Saul Friedländer

Saul Friedländer, né Pavel, was born to a family of German-speaking Jews in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1939, when he was about seven years old, his family fled the Nazis to France. During the German Occupation in World War II, he was hidden in a Catholic boarding school in Montluçon. His parents then attempted to flee to Switzerland, were arrested by the French police, deported to Auschwitz, and murdered. He did not learn of their fate until after the war. In 1948, he emigrated to Israel, where he finished high school and served in the Israel Defense Forces. For many years, he split his time between Paris, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Geneva, Stockholm, and Los Angeles. He served as secretary to Nachum Goldman, then President of the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress. In 1959, he became an assistant to Shimon Peres, then Israel's vice-minister of defense. In 1963, he received his PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he taught until 1988. He taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University. In 1988, he became professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Friedländer became one of the most significant historians of the Holocaust. He began as a diplomatic historian, publishing Hitler et les Etats-Unis 1939–41 (1963, English translation, Prelude to Downfall: Hitler and the United States) and Pie xii et le iiie Reich (1964, Pius XII and the Third Reich). He then turned towards psychology and wrote Kurt Gerstein, l'ambiguité du bien (1967, Kurt Gerstein: The Ambiguity of Good) and L'Histoire et psychoanalyse (1975, History and Psychoanalysis). He investigated the dynamics of individual remembrance in his acclaimed memoir, Quand vient le souvenir (1978, When Memory Comes), now considered a classic. He also considered cultural memory in Reflets du nazisme (1982, Reflections of Nazism). Other landmark works include Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (1997), followed by Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 2: The Years of Extermination, 1939-1945 (2007), which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. His book Where Memory Leads: My Life (2016) was a sequel to When Memory Comes.