studied at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów, the University of Vienna and the Jewish Paedagogium under Salo Baron. He moved to Łódź in 1925 after receiving his doctorate from the University of Vienna. Friedman taught at a leading Hebrew secondary school in Łódź, as well as at the People’s University of that city, at YIVO in Vilna, and at the Taḥkemoni of Warsaw. He also continued his historical research. In autumn of 1939 he returned to Lwów, where he worked in the Science Academy of Ukraine. When World War II began, he was engaged in writing a comprehensive history of the Jews of Poland from the earliest beginnings through the twentieth century. After the fall of Poland at the beginning of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Lwów, Friedman went into hiding on the "Aryan side" of the city i.e. outside the Lwów Ghetto. He survived the war but lost his wife and daughter.

After the liberation of Poland, he taught Jewish History at the University of Łódź, and also served as the director of the Central Jewish Historical Committee, whose mission was to gather data on Nazi war crimes. He collected testimonies and documentation and also supervised the publication of a number of pioneering studies, including his own on the concentration camp at Auschwitz. This work, To jest Oświęcim, was published in Warsaw in 1945 and appeared in an abridged English version as This Is Oswięcim. He also continued to publish historical works, including several monographs on various destroyed Jewish communities, including Bialystok and Chelmno and about Ukrainian-Jewish relations during the Nazi occupation. At the same time, he taught Jewish history at the Łódź University and was a member of the Polish State Commission to Investigate German War Crimes in Auschwitz and Chelmno.