From the last extermination – Fun letstn khurbn – פון לעצטן חורבן
פון לעצטן חורבן : צייטשריפט פאר געשיכטע פון יידישן לעבן בעתן נאצי-רעזשים. Fun letstn hkhurbn : tsaytshriftt far geshikhte fun Yidishn lebn beysn Natsi-rezshim. From the last extermination: Periodical for the history of Jewish people during the Nazi regime, edited by Israel Kaplan, Central Historical Commission of Central Committee of the Liberated Jews. Munich 1946-1948. Yiddish | Digital copy via Compact Memory as part of Frankfurt's Digital Judaica Collections (Campus access only).
Displaced Persons, a term that describes those who are forced to leave their home due to persecution and violence originates in the aftermath of World War II and first applied to thousands of Jewish survivors scattered all over Central- and Western Europe. The majority lived in Displaced Persons camps in occupied Germany, places of transit that were shaped by Jewish self-organization which found its expression in a vibrant cultural life and various institutions, for exemplare for political representations. One of these institutions was the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews. For many survivors one central concern was the remembrance of life in the former homes and the allday life during the Holocaust, which lead Israel Kaplan (1902–2003) and Moshe Yosef Faygenboym (1908–1986) to found the Central Historical Commission (Tsentrale Historishe Komisye).
Fun letztn khurbn is one of 40 newspapers and magazines which were published in the camps. It appeared between 1946–1948 and was printed in the former printing house of the NSDAP paper Völkischer Beobachter.
The Historian Kaplan, the editor of Fun letztn khurbn, aimed to document the history of the Holocaust, the persecution of the Jews and preserve the remembrance of the murdered Jews of Europe. By using Yiddish the editors reached out to Eastern European survivors and were able to collect more than 2000 eyewitness reports. 99 of these reports, historical documents mostly focussing on Eastern European, especially the Balkan, Ukraine and Poland, khurbn literature (Holocaust literature), poems and literary texts appeared in Fun letztn khurbn.
