Raz - Month # 2

Browning’s Remembering Survival and Bauer’s The Death of the Shtetl, point to both the limits and possibilities of using Holocaust survivors’ accounts in Holocaust Studies. However, while Bauer’s book sheds light on one-fifth of the Jewish victims of Nazi Germany and offers important insights engaging the current scholarship on the Holocaust and German rule in the kresy during World War II, interethnic relations in eastern Europe in the first half of the 20^th century, and comparative genocide research, Browning narrates a history that adds very little to received wisdom.

My main problem with Browning’s book: in many ways, it looks back at quite dated Israeli historiography rather than forward toward current trends in Holocaust Studies. This is a clear example that writing about a place or topic previously untouched could not serve as a good justification for research.

What could we, nevertheless, gain from this book? In a few interesting (and quite horrible) parts, Browning has succeeded in illuminating the actions and postwar rationalizations of Jews coerced by Germans to kill Poles (pp. 48-50); the understudied topic of rape during World War II, especially regarding German perpetrators and Jewish victims (pp. 9, 11, and in chapter 20); the efforts of Jews at the time to suppress and deny first-hand knowledge about the ongoing “final solution” – an issue still debated by survivors and scholars alike (pp. 68-71); and the centrality of ideology in Nazi genocidal policies, as manifested in the killings of Starachowice Jewish prisoners in March and then again in November of 1943 by orders from Berlin (pp. 129, 147). Browning has also demonstrated the importance and usability of survivors’ accounts recorded many decades after World War II (p. 233), but this book adds nothing new in terms of methodology to his earlier discussion in Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, and, in some cases, such as the following example, he has adopted strange explanations in favor of incidents recounted by survivors: “The tragic irony of either version – that the mother of the major killer of Starachowice Jews either perished as a “Gypsy” in Birkenau or was incarcerated there for hiding a Jewish son-in-law – gives the story a certain plausibility.” (p. 245) How tragic irony connects to plausibility and what exactly “certain” means remain in the dark.

Bauer’s book shows convincingly that generalizations about the Holocaust in eastern Europe are quite problematic. Among the many examples, Bauer has demonstrated to anybody still in need of proof that the arguments of Hilberg and Ardent (and popular views still very much prevalent in Israeli society, for instance) on the Judenräte were hasty and erroneous generalizations (pp. 85, 138-140). Bauer also provided many examples on the primacy of ideology as compared with economic considerations in German policies in the kresy (see, for example, the case of the vital Jewish leather workshops in Tuczyn, which the Germans there liquidated in September 1942 – pp. 124-125). Furthermore, Bauer skillfully proved the importance of non-Jews to Jewish survival chances. The story of Konstanty Kozlowski, related to the Bielski partisans, indeed points to “…the great difference that determined action by just one individual and his family can make on the lives of a large number of people.” (p. 116). The attitude and behavior of neighbors in genocidal situations could mean the life or death of many people, and the examples of Bulgaria and Denmark – as well as numerous localities in Nazi-dominated Europe – no doubt support this argument.

I am not sure I could agree with two of Bauer’s conclusions. First, I remain unconvinced about the lack of “amida” among other groups victimized by Nazi Germany or in other cases of mass murder (pp. 158-159). And while among Jewish partisans revenge may have figured as an important motivation for survival, I found no evidence in the book to support the idea that revenge functioned as “[t]he chief motivation…” (p. 131), and, moreover, I doubt whether for the majority of Jews during World War II revenge fantasies kept them alive. In any case, most Jewish survivors exhibited no burning desire for revenge in the post-World War II years.