Representing Auschwitz

At the Margins of Testimony

N. Chare, D. Williams, N. Chare, D. Williams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137297693
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte

This collection of essays by leading international scholars takes the Scrolls of Auschwitz as its starting point. These powerful hand-written testimonies, produced within Birkenau, seek to bear witness to mass murder from at its core. The highly literary accounts pose a fundamental challenge to the idea the Holocaust cannot be attested to.

1

The Harmony of Barbarism:
Locating the Scrolls of Auschwitz
in Holocaust Historiography

Dan Stone

Holocaust historiography

The writing of history tends towards order, towards the elimination of contingency and towards claims that become common knowledge. One such widely held view is that the victims of the Holocaust could not understand what was happening to them or were unable to make sense of their experiences as they were unfolding. In some cases, this claim is accurate: the Jews of Hungary, for example, felt, with understandable complacency, that their position as Magyar citizens was untouchable and that the disaster that had befallen their co-religionists elsewhere in Europe would pass them by (Miron, 2004; Szalai, 2004).

In Holocaust historiography, which is a massive, sophisticated field of historical scholarship, one finds numerous such examples (see Stone, 2010b, 2013). Perhaps the most famous, and most hotly contested, is the role played by the Judenräte (Jewish Councils) in the Polish ghettos in ‘collaborating’ with the deportation process (Arendt, 1977, pp. 117–119; Diner, 1992; Michman, 2004; Trunk, 1996). Taken as a whole, however, the field remains methodologically rather restricted and restrained, even though it is no longer confined to political history but also encompasses social history and approaches that focus on gender, religion and memory. This is most notably the case with respect to the use of testimony, as we will see. The debate about the Nazis’ decision-making process for the ‘Final Solution’ is still rightly central to historians’ concerns, as illustrated in the major empirical studies that have appeared in recent years, especially those by Christopher Browning (2004) and Peter Longerich (2010). But there is also a slowly growing tendency to bring together the perpetrator narrative with the experiences of the victims in what Saul Friedländer calls an ‘integrated history’.

Furthermore, the range of subjects with which Holocaust historians concern themselves has broadened immensely since the opening up of new archives after the end of the Cold War. There are now detailed local and regional studies of the Holocaust in most parts of Europe, although some key books remain to be written, such as a monograph on the Holocaust in Poland to place alongside Yitzhak Arad’s study of the Soviet Union and Jean Ancel’s on Romania, or on Slovakia, where the literature is as yet relatively undeveloped. But we now know in great detail about the unfolding of the Holocaust in Western Europe, in Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Serbia and the western USSR, and the literature on Greece, Scandinavia and other outlying areas is growing all the time.

When it comes to the camps, the relationship of the murder of the Jews to the concentration camp system in general is now much better understood, thanks to the work of historians such as Karin Orth, Nikolaus Wachsmann and Dieter Pohl, the general lesson being that most Holocaust victims were not murdered in camps at all and that the death camps need to be understood as separate from the camps run by the SS’s IKL (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager, Concentration Camps Inspectorate), a point that raises problematic questions for attempts to reintroduce the figure of the ‘concentration camp’ into contemporary discussion as the telos or most revealing synecdoche of modernity.¹ Quite large groups of Jews even survived the war thanks to being kept in forced labour camps that were outside of the SS-run system, in camps run by local councils and businesses across occupied Europe (Dreyfus & Gensburger, 2011; Gruner, 2006). However, despite the massive literature, there is a still a need for a standard monograph on Auschwitz, and for more work on Operation Reinhard, which constituted the heart of the killing process and on which there are very few monographs and not many more scholarly articles.

The mention of the Operation Reinhard camps should also remind us that most of the Holocaust’s victims came from Poland and further east, in Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States (see Brandon & Lower, 2008; Snyder, 2010). The nature of the killing process, especially in the western USSR, is hard to recreate for lack of sources, but finally research is underway into the short-lived ghettos that existed in this massive region and the nature of the face-to-face killing process as it transpired on the ground. Because Auschwitz became, for understandable reasons, the symbol and synecdoche of the murder of the Jews, and because the Operation Reinhard camps and the Einsatzgruppen killings were for many years overlooked (because of lack of sources, communist instrumentalization in the ‘antifascist’ narrative or Cold War totalitarianism theory), the vast number of religious Jews, who made up the majority of Holocaust victims, who mostly lived and were murdered in Poland and eastern Europe, have, until recently, received little attention. Historians, too, have finally started working seriously on the so-called ‘death marches’ and on the massive operation to plunder and dispossess Jews (Blatman, 2011; Dean, 2008; Dean, Goschler & Ther, 2007).

The topic of plunder is especially important, thanks to its resonance with the explosion of interest in compensation payments for slave labour and restitution of looted assets and bank accounts that took up so much time and effort in the 1990s. Michael Marrus (2009) reasonably wonders whether the claim that it was not all about money is entirely true, but his and others’ recent work helps us to understand the profound sense of the need to win at least ‘some measure of justice’ by illustrating not just the scale of plunder across Europe – from whole national economies fleeced by the Nazi occupation, to institutions set up to coordinate the theft of objects (especially the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Grimsted, 2006)), to individual, poor, eastern European looters enriching themselves at the expense of their equally poor Jewish neighbours – but providing us with the anthropological insight that human identity is to a large extent bound up with the things we own, the loss of which contributes to a loss of identity. The rediscovery of this subject, now more or less shorn of the Marxist assumptions about Nazism’s relationship with big business which drove research in the 1960s, has given rise to a massive literature, from company studies, such as Daimler Benz, Deutsche Bank or Volkswagen, to studies of the banking, insurance and clearing systems and international trade with the Third Reich. What they show is the vast extent of everyday complicity in the regime and the willingness of big business to serve the Third Reich and to profit from the opportunities that it offered to them (for an introduction, see Kobrak and Schneider, 2004).

All of these different aspects of the Holocaust – and many more besides – mean that the historiography is varied and rich. All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, deal with victims as well as perpetrators, for historians are no longer content merely to rely on Nazi documents with their illusion of officialdom and hence ‘reliability’. Methodologically speaking, perhaps the most exciting and productive development is the impact of cultural history (Stone, 2009). Here one needs to make the distinction between histories of cultural institutions (theatre or music in the ghettos and camps, for example) or of ‘high art’ and a cultural history that seeks, anthropology style, to recover meaning and meaning-production by people in the past. This is something that can be done for the victims of the Holocaust, where the challenge is to explain how meaning-production broke down or was sustained in the face of events that exceeded previous experience, and for perpetrators. In the latter case, investigating the Nazis’ (or, more broadly, the German population’s) own processes of meaning-production might seem a risky and less than tasteful enterprise. The argument would be that it is necessary to enter into a Nazi mindset in which the dynamic that gave rise to genocide can be analysed in relation to the narratives that Germans employed to make sense of the world at the time. A number of German historians are currently engaged in such a task and the initial results are fruitful indeed (e.g. Confino, forthcoming; Gross, 2010; Kühne, 2010; Neumann, 2010), as long as one does not succumb to the temptation of granting the Nazis’ own concepts and ambitions – such as the creation of a Volksgemeinschaft, or racial community – more credibility than they deserve (see Kershaw, 2011). This historical sensibility has gradually awakened historians’ interest in the potential uses of testimony, primarily survivor testimony, but also, if we can use the word ‘testimony’ with all its resonances of listener compassion and arduous telling, for perpetrators and fellow travellers.

That said, it is striking that some key texts from the Holocaust period have been neglected, much to the detriment of historical understanding. Historians are, for example, starting to discover the recorded testimonies made by David Boder in Displaced Persons (DP) camps in the immediate post-war period and texts originally in Yiddish are finding their way into the consciousnesses of historians beyond the small circle of people who could always read them and were aware of their significance (Cesarani & Sundquist, 2012; Rosen, 2010). Among the most noteworthy of all such documents is the collection of writings now known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz, texts written by members of the Sonderkommando (the Special Squad) in Auschwitz-Birkenau, who then buried them in the ground next to the gas chambers and crematoria. This collection of documents, the first of which was dug up immediately after the camp’s liberation in 1945 and the last of which was discovered in 1980, constitutes a unique view into the very heart of darkness.² The manner of the texts’ production and discovery is itself remarkable, but they are made even more precious by virtue of being some of the very few documents to have been produced by Holocaust victims from within the death camps themselves. Furthermore, for the most part, these are highly literate and thoughtful texts and not, as one might assume, hastily-scribbled lists of factual information. And yet they have rarely featured in historical scholarship on the Holocaust.

Although the first of the Scrolls was discovered straight after the war, the authors of the earliest synthetic histories of the murder of the Jews had not yet registered them. Léon Poliakov’s in many ways remarkable book Harvest of Hate (1956, original French 1951) discusses the Sonderkommando’s tasks in Birkenau, as well as the uprising of October 1944, but does not mention the men’s hidden writings. The same is true of Gerald Reitlinger’s important study, The Final Solution (1953) and of Lord Russell of Liverpool’s popular work, The Scourge of the Swastika (1956). Despite its far greater detail than the above-mentioned books, Raul Hilberg’s masterpiece, The Destruction of the European Jews, also says nothing about the Scrolls. The same applies to Nora Levin’s 1968 book, The Holocaust. And despite her focus on the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, Lucy Dawidowicz mentioned neither the Sonderkommando men nor their writings in her standard work, The War against the Jews 1933–45 (1975), perhaps precisely because to do so might, at a time when the Sonderkommando were still regarded with some suspicion, have distracted from that focus.

These early historians are not to be blamed for not sharing our concerns. But what their works suggest is how quickly the documents acquired at the Nuremberg Trials became the standard reference point for understanding the genocide of the Jews, and how anything else –especially documents made by the victims – tended to be overlooked. And despite the changes in sensibility amongst historians, the Scrolls are still for the most part passed over. For example, recent research on the post-war institutes and historians who set about the process of fact-finding and writing the first studies of the murder of the Jews – in itself, a very important addition to our narrative of Holocaust historiography’s development – does not mention the Scrolls, even in the Polish context (e.g. Cesarani & Sundquist, 2012; Jockusch, 2008; Tych, 2008).

Later historical syntheses continued in this vein of not mentioning the Scrolls, even when the Sonderkommando men themselves were discussed. Leni Yahil (1990, p. 521) quotes the ‘anonymous author’ of one of the manuscripts (Leib Langfuss), but does not discuss the nature of the source, referring to it only to provide evidence of the deportation of the Jews of Shavli. Tellingly, the one notable exception to this trend is Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust (1986), a book written almost exclusively on the basis of victims’ testimonies in a deliberate attempt to counter the deadening effect of concentrating on Nazi documentation.

Gilbert gives a brief account of the texts’ discovery and, throughout the book, cites extensively from Loewenthal and, briefly, from Gradowski (pp. 820; pp. 515–516, 649–653, 744–746, 749–750; p. 730).³ More recently, some historians have mentioned the texts – Dwork and Van Pelt (2002, pp. 358–360) or Friedländer (2007, pp. 580–582), for example – though without much reflection on the nature of the sources themselves.⁴ Others, whose research is resolutely perpetrator centred, do not mention them at all. All in all, then, it is fair to say that these texts, whilst their existence is acknowledged, have not been incorporated into the major synthetic accounts of the Holocaust and are thus not part of most people’s consciousness when they think of that event’s major documents. This is a situation that is crying out to be remedied, as has also been the case for the four photographs taken by the Sonderkommando men (Didi-Huberman, 2003; Stone, 2001).

What are the reasons why these extraordinary documents have been neglected? That is a question that requires some understanding of the main trends of Holocaust historiography, especially the tendency amongst historians to prefer ‘official’ Nazi documents to those produced by the Jewish victims, as if the latter are somehow less objective than the former. Although many historians, especially Israeli ones, have long looked to diaries and other material produced by Jews in the Third Reich, in Nazi-occupied Europe, in the ghettos and camps, somehow, the Scrolls have been left out, perhaps because the Sonderkommando men themselves were regarded in the first post-war decades with some suspicion – almost as collaborators in some quarters (Levi, 1989, pp. 22–51) – and perhaps because their writings contradicted the widespread view that there could not be Jewish documents from the death camps, first, because of a lack of available writing materials, second, because the Jews were in no fit condition to think of writing and, third, because (as was widely believed) the victims could not comprehend what was happening to them and certainly were un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Representing Auschwitz – At the Margins of Testimony
• 1. The Harmony of Barbarism: Locating the Scrolls of Auschwitz in Holocaust Historiography
• 2. On the Problem of Empathy: Attending to Gaps in the Scrolls of Auschwitz
• 3. The Dead Are My Teachers’: The Scrolls of Auschwitz in Jerome Rothenberg’s Khurbn
• 4. Chain of Testimony: The Holocaust Researcher as Surrogate Witness
• 5. What Remains – Genocide and Things
• 6. Representing the Einsatzgruppen: The Outtakes of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah
• 7. Reconciling History in Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961)
• 8. Gender and Sexuality in Women Survivors’ Personal Narratives
• 9. Art as Transport–Station of Trauma? Haunting Objects in the Works of Bracha Ettinger, Sarah Kofman and Chantal Akerman
• 10. Coda: Reading Witness Discourse
• Index