chapter 7
Lessons of the Holocaust
Holocaust history admirably meets the standard set by the best modern-day histories of other subjects. Coming from an international community of academics, writers, and students of particular themes, works in this field display, at their best, balance and objectivity, the avoidance of unsubstantiated generalizations, and up-to-date, reliable research. Their authors ask imaginative questions, and provide answers that are firmly grounded in evidence. Typically, the best histories on this subject also avoid overreach – among other things, writing prescriptions for future behaviour meant to apply without qualification in all kinds of circumstances and situations. These prescriptions are what I have referred to in this book as “lessons” – and in the case of Holocaust history, “lessons of the Holocaust.”
I began this book with a chapter on how historians nowadays are generally reluctant to adduce lessons about subjects they write about, whether they involve themes as varied as classical antiquity, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, slavery, the First World War, or other events of equal importance. Holocaust history fits the pattern of such events. Most who write about the subject avoid the popular hunger for lessons of the Holocaust, even while our culture is replete with claims that these can be formulated. Coming from many different quarters, these lessons often contradict each other or distort history and warp our understanding. They are also crafted to serve a wide variety of present-day causes, and generally tell us more about the lesson definers than about events themselves. Moreover, there is something wrong when these lessons, even when unexceptionable propositions about human behaviour, unnecessarily invoke the Holocaust for their validation. And yet for all this I do believe that we learn a great deal from the history of the Holocaust. In this final chapter I explain how, even as historians of this subject have good reasons to eschew the pursuit of lessons as conventionally understood, their work not only deepens understanding of a great watershed in the history of our times but also enlarges our knowledge of the human condition.
Why do people study history? Most historians believe that their readers derive something more than entertainment from reading about the past – even as they do not all speak with one voice on what that something is, and even though they may not be fully clear in their own minds on that matter. Generally speaking, however, they seem to agree that a serious acquaintance with the past is intellectually enriching and facilitates our understanding of the world around us. Through the study of history, people acquire a deeper and more mature sense than they would otherwise of human capacities, how contexts interact with thought and action and institutions, how societies function and evolve, and how men and women engage with each other in public life. In other words, the study of history expands intellectual horizons, just as do other disciplines through their particular approaches to the human or natural worlds. In his memoirs, the veteran historian George Mosse once used the metaphor of travel when explaining his work, describing his aspirations to be “an intellectual not tied down to [his] starting point, solely guided by his analytical mind – something of an eternal traveler, analyzing, observing, suspended above events.” History is like travel, only in time, even when not necessarily space; it takes us out of our present environment and to another, less familiar to us. It obliges us to became acquainted with a world that is not our own, and to do so systematically, guided by questions, not just random preconceptions or impressions. Of course, we eventually return from the voyage, but if we applied ourselves well to our trip we are the wiser for having left home; indeed, many would say, we are never quite the same as before we left.
How do we define those things that we pick up in our travels in time – and particularly travel to such horrifying places as the murder of European Jewry? I want to conclude this book with some thoughts about the kinds of things one does learn from Holocaust history. And I will do so, as I have with the preceding chapters, with reference to the area that I know best, namely my own involvement in this work as I have known it over the years.
Let us acknowledge that people do not approach Holocaust history with the equanimity of, say, early modern agriculture. People tell me that what I do is important, even urgent – although I usually feel embarrassed to hear them say that. Holocaust history remains alive in many people’s memories and those of their families, even though there are fewer and fewer with direct experiences of its events. The human scars are evident if one looks closely – missing generations, psychological impacts transmitted to postwar collectivities, new generations, and new individuals. There are mental landscapes where the desolation is still quite evident, extending even to subsequent generations. History, moreover, provides no unified, consolatory view. As befits a vibrant field, there are lots of opinions about it, and an abundance of authorities. Survivors have special preoccupations, although these are less easily collapsed into a single prescription than is customarily assumed. Civic leaders may speak with one voice on commemorative and other occasions, but there are plenty of dissenters, and not all of them agree with each other. Some use Holocaust history for fundraising or political purposes; others are revolted by the prospect. Some Jewish leaders promote lessons of the Holocaust as a way of energizing Jewish identity, but others warn that it is unhealthy to define oneself as a perpetual victim, particularly when this defies current reality. Non-Jews are all over the map as well. Some have had enough. Some want to dig deeper. Other ethnic or national communities have special preoccupations and are concerned with how lessons of the Holocaust might reflect upon their own group. There are also different clusters of lessons on the Left and on the Right. Media offerings vary considerably, from the thoughtful and carefully articulated to the meretricious and clumsily worded.
I have wrestled with these issues for a long time. I remember, in the mid-1960s, debating with fellow graduate students, in Berkeley, about the larger context, namely the historian’s craft. What was the historian’s vocation? Opinions varied, but in my circle, in that heady Vietnam and civil rights era, most of us saw our task as social and political change. Politics lurked just beneath the surface of everything, we believed. (The title of my doctoral thesis and first book was The Politics of Assimilation.) We were to hold a mirror to society to show the seamy underside, and then to help set things right. There was plenty of presumption on our part. Our histories were sharply critical, and seldom celebratory. Lessons made sense in that environment, and young though we were, we did not shrink from pronouncing them.
I remember to this day the response to that view, which I now believe to have been the wiser course, and which was articulated by one of my instructors at the University of Toronto, universally respected as a master at his craft – even if not admired by us for his politics at the time. This was A.P. Thornton, as he was professionally known, a great student of the British Empire. A red-faced Scotsman who had been educated at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Oxford, “Archie,” as I later knew him, was a veteran of the D-Day landings in France and had taught at Aberdeen and University College of the West Indies before coming to Toronto in the 1960s. To his Canadian students, he was the very embodiment of Empire. Later he was chairman of the department in Toronto, and I could imagine Archie answering the telephone, as did his counterpart in the film version of Kingsley Amis’s comic academic novel, Lucky Jim, intoning, “History speaking.” “The historian’s job,” Thornton insisted from his lectern – and I can remember his Scottish accent still, after more than sixty years – “is to get it right!” “Getting it right” was a sober and perhaps uninspiring injunction to youthful idealists because it suggested the diversion (as we saw it) of extraordinary energy into detail and tests of accuracy. But it also meant keeping an eye on the big picture. It meant the greatest care in research, wide-ranging reading, seeing documents in their original form, learning foreign languages, and studying the idioms of particular contexts. More often than not, it meant visits to dreary, ill-appointed archives (which, in truth, we loved), sifting paper for hours on end. Then as now, research required plenty of Sitzfleisch. This was a program sure to bring high-flying pronouncements down to earth, or discourage some from even getting off the ground. But it was the best advice we ever had.
“Getting it right” is what professional historians try to do and have a special obligation to do, in my view. According to convention, others may stray from this priority according to the dictates of occasion, conscience, public commitments, and fundamental beliefs. With Holocaust history, Jews and non-Jews, teachers and politicians, clergymen and artists, may all feel that they have professional reasons to treat the subject differently. I do not disparage such different approaches – far from it; at various moments, in other roles I perform, let us say on commemorative occasions, I may well engage the wartime murder of European Jews otherwise than as a professional historian. Some, however, have to make sure that the Holocaust upon which people act and ruminate is as faithful as one can get to the historical truth of the events themselves, or at least as faithful as we can possibly make it. Some have to be counted on for narrative accuracy, for explanatory generalizations that fit but do not exceed the evidence, and for a balanced view. Those are the historian’s tasks, making him or her a custodian, in a sense, of the public memory of the event itself.
Just putting it this way, I know, makes some people uneasy, and quite often when I elaborate, they feel even worse. No one takes kindly to assertions of external authority in matters of the heart, and when memory has become sacralized, as has sometimes been the case with the murder of European Jewry, it can clash sharply with history as historians understand it. That is why academic lectures on Holocaust themes sometimes finish in stormy question and answer periods, with lecturers rushing for the exit at the end of the evening. “Let me tell you, it was not quite the way you have told us,” questioners might say. Or, “Professor, that was a very nice lecture, but you forgot something.” What then follows is another version of the subject at hand. “Getting it right” sometimes involves questioning the recollections of Holocaust survivors (although almost invariably there are other survivors who remember things differently), disputing received wisdom (although that wisdom has been received differently), pitting book learning against or at least alongside cherished or traumatic memories (although all of these may be contested by others in the audience). To younger colleagues contemplating this challenge, I can only say, bon courage!
There are significant compensations, however. I contend that the history of the Holocaust poses historical problems at least as challenging as, and often more challenging than, any other field I can imagine. “Getting it right” is extremely demanding; to do so investigators have available to them a vast documentation about perpetrators, victims, and bystanders – an availability that has significantly increased with the opening of archives in the former Soviet Union and Soviet-dominated countries. Those who do this work proceed by asking questions, and in the case of the Holocaust these are often of great moment. Some of these questions may fall outside the historian’s province, for the answers may require a deeper understanding than we are capable of about humanity itself and its capacities for good and evil. But there are also myriad, garden-variety questions, asked and answered all the time by Holocaust historians, but in their case involving matters of sometimes extraordinary moral import: How were decisions about atrocities reached? How were they carried out? Who decided? Who acted? Who led? Who followed? Who helped? Who watched? Who knew? When? How? How did one place differ from another? Such questions, and many others, do not differ appreciably from those asked in other areas of inquiry – except that in the case of the Holocaust both the evidence and the answers involve issues of the gravest atrocities, murder, and other horrors, on a practically unimaginable scale.
“Getting it right” involves posing such questions and addressing them with the best tools the historical culture of our society provides. It entails putting ourselves in the shoes of others, often through the most vigorous efforts of the imagination, disciplined by the deepest and widest inquiry into the most varied of human circumstances. It also requires great efforts at objectivity, perhaps the most important methodological challenge for the student of the Holocaust. Among the least appreciated and often contested attributes of the researcher these days, objectivity is nevertheless what we insist upon in many other aspects of life. There are many appropriate ways to respond to murder, but if we are speaking about an investigating officer, a coroner, or a judge, for example, we feel that their task requires them to keep an open mind about the evidence they assess and a capacity to weigh it fairly and dispassionately. When it comes to serious illness of someone close to us, we can respond appropriately, say, as friend, parent, or spouse, but we have quite different expectations when it comes to the surgeon conducting an operation. Indeed, with surgery, as with the practice of law or many other professional activities, we usually feel that too intimate a relationship might interfere with sound discharge of professional responsibilities. Simply put, we feel that practitioners such as these carry out their responsibilities best when they act as professionals.
No one expects, or desires, Holocaust specialists to perform like machines. But there is a world of difference between an inquiry as a sacred duty, keeping faith with those who were murdered – intimately involved with mourning, commemoration, denunciation, or a warning for future generations – and the quite different task of analysis, trying to deepen understanding in terms that are recognized by the general culture of our day. This last is the objective I am talking about here, an effort to integrate the history of the Holocaust into the general stream of historical consciousness, to apply to it the modes of analysis and the scholarly discourse used for other great issues of the day.
More than anything else, “getting it right” involves digesting this literature and asserting the place of the Holocaust in the wider history of our time. Disagreeing with Alvin Rosenfeld in his recent book, The End of the Holocaust, I do not accept that the Holocaust is shrinking from responsible historical memory and that those of us concerned with its place in history should lament its becoming “a volatile area of contending images, interpretations, historical claims and counter claims.” I believe that Rosenfeld is right about the contestation – a matter about which we hear a great deal on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Academic Committee, which he chaired until recently. But I also believe that such disputation is evidence of the vigour of historical and other writing on the subject and its broad acceptance – one price of which is a degree of trivialization and vulgarization that seems to accompany any dominant public understanding, especially one that involves unprecedented human wrongdoing. Quite unlike the time of my youth, no one contemplating what has happened to mankind in the twentieth century can now avoid the Nazis’ assault on European Jewry. Historians of the Third Reich now must all come to terms with it. Those who study the Second World War must do the same. Researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds similarly cannot avoid the issue. Moralists and political theorists, sociologists and psychologists, religious thinkers and humanitarians must, at one point or another, consider the Holocaust. As Tony Judt once put it, “by the end of the twentieth century the centrality of the Holocaust in Western European identity and memory seemed secure.” I would say the same for much of the rest of the industrialized world as well.
Most important, the effort to eliminate an entire people, set as a major objective by a highly developed industrial society and carried out on a European scale, is now widely seen to be unprecedented, not only for a European civilization but for humanity itself. The Holocaust is, as someone once put it, “the moral signifier of our age.” In the past, peoples have constantly been cruel to one another, have tormented others in various ways, and have fantasized horribly about what might happen to their enemies. But there were always limits – imposed by politics, technology, humane sensibilities, religious scruples, geography, or military capacity. During the Second World War mankind crossed a terrible threshold. Nazi Germany operated without historic limits, until crushed by military force.
As a result, we have a different sense of human capacities than we did before. Some, particularly Jews who suffered at the hands of the Nazis but who miraculously survived, draw the bleakest conclusions of all. “Every day anew I lose my trust in the world,” wrote Jean Améry, not long before his suicide. Others think that a warning is all one can deduce. Primo Levi’s message was: “It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.” Levi too ended his life, in all likelihood, but while he lived he argued that simply reflecting on the Holocaust might help prevent another catastrophe. Whatever one’s view, the Holocaust has become a major reference point for our time, constantly kept in view for one’s judgment about the state of the world – as once was the case, say, for the French Revolution or the First World War.
In addition to studying perpetrators, “getting it right” involves looking at victims, even while refusing to see them as endowed, by their victimization, with a special aura of heroism, righteousness, or other admirable qualities. When the Israeli research and commemorative institute Yad Vashem was founded in 1953, it was denoted in English as the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority. At the centre of attention, in the words of the law establishing the institution, was a distinctly Israeli appreciation of the victims’ experiences – “the sublime, persistent struggle of the masses of the House of Israel, on the threshold of destruction, for their human dignity and Jewish culture.” The accent was on combativeness, rebellion, and unwillingness to submit. The principal outcome was national regeneration through resistance and armed struggle. No sooner had Yad Vashem been established, however, than a different Israeli voice was heard. In 1954 the Hebrew poet Natan Alterman, who has been called “the uncrowned poet laureate” of his Israeli generation and who lived in Palestine during the war, wrote a famous poem celebrating Jewish opponents of the insurgents – those who claimed “resistance will destroy us all.” A dissident voice at the time, Alterman took care to appreciate as the real heroes those Jews who were caught in the middle – heads of the Jewish Councils or Judenräte, confused and harassed community leaders, those responsible elders who “negotiated and complied,” rather than the relatively small number of young people who managed to take up arms. Following Alterman’s intervention, an intense debate began, which has renewed itself with new discoveries and new historical writing, and it has continued ever since – most recently in a book on ghetto leaders by my Israeli colleague Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust. In this way, Holocaust history regenerates. The result, I believe, has been a greater historical understanding, enriched by research and the confrontation of different points of view.
Finally, “getting it right” involves finding the right language, expressing oneself in the right idiom – speaking with a voice, in short, appropriate both for the most terrible events and also for the most recent generation to take up this field. Holocaust history is like all history in this respect; it must constantly be rewritten if it is not to vanish from public perceptions or lose the significance we want ascribed to it. Here again, Holocaust history poses special challenges. In his Reflections of Nazism, published over thirty years ago, Saul Friedländer dwelt upon the difficulties historians and others have in finding the right words to discuss the massacre of European Jewry. Friedländer worried about what he felt was an unhealthy fascination with Nazism, evident particularly in films and literature. This is part of the problem of how we communicate things that are deeply disturbing, but also strange to us and difficult to grasp emotionally – and it is of course a problem that is with us still. Historians neutralize horror, Friedländer seems to say; and he was concerned with expression that “normalizes, smoothes and neutralizes our vision of the past.” Does scholarly discourse anaesthetize in this way? Friedländer knew that there is no easy answer. “There should be no misunderstanding about what I am trying to say: The historian cannot work in any other way, and historical studies have to be pursued along the accepted lines. The events described are what is unusual, not the historians’ work. We have reached the limit of our means of expression.”
There is no alternative, I conclude, but to keep at it. Students of the Holocaust are called upon to provide various kinds of explanation, and their preoccupation is not only the intractable material they work with, but also a public that is constantly coming forward with new layers of experience, new interests, and new unfamiliarity. Diaries and memoirs of survivors reflect a widely shared obsession of those who lived and died in the Holocaust: “How will what happened to us be understood?” “Could a postwar world possibly grasp what we went through?” Imagine how those victims might understand the generation that now looks back on their agonies. The gap grows wider, and with it the challenge to historians and everyone else.
For all of those concerned to see knowledge about the Holocaust extended so that such things might be prevented in the future, I think we have something that is more durable than lessons, which in any event were bound to evolve and change with the passage of time. The Holocaust has become history, has entered into the historical canon, with all of its strengths and weaknesses. This means disputation and disagreement, but also research, new questions, and new ways of looking at old problems. It means writers and researchers around the world, and with many different backgrounds, applying themselves to the task of understanding, which is predicated upon the requirement to “get it right.” This is the way, in our culture, that historical understanding is preserved and advanced. It seems plain now that, after the shock of the postwar era, the Holocaust has become history. That is certainly the best guarantee we have that it will be remembered. As to the future, the preserve of lessons, no one knows whether a deeper understanding such as I am promoting here can enable societies to avoid the catastrophes of the past. All I can suggest is that we are better equipped to do so than if we abandoned such an effort. Studying the Holocaust deepens appreciation of human reality, and that, in a general sense, makes us more mature, wiser, more “experienced” observers of the human scene.