Survivor testimonies play the most crucial role in forming our understanding of what life was like during the Holocaust. As firsthand narratives written by people who lived through the barbarities of the Nazi system, testimonial accounts are among our primary links to the SS state. As such, it can be argued that all accounts, regardless of their artistic quality or historical accuracy, must be considered and respected. There is merit in every survivor account, even those which at first glance would seem to be of little use to the historian.
The testimonies employed in this volume are neither new nor unpublished. They are the reminiscences of European men and women who lived at a particular time in European history, and who were victims, perpetrators, or witnesses to the Nazi genocide of the Jews. They came from all walks of life and from all corners of Europe. Their accounts were produced contemporaneously, or from the perspective of a few months or after the reflection of many years. They offer a representative sample of the Holocaust experience, and what the survivors wish to be understood about that experience.
There are a number of issues relating to the distinctive quality of survivor testimony that need to be considered, however. For a start, we must ask whether (and to what degree) we can utilize survivor accounts as accurate pieces of history. For many, this is far from a clear-cut issue; some scholars actually situate their discussions in the category of literature rather than memoir or autobiography, oblivious to the fact that literature is precisely what testimonial accounts are not.
We therefore need to examine how testimonies may be assessed as a reliable source. After all, most accounts were written after the fact, when the survivors were safely away from the Nazis and their experience was but a nightmarish memory. Moreover, such accounts were for the most part not recounted by accomplished writers. Further, more often than not they were written for publication, suggesting that a sifting process had taken place in an author’s mind or by an editor’s hand, in which some elements of memory had to be sacrificed for the sake of publication while others were retained—and possibly even enhanced for the same reason.
Such considerations alert us to a type of memoir that needs to be read differently from other forms of historical documentation. Published survivor accounts are quite clearly “subjectively true,”1 in that they chronicle events either directly witnessed by their authors or told to them by others at the time of their ordeal. It is this truth, and these events, that survivors attempt to impart to their readers. What is the historian, coming on the scene much later, to do with such material?
In his celebrated study published in 1976, Terrence Des Pres addressed this very issue:
To come from fiction to documents is to move from an ideal lucidity to the dense anguish of men and women telling as straightforwardly as they know how the story of what they saw and endured…. Their testimony is given in memory, told in pain and often clumsily, with little thought for style or rhetorical device. The experience they describe, furthermore, resists the tendency to fictionalize which informs most remembering.2
For Des Pres, there is thus a certain dimension of truth in survivor testimony that is absent elsewhere. Once the dry statistical data of a prisoner’s Holocaust experiences are known—the “why” and “where” elements, which generally differed from one person to another—the contours of their experience can appear remarkably uniform:
the world survivors speak of has been so rigidly shaped by necessity, and so completely shared … that from one report to the next the degree of consistency is unusually high. The facts lie embedded in a fixed configuration; fixed, we may come to believe, by the nature of existence when life is circumscribed by death.3
Therefore, survivors aim to tell their stories in as clear a manner as possible, the better to be able to convey to their audience the essence of what they went through.
In a court of law, such evidence serves a different purpose from that of the historian. To those who would argue that the only standard of proof to be adopted by a scholar should be that found in a courtroom, it must be pointed out that the evidence a judge is looking for is altogether different from that of the historian. In a courtroom, the prosecution, defense, judge, and jury all look for specific evidence of a precise type—the kind of evidence that will either acquit or convict a person against whom a certain charge has been brought. The questions asked, therefore, are of a very special nature; generally speaking, they do not look for the textures, smells, sights, and contours of a person’s experience, nor do they explore the wider contextual backdrop against which things occurred.
Holocaust historians not only use all these things in an effort to reach an understanding of the past; they also permit the survivor to discuss “what made a special impression … at the time.”4 Such testimony is based on “an entirely different attitude to events”5 than that found in a courtroom, and even if it would not always pass for truth as a court would require it, it is nonetheless often more valuable for the historian than the kind of response that questions from a judge or attorney might elicit.
A point of clarification is in order, however, lest it be thought that all survivor testimony should be accepted at face value and without putting it through any tests. As Kurt Y. Ball-Kaduri wrote in an important essay over half a century ago, “it is impossible to set down theoretical rules for such a selective process” as assessing the value of survivor testimony.6 Historians can accept or reject a survivor’s account on the basis of known context and a broader understanding of an incident being recounted, but they cannot dismiss the survivor’s impressions of the incident once it is firmly established that the survivor saw it take place. As Ball-Kaduri wrote:
testimony given by five to ten witnesses in regard to the same incident, is valid evidence. But it is not true to say that only one testimony, not supported by other evidence is valueless. Especially in the field of active Jewish life [during the Holocaust] there are cases where only one witness has survived, and nevertheless, or even because of this fact, his evidence is of value.7
It is quite true that every account should be verified where possible, but often this is simply not possible. After all, the Holocaust saw an immense amount of history taking place. As the Israeli historian Jacob Robinson observed in 1966,
The usual course of any particular community is even and uneventful; ordinarily, little of historical significance takes place, except in those rare times when a peak of military, political, intellectual, and moral activity is reached. Thus, on a continental scale, each year brings a few people, a few ideas, a few groups, to the fore. But the era of Nazi oppression was quite different. Then, in the span of only twelve years, every single Jewish community in Europe perforce was faced with the greatest crisis possible to a group—the crisis of existence. Every single Jewish community perforce reached its peak of activity, called upon its deepest spiritual resources, brought forth its ultimate answers to the questions of life and death, of relations between man and God.8
The challenge for the Holocaust scholar is thus “to rescue from oblivion a history as eventful and rich as that of a thousand years.”9
Given the event-laden historical richness Robinson described, it might seem as though such rescue would be a relatively easy (if time-consuming) process, but this is not the case. Yes, there was an enormous amount of activity taking place in many areas, but what may we know of such things where no one survived to tell the tale? How does one establish what happened in a community where a population that once numbered several thousand has been totally obliterated? From whom does one obtain eyewitness testimony, if all the eyewitnesses have been killed? How does one examine written records, where none were kept? Are there any advantages in the historian visiting a site, if—as often happened—it had been destroyed by the Nazis? Many hundreds of small villages throughout Eastern Europe were literally expunged from the face of the earth. What happened there? How did the Holocaust manifest itself in these communities? We might never know, but the use of testimony, however fragmentary, will start the process of rescuing the history from the oblivion of which Robinson has warned us.
Further, it is through testimonies that we can appreciate the fears, miseries, and other features of life characterizing the Holocaust. Again, we are drawn to the conclusion that even one survivor account places us in a better position to try to understand what people went through, and we therefore find ourselves relying on whatever we can find to begin the long process of comprehending what happened.
It is thus necessary to consider every piece of survivor testimony individually, and to assess each on its merits. What historians make of these accounts must be up to them, and any scholar contemplating the study of the Holocaust is counseled to treat the subject with a combination of both rigor and respect. If all we have to go on as we attempt to reach an understanding of the Holocaust experience are the written accounts of survivors—and very soon this will be all we have left—then we must treat these accounts seriously.
Above all, we must be aware of just what it is the survivors are trying to convey. Generally speaking, they seek to convey a sense of what happened to them, as they remember it. Do they wish to be seen in a particular light? Perhaps. Is their intention to tell the truth as they understand it? Certainly. Do they hope to compose a particular set of images concerning their persecutors, or humanity in general? In many cases, yes. Overall, however, the reflections and reminiscences of Holocaust survivors are intimate accounts of individual experiences that the survivors wish to share with others.
Implanted within this need to tell the story as they know it is a particular consciousness of what surviving is all about. Of course, the reasons for survival varied from one person to another, but for those who set down their accounts for posterity surviving was frequently accompanied by an urge to bear witness to the evils of the Holocaust. It was, in this respect, its own revenge. As Terrence Des Pres has shown, survivor testimony is unusual as a genre not only “for the experience it describes, but also for the desire it reveals to remember and record.”10 The need to bear witness was often part and parcel of the reason for survival itself:
The testimony of survivors is rooted in a strong need to make the truth known, and the fact that this literature exists, that survivors produced these documents—is evidence of a profoundly human process. Survival is a specific kind of experience, and “to survive as a witness” is one of its forms.11
It permits the survivor to allow the dead their voice;12 it serves as a call to humanity, a signal to readers of the power of radical evil, a warning for the generations of the future.
How representative are survivor accounts? When assessing a given situation, can the memoir of any single survivor be held up as exemplary of life and conditions in, say, Auschwitz, and as therefore representative of all other survivor accounts? Do their accounts tell the full—or only—story?
As the testimonies in this volume show, there is no “right” or “wrong” way for survivors to remember their experience. Given that every survivor’s experience was unique and intimate to themselves, we must look at the totality of their experience alongside those of as many of their fellows as we can find, and ask broad questions that might be capable of being narrowed down later. Certain survivors might provide aspects of the picture that are neater, sharper, or more elegantly defined, but none can tell the whole story alone.
We could discuss in depth the literary dimensions of survivor testimony—nuances of language, the artistic merits of characterization, the expression of feelings, or the development of storylines—but these would reduce the survivors’ accounts to nothing other than pieces of literature. If it is the case that most survivors set down their experiences in order to convey something about their past lives to their readers, then the literary quality of their writing is not necessarily as important to them as it would be to a novelist or poet. The most important thing is that the message be conveyed.
Discussing Nazi concentration camps, for example, Cynthia Haft has identified what the differences between art and narrative represent when applied to survivor testimonies. She is careful to emphasize that she is discussing literature only; while many survivors have related their personal accounts as autobiography, those who continue their writing well beyond this often adapt forms of expression differing in style from the testimonial genre:
Because of a desire to render their works as faithful to detail as possible, many authors lost the perspective of their role as writers. The role of the writer is to recreate through language the passions that he wishes to convey to his reader…. To tell us how high the [concentration camp barrack] blocks were, how many miles were walked in the fields, how much water there was to drink is not pertinent to literature. And these facts taken out of context, recited without recreating life in camp, will not evoke in a reader’s mind what a camp was. The artist’s role is not to tell the number of miles that a prisoner walked each morning in order to reach the swamp where he worked. It is rather to impress upon the reader’s mind how the prisoner’s legs felt, to impress upon the reader that distance is relative and that the longest walk he can take is along a path where at every step his foot digs into a fresh cadaver. These feelings are conveyed not by a strict attention to details in ounces and miles…. Details will not communicate the reality of the experience. The passions, the conditions will be transmitted to the reader by the effective and lyric author who never mentions the miles. The reader cannot reconstruct in his mind what Auschwitz was, but, by realizing the totality of the phenomenon, he recreates the subjective truth of the experience.13
Haft is fundamentally right, though perhaps a little harsh on those survivors whose accounts are not up to the literary standards she would prefer. If some survivors consciously or unconsciously sacrifice detail for artistic merit, it is because this is the best way for them to put their ordeal into words. The same is true for accounts that sacrifice literary merit for detail. Many survivors identify a powerful duty to get their story down as accurately as possible. As Shoshana Felman has put it, “to bear witness is to take responsibility for the truth.” The process of testifying
is thus not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to commit narrative, to others: to take responsibility—in speech—for history or for the truth of an occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes beyond the personal, in having general (nonpersonal) validity and consequences.14
Taking responsibility for history is thus not the preserve of either factual details or emotional reconstruction, but both together. A piece of testimony can no more be dismissed because of its paucity of detail than it can for a lack of sensitivity, or, as psychiatrist Dori Laub has noted in relation to his interviewing of a female survivor, “my attempt as interviewer and as listener was precisely to respect—not to upset, not to trespass—the subtle balance between what the woman knew and what she did not, or could not, know.”15
For most survivors, the experiences they depict have become embedded in their souls,16 and the descriptions they provide almost always recount an atmosphere that is true if not necessarily believable. Not all accounts were written by educated people; many lack self-control and grammatical discipline, but they are no less true for that. Some accounts provide dates, for example, which we know are incorrect, and in other cases even a full chronological sequence of events is dubious. But we need to bear in mind that the Holocaust was a time that was not always dictated by a calendar in the sense that we understand it. What is true of dates, moreover, is equally true of numbers, of Nazi institutions and ranks, and even of activities undertaken by Jews in different parts of the same country. It must be borne in mind that trying to make sense of the whole from ground level was invariably impossible. And all this, of course, was compounded by language differences. Usually, all a survivor could “know” was the reality of which he or she formed a part. The rest inevitably had to be filled in later.17
Thus, survivor accounts do not ask us to try to “imagine” the Holocaust; for the most part, that is not what they are attempting to achieve. Lawrence L. Langer, the preeminent scholar of Holocaust literature, addressed the issue in an early essay:
The challenge of imagining the Holocaust—not the anti-Semitic tactics which led up to it, but its apocalyptic end in the gas chambers and crematoria of the death camps—is a permanent one, and will indeed grow more difficult for future generations who will lack the advantage of hearing living voices confirm the details of the ordeal they survived. The only evidence we will have available then is the kind we depend on increasingly today: verbal and visual accounts which inspire the imagination to conjure up an unimaginable world.18
Langer’s major interest here is not to consider testimonial accounts as historical documents, but as triggers for the imagination:
the ultimate focus, the one requiring our constant collaboration, must be unambiguous—such art is deceptive and unfaithful if it does not bring us closer to the worst, and beyond the worst—to the unthinkable. Not in tribute to the dead, not to redeem them—but in agonizing confirmation of the catastrophe that consumed them.19
Most importantly, this confirmation must be recognized and understood by the generations of the future, which will have only published survivor testimonies from which to learn what happened.
For many survivors—possibly most—it is sufficient simply to tell their story, to record, to bear witness, to show that the world through which they lived was in fact all too real. The challenge is not one of “imagining the Holocaust.” Rather, it is of conveying to the world an understanding of what the survivor went through, of explaining the essence of the evil that one group of people inflicted upon another group of people, as seen from the perspective of one who was there as a participant-observer-victim. If there is, in short, nothing mysterious about the Nazis or the Holocaust they perpetrated, neither is there anything mysterious about the testimonies the survivors have written. They do not attempt to make magic, nor do they attempt to imagine the unimaginable. They simply try to tell the story from their own individual perspectives.
How, therefore, may we best employ survivor testimonies when trying to understand the experience of those who lived through those awful times? Certain themes keep reemerging, such as maintenance of morale, separation from loved ones, exposure to death, fleeing and hiding, the nature of relationships, and the struggle to maintain life in the midst of degradation and brutality. In looking at survivor accounts, we can be less concerned with how the survivors remember their experience than with what they actually say; with what they remember, rather than why they remember it.20
Ultimately, a survivor’s testimony should be regarded as much as an historical document as a contemporary government memorandum, a diary entry, a letter, or a newspaper account. As with all documents, its applicability to a particular type of historical writing should be weighed prior to its use, and employed or rejected on that basis rather than according to some more subjective standard. All survivor testimony has its place. It is just a matter of finding where and how to use it.
Finally, a story. It isn’t a survivor’s story, though tragically, it should be. It concerns one of the greatest of Jewish historians, the Russian-Polish-Jewish scholar Simon (Shimon) Dubnow. Given the opportunity to escape the fearsome potential that a Nazi invasion might bring, Dubnow, aged 81, decided instead to remain where he was, in Riga, determined not to flee and hand the Nazis the victory they sought. A number of witnesses to his death were later to provide his biographer, Koppel S. Pinson, with the following record of his last moments:
When the Nazis entered Riga they evicted Dubnow from his home and seized his entire library. They summoned him for questioning at Gestapo headquarters and then placed him in a home for the aged. After a short period of ghetto organization the Nazis liquidated the ghetto at the end of October 1941 and a month later they carried out their first “action” against the Riga Jews. Dubnow was seriously ill, but friends managed to conceal him for a while. On the night of December 7–8 the Nazis carried out their second “action.” All the old and sick as well as the women in advanced pregnancy were herded together in buses. Dubnow was also taken outside to be squeezed into one of these overloaded buses. He was in a high fever at the time and was hardly able to move his feebled legs. A Latvian militiaman then advanced and fired a bullet in Dubnow’s back and the sainted martyr fell dead on the spot. The next day several friends buried him in the old cemetery in the Riga ghetto. A story went round that the last words that Dubnow muttered as he was being led out to the bus were: “Brothers, don’t forget! Recount what you hear and see! Brothers, make a record of it all!”21
We cannot be certain whether or not these final words were apocryphal, but there can be little doubt that they were the comments of one with an eye to posterity and the role of witnessing. It is the kind of story with which most survivor-authors could readily identify, and which they would certainly understand. Regardless of the literary or narrative quality of their accounts, all are driven by Dubnow’s exhortation to remember and recount. Those who survived—who confronted their most agonizing memories in order to write down their experiences, and in doing so provided us with a record and left us a legacy founded on human ideals and the value of life—have done their job. As stated earlier, what history will make of such material now rests with the historians.
Notes
1.Kurt Y. Ball-Kaduri, “Evidence of Witnesses, Its Value and Limitations.” Yad Vashem Studies, 3, 1959, p. 79.
2.Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 29.
3.Ibid.
4.Ball-Kaduri, “Evidence of Witnesses,” p. 82 (emphasis in text).
5.Ibid., pp. 82–83.
6.Ibid., p. 89.
7.Ibid.
8.Jacob Robinson, “Research on the Jewish Catastrophe.” Jewish Journal of Sociology, 8, 2 (December 1966), p. 192.
9.Ibid.
10.Des Pres, The Survivor, p. 30.
11.Ibid.
12.Ibid., p. 36.
13.Cynthia Haft, The Theme of Nazi Concentration Camps in French Literature. The Hague: Mouton, 1973, pp. 14–15.
14.Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 204 (emphasis in text).
15.Ibid., p. 61 (emphasis in text).
16.Ball-Kaduri, “Evidence of Witnesses,” p. 82.
17.For an interesting perspective on how to “hear” the stories of Holocaust survivors, see Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History. Westport: Praeger, 1998.
18.Lawrence L. Langer, “The Writer and the Holocaust Experience.” In Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton (Eds.), The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide. Millwood NY: Kraus International, 1980, pp. 312–313.
19.Ibid., p. 322.
20.A useful complement to this approach can be found in David Patterson’s outstanding Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998.
21.Koppel S. Pinson, “Simon Dubnow: Historian and Political Philosopher.” In Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism. New York: Atheneum, 1970, p. 39.