Szymon Datner (2 February 1902 â 8 December 1989) was a Polish historian, Holocaust survivor and underground operative from Biaà Âystok, who was born in Kraków and died in Warsaw. He is best known for his studies of the Nazi war crimes and events of The Holocaust in the Biaà Âystok region. His 1946 Walka i zagà Âada biaà Âostockiego ghetta was one of the first studies of the Biaà Âystok Ghetto.
In 1928 Datner settled in Biaà Âystok. Before the outbreak of World War II, he worked as a physical-education teacher at a Jewish secondary school in Biaà Âystok. He lived in that city with his wife and two daughters through the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. After the German attack on the Soviet Union, he was forced with his family into the Biaà Âystok Ghetto. On 24 May 1943 he helped smuggle several persons out of the Ghetto. However, his wife and daughters did not survive its liquidation.
After the war, Datner served for two years as head of the Biaà Âystok branch of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (Cà »KH). "A survivor himself, he deposited his own testimony at the Jewish Historical Commission in Biaà Âystok on 28 September 1946."
The same year, the Cà »KH published his Walka i zagà Âada Biaà Âostockiego Ghetta (The Struggle and Destruction of the Biaà Âystok Ghetto). In the late 1940s Datner moved to Warsaw. He became a prominent specialist on World War II crimes and the Holocaust. Of Jewish extraction, he was dismissed from his post during the 1968 Polish political crisis but was rehabilitated soon after.
In 1969âÂÂ70 he presided over Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute, and he was one of the historians at the . According to Bernd Wegner, Datner drew up the most comprehensive documentation of Nazi Germany's war crimes and atrocities in eastern Poland. In 1966 he published an article on "The Extermination of the Jewish Population in the District of Bialystok". states that Datner wrote in similar vain to authors engaging in "heroic-martyrological discourse". Alexander B. Rossino names Datner as the eminent historian of Wehrmacht war crimes in Poland.
His daughter is , Polish historian and sociologist specialising in the social history of Polish Jews and the anti-semitism in Poland.
Datner died in 1989 in Warsaw and was interred at the Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery.