Nachman Blumental

Nachman Blumental was born in 1902 in Borshchiv

Nachman Blumental was born on May 12, 1902, in Borshchiv. He studied literature at the University of Warsaw and earned a master's degree with a thesis titled "On Metaphor." He was said to know nearly a dozen languages, among them Hebrew, Yiddish, French, Polish and Ukrainian.

After his studies he taught in Lublin. Before the Second World War he wrote essays and literary criticism for Yiddish newspapers and magazines in Poland. He also translated a shortened version of Reymont's novel The Peasants into Yiddish.

During the German occupation he escaped to the Soviet Union and survived the Holocaust. His first wife Maria and his son Ariel stayed in Poland, were betrayed to the Nazis and were murdered in 1943.

In 1944 he returned to Poland and helped found the Central Jewish Historical Commission, which recorded 3,000 survivor testimonies and gathered Nazi documents. When it became the Jewish Historical Institute in 1947, he became its director. He served as an expert witness at 3 war crimes trials, including that of Rudolf Höss, and in 1947 published Innocent Words, the first volume of a planned dictionary of Nazi language.

In 1950 he immigrated to Israel, remarried and devoted the rest of his life to Holocaust research. He died on November 8, 1983, in Tel Aviv. In 2019 his son Miron donated his papers, over 200,000 documents, to the YIVO Institute in New York.